Here are a couple of items which suggest that the possibility of regime change in Iran is not nearly as remote as our policymakers have long been assuming.
First, Jennifer Rubin’s Right Turn blog features New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez’s denunciation of Obama administration officials for opposing the bipartisan sanctions on Iran’s central bank, o-sponsored by him and Illinois Republican Mark Kirk and adopted by a 100-0 vote. The Obama administration’s stance seems to reflect a desire not only to avoid irritating the regime but to avoid also irritating the Iranian people, on the apparent theory that any American action impinging on them or genuijnely threatening to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program, will alienate a population still simmering with rage over American support for the coup against Mossadegh in 1953 and for the Shah’s regime in the late 1970s. An alternative hypothesis might be that the Iranian people’s undoubted discontent with the corrupt mullah regime, being much more recent and much more tangible, may be a strong motivator than what the United States did in 1953 or 1978.
That alternative hypothesis is strengthened by evidence adduced by Caroline Glick in her Jerusalem Post column. She follows Michael Ledeen’s reasoning in a PJMedia blogpost, arguing that recent attacks on non-strategic Iranian facilities are far more likely to have been launched by Iranian regime opponents than by Israeli or other foreign intelligence operators, since the latter would prefer higher value targets while the locals would be more likely to attack something close at hand. Glick cites disapprovingly Barack Obama’s statement that the Iranian regime needs to punish the “students” who attacked the British embassy: this is accepting the Iranian government’s fiction that these were independent actors, perhaps even hostile to the regime, rather than regime operatives as they almost certainly were. Americans made this same mistake when hostages were taken at our embassy in November 1979. We begged the Iranian government to make the “students” release the hostages, when of course the “students” were agents of the dominant forces in the government. (And by the way, since when it is studious to seize diplomats as hostages? Seizing diplomats is not a college prank; it is an act of war.)
The prospect of Iran gaining nuclear weapons is terrifying—or, to put it more precisely, the prospect of this mullah regime in Iran gaining nuclear weapons is terrifying. The prospect of military action is also daunting, and the consequences very uncertain. The most desirable outcome of the current situation is regime change. What I take from the pieces above is that the possibility of regime change in Iran is nontrivial, and that a unanimous U.S. Senate is ready to join the British government in much stronger sanctions than anything now in place—but the Obama administration is reluctant to join in. A good question for the next presidential press conference: Why not?
