The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has no clear-cut signs of “victory.”  The administration of President Barack Obama tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.  When that did not work out to the satisfaction of Washington, the United States – contrary to its strong proclivity for having a long-term stay in Iraq – withdrew its forces.

The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq was an ideal development, from the vantage point of Iran’s strategic interests.  Iran’s adversary, the United States, spent billions of dollars and shed the blood of thousands of its own troops and that of the Iraqis to transform Iraq from a staunch adversary of Iran to its strong friend.  In fact, in Prime Minister al-Maliki, Iran has a powerful ally.  One of Iraq’s chief adversaries in the area, Saudi Arabia, has been a strong supporter of al-Maliki’s nemesis, Iyad Allawi, the head of the al-Iraqiya party, a secularist, and a person preferred by the Sunni Iraqis.  Thus, Iran, by ensuring the prolonged existence of the government of al-Maliki, is definitely enjoying the upper-hand in keeping the Saudis at bay.  The unstated aspect of that development is that Iraq has emerged as an arena for the power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and by proxy, the United States, which is very much in the corner of Saudi Arabia in undermining Iran’s growing power and influence, not only inside Iraq, but also in the Middle East.

This gathering storm is unique, in the sense that when the Persian Gulf states sided with the United States in 1991 to end Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait, they were not interested in destroying his regime.  In the case of Iran, there do not seem to be any red lines in the sand drawn by the Arab states that the United States should not cross in taking military action against Iran.

But the preceding is a minor subtext of the growing animosity between the United States and Iran.  The chief subtext is Iran’s continued nuclear research program, which the U.S. categorically depicts as aimed at developing nuclear weapons.  Iran’s denial to the contrary has few takers in the West.  Thus, while the United States is assiduously weaving complex webs of economic sanctions against Iran, Israel prefers military action against it – either of its own or that of the United States – to put an end to Iran’s nuclear research.

Viewing the issue from Israel’s point of view, if Iran indeed develops nuclear weapons, the Jewish state would lose its nuclear veto against any ambitious states in the Middle East – a veto that was strategically developed by the founding fathers of that country.  Even though a nuclear armed Iran would be no match against Israel’s military power, the mere fact that such a development is about to happen is alarming to the leaders in Jerusalem, and they have kept their pressure on the Obama administration for action against Iran.

Considering the fact that the Islamic regime of Iran has been under threat by the United States for the sake of regime survival, the Ayatollahs may be considering having nuclear weapons in the future.  Even though it has been serious about creating the circumstances for regime change in Iran, the United States – even though it denies it – does not think that Iran’s predilections for acquiring nuclear weapons has a legitimate or a rational basis.  Therein lies the rub: what Iran considers as a necessary requirement for regime survival, the United States regards as a threat to regional stability “justifying” waging another war.  Listening to the Republican presidential candidates casually talking about taking military action against Iran, and even the Obama officials’ frequent references to the phrase that George W. Bush and his officials used to iterate – that all options regarding Iran are on the table – it appears that the American political leadership is suffering from a collective sense of amnesia regarding the instability and destruction that resulted from the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In the rising cacophony of claims related to ‘threats’ regarding Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons, the Arab regimes’ siding with the United States, in reality, has an entirely different real reason.  Those states have long considered Iran as a threat to their own aspirations involving the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) capacity to manage regional stability.  For instance, GCC propaganda is trying to persuade the international community that political protests in Shia-dominated Bahrain are sponsored by Iran instead of being a manifestation of the Bahrainis to transform the shape of the tyranny of the Sunni regime.  Saudi Arabia – the dominant state of the GCC – has long regarded Iran as a threat to its own aspirations to dominate the larger Middle East.

Iran has deftly outmaneuvered the Sunni Arab states, but, most importantly, has outsmarted the United States in Iraq and in the Levant by creating a nexus with Syria.  That nexus, in turn, has dominated the distribution of power inside Lebanon in favor Hezbollah.  Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East in the aftermath of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq created a sense of long-term defeat among the Sunni rulers in Riyadh, Cairo, and Amman.  They did not know what countermeasures to take in order to undermine Iran’s enhanced power and influence.  America’s near obsession of “containing” Iran through the pretext of depriving it of nuclear weapons was perceived as a fantastic opportunity to outsmart Iran.

The upside of this American-Arab maneuvering is that Iran is likely to be forced to continue its nuclear research but would stop just short of developing nuclear weapons.  The downside is that political explosion in the Persian Gulf in particular – and in the Middle East in general – happens suddenly and with calamitous consequence.  And the next war, if it comes, promises to be highly explosive and equally catastrophic.

Watching the United States conduct its global campaign to dissuade a number of countries from supporting Palestinian statehood, I am once again reminded of how little the Obama administration has really learned from what has happened in the Arab world throughout this year.

The Arab awakening, or the Arab spring, has become one of the iconoclastic movements of this new century.  The United States has learned to accept it, only after realizing that it had no other choice.  Perhaps we can safely say that the era of autocratic rule is about to enter history in the Arab world.  There are, to be sure, a few pockets of the old era: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Algeria, etc., but those regimes will soon see that they will have to change or be discarded, like the ones in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

Israel, on its part, is pretending that nothing really has happened in its neighborhood.  Even while Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship is ousted, Israel wants to desperately cling to the Camp David peace treaty with Egypt, without even considering introducing major modifications to its old policies of altering the ground realities by building new Jewish settlements in order to prolong its occupation of Palestine as long as possible.  Israel knows that the United States will stand behind it because the whole of the U.S. Congress is pretty much in its pocket.  If you don’t believe this statement, just watch on YouTube Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech of May 24, 2011, to the joint session of Congress.  Try counting the number of standing ovations that he received during that speech.  It seems that almost every U.S. legislator wanted to be photographed applauding him so that he/she could use that photo in the next congressional campaign.

However, this is all part of old politics.  The Arab awakening has started an era when the United States’ own clout in the Arab world has palpably diminished, as evidenced by reading the hard numbers on the low popularity rating of President Obama and the United States in various Arab countries.  Still, no one expects that Israel learns lessons quickly, and will decide to bring about similar major changes accommodating the newly emerging realities in its Arab neighborhood.

There are plenty of signs that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in a few countries, which have long maintained diplomatic ties with it.  The Jewish state was indeed shocked to witness the intensity of demonstrations that dismantled the outer wall of its Embassy in Cairo on September 10.  The Israeli diplomatic staff had to flee Cairo.  Similar demonstrations in front of its Embassy
in Jordan forced it to fly its diplomatic personnel out of that country.  Israel’s ties with Turkey are also deteriorating in regard to Palestinian statehood – the support of which is characterized by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s remark during his recent trip to  Egypt that Palestinian statehood is “an obligation”.

Isreal direly needs an “awakening,” and its own version of “spring” in terms of its entire outlook toward the occupation of Palestine.  There is no way that old-style Israeli policy can result in an era of warm ties with Egypt once it elects a democratic government.  Similarly, another country that is at peace with Israel, Jordan, will also be forced to revisit the modality of its ties with the Jewish state.  Do not be surprised if the new governments of Arab countries start their own global campaign of putting international pressure on Israel through economic boycotts and sanctions within the next few months to a year or so.  The EU – as dependent as it is on the Arab world for oil supplies and trade ties – will become increasingly vulnerable to such Arab sanctions.  The entire Western framework that has been so comfortable with the Israeli continued occupation of Palestine is about to receive its own major – and well-deserved – shock in the near future.

