Israel pulls plug on Iran "regime change shop"

LR in the CABLE, here

"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 had been headed by 83-year-old Uri Lubrani, who was de facto Israeli ambassador to Iran in the 1970s and famously predicted the shah would fall. 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 Washington might support a plan of regime change in Iran....

The unit (technically known as the Lebanon coordinator unit, perhaps because of Iran's role in Lebanon) had in later years just four people and ran on a budget of just over a million dollars per year, according to Haaretz. "The main purpose of the unit was to maintain links with the Iranian community and political organizations, and follow the media in Iran."

....Lubrani and his staff spent their days thinking of ways to counter the Tehran regime by cultivating Iranian dissident and Iranian ethnic minority groups and supporting efforts to encourage some sort of democratic regime change in Iran....

In recent years, one of the Lubrani group's de facto outreach efforts was also to try to convince the Bush administration to get behind a regime change effort targeting Iran. After all, Israel's fingerprints would be political suicide on an Iranian dissident or group. Washington's support to organize, unite and fund such an effort was seen by the Lubrani group and some Iranian exiles as essential.

.... some influential hawks still actively nurtured the hope that Bush would not stop with Iraq and Afghanistan and would go on to support regime change in Iran. ......Such aspirations withered in Bush's second term, which became dominated by the increasing violence of the Iraq insurgency and the gradual sidelining of the hawks who had championed the Iraq war, some arguing that it would be relatively easy and cheap.

By late 2006, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was announcing that U.S. policy toward Tehran was not regime change, but behavior change, and the strategy for achieving it would be multilateral diplomacy. Barack Obama's election in 2008 further clarified the direction of things. ..

How seriously did the Lubrani group believe a campaign of democratic revolution or destabilization by Iran's disgruntled ethnic minorities and dissidents cultivated from the outside could be? Or were such activities merely seen as a trip-wire that would prompt Western military action to overturn Iran's regime and take out its nuclear facilities? It's hard to say. Farsi speakers who had served in Iran and cultivated ties with Iran's shah-era security services, Lubrani and Barzilay,his aide, seemed to believe that beneath Tehran's clerical regime was an Iranian population that was not inherently hostile to Israel.

"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 [Lubrani] gone, there are essentially no Israelis left with any interaction with Iran prior to '79 or any deeper knowledge of the Iranians," says Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, and author of a book,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." 

Lubrani was informed two months ago that the contracts of staffers in his unitwould not be renewed. But his office's demise hardly means Israel has embraced Washington's commitment to negotiate with Iran. It is one more signal that the West's path of trying to negotiate with Iran or ratchet up the pressure to change its behavior on the nuclear and terrorism front is likely to be dominated by conventional coercive diplomacy, rather than efforts to destabilize the regime.

"We are not in a regime change mode," Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said at a hearing on Iran earlier this month. "Just as we abandon calls for regime change in Tehran and recognize a legitimate Iranian role in the region, Iran's leaders must moderate their behavior and that of their proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas."