AEI Scholars Call for Iran Regime Change and Possible War

As tensions with Iran increase, many of the neoconservatives who laid the ideological and strategic frameworks for the invasion of Iraq are calling on the Bush administration to prepare for a preventive war against Iran and to immediately implement a “regime change” strategy.

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), along with the Project for the New American Century, provided the Bush administration with many of the key members of its foreign policy team. In a January 2003 speech at AEI, President Bush noted that 20 AEI associates had joined his administration. Today, AEI scholars Reuel Marc Gerecht, David Frum, Michael Rubin, and Michael Ledeen are beating the drums for a preventive war against Iran or for a “regime change” strategy that rests on additional U.S. aid to select Iranian dissidents. We have included excerpts from their recent essays to provide readers a quick overview of the neocon arguments for expanded U.S. intervention in the Middle East.

Stephen Zunes, Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus (a joint project of the IRC and the Institute for Policy Studies) and professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, was among the leading critics of the pro-war arguments for preventive war against Iraq. In a recent analysis from FPIF, Zunes argues for a less bellicose U.S. foreign policy toward Iran and a more even-handed policy on nuclear proliferation issues. FPIF