The Washington Post, 10 Jan 2012 – The goal of U.S. and other sanctions against Iran is regime collapse, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, offering the clearest indication yet that the Obama administration is at least as intent on unseating Iran’s government as it is on engaging with it.
The official, speaking this week on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the administration hopes that sanctions create enough hate and discontent at the street level that Iranians will turn against their government.
A Western diplomat familiar with the sanctions policy echoed those somewhat convoluted sentiments, saying that although regime collapse was a logical outcome of the sanctions, it was not the stated intent of the sanctioners.
‘We’re introducing in the cost-benefit analysis a new parameter in the calculus of the Iranian government’, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the intent of the sanctions. ‘To the extent we have done that, it is not because we want to collapse the government. It is because we want the Iranian government to understand that is a possible cost in continuing the way it is.’
Dennis B. Ross, who managed Iran policy on the National Security Council staff until November, said, ‘The sanctions all along have been designed to put the Iranians in a position where they had to make a choice, and if they did not make a choice, that they realize the price for not doing so would be high. They are absorbing a price now that they themselves do not want to absorb.’
Ross said the sanctions, which he was involved in drawing up and implementing, did not have as their goal regime change in Iran.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed international concerns about an Iranian nuclear weapon Wednesday, calling it a joke.
‘It’s something to laugh at’, Ahmadinejad said during a visit to Venezuela, the Associated Press reported from Caracas.’ It’s clear they’re afraid of our development.’
Obama’s Iran policy, which began with an attempt to engage Iran’s civilian and clerical leadership, has come under withering criticism from Republican presidential candidates eager to cast the president as weak abroad. The GOP frontrunner, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, has said that if we reelect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon.
But Obama has never publicly called for regime change in Iran, even during the government’s violent crackdown against democracy protesters in June 2009, drawing criticism that his stance toward the Islamic Republic remains naive.
In that respect, the intelligence official’s comments serve to harden the administrations public stance against Iran at a time when a more aggressive tone could be politically useful to the president.
The GOP campaign has also accused Obama with being insufficiently attuned to the immediacy of the Iranian nuclear threat.
The intelligence official, however, said the intelligence community stands by its controversial 2007 conclusion that Iranian leaders have not yet decided whether to build a nuclear bomb.
Although Iran has continued developing its nuclear infrastructure including a recently revealed second uranium enrichment facility, the pause in Iran’s direct march toward a weapon continues, the intelligence official said.
‘Our belief is that they are reserving judgement on whether to continue with key steps they haven’t taken regarding nuclear weapons’, the official said. ‘It’s not a technical problem’, he said, adding that Iran already has the capability of building a bomb but has not made a political decision to do so.
‘Israel’, the intelligence official said, ‘has a different opinion. They think [Iran] has already made the decision.’
‘Fear that Israel will take action on its own to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a very serious concern’, the intelligence official said. ‘If the Israelis attack’, he said, ’it is very clear that Iran will retaliate against Israel and hold the United States ultimately responsible’. In the end, the intelligence official said of Israel, ’they’re a sovereign country. How much notice they might give us, I don’t know.’
The U.S. intelligence community’s assessment is also at odds with those of key European and Middle Eastern allies, and is more conservative than the views of the U.N. nuclear watchdog. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report on Iran in November cited evidence suggesting a resumption of weapons research after 2004, including work on triggering devices as recent as 2007. Officials for the nuclear agency have acknowledged in interviews that the evidence is ambiguous. The information indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device, the nuclear agency said in its report. [T]he information also indicates that prior to the end of 2003, these activities took place under a structured programme, and that some activities may still be ongoing. Although different countries and agencies are looking at the same evidence, U.S. officials have tended to be conservative in their interpretation, in what some of the European counterparts regard as a reaction to the U.S. intelligence missteps before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
It is clear to everyone that, early in the last decade, a decision was made by Iran to close the formal program, said one European diplomat involved in internal IAEA discussions about Iran. The question is whether the work is still being carried on, and to what end. It is harder to pin that down with exactitude.