Israel pulls plug on Iran regime change shop

[laststeamtrain]

Israel pulls plug on Iran regime change shop
Mon, 05/25/2009 - 3:38pm

Israeli media are reporting that a small and unconventional Iran office in the Israeli Ministry of Defense will be shut down. The 30-year-old office has been headed by 83-year-old Uri Lubrani, who was de facto Israeli ambassador to Iran in the 1970s and famously predicted the fall of the shah. While the closure of the office may seem a minor bureaucratic matter, it also speaks to the demise of an idea that gained currency in some Washington circles just a few years ago and then faded: that the United States might support a plan of regime change in Iran.

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"Lubrani and his team were the last group of prominent Iran analysts of a major country that believed that the empowerment of the Iranian people was the best short-term and long-term Iran policy," said Pooya Dayanim, an Iranian Jewish pro-democracy activist in Los Angeles. "As an analyst who predicted the Iranian revolution, I think his words and plans deserve serious consideration." Dayanim predicted that Defense Minister Ehud Barak will keep Lubrani around in some capacity, despite the unit's closing. "They have no one like him."

"The demise of that office does have another important implication: With gone, there are essentially no Israelis left with any interaction with Iran prior to '79 or any deeper knowledge of the Iranians," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, and author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States. "You have increasingly a generation of Israelis who only know Iran -- and the Israeli perspective on Iran -- from the 1990s and forward. Their education is not any real dealings with Iran, but the Israeli talking points on Iran." (A problem Washington -- which broke off official diplomatic relations with Tehran in 1979 -- shares to some extent.)

But it's also true that Lubrani's influence had been waning for a long time, Parsi added. "A key thing that many Israelis don't talk about is that by the mid-1990s, it no longered matter whether the mullahs would run Iran or not. Iran would be a rival nevertheless -- either since religious elements would ensure that the next Iranian government wouldn't be friendly with Israel, or simply because Iran's rising relative power could challenge Israel's position in the region."


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http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/05/25/israel_pulls_plug_on_iran_regime_change_shop