A REAGAN DOCTRINE FOR IRAN

This is the text of a briefing I am giving to Senate and Congressional staffers on Capitol Hill this morning.

The Reagan Doctrine was developed in the early Reagan years as an objection and alternative to the Containment Doctrine, initially formulated by George Kennan in the late 1940s as the dominant paradigm of American foreign policy towards the Soviet Union.

By 1981, the Containment Doctrine was a clear and undeniable failure. The US under Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and most especially Jimmy Carter had totally failed to contain Soviet colonial expansion: from 1969 with Brazzaville-Congo through 1979 with Nicaragua and Afghanistan, the Soviets added 14 new colonies to their empire.

Thus the Reagan Doctrine was proposed to stop playing defense with the Soviets and start playing offense – by identifying their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, then implementing specific strategies and tactics to maximize those vulnerabilities.

Four strategies in particular were activated. In the early 1980s the Soviet Union was the world’s largest oil producer and prices were high. President Reagan convinced King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to crash oil prices by explaining to him that, given the Saudi’s vastly lower extraction costs compared to the Soviets’, such a crash would increase the Saudis’ market share and they would end up making more money. Fahd agreed and the Soviets’ oil cash cow died.

Second, the Soviet economy depended upon the transfer and acquisition of Western, primarily American, technology. US Customs was charged with stopping this under the so-called COCOM restrictions. Jimmy Carter had less than two dozen agents assigned to blocking tech transfer and enforcing COCOM. Ronald Reagan had two thousand agents assigned. Tech transfer came to a halt.

Third was SDI. Reagan bluntly told Gorbachev in Reykjavik that, as the US could afford to build a missile defense and the USSR could not, the US would do so and that was that. “We’re playing poker and I have the high cards,” Reagan told Gorby – and Gorby had no choice but to fold.

Fourth was support of anti-Soviet freedom fighters. This took two forms. The first was providing weapons and military training to anti-Soviet guerrilla insurgencies: the Contras in Nicaragua, UNITA in Angola, the Mujahaddin in Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent, the EPLF & TPLF in Ethiopia and the KPNLF in Cambodia. The second was providing money and covert organizational and technological assistance to democracy movements in Eastern Europe, such as Solidarity in Poland, FIDEZ in Hungary, and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. The same was provided to democracy movements as they began to emerge in the Soviet Union’s “Inner Colonies” such as Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltics.

The goal of insurgency support was armed resistance leading to the overthrow of a Soviet-backed government. The goal of democracy-movement support was “The Three U’s” – uncontrollable urban unrest, again leading to the overthrow of a Soviet colonial regime.

The Reagan Doctrine was thus above all a paradigm-shift. We weren’t going to try and outlast the Soviets anymore, we were going after them. We didn’t want peace with them, we didn’t want to get along with them, we wanted them gone, history, da svedanya, adios and goodbye. Support of various anti-Soviet insurgencies was a conscious assault on the structure of the Soviet Empire. The goal wasn’t simply freedom for this or that Soviet colony, but the full collapse of the Empire as a whole, which ultimately meant the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

This strategy… worked. The Reagan Doctrine is the most spectacularly successful geopolitical strategy of modern times. The question now is: where and how can such a strategy be best applied to the War on Islamofascism?

I think the “where” is Iran. Iraq is a job for the United States Military. Iran is not — not in the sense of the 3rd ID taking Tehran. During the Cold War, we needed US and NATO forces in Europe capable of blocking a Soviet invasion, say through the Fulda Gap*. But we didn’t need US soldiers to fight in the jungles of Nicaragua or protest in the streets of Prague and Budapest. What we needed – and what we had — were large numbers of people living in these countries willing to struggle for their own freedom. This is what we need, and this is what we have, today in Iran.

The main obstacle in implementing a Reagan Doctrine for Iran is the same we had with implementing a Reagan Doctrine for the Soviets: Squishes in the White House and the State Department. In the 1980s they were Michael Deaver, Dick Darman, Jim Baker, and George Shultz. Today they are Robert Blackwill, Richard Armitage, and the entire Near East Bureau at State.

Thus to implement a policy of regime change in Iran, there must be a strategy of regime change in the National Security Council and the State Department, with the main targets being Blackwill and Armitage (as I assume along with everyone else that Powell is stepping down). Blackwill and Armitage are the quintessential appeasers posing as sophisticated geostrategists. They actually believe that as FDR made an alliance with Stalin to fight the Nazis and Nixon made an alliance with Mao to triangulate the Russians, so George Bush should befriend the Iranian Mullahcracy in order to get them to stop sponsoring terrorism. These people are a danger to our national security.

