Irish Times: Gaza conflict a template for US policy on Iran

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Gaza conflict a template for US policy on Iran

PAUL GILLESPIE

Sat, Jan 10, 2009

WORLD VIEW:EVERYONE WANTS to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” The neo-conservative nostrum from 2002-2003 is worth recalling in discussing Israel’s war objectives in Gaza. As Richard Perle told an audience not long after the Iraq invasion: “We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: ‘You’re next.’”

The Gaza operation, quite aside from its immediate lethal brutality, is part of a larger and longer Israeli strategy: to convince the incoming United States administration that engaging Iran directly in a possible grand bargain about the future of the Middle East and Afghanistan would be a dangerous mistake.

Recall, too, the speculation last year that either the US on its own, or Israel with US approval, would attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities before George Bush left office. Neither happened, since both courses of action were in effect vetoed by Pentagon realists.

But there is a proxy and pre-emptive character to Israel’s action: don’t bomb Iran, attack Hamas. It is directed not only against Hamas’s rocket-launching ability, but to destroy the organisation and point up its existential threat to Israel – and to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the so-called moderate Arab states. This is intended to create a continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations by locating Hamas and its ally Iran in the discredited “war on terror”, reframing the policy against fundamentalist Islam.

Hence the homology between Israeli rhetoric and propaganda about Hamas (an organisation dedicated to the destruction of the Israeli state according to its founding charter), and about Iran, whose president wants to drive Israelis into the sea. Both should be outside the pale of regional politics, they argue. They must be contained or defeated if peace is to have a chance.

Obama’s argument in favour of talking directly to Iran was maintained even as his campaign moved towards the centre ground in its closing stages. He understands Iran is an unanticipated net beneficiary of US intervention in Iraq. It is now a major regional power, possessing the world’s second-largest reserves of oil and natural gas, with a crucial stake in Iraqi stability and sharing many common interests with the US in neighbouring Afghanistan. It has no desire to see the extreme Sunni Taliban back in power there, having already developed a serious drug problem as a result of the booming opium trade through its eastern regions.

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http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0110/1231515461125.html