The foremost purpose of the proposed Israeli awakening has to be aimed at earnestly negotiating with the Palestinian leadership for the emergence of an independent Palestine.  It should also seriously consider dismantling a number of Jewish settlements that were aimed at creating “Bantustans” inside Palestine.  The Israeli awakening should be about assigning the same notion of sovereignty for the Palestinians that it exercises as a Jewish state.  These are reasonable expectations, but they require that the Likudniks and other right-wing extremists inside Israel discard their anachronistic framework that envisions the Palestinians as lesser human beings.

Since I am finishing my own book on the relationship between the Islamic challenge and the great powers, I read Kull’s essay with considerable interest.  His essay is interesting and contains more than a few insights about Muslims.  I think his insights are worth considering, because he is much more informed than most of the other written work that I have read on the subject.

One of Kull’s observations that captured my interest deserves some attention.  Describing one of the “most fundamental” aspects of the Muslim perception about America, he writes: Muslims are of the view “…that America seeks to undermine Islam – a perception held by overwhelming majorities.”  The author goes on to add:

Muslims tend to view current events through the lens of a long-standing historical narrative.  According to this narrative, going back to the Middle Ages Christian forces from the West have persistently sought to break the grip of Islam on its people.  By holding fast, Muslims believe, they were able to flourish as a civilization, at times superseding the West in many dimensions.  Today, they believe, that struggle continues – except that today the challenge is greater.  Western cultural products are seen as seductively undermining Islamic culture.  More importantly, Western powers have gained extraordinary military might that is seen as threatening and coercively dominating the Muslim world and propping up secular autocrats ready to accommodate the West.”

Since I have been reflecting over the issue of why there is so much antipathy between the United States and the world of Islam, my own tentative conclusion is that it is the outcome of America’s long-held perception (which goes back to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, which brought to power a stridently anti-American government) that Islam as a political force
is determined to challenge the United States’ global dominance.  The first phase of that challenge would come within the world of Islam (it can be argued that it is already a reality in Iran, and it is likely to become a reality if or when anti-U.S. governments are  elected as a result of political changes stemming from the Arab Awakening).  Then, in the next phase, it is likely to become a global challenge, since the followers of Islam reside all over the world.  That perception was only intensified in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.  The anti-U.S. rhetoric of al-Qaida continues to echo throughout the Muslim world, even when that entity is experiencing a palpable decline, largely as a result of the assassination of Usama Bin Laden at the hands of the U.S. Special Forces in May of this year.

The United States never understood that the chief strength of al-Qaida’s message was not related to Islam as a religion, but with Islam as a political force.  From the religious perspective, no one can create a universally accepted argument (universal in its applicability among the Muslims of the world) about the implementation of Jihad against the United States – that is when it is  legitimate to declare a Jihad or who is a legitimate authority to make such a declaration.  However, from the perspective of politics, a powerful argument can be made – and was indeed made by al-Qaida and other Islamist groups – that the United States has a fight with Islam.

The United States had to respond to attacks on its territory by invading Afghanistan, where originally planned by al-Qaida  originally planned those attacks.  However, the rhetoric and the palpable resolve of the Bush administration to remain on the offensive under the general rubric of “global war on terrorism,” perpetuated its own narrative, especially on the part of the
Muslims that America is determined to dominate the world of Islam through military attacks and occupation.  That  narrative and the decision of President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, more than anything that al-Qaida would have said or done, became the mother’s milk for anti-American feelings inside various Muslim countries.

From the American side, the perception related to Islam may not have been driven primarily by the treatment of it as a religion, but as a political force.  In fact, a lot of Western “experts” on Islam take the position that America’s problem is with “political  Islam” and not with the religion of Islam.  Sadly, a number of Muslim scholars, in parroting Western scholars, have adopted that rhetoric.  However, anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that politics is only the flip side of Islam as a religion.  For a majority of Muslims anywhere in the world, Islam is both a religion and a political force.  As such, Islam contains its notions of government, its own rules of governance (the Shariah), and its own code of conduct in terms of dealing with the West.  There is a lot of room for interpretation on all those issues and there is no one prevailing dominant perspective on them.

This is one of the most controversial  of the problem that exists between Islam and the West. While al-Qaida and other  self-styled “Jihadists” have articulated their militant rhetoric related to the West and how to deal with it (i.e., only by perpetrating terrorist attacks), there is no equally voluble or dominant narrative that came out from the side of any Muslim government countering that of the Islamists.  As a complicated political force and religion, Islam needed equally sophisticated narratives explaining the meaning of a lot of concepts like Jihad, Ijtihad, and the need of interpreting both of them in the ever-changing intricacies of a globalized world.  However, no Muslim scholar – much less a Muslim politician – could muster enough mental prowess or courage to respond to the challenge.  Thus, the best that he Western world knows about the relationship between Muslims and the West is through the notion of anger.  It is mostly an intellectual cop-out on the part of its peddlers, because they lack other multi-dimensional and sophisticated explanations.

Muslim attitudes, at the least, are a potpourri of feelings of antipathy, frustration, and even anger for being at the bottom of the barrel in the hierarchy of nations.  The Quran indentifies them as the best of the chosen people.  Yet what confuses them is why that divine statement does not include them among the most powerful and influential nations of the contemporary world.  Muslims might be angry at their inability to alter their plight as a collective entity or as individuals when it comes to their failure to bring an end to enduring autocratic rules in their polities.  They rightly blame those rules for keeping them backward and poor and for their incapability to control their destiny in the realms of politics and economics.  Perhaps they feel too strongly in blaming the West for its support of autocratic rulers; however, no one can ever state that they are wrong in holding that conviction.

Being backward, weak, and subservient to the West were motivating forces behind China’s desire to become a premier rising power of the world.  However, the most important initial step that China took in becoming a rising power was when it
succeeded in overthrowing the highly corrupt regime of Chiang Kai-shek, which was also a friend of the West.  Neither the Arabs nor the Muslims of other nations succeeded in creating governments that are even half as dedicated about becoming a world-class power as the PRC (Contemporary Turkey might be one rare exception).  Muslim autocrats seem happy to be heading the regimes that kept their peoples backward and weak.  Those rulers treat those traits as guarantees for prolonging their discreditable rule.

Still, Kull is right in noting that Muslim anger stems from the fact that the United States has been determined about imposing its own model of secularism on Muslim countries, because “most Muslims want to preserve the Islamic foundations of their society and want their public life to be infused with Islamic principles.  Most want Shariah to play a greater role.  They want a quality of piety to pervade their culture. Integrating these aspirations with liberal ideas of democracy and freedom of religion is a decidedly challenging endeavor.”  Consequently, according to Kull, “…it is particularly infuriating to Muslims when America intervenes in a way that is destabilizing, trying to root for one imagined side against another, in what Americans conceive of as an inevitable evolution toward the victory of one side.”

