Israel-Driven U.S. “Containment” of Iran Has Failed

by Andrew I. Killgore

“The Europeans will not let us contain Iran.” Writer-Editor Arnaud De Borchgrave on a 1996 “McLaughlin Group” TV show.

“A high-level U.S.-Iranian diplomatic contact would be a dramatic event, capturing headlines; in the present environment, it would be interpreted as a collapse of American policy under international pressure.” Peter W. Rodman, former National Security Council and State Department official, The Washington Post, Dec. 11, 1993.

In the March 13, 1993 Washington Post staff writer David Hoffman reported that Israel was seeking to convince the United States that the Islamist regime in Tehran destabilized the Middle East and threatened Western interests. Less than two years later Martin Indyk, then the White House Middle East adviser and now America’s first Jewish ambassador to Israel, announced the U.S. policy of “dual containment” of both Saddam Hussain’s Iraq and its enemy, the Islamic revolutionary government of Iran. That plan, simultaneously closing the door on U.S. contacts with either of the two most populous countries in the Gulf, had all the hallmarks of made-in-Israel strategy. (See September 1995 Washington Report.)

Containment is a mild euphemism for what has become economic and even psychological warfare against Iran, aimed primarily at its vital oil industry. But the policy isn’t working.

When President Clinton vetoed an oil development contract between Iran and Conoco, a partially American-owned company, the contract was picked up by France, a NATO ally.

Psychological warfare was added recently when press reports had the United States threatening military action against Iran if it appeared Iran was behind the bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Threatened U.S. sanctions against foreign companies investing beyond a certain amount in the Iranian petroleum industry also are getting nowhere. President Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally, and President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran have exchanged visits during which contracts were signed for two pipelines to carry Iranian oil and gas through Turkey to the Mediterranean Sea.

Arnaud De Borchgrave, quoted at the beginning of this article, stated the obvious when he said that the Europeans will not let the U.S. contain Iran. In fact, De Borchgrave didn’t go far enough. Like the Europeans, Japan and China see our allegations concerning Iranian rearmament and terrorism as overwrought.

Any new attempt to recreate a Washington/Tehran/Tel Aviv axis will not be tolerated.

A sure sign that containment has failed is the above quoted comment by Peter Rodman urging that containment not be abandoned, for to do so would subject the United States to charges that it lacked resolution. During Rodman’s earlier stints on the National Security Council and the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff he was deemed an ardent supporter of Israel. In his present role with the Nixon Center in Washington, DC, he remains one.

From Tehran, the U.S. campaign against Iran must be a source of wonder. Does it mean that the U.S. seeks a regime ready to do business with Israel, such as existed under the late Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi between 1972 and 1979? Or would the United States be satisfied if Tehran only stopped supporting Hezbollah guerrillas fighting Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon? Does the United States not understand that neither is possible?

From 1972 to 1979 the Shah bought grossly excessive amounts of U.S. military equipment. But he neglected his people and visited equally excessive suffering on them. The current Tehran leaders bitterly remember that the Shah’s quest for a dominant role in the Persian Gulf culminated in an eight-year war with the Arabs. By manipulating Kurdish and Shi’i dissidents in Iraq, the Shah forced the Iraqis to sign away rights in 1976 in the Shatt al Arab, the waterway that forms part of the boundary between the two countries. After the Shah’s overthrow, Iraq’s Saddam Hussain sought in 1980 to overturn the 1976 treaty by force in the early days of the Islamist regime. The result was a war that evolved into an eight-year unwinnable stalemate pitting Iran against all of the Arabs, and costing Iran half a million dead.

Has Washington Forgotten?

The Rafsanjani regime in Tehran can see that any new attempt to recreate a Washington/Tehran/Tel Aviv axis will not in the end be tolerated by the Iranian people, much less by Iran’s Arab neighbors, just as it was not tolerated before. And Iranian officials surely recall that when it seemed Iran could win the war against Iraq and the Arab world, the United States signaled, by putting its own flag on Kuwaiti oil tankers, that an Iranian victory was unacceptable. Has Washington forgotten this?

Adding to Iranian puzzlement over American policy is the fact that the ancient Russian threat to Iran ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. So fear of Russia, which partially fueled the Shah’s close ties to the U.S. and Israel, no longer counts among the Islamists ruling in Tehran, nor among U.S. policymakers.

Finally, Israel’s unilateralism over Jerusalem, a city sacred to Muslims and Christians as well as Jews, and its brutality in Israeli-occupied south Lebanon against Iran’s fellow Shi’i Hezbollah guerrillas, excites deep resentment in Iran. The fact that the current administration in Washington seemingly is incapable of understanding that no Iranian government of any persuasion can make common cause with Israel under such circumstances is bewildering—and not just to the Iranians.

That U.S. intimidation against Iran has failed, however, does not mean it will be abandoned. To do so would mean that Israel and the Israel lobby have failed. The cost of continuing containment of Iran will be minimal on the U.S. domestic political front. But the cost internationally will be world-wide wonderment, that a tiny Zionist minority has such a throttlehold on “the sole surviving superpower.”