“I am opposed to a military strike on Iran because I don’t think it accomplishes very much in the long run,” said Mr. Gingrich, who supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and has been a strong defender of Israel. 
“I think if this regime [in Iran] is so dangerous that we can’t afford to let them have nuclear weapons, we need a strategy to replace the regime,” Mr. Gingrich said. “And the first place you start is where Ronald Reagan did in Eastern Europe with a comprehensive strategy that relied on economic, political, diplomatic, information and intelligence” means. ~The Washington Times

When I saw the headline that Gingrich was opposed to a strike on Iran, I thought I must have been dreaming.  But, of course, there was a hitch.  There was no way Newt “World War III” Gingrich was going to take the more reasonable view on how to handle Iran policy, and, sure enough, he didn’t.  So what’s the plan for toppling the Iranian government?  As you would expect, it has all of the same sophistication that went into planning regime change in Iraq:

“I think our position should be that we don’t expect Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be around for very long,” he said. “But we think the Iranians are going to get rid of him. We’re not. But then I would do everything I could to make that possible.”

The old “encourage the Iranian democrats to commit treason” plan seems as unbelievable as ever.  Even while granting that these were off-the-cuff remarks on a cruise ship somewhere, Gingrich’s comments here tell us something about how the WWIII/WWIV crowd sees Iran: as a country where, apparently, Ahmadinejad is in charge of everything (he isn’t), where the Iranian people are groaning under the yoke of the man whom a sizeable number of them elected as president (they aren’t, at least not exactly) and where getting rid of Ahmadinejad will constitute some kind of regime change.  What Gingrich seems to be proposing as a concrete policy is to provoke rebellion against the Iranian government in the wild hopes that this will prompt a general uprising that will topple the government.  Even supposing that making another large Muslim nation unstable and chaotic was a desirable thing to do, what makes Gingrich think that this is going to work?  But let’s keep Gingrich’s idea in mind whenever we hear about the need to prevent Iran from getting nukes, because his is the logical conclusion of all the arguments in favour of intervention.