Hearing in SFRC on Iran & Nukes & Political Ambitions on 5/17

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The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is holding two hearings this week in order to hear testimony on:
Iran’s Political/Nuclear Ambitions and U.S. Policy Options

You can go to the SFRC site and watch a live webcast of this hearing at this link at 9:30 on Wed, May 17th: http://foreign.senate.gov/index.html

The second panel in this first hearing has Dr. Patrick Clawson as an expert witness. According to the following Seymour Hersh article from the April 17th issue of the New Yorker, Dr. Clawson has testified as an expert witness earlier this year for the Bush Admin's point of view: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact

The rationale for regime change was articulated in early March by Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert who is the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has been a supporter of President Bush. “So long as Iran has an Islamic republic, it will have a nuclear-weapons program, at least clandestinely,” Clawson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2nd. “The key issue, therefore, is: How long will the present Iranian regime last?”

When I spoke to Clawson, he emphasized that “this Administration is putting a lot of effort into diplomacy.” However, he added, Iran had no choice other than to accede to America’s demands or face a military attack. Clawson said that he fears that Ahmadinejad “sees the West as wimps and thinks we will eventually cave in. We have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates.” Clawson said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

You can see the earlier March 2nd hearing on Iran at this link and see the documentation the witnesses submitted on Iran as a nuclear threat. (You can see the webcast by double-clicking the name of the hearing at this link: http://foreign.senate.gov/hearings/2006/hrg060302a1.html Also, Dr. Clawson's paper on the threat he percieves Iran to be is also here. Double-click Clawson's name at this hearing to see his .pdf witness testimony.)

The second of the these hearings is being held the next day. I think these are very important hearings. The SFRC had a closed briefing on Iran last week and this is the first public hearing on the subject since March. I hope to be able to live-blog some of this tomorrow, and I hope that other with deeper knowledge of the Iran situation join in. It should be interesting to see how the Admin spins this situation for the Senate.

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1. Heraing today on Iran in the Senate.

K&R for this because this is real and important. Now.