December 2003, page 17
Special Report
Judeocons Plot Regime Change in Iran
By Andrew I. Killgore
On May 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dined in Tehran with Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi. They told the ruler of Iran that he could buy all the American weapons he wanted, nuclear arms excluded. Under Kissinger's influence, America's long-standing policy to limit the sale of arms was abandoned. The shah,anxious to play a bigger role in the world, went on an arms-buying orgy that reached $25 billion by 1978, in 1978 dollars.
The years 1972 to 1978 were ones of halcyon alliance between Iran and Israel as well. The Shah wanted arms (and was obliged by Kissinger), and the Israelis wanted contracts and oil, which Iran secretly supplied to the Jewish state in defiance of the Arab oil boycott. Having Iran's huge Muslim, but non-Arab population as allies gave psychological reassurance to a small Israel worried by heavily populated Arab neighbors. Mutual dislike between Persians and Arabs, moreover, held out the hope that the Iran-Israel alliance would endure.
The Shah, however, grossly overplayed his hand, and the alliance collapsed in the Iranian political cataclysm of 1978-1979. Ever since, the Zionists have worked feverishly to change Tehran's Islamist regime, especially as it continues to give aid to south Lebanon's Hezbollah, which thwarts Israel's continuing quest for the waters of the so-near-and-yet-so-far Litani River.
Here at home, all the judeocon "usual suspects" have thrown themselves behind Israel's effort to overthrow the Iranian regime now that a democratic Turkey shows signs of disaffection with its U.S./Israeli alliance.
A few months ago, the late Shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, DC that he was working for a democratic regime in Iran, and that a plebiscite would be held on the monarchy. Now, according to the Jewish weekly Forward, "administration hawks (read Judeocons), Jewish groups and Iranian supporters of Reza Pahlavi" are pushing regime change in Tehran. Slippery Judeo-con Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, argues that the regime in Tehran is on the brink of collapse and all that?s needed from the outside is a push.
Ledeen's ubiquitous fellow traveler William Kristol, editor of the fervently pro-Israel Weekly Standard, leads the charge for a more aggressive foreign policy on Iran. In the May 12 issue of his Rupert Murdoch-funded publication, Kristol wrote an editorial pushing for covert action and other steps to trigger a revolution in Iran. Gary Sick, President Jimmy Carter's Middle East man on the National Security Council and currently director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, was quoted as saying, "Some people at the Pentagon (where the judeocon cabal is clustered) concluded that the reformists are just mullahs with smiling faces and that regime change is the only way. They think Iran is ripe for revolution, but I think this is highly questionable!"
With $20 million, there could be a "free Iran." Ledeen would know how to use the money.
Two sources quoted in Forward had "Iran expert" Michael Rubin working on Iran at the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans" (OSP) --which, with the help of its counterpart in the Sharon government, got everything wrong on Iraq. Rubin, previously, a researcher at the Washington Institute of Near East Policy --a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-- "vocally" advocated regime change in Iran. He did not respond to Forward's request for comment.
The (OSP) is the creation of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, who presided over the small pro-Israeli group which "planned" the shambles that Iraq has become. Once Saddam Hussain was overthrown, the OSP reckoned, American troops would be welcomed as liberators, Iraq's oil would pay for the country's reconstruction, and Iraq would be shown to have had weapons of mass destruction and to have cooperated with al-Qaeda. The fact that none of this proved out has not stopped the totally discredited Israel-firsters from beating the "attack Iran" drums.
Predictably, AIPAC, Israel's principal lobby in Washington, also joined the fray. "We support efforts to encourage the people of Iran to cut the regime's ties to terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons," AIPAC spokeswoman Rebecca Dinar said piously. Morris Amitay, a former AIPAC director, said it would only be "natural" for Jewish groups to want regime change in Iran. Young Pahlavi was to meet with Iranian Jewish AIPACers, but, since "it could be seen as inappropriate" the meeting was scuttled.
Ledeen, "involved" but never charged in the Iran-Contra scandal, has joined Amitay, former CIA director James Woolsey, the Reagan administration's Frank Gaffney, former Senator Paul Simon and oil consultant Rob Sobhani in setting up a group called Coalition for Democracy in Iran. CDI is its name and regime change is its game. In April, Ledeen, speaking to a pro-monarchist crowd in Los Angeles said that, with $20 million, there could be a "free Iran." He would know how to use the money, he assured the crowd.
The Zionists (judeocons today) have been working since 1994 to paint Iran as a terrorist nation whose military ambitions threaten American interests. They persuaded President Bill Clinton to support the AIPAC-written Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA), which launched U.S. economic warfare against Iran ($20 million invested in Iran's oil or gas industry triggered --or was supposed to trigger-- sanctions against the violator).
Who's Got the Weapons?
The judeocons based their campaign against Iran on the claim that it was about to develop nuclear weapons. In October, however, Tehran agreed to full inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That should prove that the judeocons' specter of a "threatening Iran" has always been pure propaganda --and should end, at least for now, the threat that the United States will militarily attack Iran, a member of President Bush's "axis of evil."
Perhaps the judeocons would like to turn their attention to Israel, which does produce nuclear weapons, and refuses to allow international inspection of its facilities.
Perhaps the rest of us should not hold our breaths.
Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
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