As much as the United States portrays itself as a champion of democracy, when it comes to the world of Islam, the lone superpower wishes to see the establishment of a “secular” democracy only.  Bush was clearly disappointed, indeed shocked, at the emergence of an Islamic democracy in the post-Saddam Iraq, which he wanted to emerge as a prototype of the Jeffersonian
democracy in the Middle East.  To add further to his dismay, the citizens of the occupied Palestine overwhelmingly voted for Hamas, a predominantly Islamist party, in the election of January 2006.  Even after entering into office, Hamas refused to either renounce violence or recognize Israel so that it could negotiate with the Jewish state the political resolution of the Palestinian
conflict.  The immediate response of the United States and the EU was the issuance of a threat that they would cut off funds for the Palestinian Authority (PA).  That decision became the basis for denying any chances of effective governance for Hamas, and thereby leaving the entire Palestinian conflict on the precipice of another disaster of a major proportion.  To be fair, however, Hamas, as well as the West, are equally responsible for this catastrophe in the making.

As the countries of the Middle East and North Africa experience the Arab Awakening, the American hope is that the eventual outcome of the ouster of a number of aging autocrats is the emergence of secular democracy.  Needless to say, the chances of the emergence of such a model of governance in a number of Arab countries appear reasonably good for now.  However, the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Al-Nahda (Renaissance) party in Tunisia remain very well-established Islamist parties, one cannot rule out the emergence of a coalition in which the Islamists will also play a visible role, at least initially.  The major unknown about this issue is whether the Islamist parties will remain committed to the proposition of the evolution of a pluralistic democracy – as they appear to be for now – or the moderate elements of them would be replaced by the hardliners or the self-styled Jihadists.

From the perspectives of the Muslims of the Arab world, the Arab Awakening holds a great promise that they would take charge of their destiny, even though the high visibility of France and the UK in the immediate aftermath of the downfall (though not yet the capture of) Muammar Qaddafi is a worrisome development.  Given the reprehensible legacy of colonialism of those two countries in the Arab world, the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) has every reason to remain wary about not losing any control to the representatives of those two countries or to the United States in its eagerness to get technical assistance in governing Libya in the coming months and years.

In the final analysis, Muslims have reason to be angry at the United States; however, they must ensure that, while they remain ambivalent or unhappy toward Washington, they do not lose track of finding a rapprochement with it.  After all, the United States has an established record of coming to the rescue of Kuwait when it was invaded by Saddam Hussein.  Washington also played a
crucial role in the Yugoslavian conflict and in bringing an end to the Serbian massacre and dominance of the Bosnian Muslims.

As a starting point, Muslims need to shed their legacy of believing in conspiracies and stop looking for one-dimensional explanations related to the United States’ attitude toward Islam.  At the same time, US decision makers need to revisit their cultural prejudice of imposing secularism on the world of Islam.  This palpable feeling of condescension toward Muslim countries has to be cast aside if the United States is to have even a decent chance of playing the role of an honest broker in the Muslim regions in the future.

The post-9/11 involvement of the United States in the world of Islam should have provided its top officials a sophisticated understanding about Muslims’ feelings toward secularism, especially when proposed or imposed from the West.  Secularism might be tried as an important rule of governance in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, or Libya.  However, that experimentation has a greater chance of success if it is implemented from within; it is most likely to fail if it is imposed from abroad.  If the United States should have learned one lesson after invading Iraq, it is that externally imposed democracy is likely to be very tenable at best.  Only when it is adopted as a result of popular demand from within that it holds a high promise of success.  Indonesia is an excellent example of the correctness of that observation.

When the Hezbollah party was created by Iran in the early in 1980s, it was based on the ideology that carried out the Islamic revolution, which had ousted “America’s Shah.”  That ideology was brimming with Shia pride.  The establishment of an Islamic government in Iran was not only a revolutionary idea in its own right, but it also created the possibility that such a major change had also paved the way for creating Islamic governments in other Muslim countries.  As participants of the Islamic revolution, the representatives of Iran went to Lebanon in their zealotry to politicize the Shias of Lebanon, who were disenfranchised and marginalized by an anachronistic Sunni-Christian power system that was ruling Lebanon.  The Mustadafeen (the deprived or dispossessed ones in the vocabulary of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini) of Lebanon had to be empowered through a process of militant politicization.  Hezbollah was created out of that endeavor.  Iran’s politicization of the Shias of Lebanon gave them a new self image.  They were taught that the Sunni-Christian power arrangement was highly corrupt, and that, in order to acquire what is their right, the Shias of Lebanon had to fight for it.

Consequently, the Shias of Lebanon erupted on the political scene with a vengeance. They had had enough of being pushed around by the corrupt elites of their country.  They were also getting especially tired of becoming victims of Israeli retaliations in response to the attacks launched on the Jewish state by the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon.

Around the same time, the Israeli government invaded Lebanon to “finish off” the Palestinian “terrorist” attacks.  However, in the process of invading Lebanon, the Israeli leaders also decided to become the kingmakers of that country by forging an alliance with the Christian Phalangists.  In fact, according to one source, creating a Christian state in Lebanon has been a long dream of the Israeli leadership.  Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was of the view that Israel “should prepare to go over on the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Transjordan and Syria. The weak point of the Arab coalition is Lebanon for its regime is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state should be established, with its southern border on the Litani River. We will make peace with it.”[1]

It was during the initial phase of the Israeli invasion and the occupation of Lebanon that Hezbollah intensified its activities.  Its shadowy predecessor was blamed for the mass assassination of the U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983.  President Ronald Reagan, as much as he was interested in cooperating with the Israelis about promoting a Christian dominant regime in Lebanon, wisely decided to pull out the American forces from that country.  And Hezbollah continued its presence and dominance of the Lebanese political scenes.

Hezbollah’s finest hour was the 2006 war against Israel.  During that short war, the Jewish state swore to eradicate it, and unleashed a campaign of intense bombing of Lebanon.  However, when the dust settled, Hezbollah was bruised but still standing.  In the Arab world, the outcome of that campaign was interpreted as a “victory” for Hezbollah over Israel.  In the aftermath of that episode, the political popularity of Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, witnessed new heights in the Arab world.  No Arab leader had the reputation of challenging the military might of Israel and surviving it.  In fact, before the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli war, Israel had the reputation of handing a crushing defeat to the Arab armed forces, thanks to its decisive victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Along with Hezbollah, Iran’s political reputation as the chief backer of that party also grew in the aftermath of the 2006 war, as the entire Sunni Arab leadership watched with a mixture of envy and frustration. Even the United States, whose occupation forces were then fighting an uphill battle with the Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaida-related Islamists, appeared vulnerable to encountering a defeat in Iraq. While the Arab leaders were attempting to hide their envy of Iran and Hezbollah by coining highly pejorative phrases such as the threat of the rising so-called “Shia crescent,” Hezbollah proceeded to further dominate the internal
power distribution of Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s dominance of Lebanese politics might have lasted for quite awhile, except for the Arab awakening that is currently sweeping through the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. One of the current targets of that movement is the growing revolt inside Syria – one of the chief backers of Hezbollah.  As Bishara Assad has turned loose his killing machine against his citizens, his regime, instead of getting strong, is looking increasingly desperate and weak. That is bad news for Hezbollah and Iran, which had been playing a major role in Lebanon, thanks to the Syrian occupation of that country since 1976. Even though that occupation happily ended in April 2005, Syria remained an influential actor inside Lebanon because of its geographical proximity to that country, and also because of the highly proactive resolve of both Iran and Syria to influence the internal power
dynamics of Lebanon through their support of Hezbollah.

