Key to regime change: Close down Iran’s oil exports

The most effective way for the world – particularly the United States – to promote regime change in Iran is to shut down the Islamic Republic’s ability to export oil.

That’s the consensus of Iranian secular democrats and some of the most informed experts in the West.

The Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS) has been the most public Iranian opposition group calling for a full oil embargo against the Islamic Republic. As a 2010 Congressional Research Service report of the Library of Congress states,

“CIS supports imposition of severe sanctions against Iran, including a total oil sale embargo, to deprive the regime of the funds it needs to pay its security forces.”

CIS is led by former student activist and political prisoner Amir Abbas Fakhravar.

Now, Fakhravar and the CIS are joined by one of the most influential Iran strategists in the Middle East: Uri Lubrani, a former Israeli envoy to the shah’s government in the 1970s and presently on the staff of the Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs.

In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Lubrani urges President Barack Obama to embrace the Iranian opposition and to impose an oil embargo on the regime. Here’s what he says:

“The economic situation in Iran is catastrophic. You have to ensure that it gets worse. What does that entail? Closing down their capacity to sell oil. And the US can help considerably in this matter if it wants to, by placing sanctions on companies that deal in Iranian oil. And then you need to encourage strike action, to bring the country to a standstill.”

After that, Lubrani urges, “you must also bring about a situation in which the army – the most neutral organization – will be prepared to do something. The army has a long score to settle with the regime.”

Lubrani doesn’t expect Iran’s street protests to succeed until the United States changes tack – exactly the situation that the intelligence chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned about a week ago, saying that if the US backed the opposition, the regime could collapse within a year.

In Lubrani’s words, the Iranian people continue to come out and protest in the midst of a crackdown: “despite the fact that they’ve hanged 80 or 90 people in the last two or three months to terrify and deter; that they’ve arrested and tortured and sent people into exile to prevent any organized protest, still people ran in the streets. These kids are heroic. To protest in the street is to court death, and yet they run. But it wasn’t enough.”

Source: Iran Channel

By Cyrus Maximus · March 11, 2011
US Policy · Tagged: Amir Fakhravar, CIS, Confederation of Iranian Students, Fakhravar, IRGC, oil, oil embargo, regime change, Revolutionary Guards, Uri Lubrani