Israel Matzav

Let's be realistic: The only way to stop Iran is regime change

Writing in the New York Post, Israel Radio correspondent Benny Avni urges the Obama administration to stop trying to find a soft footprint for sanctions and to hit Iran hard and fast.

The biggest fallacy is the thought that, if only the right American emissary would be found, if only a creative Western diplomatic formula would be proposed, Tehran's sane elements would emerge and reason would prevail -- the fallacy, presumably, behind the trial balloon of the proposed trip to Tehran by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry.

The plan, reportedly, was to travel to Tehran for a year-end, last-ditch effort at saving Obama's diplomatic initiatives, which Tehran has roundly rejected. Last week the Iranian press roundly reported that he had asked to visit the country. Kerry's camp has since denied those reports (and similar ones in America), and yesterday the Iranian Fars news agency reported that the Majlis, Iran's rubber-stamp parliament, denied Kerry an entry visa, anyway.

Here's why: Our diplomacy advocates may yearn to prevent a head-on collision with Iran by finding the right regime interlocutor. But escalating a confrontation with America is a strategic imperative of the clerics under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

No one in last week's well-organized pro-regime mass demonstrations carried a sign advocating diplomacy to defuse tensions with America (and anti-government demonstrators aren't itching for it either). A diplomatic solution exists only in our head.

Some (like Kerry) cling to last year's foolishness, but for others it's replaced by a new "boomerang" theory: If we sanction the Iranian people too heavily, they "will be fooled into thinking we are to blame," as an unnamed administration official told The Washington Post.

Nonsense, says Israel Radio's Farsi Service veteran Menashe Amir, whose broadcasts are often cited by Iranian media as instigating the antigovernment protesters.

"The anti-regime movement will be strengthened tremendously if more Iranians believe that the government can't deliver daily necessities and realize that it can't effectively govern," Amir says. (Creating gasoline shortages, as proposed by Congress, would hurt the well-connected upper-middle class, not the masses that can't afford to own a car, he adds.)

Once again, the ideas underlying Washington's new policy miss the target. At this late date, sanctions can only be helpful if they facilitate regime change, which should be the top objective of the new strategy. Targeting for sanctions only a handful of evil regime operators would hardly impress the Iranian masses (although it will be widely applauded in Washington and the United Nations.

Read it all.

This administration has not even thought about what sanctions' goals ought to be, let alone about what sanctions to use. But it should be clear to everyone it is too late now for sanctions alone to stop Iran's nuclear program. The Obama administration wants to try to 'contain' a nuclear Iran, but Israel won't and the American people won't accept 'containment' as a strategy. Israel and the American people want Iran stopped. Containment is putting a volatile mix into the hands of an apocalyptic religious fanatic. But Obama is even willing to do that to avoid war.

What could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:57 PM