Secretive group aims for Iran regime-change

Liz Cheney heads special Iran regime-change group (Photo: Village Voice)

Missing from recent media coverage of the Bush administration's preparations for a military strike against Iran is any mention of the State Department's accelerated campaign for regime change in Iran, according to Lawrence Kaplan, a senior editor at The New Republic.

Kaplan says the administration last month formed a secretive body led by Vice President Cheney's daughter, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Liz Cheney, called the Iran-Syria Operations Group.

Cheney has more than $80 million at her disposal to promote democracy in Iran and help craft official policy, according to Kaplan.

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Kaplan said a spokesman for the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs won't comment on the existence of the group, which parallels State's understaffed Iran desk.

The Washington Post reported last month the Iran desk has just two foreign service officers while additional Iran analysts, including several political appointees, have been brought into the Iran-Syria Operating Group.

"Unsurprisingly," says Kaplan, "this has led to grumbling at NEA, with staffers complaining the Bush team has set up its own Iran shop and has been making end runs around the State Department's traditional bureaucracy."

Kaplan says, however, that according to State Department and Pentagon officials, ISOG is confined to promoting regime change from within and has no role in security issues or in coordinating White House efforts against Iran at the United Nations.

Prior to the Iraq war, the White House created the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to assemble intelligence to help make a case for the war. Another team, the White House Iraq Group, was then given the task of promoting it to the public.

Iran's announcement yesterday that it successfully has enriched uranium was the third major development this year on the way to producing an atomic bomb, leaving only one more step.

That next development – metalizing the enriched uranium to fit it into a warhead – could come as soon as four months from now, says author Jerry Corsi, who has watched the predictions in his book "Atomic Iran" unfold since it was published one year ago.

In a nationally televised speech yesterday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that with the production of enriched uranium, "I formally declare that Iran has joined the club of nuclear countries."

The audience, which included top military commanders and clerics, broke into cheers of "Allahu akbar!" or "Allah is greatest!"

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In January, Iran successfully tested a missile with solid fuel, and last week, a U.S. official reported Iran now has ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Tehran has rejected a demand by the U.N. Security Council to stop all uranium enrichment activity by April 28. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the U.N.'s watchdog agency, plans to travel to Iran this week for talks.

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