Obama's Global Gamble on Iran: What Do We All Stand to Win or Lose?
Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News
ike premature reports of Mark Twain’s death, complaints that the Obama administration is pulling back from the Middle East are greatly exaggerated, and for reasons that are not what they seem.
On the surface, our two long-time allies – Israel and their new best friends in Saudi Arabia – fear that the United States, the other four members of the U.N. Security Council, and Germany will allow Iran to build nuclear weapons, which the Netanyahu government portrays as “an existential threat” to the Jewish state. But, as I argued months ago, the nightmare man and his supporters are “consciously stirring up irrational fears of a second Holocaust at the hands of Iran simply to bolster Israel’s strategic role as a regional super power.”
As far back as September 2009, Ehud Barak, then the Israeli defense chief, set the record straight. “I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel,” he told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth. “Israel is strong, I don’t see anyone who could pose an existential threat.” Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and other major figures in Israel’s defense and intelligence establishment have publicly expressed similar views, adding that a military strike even from the United States could only delay an Iranian bomb, but not destroy Iran’s widely dispersed and deeply buried nuclear program.
The Saudis, who have reportedly cooperated with Israel’s off-and-on plans to bomb Iran, lack the Israeli nuclear arsenal and might choose to buy or build nuclear arms with help from Pakistan. But, as I wrote in “Obama bin Sultan and Bandar ibn Israel,” the Saudis primarily want more U.S. support for their Sunni war against the Shiites, especially in Syria.
No one should deny that the regional stakes are high. They are. But they do not include a plausible threat of nuclear conflict, not with the huge nuclear arsenal the Israelis now have and will continue to expand. The threat that Israel, Saudi Arabia, and their supporters fear is that a successful negotiation of the nuclear issue could remake the Middle East in ways that significantly alter the regional balance of power.
Israel and Saudi Arabia would emerge with a somewhat weakened ability to dictate what happens in their neighborhood, though both could benefit from adapting to the changed circumstances, as they did in the time of the Shah. The Iranians would gain, though the hardline Revolutionary Guard would not. And perhaps the biggest winners would be the American people, who could finally move toward a sensible relationship with all three countries.
Saudi Arabia and its allies in Big Oil like Dick Cheney have long played too important a role in American foreign policy. So have Israel, AIPAC, and their not-so-silent partners in the Military Industrial Complex, who have long funded the neocon push for a Cold War-like foreign policy. And “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” has remained an all too dangerous possibility ever since the neocons and their über-nationalistic friends Cheney, Rumsfeld, and McCain began pushing for it back in the 1990s.
We are not yet rid of these masters of war. Far from it, as I argued in “AIPAC and the Israel Lobby: Down, but Not Yet Out!” Even worse, any hope of success rests to a terrifying degree on the “historic flexibility” of Iran’s theocratic ruler, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who for the moment seems to be holding back his own radical flanks from devouring President Hassan Rouhani. To secure an end to crippling economic sanctions, Khamenei’s negotiators need to assure Obama and the other global players about Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions. That may seem imperialistic to purists, and it is. But this is the game we are in, and so far at least, the Iranians are playing it to give Obama and Rouhani a victory.
Looking back, it is only fair to note that Obama had something like this in mind when he first ran for president in 2008. Iran was one of the primary issues on which he and Hillary Clinton disagreed. Americans should hold that in mind as we look to pick a new president in 2016.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."
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