A concrete example is how the CIA war game results, purporting that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would backfire, were rigged and leaked last week. These folks are desperately doing whatever they can to prevent the destruction of Iranian nukes – even to persuading the Nobel Committee to give the Peace Prize to the IAEA’s El Baradei.

Thus it should be a focused goal to demand a thorough house-cleaning of the NSC and State beginning November 3rd. It should be a priority of Porter Goss to house-clean the CIA of the left-wing dinosaurs who dominate it.

Now about the students and other folks who could spark a democratic revolution in Iran. To talk about them I need to tell you a couple of quick stories. As the Reagan Doctrine was getting going in the early 80s, I met with a number of anti-Communist Russians in Paris. They were virulently any-Soviet and proclaimed their desire for a free and democratic Russia. I asked them if this desire extended to other internal colonies within the USSR like the Ukraine.

The hair on their necks bristled and they got red in the face. “Ukraine is a part of Russia!” they declared. “It will always be a part of Russia!”

Ten years later I spoke at a conference along with another speaker, Lu Li, one of the leaders of the 1989 Tienanmen Square demonstrations. He was passionate in his plea for a free, democratic China and received a standing ovation. I later congratulated him on his speech, and asked if he advocated freedom for Tibet.

His eyes and nostrils flared. “Tibet is a part of China!” he said angrily. “It will always be a part of China!”

Today, you’ll get the same reaction from Iranians professing their hatred of the Mullahcracy if you tell them Iran’s nuclear facilities must be taken out. “These facilities belong to the people of Iran!” they will shout. “If you destroy them, you will turn all the people of Iran against America!”

The solution here is to give these folks a choice. It is the solution of the United States Marines, who describe themselves as “your best friend, your worst enemy.” Which do the Persians want? America to be their best friend or their worst enemy?

Notice I said “Persians,” not “Iranians.” We all know how Iraq is ethnically divided. So is Iran. Fully one third of Iran’s population of 65 million is Azeri, not Persian – and they are located cohesively in northwestern Iran just across the border from their ethnic brothers in Azerbaijan. The desire to unite and form a Greater Azerbaijan is strong among them. Breaking Iran apart is something that would not upset the Turks very much either.

Then there are the millions of Turkmen who live right across the border from Turkmenistan.

In other words, Iran has potentially very severe fracture lines. One of the key strategies of the Reagan Doctrine was to identify fracture lines in an enemy such as the Soviet Union, then work to widen and split them apart. It must be made clear to opponents of the Mullahcracy that Iran is quite vulnerable to this strategy.

For it is a given now – absolute with no alternative — that Iran’s nuclear facilities must be militarily destroyed, completely and soon. Soon means within 60 days, the sooner after November 2 the better.

It must be made clear to the Mullahcracy’s opponents that the United States will support in a large number of ways their efforts to create a free and democratic Iran. Primarily, this would not be done through supplying an armed insurgency as with the Contras, but helping to create the Three U’s: uncontrollable urban unrest in cities throughout Iran and especially Tehran.

A critical part of this must be a clear statement from the White House that achieving regime change in Iran is the official policy of the United States Government.

Yet it must also be made clear, however whispered and publicly unstated, that Persian Iranians have got to work with us, or else we put the Azeri Option into play.

Iran is the primary sponsor of terrorism in Iraq today. As Michael Ledeen says, “Peace in Iraq requires regime change in Iran.” Iran is now the single greatest threat to not just American national security and that of Israel’s, but is the world’s single greatest state supporter of terrorism and single biggest obstacle to victory in the war against Islamofascism.

In sum, we must urge the second Bush Administration to:

1. Replace Robert Blackwill at the NSC.
2. Replace Richard Armitage at State.
3. Replace pro-Arabists at the Near East Bureau.
4. Retire aging leftists at the CIA.
5. Militarily attack and destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by December 1st.
6. Publicly announce that regime change in Iran is the goal of the US Government.
7. Support a democratic revolution in Iran by assisting uncontrollable urban unrest.
8. Quietly explain to Persians the alternative to working with us is the Azeri Option.

The implementation of these action items will ensure that well before the end of President Bush’s second term, the threat of the Iran’s terrorist government to Iraq, Israel, America, and the world will be terminated, and the tyranny that government has imposed on the people of Iran will be no more.

* The “Fulda Gap” was the shortest distance between the East German border and the Rhine, together with the New York of West Germany, Frankfurt. Named after the town of Fulda and the easily-fordable Fulda River near the East German border.