Tuesday, January 17, 2006

CNN and Talk of Regime Change in Iran?

A few hours ago, Mr. Ken Adelman was on " CNN's The Situation Room" talking about Iran and the possiblity of a democratic regime change in Iran like Poland.

I still can not believe I heard these stuff on CNN but I take it as a good sign and hope the rest of the American Media follow the Cable News Network!

I liked what he said and I wished MSM in the States could allocate 5 minutes of their daily schedules to the events of Iran through a fair point of view!

Let me put parts of his comments here:

Ken, thanks very much for joining us.

KEN ADELMAN, FMR. DIR. ARMS CONTROL AGENCY: You're welcome.

BLITZER: Is there a military option, a viable U.S. military option to go ahead and knock out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

ADELMAN: I don't think we should ever take it off the table, but when you look at the practicalities of knowing what they are doing, knowing where they are doing it and knowing that you can get to those targets, it seems very improbable to me.

BLITZER: The president also went on to say, as he often does, he says he hopes this can be resolved diplomatically, but he never takes any option off the table. But if you say, and a lot of other military experts say, that there really is no viable military option to deal with this issue, what is the incentive on the Iranians to stop their nuclear program?

ADELMAN: Well, because, Wolf, they have no legitimacy domestically, OK. Their last election was boycotted by a majority of Iranians. They have -- the people there hate the regime. It's corrupt. It's illegitimate in a fundamental sense. And to deprive them of legitimacy on the international scene would only complicate their problems.

Plus, they have the fear that there's going to be a regime change in Iran. And I hope there is a regime change in Iran. And then it can come about not by military action but that can come about by subverting the regime right there, using the methods of Martin Luther King to tell you the truth, civil disobedience, peaceful, nonviolent techniques.

BLITZER: Well, should the U.S. and its allies be engaged in covert action to try to result in this regime change?

ADELMAN: Sure, we should have been doing that for the last 30 years. And that's part of the spread of freedom the president talks about, but we haven't done enough on that.

BLITZER: So to encourage the dissidents in Iran right now to overthrow the regime.

ADELMAN: Absolutely.

BLITZER: And you think that is a doable option?

ADELMAN: Well, it's certainly doable to give them support, more support than we are doing. Whether they succeed or not, you just don't know, but one thing you can do is to model it after what you had in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, what you've had in peaceful demonstrations around the world.

BLITZER: Well, I've heard, you know, that scenario, but the U.S. has been trying to do that in Cuba, for example, for decades unsuccessfully to get rid of Fidel Castro. North Korea, the U.S. has been trying to do that for decades to get rid of Kim Jong-il unsuccessfully. Yes, there was a successful end of the Cold War and all the change, the Democratic reforms in central and eastern Europe, but is Iran, in that model?

ADELMAN: No, Iran is a much more right model. It's more like Poland is at the outset of solidarity.

Why is that?

Because what we know is the majority of people in Iran, the vast majority, can't stand these corrupt and really awful repressive laws. And so you have the conditions, it's a far more educated population. It's a far more open population. It's a far more open country than others. So that you can really go in there and these kind of techniques that you had in Poland, and you in the Ukraine, and you had in Georgia. I mean, this is a proven technique. Now, it's not proven everywhere, and it doesn't work everywhere, but it's not going to work unless you help it.

BLITZER: I've heard top administration officials say that the goals should be to delay Iran's development of a nuclear weapon for as long as possible, with the hope that perhaps in the interim there could be regime change.

ADELMAN: That's fine. I would agree with that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent!

Anonymous said...
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