Here is the current plan to achieve regime-change in Iran:
The Iran NIE was greeted with some relief as it asserted that Iran didn’t have an active military nuclear program. People believe that this has made an attack on Iran unlikely. But as I remarked when it was published, the NIE contained a poison pill. It also asserted that Iran has had a military nuclear program up to 2003. Iran must now "confess" this or it will be used to justify more sanctions and, in the end, war on Iran.
There is no public or reported evidence for the second NIE assertion and the IAEA has found no hints for a past or present military nuke program in Iran. Despite threats against IAEA director ElBaradei from the U.S. and France, the IAEA is likely to give Iran a clean bill of health in its upcoming report.
But the U.S. is committed to regime change and ever tightening economic and physical pressure on Iran is seen as the way to get there.
It has now laid out a strategy for implementing this:
- The U.S. accuses Iran of some nefarious programs Iran has most likely never done.
- Selected secret evidence for such programs from the highly dubious
Niger papers"Laptop of Death" has been given to the IAEA. (The Laptop might be somewhat authentic and include some Iranian student’s college notes. Its content could also be completely forged. Most likely it is a mix of both. The Niger papers were false but written on real Nigerian embassy stationery.) - The U.S. now officially demands that Iran "Must Confess" that it has had the military nuke program the NIE alleges.
- The IAEA will ask Iran about the plans and experiments laid out in the secret evidence and, as Iran has never had these, come back with nothing.
- El Baradei, the IAEA chief, will say that there is no proof for such programs. But he will be pressed into also saying that the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
- The IAEA board, which consists of 35 country seats, will then report to the UN that the IAEA has done all it can, but that it cannot guarantee for the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.
- The UN security council will then either tighten sanctions and demand that Iran proves a negative, or, more likely, not further sanction Iran.
The situation is then the same as it was on Iraq and the U.S., with the support of France and the UK, will in one way or another act with the flimsy justification that the "UN is not willing to act."
The most likely act is a blockade of sea transport from and to Iran.
Under the justification of the need to prevent smuggling and proliferation of nuclear material, the U.S., the UK and France will establish sea patrols that will interdict all ships from and to Iran and search these for "dual use" material. (The French are preparing for this with their new Navy base in the United Arab Emirates.) They will confiscate any "dual use" stuff under a similar flexible definition of "dual use" as was used against Iraq and killed 500,000 Iraqi children.
Such plans for sea interdiction were laid out in the first reports about a third round of UN sanctions against Iran. These were not, as falsly reported by the NYT, part of new sanctions the permanent SC members had agreed upon, but a suggestion in one of various proposals that were distributed to non-permanent UN security council members.
In international law, the interruption of free sea traffic without a UN SC resolution is an act of war. Iran will be fully in its right to use force to break such an imposed blockade. But if it does, the Iranian use of force will be a welcome justification for punative air strikes and devastating cruise missile attacks against it.
After the first few air campaign days Iran will no longer have an Air Force and Navy to speak of. It will be bombed again and again, its trade further suffocated, until its people submit to U.S. will by changing their government, or until Iran, ten years from now, is just a former shell of itself that can easily be invaded.
That is the script, as far as I can tell. It is independent of who will become U.S. president. If it looks somewhat familiar to the history of what happened to another Middle East country that is certainly no coincidence.
The script has worked once. That why it is used again.