Clinton wary of military power in Iran
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Monday that the United States feared Iran was drifting toward a military dictatorship, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seizing control of large swaths of Iran’s political, military and economic establishment. “That is how we see it,” Clinton said in a televised town hall meeting of students at the Doha campus of Carnegie Mellon University. “We see that the government in Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the Parliament, is being supplanted and that Iran is moving towards a military dictatorship.”
The US, she said, was tailoring a new set of tougher UN sanctions to target the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls Iran’s nuclear program and which she said had increasingly marginalized the country’s clerical and political readership. Clinton’s remarks were remarkably blunt, given her audience in Qatar, a Persian Gulf emirate with close ties to Iran. But they build on the administration’s recent strategy of branding the Revolutionary Guard Corps as an “entitled class” that is the principal menace in Iran.
The US, Clinton said, would protect its allies in the gulf from the Iranian aggression - a pledge that echoed the idea of a “security umbrella” that she advanced last summer in Asia. She noted that the US already supplied defensive weapons to several of these countries, and was prepared to bolster its assistance if necessary. “We will always defend ourselves, and we will always defend out friends and allies, and we will certainly defend countries who are in the Gulf who face the greatest immediate nearby threat from Iran,” she said. “We are also talking at length with our friends in the Gulf about what they need in the event that Iran pursues its nuclear ambitions.”
Pressed repeatedly by an audience of mainly Muslim students, Clinton said the US had no plans to carry out a military strike against the Iran. Still, the Obama administration moves from diplomacy to pressure, its policy is edging closer to the hard line toward Iran that Clinton advocated as a presidential candidate. At times on this trip, her public comments have sounded a lot like her worlds on the campaign trail. Her comments on Monday underscored the Obama administration’s determination to single out the elite corps as a way to curb Iran’s nuclear program. The administration is also working on a series of sanctions that would publicly single out the corps’ vast array of companies, banks and other entities.
The latest designations, which come two and a half years after the US first imposed sanctions on the corps, illustrate both the scope and limitations of the president’s pressure campaign. Senior White House officials described what they said would be a “systematic” effort to drive a wedge between the Iranian population and the Revolutionary Guards, which the West says is responsible for running Iran’s nuclear program.
February 19th, 2010 at 7:03 am
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