As we all know, Iraq is bursting into a full-on civil war. Despite that, Iraq is not currently the Bush administration’s highest priority. Iran is.
As the dispute over its nuclear program arrives at the U.N. Security Council today, Iran has vaulted to the front of the U.S. national security agenda amid Bush administration plans for a sustained campaign against the ayatollahs of Tehran.
President Bush and his team have been huddling in closed-door meetings on Iran, summoning scholars for advice, investing in opposition activities, creating an Iran office in Washington and opening listening posts abroad dedicated to the efforts against Tehran.
The internal administration debate that raged in the first term between those who advocated more engagement with Iran and those who preferred more confrontation appears in the second term to be largely settled in favor of the latter. Although administration officials do not use the term “regime change” in public, that in effect is the goal they outline as they aim to build resistance to the theocracy.
Welcome to 2006. Same as 2002. This time we are prepared. We know better than to believe anything the administration says. William Safire is retired, Judith Miller is gone, Jeff Gannon is a distant memory. But, the Bush regime intends to carry on.
“We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Senate testimony last week. “We do not have a problem with the Iranian people. We want the Iranian people to be free. Our problem is with the Iranian regime.”
In private meetings, Bush and his advisers have been more explicit. Members of the Hoover Institution’s board of overseers who met with Bush, Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley two weeks ago emerged with the impression that the administration has shifted to a more robust policy aimed at the Iranian government.
“The message that we received is that they are in favor of separating the Iranian people from the regime,” said Esmail Amid-Hozour, an Iranian American businessman who serves on the Hoover board.
“The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than those who are advocating more diplomacy,” said Richard N. Haass, who as State Department policy planning director in Bush’s first term was among those pushing for engagement.
Apparently the Bush junta is not dissuaded by terrible poll numbers, a total lack of allies, fiscal bankruptcy, zero credibility, or that little thing about ‘having a little bit too much on their plate at the moment’.
There is no reasoning with this government. They must be confronted. And they must be stopped. Whatever the merits of stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we are no position to have the Washington Post telegraphing our intentions to effect regime change in Iran.
Nothing could unite ordinary Iranians behind their mullahs quicker than a suspicion that the hated CIA is thinking about a reprise of the 1953 coup. Oh wait? What’s to suspect? It’s on the front-page of the Washington Post!
Will the Dems ever take this insanity seriously? We are running out of time.
