John Bolton: " Once upon a time, we knew how to do clandestine regime change."

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3979&page=1

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FP: Switching gears to Iran, the Iranians are showing little sign of slowing down their nuclear program. If the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) refuses to enforce its mandate and Iran crosses uranium red lines once again, what should the United States do?

JB: Well, I think more than four years of diplomacy has given the Iranians the one asset they otherwise couldn’t purchase for any price, and that’s time. And during that long, unsuccessful period of negotiations, they have now—by the IAEA’s own information—perfected all of the critical steps to achieve indigenous mastery over the nuclear fuel cycle. And so by allowing diplomacy to proceed as long as we did, we have dramatically limited our options. I’m afraid now we’re past the point where even strong Security Council sanctions could dissuade Iran from continuing to follow the strategic decision to acquire nuclear weapons. What that means unfortunately is that our options may be down to regime change or the use of force against the nuclear program.

FP: What then? Assuming the United States pursues some kind of regime-change option in Iran, for example, how would the United States be able to sustain that, given the current situation in Iraq and elsewhere?

JB: Once upon a time, we knew how to do clandestine regime change. We need to reacquire that capability. I don’t think overt support for Iranian dissidents is necessarily very helpful, and it may well impose a political cost on the dissidents themselves. But I think there’s enormous dissatisfaction with the Iranian regime, for economic reasons, for religious and political reasons, for ethnic reasons. I don’t think that regime is as stable or as secure as you might think from the outside. By the same token, I don’t think that necessarily means it can be brought down quickly, and we’re in a race against time here with the nuclear program. But certainly as a preference to military force, I would hope that regime change could succeed.

FP: Do you see any parallels between the reporting on Iran’s nuclear facilities today and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002–03?

JB: Much of what we know about Iran today is public information that’s come from the IAEA. In any case, I don’t think that the concerns that the United States and almost everybody else had about Iraq’s chemical weapons program in particular was the result of distorted or incorrect intelligence. It stemmed from Iraq’s own 1991 declaration of its chemical weapons stockpiles. So the people who are saying that this is just Iraq redux are ignoring the critical differences between the two cases.