WASHINGTON - The week-old
Israeli-Hezbollah conflict is likely to boost the
chances of US military action against Iran,
according to a number of regional experts who see
a broad consensus among the US political elite
that the ongoing hostilities are part of a broader
offensive being waged by Tehran against Washington
across the region.
While Israel-centered
neo-conservatives have been the most aggressive in
arguing that Hezbollah's July 12 cross-border
attack could only have been carried out with
Iran's approval, if not encouragement, that view
has been largely accepted and echoed by the US
mainstream media, as well as other key political
factions, including liberal
internationalists identified with the Democratic
Party.
"In my reading, this is the
beginning of what was a very similar process in
the period, between [the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks against New York and the
Pentagon] and the Iraq war," said Gregory Gause,
who teaches Middle East politics at the University
of Vermont.
"While neo-cons took the lead
in opinion formation then, eventually there was
something approaching consensus in the American
political class that war with Iraq was a necessary
part of remaking the Middle East to prevent future
9/11s," he said.
"That strong majority
opinion was bipartisan [and] crossed ideological
lines - neo-cons supported the war, but so did
lots of prominent liberal intellectuals," he said.
"I think it is very possible that a similar
consensus could develop over the next few years,
if not the next few months, about the necessity to
confront Iran."
Indeed, almost as if to
prove the point, the US Senate voted unanimously
on Tuesday to approve a resolution that not only
endorsed Israel's military actions in Gaza and
Lebanon without calling on it to exercise any
restraint, but also urged US President George W
Bush to impose across-the-board diplomatic and
economic sanctions on Tehran and Damascus. The
House of Representatives was expected to pass a
similar resolution on Thursday.
To Gause
and other analysts, Tehran, even before the
current crisis, offered a tempting target of blame
for Washington's many frustrations in the region.
In addition to its long-standing support
for Hezbollah, whose political power has, in
Washington's view, stalled last year's so-called
"Cedar Revolution", Iran has backed both Hamas,
including the Damascus-based military wing that
last month precipitated the current round of
violence by abducting an Israeli soldier outside
Gaza, and Shi'ite militias that have helped push
Iraq to the brink of a sectarian civil war.
"The world needs to understand what is
going on here," wrote the influential liberal New
York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last week as
Israel launched its military counter-offensive
against Hezbollah.
"The little flowers of
democracy that were planted in Lebanon, Iraq and
the Palestinian territories are being crushed by
the boots of Syrian-backed Islamist militias who
are desperate to keep real democracy from taking
hold in this region and Iranian-backed Islamist
militias desperate to keep modernism from taking
hold."
But Iran can be blamed for other
ills, as well. By allegedly promoting instability
throughout the region, as well as fears of an
eventual military confrontation with Washington,
Iran can also be blamed for the rise of oil
prices, from which it is profiting handsomely, to
record levels.
And its repeated rejection
of US demands that it respond to the pending
proposal for a deal on its nuclear program adds to
the thesis that Iran is engaged in its own form of
asymmetric warfare against Washington. Indeed, it
has become accepted wisdom in Washington that Iran
encouraged Hezbollah's July 12 raid as a way to
divert attention from growing international
concern over its nuclear program.
"There
has been a lot of connecting of the dots back to
Iran," said retired Colonel August Richard Norton,
who teaches international relations at Boston
University. "This goes well beyond the
[neo-conservative] Weekly Standard crowd; we've
seen the major newspapers all accept the premise
that what happened July 12 was engineered in some
way by Iran as a way of undermining efforts to
impede its nuclear program."
Graham
Fuller, a former top Central Intelligence Agency
and RAND Corporation Middle East expert, noted
that there has been a "buildup of domestic forces
that now see Iran as inexorably at the center of
the entire regional spider web".
"The
mainstream is unfortunately grasping for coherent
explanations, [and] the neo-con/hard right offers
a fairly simple, self-serving vision on the cause
of the problems, and their solution," Fuller said.
In much the same way that Saddam Hussein
was depicted, particularly by neo-conservatives,
as the strategic domino whose fall would unleash a
process of democratization, de-radicalization,
moderation and modernization throughout the Middle
East, so now Iran is portrayed as the "Gordian
Knot" whose cutting would not only redress many of
Washington's recent setbacks, but also renew
prospects for regional "transformation" in the way
that it was originally intended.
The
notion that, as the puppetmaster behind Syria,
Hezbollah, Hamas and Shi'ite militias in Iraq, an
aggressive and emboldened Iran is the source of
Washington's many problems has the added virtue of
relieving the policy establishment in Washington
of responsibility for the predicament in which the
US finds itself or of the necessity for "painful
self-examination, or serious policy revision",
said Fuller.
"Full speed ahead - no
revision of fundamental premises is required. And
even though we revel in being the sole global
superpower, God forbid that anything the US has
done in the region might have at least contributed
to the present disaster scene," he said.
As was the case with Iraq, the only
dissenters among the policy elite are the
foreign-policy "realists", who argue that the Bush
administration, in particular, has made a series
of disastrous policy errors in the Middle East -
especially by providing virtually unconditional
support for Israel and invading Iraq.
They
also include regional specialists such as Norton,
who maintain that the depiction of Hezbollah, for
example, as a mere proxy for Iran - let alone the
notion that Tehran was behind the July 12 attack -
is a dangerous misreading of a much more complex
reality.
These forces have been arguing
for some time that Washington should engage Iran
directly on the full range of issues - from
Tehran's nuclear program to regional security -
that divide the countries. But the current crisis,
and Israel's and the neo-conservatives' success in
blaming Iran for it, is likely to make this
argument a more difficult sell.
