.

Just days after his return from post-election Iran, we spoke with journalist and author Reece Erlich. Erlich explains that the importance placed on Internet social networking like Twitter by the Western media is a function of how they have been learning about the events, not a reflection on the movement as a whole. “The movement is a lot broader than the relatively well-to-do people who can afford to send Twitter or invest in computer equipment,” says Erlich. Erlich published a book in 2007 exposing US attempts to destabilize Iran, such as the funding of domestic terrorist groups. But he adds that while the CIA and others may be active in the country, they are not responsible for the uprising.

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The former speaker of the US House of Representatives has said that the US should “sabotage” Iran’s oil and gas infrastructure as part of its efforts to bring down the government.
In an interview with Al Jazeera’s Avi Lewis for the Fault Lines programme, Republican Newt Gingrich said targeting Iran’s refinery would spark an economic crisis that would destabilise the government in Tehran.

He said the US should “use covert operations … to create a gasoline-led crisis to try and replace the regime”.

“I think we have a vested interest, the world has a vested interest, in a responsible Iranian government, just as we have a vested interest in a responsible North Korean government,” he said.

In depth

Newt Gingrich speaks to Al Jazeera on Iran

While Barack Obama, the US president, has attempted diplomatic engagement with Iran following years of icy relations, some of his administration’s critics have been calling for destabilisation instead.

But Gingrich qualified that such a tactic to destabilise would only be “one piece out of many”.

“I think that the Reagan strategy in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s is the right strategy: we use economic, diplomatic, psychological pressures to try to change the regime.”

U.S. President Barack Obama warned Iran on Friday the world will not wait indefinitely for it to end its nuclear defiance, saying Tehran had until September to comply or else face consequences.

Obama, speaking at the end of a G8 summit in Italy, said leaders had sent a message condemning the “appalling” events surrounding Iran’s disputed presidential election and expressing solidarity against Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

He said he hoped Iran would enter negotiations on the issue and that leaders would review the situation again at a G20 meeting of developed and developing countries in Pittsburgh in September.

Matt Spetalnick
The Washington Post
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The United States will call for “even stricter sanctions on Iran to try to change the behavior of the regime,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a TV interview broadcast here.

Washington remained concerned about what she called Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons,” which could “be very destabilizing in the Middle East and beyond,” Clinton told the private television network Globovision.

Tehran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian energy purposes.

“We would ask the world to join us in imposing even stricter sanctions on Iran to try to change the behavior of the regime,” Clinton said in the interview, which was broadcast late Tuesday.