Why is the United States so mad about Iran?

Despite Iran’s hard-line stance on the illegitimacy of Israel as an independent state, on the American role in the Middle East, on the spread of democracy and Western culture across various political and cultural landscapes, most countries, including such economic powers as China, Brazil and India, view possible enhanced pressure on Iran as unproductive (to say nothing of some anti-sanctions sentiment in the US itself, which is quite marginal inside the political establishment).

Why are these powers so benign? The answer is simple: Iran is just one of the many. Both China and India have had quite uneasy personal stories. Both countries entertain quite stressful relations with their neighbors: as for China, many experts believe it will attempt one day to solve its territorial dispute with Taiwan by force, and India and Pakistan continue to remain on their belligerent positions from more than a few decades ago. Therefore, each of them may become a potential source of instability and conflict, given their far-reaching ambitions and giant capabilities exceeding those of Iran.

The recent trip of Brazilian President Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Tehran, where an important agreement was signed on the swap of enriched nuclear fuel for Iran against its slightly enriched uranium, shows more clearly than ever that the Iranian problem is just a matter of how you look at it. And this is when the IOS instilled in the American elite a long time ago and being carefully sustained by the powerful Israeli lobby and some other stakeholders benefiting from Iran’s weaknesses reappears at the surface.

It is always difficult to say for certain whether our actions, even minor ones, will be good or bad for ourselves and for those around us. The same thing is true in politics. The only difference is in scale. If you part ways with somebody you have known for many years and then you see that the fault is finally with you, do not hesitate to write a conciliatory note or make a call asking for pardon and understanding. Once this moment is successfully passed, the whole matter will remain between you and the re-conquered friend.

With countries and peoples, it is much more difficult. Politicians have to weigh every action they ruminate about, look out for any awkward remarks that may slip off their tongue, and try to be the least incisive and look determined at the same time. It is also difficult to break with an old tradition, especially the one of blaming others for something off the table now.

The Iranian Obsession Syndrome seems to stand in the same row, just like the decades-long tradition of all American presidents to tackle the Mideast talks as their personal concern. Hundreds of books have been written so far on how America tried to handle and sometimes mishandled a very sensitive Arab-Israeli negotiation. As Aaron David Miller points out in his article for the latest issue of the Foreign Policy magazine, the whole process of peace talks, appearing in the media under various appellations, has been permeated with the “false religion of the Mideast peace”. “If that leads to more realistic thinking when it comes to America’s view of Arab-Israeli peacemaking,” he concludes, “that’s not such a bad thing”.[2]

Indeed, thinking realistically, where the stereotyped views have largely dominated, is the safest way to turn the tide and make a difference amid continued failures and incessant attempts. If the Middle East is corrupt with “the false religion of peace” that makes it difficult for diplomats to look straight into the eyes of the problems they are facing, there should be another false religion, worshipped by American policymakers towards Iran. As Mr. Miller believes, “right now, America has neither the opportunity nor frankly the balls to do truly big things on Arab-Israeli peacemaking”.

Perhaps, this brave conclusion has been drawn from a failed strategy to reconcile Israelis and Palestinians who have more than one reason not to trust each other and whose reciprocal animosity can be traced back to the 1940s, when the state of Israel was established and the United States was not even in mind. Mr Miller’s call for realism in American foreign policy stems mainly from the fact that the United States is not capable of settling one of the toughest conflicts in human history by using its highly ambiguous strategy, when both parties are to be equally accommodated. Thus, the only way to get through with this complicated situation is to either find another way of talking across the round table or to give up the battle, which is not worth powder and shot.

What if the same principle were applied to the Iranian maze? In this case, as history shows us, there will be more than two things at the end of the day to choose from. American diplomacy may become even more proactive by abandoning its rigid shell, where it once pierced a pigeonhole to look through, but now seems to lose sight of the world in the making. No cut and dried recipe, just another angle to look at, another vantage point yet unused.

Indeed, diplomacy is a tough thing to deal with. 1972. The Cold War was raging. The disarmament talks had just kicked off, and neither party (the US and the USSR) was sure they would result in a breakthrough. The United States was at the final stage of the terrible Vietnam War, which had become an unmanageable burden for the American economy and military (try to draw some parallel with the current Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns). The devaluation of the US dollar, the first in the history of the all-powerful buck, was nearing its materialization. The world was in trouble, one might say. The first energy shock orchestrated by the OPEC members would occur in less than a year. US President Richard Nixon, one of the most charismatic leaders of the New World, made his first official visit to the People’s Republic of China, which had been recently clamoring against the Soviet defeat in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, where the Soviets should have acted more resolutely, the Chinese thought. The whole world was set on fire.

It was a daring thing to go to China to meet the author of the Cultural Revolution, still rippling collective memories, and to stand firm in the face of Taiwan’s astonished public. Think now that Barack Obama, the transformational president as he is widely referred to, delivers his speech from the central square of Tehran, speaking the words of President Nixon, with a few alterations of course: “…and what we have said today is that we shall build that bridge”. You will certainly see, as he is still making his way to the end of the speech, a certain number of pre-eminent figures violently protest against the treason committed by America and its nonchalant leadership. And the AIPAC will add more fuel to the fire.

But as the construction of the bridge between the two previously hostile nations was made possible by President Nixon in the 1970s, it is hardly foreseeable today that in order to construct a new bridge with Iran one will need to demolish the old one, more than a thousand kilometers away, with Israel. What about the Iranian Obsession Syndrome then? Indeed, the world has to be healed, once and for all.

[1] Veronika Oleksyn, IAEA: Iran activates enrichment equipment, the Washington Post, 9 August 2010, accessible at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/09/AR2010080902733.html; Jay Solomon, Panetta warns of Iran threat, the Wall Street Journal, 27 June 2010, accessible at: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704846004575332823388936154.html; Associated Press, Iran ‘digging mass graves for US troops’ in case of invasion, the Guardian, 11 August 2010, accessible at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/11/iran-digging-graves-us-troops.

[2] Aaron David Miller, The False Religion of Mideast Peace, the Foreign Policy, May/June 2010, the article can be found at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/19/the_false_religion_of_mideast_peace

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