As the future of Bishara Assad’s murderous rule appears bleak in Syria, Hezbollah, and its long-standing nexus with Syria and Iran, looks increasingly anachronistic.  If or when the Assad regime falls, Iran’s influence in Lebanon will also suffer a major setback.

One option for Hezbollah is to revise its strategy of dependence on Syria and Iran.  But there is no alternate strategy for Hezbollah to fall back on.  As a Shia entity, it was heavily reliant on Shia Iran and on the Alawite-ruled regime of Syria.  Even though the Alawites (a minority Shia sect) comprise no more than 10 percent of the Syrian population, they have been ruling that country for several decades.  Hezbollah has no other friendly state supporting it.  In fact, some rare good news for the Sunni Arab leaders — who have been highly wary about Iran’s rising influence in Lebanon and Iraq, and who were also manifesting their antipathy toward Iran by airing their concern through muttering the phrase “Shia crescent” — is that the future of Hezbollah’s continued dominance of Lebanon’s  internal politics also appears shaky and highly questionable.

The Arab awakening is the revolutionary movement of today.  How it will change the political face of the Middle East is not yet known or understood. But, like the aging monarchs and dictators of the Middle East, Hezbollah has little reason to be optimistic. The march of history in the Middle East promises to throw Hezbollah — the revolutionary of yesteryear — into the dustbin of history.

The United States, indeed the West in general, always knew that their best bet in the Arab world was to deal with the dictators. In the 1950s and 1960s, the “Arab Cold War,” which was fought between the republican and monarchical states, made an opening for the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. Britain was the declining hegemon of that era. As it further diminished into a posture of insignificance, the United States emerged as its heir and the leading power of the Cold War. In that capacity, it succeeded in establishing the rules of the game that the Arab monarchies had to follow if they were to survive the conspiracies hatched to overthrow them by the Nasserite “revolutionaries” of that era. They were to remain in the U.S. camp during the Cold War and not to make much over the American support of Israel. The Soviet Union similarly backed the states supporting pan-Arabism in their opposition to Israel, and it also became a source of arms to them.

Thus, the divided Arab world became permanently dependent on the backing of the two superpowers. That dependence lasted long after the end of the Cold War. Except that when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the prestige and the clout of the United States in the Middle East rocketed further. It could insist on having access to cheap oil, support the Arab dictatorships, and ensure that Israel remained militarily powerful while refusing to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The preceding could have been the modern version of the ending line of some old Arab fairytales: “…and they lived happily ever after,” but for the inception of the Arab Awakening in December 2010. To the extent that this social movement has emerged as a “giant killer” in its success in ousting Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zein el-Abideen of Tunisia — and more dictators to follow — it caused a near-panic inside the bowels of the American national security bureaucracy. There emerged an urgent need to somehow influence, if not control, it.

Since the Arab masses were crying to establish democracies within their borders, it became clear to the United States (and to the West in general) that the erstwhile notion of controlling the Arab governments and supporting the dead-end status quo on the seemingly permanent Israeli occupation of Palestine were about to become things of the past.

However, old habits die hard. The United States is not about to accept its ostensibly mounting irrelevance to the Arab world as the Arab masses protest and die to bring an end to the near-death grip of the old dictators. Even the U.N.-sponsored no-fly zone over Libya has not been given much enthusiasm outside of that country. The fervor of the U.K. and France to bomb the tanks and ships belonging to Muammar Qaddafi has yet to show its result in ousting that dictator. The palpable reluctance of the United States in using its military option and the related debate inside Washington about how Libya is not a part of “vital” U.S. interests have not been ignored by Bishara Assad’s regime, which is conducting its own bloody massacre of its citizens.

The enthusiasm with which the Arab masses have taken their destiny into their own hands is definitely one of the most awesome developments of this new century. What kind of potential change awaits the region is most evidenced by the fact that the United States and the West are groping to find a new paradigm of relevance. Israel is wary that, with all of its military prowess, it might be forced to offer a “land for peace” concession that the Arab side has been demanding and that leaders in Jerusalem – stemming from their smugness of indomitability – have been consistently ignoring.

The spillover effects of the Arab Awakening have also affected the quarrelling Fatah organization and the Islamist Hamas. They agreed to form a unity government, which, if it lasts, will be very hard for Israel, the United States, and the EU to ignore. However, the newly established Palestinian unity must also be ready, at some point, to recognize the existence of Israel and to renounce violence before the Jewish state agrees to a political resolution of the Palestinian conflict.

In the wake of these developments, the traditional Arab expectation — that America would put “pressure” on Israel to offer territorial concessions — has also become irrelevant. Israel has to size up the Arab Awakening and its attendant political mega-changes and then calculate the modalities of its own future negotiating position. It seems that the Likud leaders have not yet come to grips with the fact that their traditional sustained intransigence to swap land for peace has also become anachronistic in the wake of the Arab Awakening. What is not clear, however, is when will Israeli voters recognize that fact, throw the Likudin dinosaurs out of office, and elect a new corps of leaders who would be daring enough to negotiate peace with Israel. The first precondition for such a possibility is that the Arab world should continue the process of building democracy within its borders. For the Israelis, governmental changes related to regime change are not enough. In fact, they are quite wary to see Israel’s “favorite,” Hosni Mubarak, overthrown. They need to see the sustained prevalence of moderation and the evidence of an Arab resolve to live with them in peace.

While the Arab world is undergoing major political change, the United States remains trapped in its old way of thinking about the Cold War, and even the post-Cold War era, in dealing with the Arab autocrats, as well as “having its cake and eating it too” through its strong support for Israel’s resolve to keep the Palestinians under the bondage of occupation. President Obama’s speech — as much as it sounded ground-breaking in his own mind — is a total reflection of that conventional thinking regarding the Arab world, with the exception of a few “bread crumbs” that he has thrown in the form of debt forgiveness and further economic assistance. It was not enough to tell Israel to make the 1967 borders a frame of reference, because Israel is not likely to do that. The most important variable would have been to tell the Jewish state that it cannot continue to build illegal settlements on occupied land and expect the Palestinians to keep accepting it as a fait accompli. Similarly, he should have offered the carrot of recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political entity if it were to earnestly start negotiating with Israel (no prior condition for starting the negotiations from either side). But Obama is also mindful of getting reelected. And that variable is one of the chief driving forces of his presidency.

So, while the Arab Awakening requires equally unusual measures to bring about changes in the political landscape of the Arab world, neither the United States nor Israel is yet ready for it. That is the chief reason why President Obama continues to be viewed as an unexciting — if not an irrelevant — political actor in the Arab world. To be fair to President Obama, however, one has to keep in mind that no one is sure yet whether the ultimate outcome of the Arab Awakening will create a stable, secular, and democratic Middle East or whether it will make it a place where Islamist-dominated turbulence will surface in the coming months.

The chief difference between Obama and Bush is that, since the neoconservatives (neocons) are only watching the events in Egypt from the obscure margins of the American domestic arena (where they really belong), we are not hearing the scary scenarios of an Islamist takeover of Egypt. Still, if you listen carefully, that rhetoric is not completely absent from all official statements in Washington.

