May 9, 2012 | Quote
Washington’s War of Words Against Iran
Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative-dominated thinktank composed of well-known hawks, has been analogizing sanctions as “silver shrapnel” that that can “injure” Iran for years. Frequently quoted in the media, Dubowitz recently boasted to a Canadian newspaper that the FDD has shared six reports exclusively with the Obama administration and congressional committees advocating harsher sanctions on Iran.
“Sanctions that cannot starve the nuclear program could still conceivably collapse the Iranian economy, bringing on political chaos that paralyzes the nuclear program,” explains a March op-ed written by FDD senior fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht. Formerly a director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which is best-known for its influence over the Bush administration's Iraq policy, Gerecht also warned that “modern authoritarian states have considerable resilience and a high threshold of pain.”
Yet, for all of the FDD's focus on sanctions, Dubowitz and Gerecht argue they cannot achieve the administration's stated goals. “Designing sanctions to make Khamenei relent in his 30-year quest for the bomb is a delusion,” they wrote in January for Bloomberg – but “[s]anctions that could contribute to popular unrest and political tumult are not.”
Dubowitz and Gerecht are not alone in pushing for US-backed regime change in Iran. Last week, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who served as Pentagon adviser on Iran and Iraq during the first Bush administration, argued in Commentary magazine that the “key to US national security is simply regime collapse in Iran. How to hasten that collapse should be the guiding principle of US policy.”