Iran Regime Change

Despite all the bad news out of Iraq, former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter says the current conflict is just the first step in the Bush plan for a Middle East makeover.

Tavis: This White House is saying now that we're not talking about regime change in Iran. It's about nuclear capacity, it's about weapons, it's about, you know, what they intend to do with them, but it's not about regime change. So who should I believe? Scott Ritter or the White House?

Scott Ritter: Well, I'll tell you what. I'll put their 2002 National Security Strategy on the table, then I'll spring their June 2006 revision of it in which they say, "Regime change is our policy." So I mean, it's not about believing me. It's about the White House repudiating their own documentation. It's about the White House repudiating Condoleezza Rice's repeated testimony before different oversight committees in Congress where she has said, "Our policy in the Middle East is regional transformation.""

Now that might be cute little semantics, but what does it mean to transform a region when the Bush administration defines the region as a collection of failed states and rogue states that can only be transformed once the governments of these failed states and rogue states are removed and democratic institutions brought in? So I would say that it is quite clear that the Bush administration policy is not only vis-à-vis Iraq, but also about Iran.

Tavis: So pardon my naiveté or my ignorance about this, but if the plan is for regime change, if that's the desire, the end result, why not say that?

Ritter: Well, because it would be very difficult to sell the American public. You see, the Bush administration has not -

Tavis: - but if you're making the case that these are a bunch of rogue, out of control, crazy people like Kim Jong Il, Ahmadinejad, etc., etc., why can't you sell that?

Ritter: Well, you can say all that, but then you have to say that you don't go to war to get rid of crazy people. You go to war to get rid of threats that manifest themselves in a way that negatively impact the national security interests of the United States of America.

You know, it was easy to make the case that Saddam Hussein was a rogue dictator. However, we're not going to go to war to remove a rogue dictator from power unless that rogue dictator acts in a manner which threatens us. That's why we had to create the fiction of weapons of mass destruction.

Ahmadinejad is a poster boy for demonization. Every time he opens his mouth, it seems he's inserting his foot, so it's easy to point to him. But America is not going to go to war against Iran just because Ahmadinejad says silly things. But we might talk about engaging Iran in a military conflict if it can be demonstrated that they have a nuclear weapons program at least demonstrated in terms of creating the same sort of fiction that we created vis-à-vis Iraq.

Tavis: Hold the phone. You can't be suggesting to me that there is any scenario under which we'd march into Iran as we did Iraq.

Ritter: Oh, of course not. We're not going to march into Iran with two hundred thousand troops with an invasion plan that's focused on ground forces. We're talking about regime change through the application of military force.

The Iranian plan appears to be initiating conflict with a massive aerial bombardment where we say that we're not going to invade, but we're going to create the conditions inside Iran that facilitate regime change by not only bombing Iran to neutralize their nuclear capability, but increasing the size of the target deck, the points that are going to be bombed, to bring into play the regime targets itself.

We're going to decapitate the regime. We're going to neutralize their security establishment thereby liberating the Iranian people to take matters into their own hands. See, there's a feeling in Washington, D.C. amongst the Bush administration that the Iranian people are chomping at the bit waiting to be given an opportunity to wipe the Mullahs off the face of the earth.

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