The Islamic revolution of Iran in the late 1970s is seared into the collective memories of American foreign policy elites. Perhaps because of that fear, the Obama administration is staying at the tail end of the revolutionary change being demanded – if not managed with any degree of clarity regarding its long-term objectives – by the youths of Egypt. The declining capability of the United States to influence the pace or the scope of change in Egypt is just another example of its dwindling power in the Middle East.

At the same time, the high level of concern inside Washington is understandable, in the sense that the ouster of Mubarak promises to start an era of uncertainty in Egypt. Consequently, the best course for the Middle East experts who are on the payroll of the National Security Council and the Departments of State and Defense is to issue to the media a variety of scenarios for the attention of the boisterous crowds in Tahrir Square – which wants an imminent end to the Mubarak regime – and for the ruling circles in Cairo who are still hoping to prolong his rule by agreeing to bring about minimum amounts of change. Essentially, the bottom line American preference is the lite-Mubarak version of authoritarianism as a tactic to appease forces of change in Egypt.

As much as the Obama administration insists that it is not trying to dictate the modalities of change in Egypt, it continues to harp on the fear of the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover in Egypt and its implications for the security of Israel.

What is important to emphasize is that there is no amount of inevitability attached to the ouster of Mubarak and the ominous return of the Islamists in Egypt. The Brotherhood undoubtedly remains the most organized party in a country where political opposition has been systematically decimated by Mubarak. However, there is no monolithic ideology of that party that promises the instant insertion of rabid anti-Americanism, even if it were to emerge as a major ruling party in post-Mubarak Egypt.

In fact, an argument can be made that, if the United States is really afraid of the takeover of any extremist group in Egypt, it should push for the immediate ouster of Mubarak. That means getting him out of the country, instead of developing scenarios of “honorable exit,” or allocating for him a palace in Sharm el-Sheikh from where he will have opportunities to conspire to return to power. Why should Mubarak stay in a palace while the rate of abject of poverty in Egypt remains high and its unofficial unemployment rate is reported to be around 25 percent?

Thinking about the best course for Egypt, it is imperative that Mubarak resign and hands over power to Omar Suleiman. The flip side of that option is the assurance that Suleiman is doing everything to manage the transition of power to a committee of honorable civilians, after which he should also resign. In order to guarantee to the military that its interests will not be jeopardized, one military representative, probably Field Marshal Mohammad Hussein Tantawi, should also be appointed to that committee.

The current constitution of Egypt should be dissolved, along with its current parliament. The process of writing a new constitution is reportedly underway. If that is true, then the Egyptian people should be informed about it. When the specifics of the draft constitution are ready, they ought to be publicized in order to ensure that no hidden clauses are inserted that provide an exorbitant amount of power to the president. In a country where dictatorship has been such an integral part of its political culture, all attempts ought to be taken to de-fang the presidency. One of the most important features of the new constitution of Egypt ought to be to include term limits for president – no more than two four-year terms. No spurious notion of “national emergency” should be provided in the constitution for a future president to sabotage the principle of term limit in order to accumulate power.

While the current dictator is being removed and the constitution is being rewritten, close watch must be kept to ensure that the three current power holders appointed by Mubarak – Vice President (retired Army lieutenant general) Omar Suleiman, Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq (retired Air Force air marshal), and Abdel Moneim Qattou (another retired Army general) do not conspire to remain in power. Field Marshal Tantawi has a good reputation in Egypt, but no one who currently wears or wore a military uniform should be trusted to create a system of government based on civilian supremacy, which a democratic Egypt direly needs.

While such developments are taking place in Egypt, the best option for the Obama administration is to make it clear to all military hounds of Egypt that no shenanigans to undermine Egypt’s march to democracy will be tolerated. Since the United States has been providing $1.5 billion of economic and military assistance to that country, it is the only source of real influence that remains at the disposal of Washington. It should be exercised wisely and with utmost care.

Regarding American concerns about the future of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, a smooth transition to democracy will be the best way to ensure that the future Egyptian government remains committed to it. At the same time, the Israeli government should be told in no uncertain terms to abandon its current commitment to the status quo, which has resulted in its continued subjugation of the Palestinians and its sustained occupation of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms (a strip of land that is claimed by Lebanon, but, according to the U.N. and Israel, belongs to Syria, and thus can only be part of a comprehensive peace negotiation between Israel and Syria). The return of democracy in Egypt means that both Washington and Israel have to find new zones of comfort where the freedom and dignity of the Palestinians has to be restored and a new modus vivendi between Syria and Israel ought to be found.

Of the three actors involved in the seemingly imminent change to the government in Egypt – the people of Egypt, the United States, and Israel – the last two actors will find it hardest to get used to the new political conditions. Hopefully, their readjustment to the evolving realities will not be too difficult.

The Islamic Revolution brought an end to the rule of “America’s Shah.”  Even President Jimmy Carter, who has evolved as America’s best ex-president, attempted to encourage the Iranian Army to bring an end to the revolution.  Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, openly sided with Iraq in its aggression against the Islamic Republic.[1]  Iran has long been depicted as a “pariah” or a “rogue” state by Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.  Bush’s Secretary of State, Condy Rice, in her quest for new phrases of affront, once characterized it an “outpost of tyranny.” 

When President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009, he famously offered an “unclenched” America’s fist to Iran (which was more of a PR job than a promise of a substantive change in America’s policy toward that country), but for a price.  He wanted Iran to abandon its nuclear research program.  The United States is not wrong in its estimation that Iran ultimately wishes to develop its own nuclear weapons, which Israel already possesses since the late 1960s.  When Iran refused to comply with Obama’s demands, he came up with his own phrase to deriding it.  He called Iran “an outlier” state.

One can imagine how little the United States has learned from its unilateral invasion of Iraq and its deleterious implications for regional stability and for its own economy, the U.S. officials are still parroting the line in their public statements: “All options regarding Iran are on the table.”  That is a not-so-cryptic threat about the option of taking military actions against that country. 

The Atlantic magazine, in its September 2010 issue, has a “screaming” headline on its cover page: “Israel is getting ready to Bomb Iran.” The latest issue of Foreign Affairs has an article entitled, “Legitimizing Israel’s bomb.”  The authors foolishly (or may be naively) argue that Israel should get its nuclear weapons out of the closet.  Why should Israel do that?  It is having its cake and eating it too: it is a nuclear state, yet it pretends not to be one and no one seems to be bothered about it.  The byline of that essay asks: “Has nuclear ambiguity outlived its shelf life?” The conventional thinking in the West has gotten so used to discussing the unmentioned nuclear weapons of Israel in a conceptual vacuum, as if they have no relevance to the thinking of Iranian leaders in their own attempt to develop nuclear weapons.

The motivation underlying Iran’s nuclear program is a highly rational one.  It is based on deterring the United States and Israel from using the military options aimed at bringing about regime change, as the United States did against Iraq in 2003.  Given the frequently uttered Israeli threats to deprive Iran of its nuclear option, leaders in Tehran envision having nuclear weapons of their own as an ultimate deterrence. 

At the same time, Iran also would like to end the double-standards that the United States exercises by giving a wink-and-a-nod to Israel’s growing nuclear arsenal, while denying that very same right to Iran.  India and Pakistan caused a major dent in that regime of supporting double-standards, when they brought their respective nuclear weapons programs out of the basement in 1998.  India is the only country that is enjoying the fruits of that audacious decision.  Today it is America’s strategic partner.  Pakistan has not been able to achieve that status.  However, it has been persistent about expressing its own aspirations of persuading the United States to grant a similar strategic partnership sometimes in the future.  

