US aims for 'regime change' in Iran
Tuesday March 14 2006
in Washington
THE Bush administration has started a new, more vigorous phase in trying to undermine the ruling mullahs of Iran after five years of indecision and internal disputes.
The phrase "regime change" is seen as too loaded to use in public but in effect that is what the administration is hoping to do, according to officials in Washington.
Buoyed up by achieving its initial goal of dragging Tehran before the United Nations Security Council, which is to debate Iran this week, officials are now promoting several measures reminiscent of the American approach towards Moscow in the Cold War.
Even as €70m is pumped into television and radio outlets to broadcast messages to the Iranian people, listening posts are to be opened in countries close to Iran to make up for America's lack of a diplomatic presence there.
At the same time, officials from the state department and the Pentagon, traditionally at loggerheads on Iran, appear to be sounding the same tune. Talk of "overtures" and "outreach to Teheran", the preferred approach of many in the state department in President George W Bush's first term, is over as Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, nudges the diplomats towards a more confrontational approach.
"A lot of things have come together," a senior administration official said yesterday. "It's not yet the end of the line . . . but this is the moment for us to start organising our efforts."
US officials are privately cockahoop that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's new president, has "played into their hands" by threatening to eliminate Israel and by denying the Holocaust.
That played a role in bolstering EU nations, in particular Germany, to abandon misgivings over the Bush government and work with it to confront Iran.
"So determined are they to get nuclear weapons that they have forfeited a lot of what they had gained. It had been a great success of Iranian foreign policy to split America and Europe but they have thrown that away," said the official.
The official insisted that military action against Iran's nuclear sites remained a last resort. But he suggested that people were wrong to assume that the presence of 130,000 US troops across the border in Iraq meant that action was out of the question. "I wouldn't assume anything." Some insiders suggest that a decision will have to be made on military action by the end of this year.
In the meantime there will be a twin-track approach of boosting opponents of the regime, while trying to stiffen the spines of nations on the Security Council.
In Washington officials feel that after deliberately staying on the sidelines over a year of diplomacy led by Britain, France and Germany, it is time to take charge of the debate. (©Daily Telegraph, London)
