Kash Kheirkhah of Kash’s Newsroom discusses how the West can aide the Iranian people overthrow the Iranian regime thus ending the nuclear crisis. Kash is an Iranian currently living in Canada therefore his words are far more educated in how to help the Iranian people than my own.A brief excerpt of Kash’s post:

But more importantly, the Iranian regime perfectly knows that the current crisis has also the potential to awaken the long-suppressed longings for freedom and democracy that lie within the majority of Iranian people.

It is true that the majority of my compatriots believe they have a right to nuclear technology but it is also true that they are fully aware of the risks and consequences such technology can have at the hands of their current leaders. The Iranian people once paid dearly for mullahs’ war ambitions 20 years ago and are not ready to go through such an ordeal again. What’s more, they are fed up with this regime.

Believe me THAT’s what has got Tehran so scared.

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Kash discusses the rise of the Mulllah’s in Iran and how many Western nations either cut off all contact or looked the other way for trade with Iran. I encourage all ITB readers to read Kash’s post and note his idea of “smart sanctions.”

No one wants bombs dropped in Tehran or the 300 nuclear sites, many of which are buried deep within the ground, located throughout Iran. Some of those sites have only recently been found and there is very little intelligence to indicate where all of the underground sites are. At this point there doesn’t appear, to me anyway, that there is another viable alternative to a bombing run in order to solve the crisis. There is absolutely no way the international community can allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, and it is these weapons which have become increasingly clear Iran is pursuing.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a dangerous man who has repeatedly called for the entire extermination of Israel. The threats Iran made regarding the resumption of nuclear enrichment ring hollow. Over the past year during the diplomacy with the EU Three, Iran has threatened to resume enrichment several times over. They have resumed research and resumed enrichment despite messages to the contrary. The Iranian threat to resume research is, and always has been, hollow because you usually hold up on following through the threat in order for a threat to have any backing. Iran has not done so.

The IAEA has been kicked out of Iran following the referral to the Security Council, but it’s not as if Iran was being forthcoming before they kicked the IAEA out. For a nation which supposedly was concerned with complying with the IAEA, they don’t exactly have the best track record in doing so. Not only have they decided not to show up for a meeting with the IAEA, there is also a deception going on.

DICKEY: At one site called Lavizan, facilities were bulldozed by Iran before you could look at them, and you weren’t allowed to run tests in the area.

ELBARADEI: We clearly need to take environmental samplings from some of the equipment that used to be in Lavizan. We need to interview some of the people who have been engaged in Lavizan. We have [also] gotten some information about some modification of their missiles that could have some relationship to the nuclear program. [emphasis added] So, we need to clarify all these things. It is very specific. They know what we want to do, and they just have to go and do it. I’m making it very clear right now that I cannot extend the deadline, which is … March 6. (source)

It is Lavizan II where Iranian dissident groups say there has been extra Iranian activity during the so-called ceasing of nuclear research and production (registration required).  So what can be done and just what are these “smart sanctions” Kash calls for?

Smart sanctions are the sanctions that will help break the fake “untouchable” image of the Iranian regime in the eyes of its suppressed people; sanctions that would target ” the Iranian officials”, barring them from traveling abroad, suspending their membership in the world’s most prestigious bodies such as the UN and cutting their finances, particularly their economic, military and nuclear-related trades.

Interestingly enough, Senator John McCain told members at the Munich Conference on Security Policy what sanctions need to be imposed on Iran.

“Immediate UN Security Council action is required to impose multilateral sanctions, including a prohibition on investment, a travel ban, and asset freezes for government leaders and nuclear scientists,” McCain told a security conference in Munich.

“Should Russia and China decline to join our peaceful efforts to resolve the nuclear issue, we should seek willing partners to impose these sanctions outside the UN framework.” (source)

Iran though has prepared for freezing of assets. The nation has moved a vast amount of their money from European banks to banks in Asia, so will sanctions that call for freezing of assets do the job? In the larger course of debate on this post with how to support the Iranian people impose regime change, with freezing of assets be more symbollic than actual workable sanctions, will symbols show the Iranian people we support them?

Iran is not a nation that our technology can break through the barriers to broadcast our message into Iran; satellite dishes are banned, though there are still many. In the past we have dropped leaflets into nations and regions, but the Iranian air force and anti-aircraft capability they have increased in recent years thanks in large part to Russian sales makes this plan all but impossible. With every move the international community makes, Ahmadinejad tells the Iranian people the complete opposite and quite often makes things up to support his tirades.

How could we possibly break through the barriers and inform the Iranian people that it is not them the international community wants to remove, but the “small clerical elite” that we feel we must remove in order to keep a nuclear weapon out of the hands of both the Iranian regime and the known terrorist groups the nation sponsors? There is no easy answer to this question and I do not pretend I know it.

Perhaps the most effective way, though not the best, would be to rely on Iranian dissident groups and people like Kash to help spread the word. The credibility gap Iranians have on the West due to past injustices aren’t likely to be bridged with a speech given by any leader of a Western nation, but they just might be bridged with their fellow countrymen explaining what is truly at stake. If Iran gets the nuclear bomb, there is a decent to good chance one of those bombs will be transported to a radical Islamic terrorist group which Iran supports.

We can think Hezbollah or Hamas, but also think Al Qaida as both have links to Al Qaida. Al Qaida’s recent forays into Southern Lebanon raise the question on just how much cooperation there is between Al Qaida and Hezbollah. While Al Qaida and Hezbollah insist their enemy is the West and Isreal respectively, both have caused far more deaths to those within their faith than those outside their faith. If Iran acquires a nuclear bomb, it is far more dangerous for the nations of the Middle East and the nations within than to Europe even though it would be in rocket range (Eastern U.S. once the Shahab-6 is fully developed).

This type of a threat to Middle Eastern nations and citizens within cannot be discounted. Irah has already moved aggressively in the region to prevent Democracy even though it claims Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected democratically (839 percent turnout in one Tehran neighborhood for Ahmadinejad though puts a damper on the thought the election was democratic).

But then what about what the Islamic Republic is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, to mention just two examples of Teheran’s attempt at exporting its Khomeinist ideology? Teheran has also revived contacts with dissident Shi’ite exiles from Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. And last December Teheran encouraged radical Shi’ites in Kuwait to form a party to oppose “American-inspired democratization.”

All that fits into what Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Muhammadi has described as “master plan for a pan-Shi’ite caliphate” covering part of the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, with Iran’s “Supreme Guide” as the caliph. (source)

Imagine what an Iranian controlled Caliphate armed with nuclear weapons would do to the entire world, much less the inabitants of the region. This is a regime which regularly beats its own citizens, hangs gay people and executes women for being raped among many, many other deplorable acts. The hostility Iran currently has towards Isreal would be magnified, but as Amir Taheri explains, Iran’s hostility stretches far past the Israeli shores.

With nuclear weapons and the desire to create a Caliphate ruled under Iranian law and by an Iranian regime, Iran would have two wild cards to hold the entire world hostage; nuclear weapons and oil. Iran has already spread its hold on radical Islamic terrorist groups throughout the world, if regime change in Iran is not a priority of the international community now, these Iranian supported groups are likely to hold the world hostage.