The greatest enemy of the nuclear weapons-related double standards is the fact that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle.  The knowledge of how to make a bomb is no longer a Western monopoly.  North Korea has emerged as the latest gatecrasher into the nuclear club.  Iran is likely to be next regardless of what Israel threatens to do.  That fact seems to bother and annoy Washington and Jerusalem most.

When Iran witnesses a nuclear India being rewarded by the United States with cooperation in nuclear technology and becoming a recipient of the cutting-edge technology and weapons from Nuclear Supplier Group as a “reward” for acquiring nuclear weapons, it concludes that becoming a nuclear power might not be a bad thing, if not now, then, to be sure, sometime in the not-too-distant future. 

Iran has been motivated in the direction of continuing its nuclear research program because of the fact that the United States, even under Obama, has not stopped threatening it with endless sanction regimes, while also winking at Israel into periodically threatening Iran that it would attack its nuclear facilities.   

What is also driving the lone superpower and the Jewish state together on the issue of Iran is that the latter is the last confrontational state of the Middle East, now that Saddam Hussein and his regime have entered the dustbin of history.  Syria never was much of a challenge to Israel or the U.S, since its military power does not even pose a minimal threat to nuclear-armed Israel.  Iran, on the contrary, remains a state that has not accepted America’s dominance in the Middle East.  At the same time, it has remained highly proactive in expanding its own sphere of influence in the region, in direct competition with the United States.  Iran’s inventory and knowledge of ballistic missiles is also increasing, while it is proceeding ahead with its nuclear research program. 

Iran’s leaders have always pooh-poohed America’s pretensions that any type of a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian conflict would emerge.  In that capacity, Iran enjoys considerable sympathy inside the Arab world.  To the embarrassment of a number of leading Arab states, Iran has emerged as the major supporter of Hamas’ ostensibly permanent defiance of Israel, while the Arab rulers are still jockeying either for gaining or securing a favorite spot on America’s list of “friends” in the Middle East.

At the same time, Iran seeks an anti-Taliban nexus with Russia and India, states that are scared out of their wits about the potential of the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Afghanistan offers Iran a great potential of escalating its clout, because Russia and India remain wary of the readiness of the United States to withdraw from that country by July 2011.  The Obama administration’s and President Hamid Karzai’s willingness of having a dialogue with Taliban sends palpable shudders through Tehran, Moscow, and New Delhi for different reasons.  Iran is worried about the acutely anti-Shia posture of the Taliban; India is determined not to allow Pakistan an upper-hand in Afghanistan under a potential Taliban’s return to power; while Russia is also fearful of the promotion of regional Jihads under a Taliban rule.  Thus, Iran, Russia, and India are very much interested in developing the modalities of their own options of dealing with the post-American Afghanistan.

Iran has been enjoying a lot of support in the Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, where the United States has also lately demonstrated some sway.  The U.S. influence is likely to sustain only if Lebanon does not undergo another round war with Israel.  However, if there is another war in Lebanon, one can pretty much guarantee further escalation in the clout of Hezbollah and Iran.  Most important, Iran remains the major supporter in the Muslim world of the defiance of Hamas toward Israel.  It dismisses the latter’s overtures toward negotiations with Palestinians as mere pretensions of conducting peace talks with politically impotent (thus) a diffident Mahmoud Abbas, President of PLA, while continuing with its policy of building additional Jewish settlements on the occupied territories. 

As much as Iran has emerged as a major player in the Middle East for the past thirty years or so, the worst threat to its security—which remains its Achilles’ heel—might be coming from within since June of 2009, when the regime was allegedly involved in election fraud that lead to the “victory” of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  As the rulers of Iran appear confused and even divided about dealing with the protest movement, as Iran remains cutoff from global trade stemming from the U.S.-sponsored sanctions, its regime is likely to become more chauvinistic and even more repressive, thereby escalating the chances of further upheaval and even regime change. 

However, in the context of the power game that is being played in the Middle East in general, Iran remains powerful only if it can survive—or better yet, reaches a rapprochement with—the growing domestic dissent, which can be exploited by the intelligence agencies of the West, as was done in 1953.  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s sustained diatribe about the “fictitious” nature of the holocaust is not at all helpful to Iran.  Indeed it has created considerable resentment in the West toward that country.  Under such circumstances, it has been easier for the EU to show its antipathy toward the Islamic Republic by remaining in the forefront of opposition to Iran’s recalcitrance to abandon its nuclear research program.

The U.N. imposed economic sanctions of June 2010 was a major jolt to Iran’s expectations that China and Russia would be shielding its interests in the world body (UNSC).  In order to undermine the Western-backed sanctions, Iran worked up an agreement with Turkey and Brazil, whereby it was to let Turkey as the storage point of its enriched uranium stockpile.  However, that agreement was rejected by Washington as Iran’s “stalling tactic.”  When it became clear that neither Beijing nor Moscow would return on its side, Iran agreed to restart its negotiations with the EU on the nuclear issue. What is still not clear is whether Iran would agree to send the stockpile of enriched uranium to a country that is acceptable to the U.S.

Washington is also taking full advantage of the fact that China and Russia are supporting the economic sanctions on Iran.  The United States and the EU have hardened their previous negotiating stance by insisting on higher proportion of Iranian uranium be sent abroad.  Iran on its part is, quite deftly, insisting on including Israeli nuclear weapons to be included in the negotiations with the EU.  Such a measure would give Iran an excuse for backing out of the talks if that issue is not included in the agenda.

Iran is not in an enviable position in its dealings with the West.  Under Barack Obama, the United States has drastically altered its approach toward Russia and China.  A selected use of multilateralism by Washington and the abandoning of the shrilled rhetoric of George W. Bush of remaining as the most powerful nation of the world, the Obama administration has made it easier for the United States to seek a rapprochement with Beijing and Moscow.  Unfortunately for Iran, it does not enjoy a very high spot on the strategic agendas of China and Russia in comparison to their desire to seek common grounds with the United States.

Still, given the fact that strategic ties between Washington and Beijing, on the one hand, and between Washington and Moscow on the other, are likely to experience their usual upward and downward swings, Iran expects to exploit them to its advantage in the future.  All in all, if Iran can improve its regime stability from within, its chances of remaining a highly influential actor of the Middle East remain bright.

Her apology was not sufficient for the bloodhounds who wanted her fired. She spoke her mind, but, in a politically correct world, she had to pay by resigning. That was very unfortunate, because the push to be politically correct is creating a world where no one would dare challenge conventional wisdom of the West. If one does, one has to be ready to pay the price by ending their productive career.

As much as I am exposed to the American media, it never ceases to amaze me how powerful the pro-Israeli frame of reference really is in this country. It is more powerful than the legendary pro-Israeli lobby AIPAC. It is more pervasive and it is sharply honed to collect any comments about Israel that are considered derisive or even mildly offensive. No one dares to apply the same standards of freedom of speech regarding Israel as they do about everything that is not part of the United States. I was watching Washington Week in Review last Friday (June 4, 2010). The subject was Israeli commandos’ killing on the Turkish peace vessel that broke the Israeli embargo that day. All four journalists on that show were doing their best to dance around the issue. I invite the reader of this column to watch that show.

