Planning for regime change – again (20 May 2006)

The officials running US policy towards Iran are the same ones who engineered the Iraq invasion – and they’re looking for British support again, argues Glen Rangwala.

Published in Labour Left Briefing (June 2006)

After George W. Bush won his first presidential election in November 2004, many thought that his second term foreign policy would be different. All the assurances of the neoconservatives – that Iraqis would welcome US invaders, that democracy would spread like wildfire across the Middle East, that all major states would accept US military dominance and that oil prices would tumble – turned out to be false. Many of those close to Bush spoke of how lessons had been learnt, how the neocons were now in retreat and a more realistic foreign policy would emerge. Lots of the architects of the Iraq war did indeed leave their old jobs – but many of them have instead ended up running US policy on Iran.

Since late last year, the Bush Administration has been setting up a series of new offices to run what it calls the project to “democratise” Iran, backed by a budget that was increased earlier this year to $85 million. The rhetoric about democracy is little more than a front, however: as one former Bush official told the Financial Times, “Democracy promotion is a rubric to get the Europeans behind a more robust policy without calling it regime change.” The real aim - planning the overthrow of the Iranian government - is reflected in the personnel involved.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the new Iranian directorate at the Pentagon includes Abram Shulsky and John Trigilio. Shulsky was the director of the infamous Office of Special Plans (OSP), a project devised in 2001 by the then Pentagon Number Two, Paul Wolfowitz, to provide the justification for an invasion of Iraq. Trigilio was named by a former Pentagon official in 2004 as an OSP official responsible for organising the supposed intelligence on Iraq. The OSP was designed to outflank the established US intelligence organisations which were then more sceptical about claims of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its links with al-Qaida. Instead, it led a disinformation campaign, concocting intelligence reports that were put to the public and unconverted officials to make the case for war.

Within the State Department, a new Office of Iranian Affairs (OIA) was created earlier this year, with the task of co-opting and supporting Iranian opponents of the Tehran government and broadcasting pro-US propaganda into Iran. Its leading officials are all members of the team that took charge of Iraq shortly after the invasion. David Denehy and J. Scott Carpenter were both senior officials at the International Republican Institute – the international wing of the US Republican Party – before being drafted in to run the “Governance” office of Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority, the US body that mismanaged Iraq after the invasion, in mid-2003. Much of their work involved a spectacularly bad attempt to organise Iraqi exiles whom the US transported to Iraq to act as their link into Iraqi society. Denehy and Carpenter are joined at the OIA’s helm by Alberto Fernandez, an anti-Castro Cuban exile who was given the job of State Department’s Director of the Office of Iraq Affairs in 2004. The OIA comes under the authority of Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of the vice-president, who is now a leading State Department official. Her original appointment there, in 2002, was widely interpreted as providing the OSP with a backdoor route to State Department officials whom they wanted to tap, so that they wouldn’t have to work through the more sceptical leadership then in place under Colin Powell.

The presence of so many veterans of the Iraq invasion among the officials now running Bush’s Iran policy clearly indicates what the Bush Administration is planning. Rather than appointing seasoned diplomats, with a record of being able to negotiate difficult but peaceful compromises, the Administration has appointed those whose capabilities lie only in selling false intelligence and in co-opting exiles seeking regime change. Even if the Bush Administration hasn’t made a final decision to use military force against Iran, the officials now in charge of Iran policy are highly ideologically motivated, and capable of dragging others into schemes that they support on the basis of their misinformation.

They also seem to be particularly keen on securing British support for military action against Iran, much more so than before the Iraq invasion. The US, unlike Britain, has not had personnel inside Iran for 25 years, and according to news reports, has few reliable links into the country. Supporters in the US of bombing Iran are also seeking to bring the dialogue of the three EU countries, including Britain, with Iran’s leadership to a complete end, as that still leaves open the possibility of a compromise with Iran on the nuclear issue, which US hawks want to avoid. The departure from the Foreign Office of Jack Straw – who had previously ruled out military action against Iran – could well clear the way for a policy of once again backing the US Administration on another disastrous military venture.

Author: Glen Rangwala

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