As I mentioned today in my Salon article on nasty in-fighting at the Pentagon, Iraq isn’t the only country in line for the ‘regime change’ treatment. In many ways the neo-cons are even more interested in tossing the regimes in Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Which brings us to the Voice of America and Iran.
As I’ve mentioned to you before, The Nelson Report is Washington’s bible for the hottest scoops and gossip on Asian diplomacy and trade negotiation politics — Nelson’s sort of like the Drudge of Fast Track.
Anyway, Robert R. Reilly is the extremely conservative Bush political appointee in charge of Voice of America. According to Wednesday’s Nelson Report, at last month’s meeting of the Voice of America Board, Reilly proposed and got approval to shut down “all the major [VOA] news bureaus in Asia, Latin America and Europe” in order to free up money to create a new station dedicated exclusively to broadcasting youth-oriented popular music in Iran — the idea being of course to channel the incipient rebelliousness of Iranian youth (of which there is actually quite a lot) to overthrow the mullahs by pumping the Iranian version of Britney Spears into the country 24/7.
I can just hear the morning radio lead-in now … “Yo, yo, yo Tehran, we got some cra-a-a-a-zy bumpin’ and grindin’ comin’ your way this morning from Michael Ledeen and his fly peeps at AEI…”
Truth be told, on its own, I’m not sure this is such a bad idea. The issue is more gutting the rest of VOA to do it. The career people at VOA 
are, as you might imagine, not happy about this. The decision was apparently made without consultation with any professional journalists or the American diplomats with responsibility for the regions in question. The bigger story, though, seems to be that this is administration payback for the career people at VOA being too independent from the administration line.
P.S. Independent reporting from the TPM research department has revealed another possible angle on Reilly’s Iranian radio station: Reilly’s bio at the VOA website says he “has written music criticism for 20 years for such publications as High Fidelity, Musical America, Schwann Magazine, and Crisis Magazine.” So in addition to ideology, this may also be about tunes.
