Iran: US opts for regime change,
not force By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - In every statement on Iran,
officials of the Bush administration routinely
repeat the party line that "the president never
takes any option off the table".
Despite
the constant invocation of a possible military
attack on Iran, however, a little-noticed section
of the administration's official national-security
strategy indicates that President George W Bush
has already decided that he will not use military
force to try to prevent Iran from going nuclear.
Instead, the administration has shifted
its aim to pressing Iran to make internal
political changes, based on the dubious theory
that it would lead to a change in Iranian nuclear
policy.
News coverage of the US National
Security Strategy (NSS) issued on March 16
emphasized its reference to the doctrine of
preemption. But a careful
reading of the document reveals that its real
message - ignored by the media - was that Iran
would not alter its nuclear policy until after
regime change had taken place.
The NSS
takes pains to reduce the significance of Iran's
obtaining a nuclear capability. "As important as
are these nuclear issues," it says, "the United
States has broader concerns regarding Iran. The
Iranian regime sponsors terrorism; threatens
Israel; seeks to thwart Middle East peace;
disrupts democracy in Iraq; and denies the
aspirations of its people for freedom."
Then the NSS states, "The nuclear issue
and our other concerns can ultimately be resolved
only if the Iranian regime makes the strategic
decision to change these policies, open up its
political system, and afford freedom to its
people. This is the ultimate goal of US policy."
This carefully worded statement thus
explicitly makes regime change - not stopping
Iran's progress toward a nuclear capability - the
goal of US policy toward Iran.
National
Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, speaking at the
US Institute of Peace the same day the NSS was
released, invoked the document's formulation on
Iran policy and suggested that implementation
would be guided by whether any particular action
would contribute to broader political changes in
Iran.
According to a transcript obtained
by Inter Press Service, Hadley referred to a
"strategy of trying to keep the international
community together and get Iran to change its
policy on the nuclear issue, on support for terror
and on its treatment of its own people". He said
the administration would make "tactical decisions
in the context of whether it will advance our
overall strategy".
Hadley suggested that
the NSS formulation amounted to a policy of regime
change. "In terms of regime change," he said,
"what I have said and what is said in this
document is we need regimes to change their
policies."
The implications of the NSS and
Hadley's remarks for the military option are
clear: if the goal of the policy is to achieve
internal political change in Iran, which is
assumed to lead to a change in nuclear policy,
then there is no need for the administration to
contemplate an attack on Iran. And if a military
attack on Iran might impede progress on political
change, the logic of the formulation is that the
military option should be avoided.
A
report by David Sanger in the New York Times on
March 19 quoting an administration official in an
interview a few weeks earlier further underlines
the administration's decision against using force
to prevent Iran from going nuclear.
"The
reality is that most of us think the Iranians are
probably going to get a weapon, or the technology
to make one, sooner or later," the official was
quoted as saying. The hope, according to the
official, was that by the time it happened, "We'll
have a different relationship with a different
Iranian government."
The official said the
"optimists" hoped to delay Iran's nuclear
capability by "10 or 20 years". That statement
clearly inflated the time administration officials
believe it would take Iran to be able to make a
nuclear weapon. Intelligence estimates have been
consistent that Iran will be capable of building a
bomb within five to 10 years.
But the Bush
administration will only be in office for another
two and a half years, so it knows Iran will not go
nuclear on its watch.
Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's long and unsuccessful
diplomatic campaign to get the five powers
(Britain, France, Germany, Russian and China) to
agree on a United Nations Security Council
resolution under Chapter VII of the charter would
have opened up the theoretical possibility of a
Security Council-sanctioned US air attack on Iran,
thus serving to make that threat somewhat more
credible.
But the administration has done
nothing to indicate that it actually plans to use
a Security Council resolution as the basis for a
preemptive attack. On April 30, after a meeting of
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European
Union foreign ministers on Iran in Sofia,
Bulgaria, EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana
said "nobody" had "considered the possibility of a
military solution in Iran" or of a "coalition of
the willing" such as that formed to go to war
against Iraq, to use military force against Iran.
The only multilateral sanctions against
Iran that have been mentioned by US administration
officials thus far involve "isolating" Iran by
cutting off diplomatic contacts and trade. But
such a diplomatic and economic isolation strategy
depends entirely on other major powers.
The US can't do anything more to isolate
Iran, because it has had no diplomatic relations
with Tehran for 27 years and has had comprehensive
economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic
since 1995.
Even if all the powers agree,
it would take months for such diplomatic and
economic sanctions to go into effect and many more
to see what difference they made, if any, on
Iran's policy. Meanwhile, however, Iranian
scientists would be continuing to master the
technology of uranium enrichment.
No one
knows when Tehran might be able to claim that it
already had the technological know-how to be a
nuclear power, even if it did not go to the stage
of weaponization, but it well may be less than two
years from now.
Despite the evidence of
Iranian success in entering the first stage of
uranium enrichment in April, however, Rice has
continued to express confidence that the threat of
diplomatic and economic isolation of Iran from
other major powers would be devastatingly
effective.
Appearing on the Fox News show
The O'Reilly Factor on May 31, for example,
Rice declared, "I don't believe that the Iranians
can tolerate the level of isolation that they will
endure if they don't make the right choice."
Rice's confidence in the isolation
strategy makes little sense, except as a cover for
the administration's quiet abandonment of the
military option and its real focus on regime
change.
That objective is also being
pursued through overt funding of Iranian
opposition groups (including US$75 million to
"promote democracy") as well as covert support for
armed resistance elements operating in Iran's
border areas.
But the advocates of war
against Iran are already up in arms over the
administration's Iran policy. In the May 8 edition
of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, William
Kristol ridiculed claims apparently made by Rice
and her colleagues privately that they have been
merely "reassuring Europeans so as to keep them on
board".
"Much of the US government,"
Kristol concluded, "no longer believes in, and is
no longer acting to enforce, the Bush doctrine."
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
in June 2005.