But entirely different standards are applied to Islam and most things Muslim. When I read about a cartoon contest insulting the Prophet of Islam, or damning Muslim women for wearing hijabs, or banning of hijabs in France in the name of secularism, or the recent vote in Switzerland about disallowing the building of the minarets to a mosque and the related hateful cartoons making the minarets looking like missiles, I wondered how those “fearless” practitioners and defenders of freedom of expression would behave when it comes to Judaism or Israel. There are even laws in some European countries making it a crime to deny that the Holocaust ever happened. I think it is idiotic to deny the occurrence of a shameful incident in history (or any other historical incident for that matter). However, sending someone to jail for denying it is a borderline insane act.

Then there is Helen Thomas, who had very unconventional ideas about the Middle East and Israel, as a dispatch of the Washington Post makes its quite clear. She asked hard questions that no regular American journalist dared ask about America’s war in Iraq: “Why are we killing people in Iraq? Men, women, and children are being killed there. . . . It’s outrageous” she asked. Regarding the Israeli intense bombing of Lebanon during the Hezbollah-Israel war of 2006, she told Tony Snow, one of many Press Secretaries of George W. Bush, that the United States “could have stopped the bombardment of Lebanon” by Israel, but instead had “gone for collective punishment against all of Lebanon and Palestine.” Snow acerbically thanked her for “the Hezbollah view.” On another occasion, according to a freelance cameraman, she was reported to have said “thank God for Hezbollah” for driving Israel out of Lebanon, then added “Israel is the cause for 99 percent of all this terrorism.”

Okay, these are not conventional views, and some of them are certainly politically incorrect. However, the last time I checked, Helen Thomas is living in a democracy, and she has views like all thinking persons or journalists. She was not a reporter, but a columnist. As such, she could (and did) ask questions that were more editorial remarks than questions. So, what? Why shouldn’t she ask them? Just because she was the only person of the White House Press pool given an assigned seat did not mean that she should have become a mouthpiece of whichever president was in the White House or should have never asked questions that would have rattled America’s special friends.

As much as we hear that there is freedom of expression and freedom of the press in the United States, one must also keep in mind a highly implicit aspect of that freedom which goes like this: if you ask politically incorrect questions, and especially anti-Israeli questions, you will pay the price by losing your career or being cast away as a “whacky” person or “nerd.” Almost all dispatches that I read on the Helen Thomas incident identified her as a Lebanese American. One of her former colleagues, Sam Donaldson, former ABC News correspondent and an obnoxious questioner of the powers-that-be during his career, without defending her comments on Israel, said her views likely reflect the views of many people of Arab descent.

If it is okay to relate Thomas’ views with her ethnicity, I wonder how others would react if I were to merely report that a Jewish-American columnist for National Review, Jonah Goldberg, said the following about Thomas: “She’s always said crazy stuff.” Or, another Jewish American, Ari Fleisher, former Press Secretary to George Bush, was reportedly leading the campaign for her ouster and was in the lead in “e-mailing journalists who might have missed her remarks.”

Ideological warfare is becoming too pervasive and strident inside the American political and social arenas. There are extreme right wing Tea Baggers and their pal, Sarah Palin. You want to get your blood boiling? Start or end your day by watching the “fair and balanced” Fox channel, or listen to Rush Limbaugh to find out how much the airwaves are being polluted with insult, bigotry, and other nonsense in the name of journalism.

What is important to know (and remember) is that for most of us there are rules, which we cannot violate even in the name of freedom of expression. For some selected few, no such rules apply. Helen Thomas belonged to the former category.

Iran refuses to close down its nuclear research program; and, despite all its assertions that it is not interested in making nuclear weapons, Washington believes that that is precisely the direction Iran is heading.

Iran also has a very active ballistic missile program. And the United States is afraid that it is just a matter of time before Iran will not only put all the systems together to build a bomb, but it will also be able to integrate its nuclear weapons with its delivery system.

There is also much substance to the United States’ suggestion that Iran might have already acquired a bomb-making capability and might be waiting on an appropriate time for its “breakout” announcement — a term used, in the parlance of nuclear proliferation, to describe a surprise announcement of a country whereby it renounces the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) and uses it capabilities to build a small nuclear weapon.

The most striking aspect of the Obama administration is that, in the past several weeks, while it was involved in issuing its nuclear posture review and signing a new nuclear arms reduction treaty and then holding a “summit” on the issue of “loose nukes,” it never interrupted its focus on Iran.

Russia, while signing the nuclear arms reduction treaty, falsely created an impression that it was willing to side with the United States in imposing sanctions on Iran. A more correct interpretation of Russia’s attitude toward Iran is that it still wants to discuss the option of negotiating with that country, and is not at all interested in imposing the kind of harsh sanctions that the pro-Israeli elements in the United States would love to see implemented.

The same thing is also true for China. In fact, after the loose nukes summit, China has made it clear that it is not as much in the corner of the United States as the American media made it out to be immediately prior to, and in the aftermath of, that summit.

The presence of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, in the thick of policy discussions on Iran becomes important when one considers his long experience in the realm of national security, and the fact that he is very much in the forefront of developing a comprehensive strategy.

However, the role of Admiral Mike Mullen remains a source of concern when one considers the fact that one of his top “informal” advisers on the Middle East is a woman by the name of Dr. Lani Kass, a holder of Israeli and American citizenship. One is befuddled by the fact that a holder of dual citizenship is given top Department of Defense clearance, while Israel’s use of such persons as spies against us is a known fact. Dubbed as “Dr. Strangelove made in Israel,” an essay written by a former CIA agent, Philip Giraldi, describes Kass as rabidly anti-Iran and an equally staunch Islamophobe.

As reported by Giraldi, Kass told her U.S. Air Force audience that, “the long war against the Islamists will end ‘when they learn to love their children more than they hate us,’ a comment originally attributed to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.” On another occasion she said, “radical Muslims hate the western world because Europe took their dominant political position away and they want it back.” This is a diatribe that Bernard Lewis has been peddling to the Western audience in the name of his “expert analysis.”

She is also on record as being more audacious than she was in the afore-cited quotes. This time, she disposed of the nuance between Muslims and radical Muslims and included all Muslims in her fictional “expertise” on the world of Islam. Giraldi notes, “In her speech she explained that Muslims hate western culture and want to dominate the world, adding that because radical Islam has a ‘culture of death’ all those who do not submit to Islam must die, an assertion so absurd that one suspects her political analysis derives from the Free Republic website.” Not surprisingly, no one in her audience questioned the veracity of that comment or demanded any evidence.
Regarding Iran, Kass is totally sold on the use of military option. She is reported to have said, “We can defeat Iran, but are Americans willing to pay the price?” In other words, she is very much gung ho on going to war against Iran. Her comments remind one of two other women who were way ahead of even the Bush administration in their fictional belief that, between 2001 and 2003, Iraq was fully engaged in making weapons of mass destruction: Judith Miller of the New York Times and Laurie Mylroie, who coauthored a book on Iraq. A detailed narrative of the roles of these two women is provided in Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.
.
The question that is uppermost in my mind is why has Admiral Mullen decided to rely on such a highly partisan source for advice on the Middle East. Don’t we already have enough of a horrible image on being extremely one-sided when it comes to the strategic affairs of that region? More to the point, why is Admiral Mullen not getting his cue from the White House, which seems bent on pursuing policy options to take into consideration, first and foremost, American interests?

