DancesWithCamels

The following is in response to an article penned by Justin Raimondo on antiwar.com. While I don’t oppose the position the author advocates (defeating legislation that amounts to a declaration of war with Iran), I find the manner in which he frames the discussion to be problematic. While the article is peppered with disclaimers and justifiers, bluntly, it suggests that Jews control U.S. foreign policy and Israel is threatening to drag the U.S. into war by initiating a strike on Iran. It appears that the author has very little knowledge of the policy debates going on in Israel and the United States. Moreover, for one who apparently identifies with a group of policy advocates that claims to be solely guided by realist thinking it’s strange that his interpretation smacks of the extraordinary.

If the administration and the Israeli lobby can be accused of war-mongering then it is only fair to accuse Mr. Raimondo of anti-war mongering. I’m not an advocate of striking Iran; I am in agreement with Mr. Raimondo that it would be potentially disastrous for a variety of regional and international actors. My biggest concern is that the manner in which the author portrays the potential for conflict is overly alarmist. Furthermore, throughout the author perpetuates some pretty conspiratorial views about U.S. decision making in the Middle East with regards to U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iraq and Iran and Israel’s role in shaping that policy. I take particular issue with the following statement, “Yet it cannot be denied – as I wrote before a single shot had been fired – that the Iraq war was launched, as Klein notes, to make the Middle East safer for Israel, just as the current push for “regime change” in Iran is energized by the same motive.”

The U.S. invasion of Iraq involved many considerations, some ideological, some geo-strategic, most ill-conceived. However, to state so directly that the over-riding goal of invading Iraq was to ensure Israeli security suggests naivety. Very briefly, the U.S. hoped that by invading Iraq they could:

• Establish a pro-American Iraq to act as a substitute for a U.S.-Saudi relationship that got all the more problematic in the wake of September 11.

• Further contain and confront Iran with the additional leverage of military bases in Iraq.

• Ensure energy interests and the American position in the Gulf.

• Boost liberal political forces in the region in the hope creating a new regional order predicated on good-governance and democracy (whatever the definition of that was).

As I said, these goals, and there were others, were largely ill-conceived and only plausible to those sitting around a conference table in Washington D.C. Regardless it would appear that the U.S. entered Iraq to perpetuate what policy makers perceived were U.S. strategic interests, not Israeli. If there happens to be a confluence of interests between the U.S. and Israel in some respects this need not be construed as a grand Israeli/AIPAC plot to dupe the dumb and dopey U.S. government into doing the regional bidding of the sly and cunning Israelis.

The current U.S.-Iran dispute and possible avenues of dealing with Iran is being approached from the same U.S.-centric perspective, meaning U.S. interests are paramount in the minds of policy makers. Certainly perspectives in Washington differ greatly on this issue especially in light of U.S. tribulations in Iraq. General Petraeus for one has recently discounted the notion that there will be a strike on Iran. Regardless, rest assured that the U.S. will not commit itself to a potentially disastrous military engagement with Iran for the sake of Israel alone. While Israel will act in its own security interests, it’s not likely that Israel would be so brazen so as to gamble its fate on initiating a conflict that has the potential to embroil the U.S. in a situation it might not support.

Iran’s goals since the revolution have been made clear. From the get-go Khomeini established that Iran’s primary strategic objective is to rid the United States from the ‘Persian’ Gulf in order to restore the Iranian lake to its natural hegemon. This is at the heart of the ‘Iranian challenge.’ Clearly, such an objective places America and primarily her Arab Gulf allies on a collision course with the Islamic Republic, whether that trajectory will result in war is unpredictable. While the standard canard of the ‘Jews run the world’ is often an easy explanation for U.S. policy in the Middle East, it lacks plausibility, suggests a huge overestimation of pro-Israeli Jewish influence in the U.S. and ultimately amounts to naught.