The administration of US President George W. Bush plans for a sustained campaign against the ayatollahs of Tehran that could include regime change, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
The newspaper said Bush and his team have been huddling in closed-door meetings on Iran, summoning academics for advice, creating an Iran office in Washington and opening listening posts abroad dedicated to the efforts against Tehran.
The internal debate that raged in the first term between those who advocated more engagement with Iran and those who preferred more confrontation appears in the second term to be largely settled in favor of the latter, the report said.
Although administration officials do not use the term "regime change" in public, that in effect is the goal they outline as they aim to build resistance to the theocracy, the Post pointed out
"We do not have a problem with the Iranian people. We want the Iranian people to be free," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Senate testimony last week. "Our problem is with the Iranian regime."
In private meetings, Bush and his advisers have been more explicit, the paper said.
Members of the Hoover Institution's board of overseers who met with Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley two weeks ago emerged with the impression that the administration has shifted to a more robust policy aimed at the Iranian government, according to the Post.
"The message that we received is that they are in favor of separating the Iranian people from the regime," the paper quotes Esmail Amid-Hozour, an Iranian-American businessman who serves on the Hoover board, as saying.
Richard Haass, who was State Department policy planning director in Bush's first term, is quoted as saying, "The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than those who are advocating more diplomacy."
Meanwhile, US lawmakers say the use of force, subject to congressional approval, is still an option to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
"I think we can stop them from having a nuclear weapon short of war," Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat, said on NBC's Meet The Press on Sunday.
Republican Senator George Allen said on the same show: "Ultimately, you never want to take military action off the table. But you never want it to get that far. But if necessary, it is an option. But it is not one that is desirable."
Biden and Allen, both potential US presidential candidates in 2008, agreed that Washington must work with other countries to deal with Iran, and that Bush would need congressional approval before the US participates in military action to curb Iran's nuclear weapons program.
"He has to do that," Biden said.
"I believe he should," Allen said. "And I believe he would if necessary."
The UN Security Council was due to take up Iran's case this week after the International Atomic Energy Agency sent the council a report saying it could not verify that Iran's nuclear plans were purely peaceful.
Iran on Sunday said it was no longer considering a Russian compromise deal intended to overcome the international dispute over whether Tehran is seeking to build an atomic bomb.
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