If America’s miserable record of going to war against Iraq on imaginary evidence, the cherry picking of intelligence, and in some instances even deliberately relying on highly deceptive sources (see the above-cited source), the only option that stands out in dealing with Iran is to avoid the military option at all costs. The only viable option is to negotiate, negotiate, or negotiate with that country.

The United States is manifesting a similar amount of eagerness about imposing economic sanctions on Iran, which has remained much more defiant than Saddam Hussein ever was in terms of challenging the America’s dominance of the Middle East. It is important to ask whether Iran will meet a similar fate as Iraq, perhaps not a direct military invasion, but other actions whose purpose would still be to bring about regime change. President Obama has already stated that his administration would consider aggressive sanctions on Iran.

Iran remains the last major state that consistently rejects any proposition of kowtowing to American diktat or its hegemony in the Middle East. It has accumulated ample clout in that region in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The United States, either for propaganda reasons or merely in order to underscore the nature of Iran’s anti-Americanism, consistently harped on the growing Iranian influence in post-Saddam Iraq. Indeed, if the U.S. assertion of Iran’s role in the political turbulence in Iraq between 2005 and 2007 was true, it can be safely concluded that Iran played a crucial role in America’s decision to actively seek an exit strategy. After all, it was largely as a result of intense political instability emanating from the violent role played by the Iraqi insurgents and Islamists groups that forced Washington to calculate that it could not stay in Iraq for long. Iran had strong ties with a number of those insurgents. That was a coup de grace from the perspective of Iran’s interests in Iraq, because the neoconservatives – working as the brains of the Bush administration – had an elaborate plan to make the entire Middle East a part of pax-Americana.

Iran’s military and material support of Hezbollah was very crucial in that organization’s ability to withstand the punishing Israeli attack on Lebanon during the short war of July-August 2006. The resultant general perception in the Arab world was that Hezbollah won that round of the battle against the Jewish state. Iran’s strategic dominance in that region was emerging as a new phenomenon regarding which neither Washington nor Jerusalem could produce effective countermeasures. Consequently, U.S.-Iran ties became even more antagonistic than before.

A major strategic shift from the Bush administration to the Obama administration in the Middle East and South Asia is that, in terms of conducting military operations, the U.S. would rely on a multilateral approach. The military operations conducted under the auspices of NATO in Afghanistan emerged as the best multilateral vehicle. However, the constraining aspect of the role of NATO is that it cannot be used anywhere without the approval of the entire Alliance; and that approval is very hard to secure. That fact ties the hands of any future American president who would develop any notion of adventurism a la George W. Bush in Iraq. That reality also prevents the United States from taking any military action against Iran, even in the wake of its intransigence about abandoning its nuclear research program.

The preceding constraint might be a major reason why the United States would heavily rely on the use of covert operations. President Obama has become the most prolific user of such operations by regularly ordering drone attacks against Islamist groups in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. One can only guess how many other covert operations involving U.S. Special Forces are being carried out presently in South Asia, the Horn of Africa, Yemen, and other Middle Eastern countries.

Because of an inordinate technological gap between the United States and the Islamist forces in the aforementioned countries, the use of covert operations has emerged as the most convenient weapon of the strong. As long as American soldiers are not returning home in body bags, U.S. public opinion remains highly supportive of such operations. That is why the United States is likely – if it hasn’t already been doing so – to use covert tactics in Iran in order to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

According to a report prepared in July 2008 by the muckraking journalist, Seymour Hersh, the United States secretly allocated up to $400 million to underwrite covert operations against the Islamic Republic. Such operations “involved ‘working with opposition groups and passing money.’ The Finding provided a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong.”

The chief problem that President Barack Obama faced when he first became president is that there is no proven record of diplomatic encounters between the United States and Iran since the days of President Jimmy Carter. Even Carter – one of the most ardent promoters of justice and constitutionalism in the Middle East and the most successful former president – did his best to oust the fledgling Islamic Republic in 1980, while he was still in office. All American presidents who followed him spent a lot time and capital in their attempts to overthrow the Islamic Republic, even by going to the extreme of cooperating with Saddam Hussein during his brutal aggression against Iran in 1981.

In the wake of Iran’s refusal to buckle under the pressure of the United States to abandon its nuclear research program, Obama could have made a courageous decision to abandon the covert operations that Bush had started. However, the United States’ heavy reliance on covert operations in Pakistan tells us that Obama envisions such operations as safe alternatives to any bold new measures, which still might not persuade Iran to cooperate with the United States. In the meantime, the hyperactive Israeli lobby has made sure that any actions other than imposition of harsh economic sanctions are unfailingly condemned as “appeasement” of the Ayatollahs.

It should also be noted that the Iranian leaders did nothing to make their own case in the court of the world’s public opinion when they seem to have fraudulently stolen the election from the reformist candidate, Hussein Moussavi, last June. In the aftermath of those elections, it was interesting to watch how adamant the anti-Iranian forces inside the U.S. Congress were in their insistence that the President strongly condemn the Iranian leaders for allegedly stealing the elections. One should contrast that eagerness with the deafening silence inside the U.S. government following the murder of the Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, allegedly perpetrated by Mossad in Dubai.

Given the strategic environment that is marked with a high degree of hostilities and intense distrust on both sides, the chances of the resolution of the nuclear program-related crisis through peaceful means are slim, at best. The United States has even attempted to go to the extent of creating Arab endorsements for its harsh economic sanctions on Iran. The U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, went to Riyadh asking the government to persuade China to agree to sanctions on Iran, which Saudi Arabia wisely rejected. However, Gates was not about to give up. He proceeded on the same mission to the UAE. His chances of gaining a somewhat favorable reception from that country are pretty decent, given its long-term tensed relations with Iran. But the UAE is not Saudi Arabia. Even its endorsement of U.S. sanctions on Iran would not sway any other major Arab state.

As the United States’ diplomatic choices regarding Iran narrow, Israeli pressure for military action against that country is likely to intensify. The question is whether or how long Obama is likely to withstand it. A lot depends on whether he becomes politically stronger as a result of a potential passage of the healthcare bill in the next few weeks.

At least for now, the government of Benyamin Netanyahu has been digging a diplomatic hole for itself by allegedly orchestrating the murder of the Hamas leader in Dubai. To further deteriorate its case, Israel, during a visit of the U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, announced the building of new housing projects in East Jerusalem. However, no one should underestimate the Israeli hubris concerning its strong support inside the U.S. Congress. The Jewish state has long understood the nature of its political support inside the U.S. and has assiduously worked through its tool, AIPAC, to solidify that support. Just based on that fact, chances are high that it would push President Obama hard to take military action against Iran. How wise is such an action likely to be from the viewpoint of American strategic interests in the Middle East? It would be very foolish, indeed. However, Israel has not been known to waste time thinking about what is best for America in the Middle East. Friends of Israel inside the United States incessantly, and without even giving it a second thought, confuse Israeli interests with American interests. So, the world should not rule out the high probability of U.S. military action against Iran in the coming months, which would create another hell for American strategic interests in that region.