Israeli-Dominated U.S. Policy Toward Iran Crumbles Under Geopolitical Realities

By Andrew I. Killgore

"Israel is attempting to convince the United States that Iranian-inspired extremism and Iran's rearmament drive have become a major threat to the stability of the Middle East and the interests of the West." —David Hoffman, The Washington Post, March 13, 1993

It took two years for the Israeli campaign revealed by journalist Hoffman, quoted above, to bear fruit. On April 30, 1995, President Bill Clinton announced a trade embargo against Iran, charging that Iran's goal was to acquire nuclear weapons.

The fact that the always-eager-to-please-Israel U.S. president took so long to make the announcement means that Clinton really didn't see a threat but decided to ring an alarm bell anyway. Also significant is the fact that neither Japan nor any of America's European allies supported the president's decision.

Clinton's Motivations

The president's purposes had little to do with U.S. strategic interests. He doesn't know much about the outside world, including the Middle East. And he is unlikely to get much contrary advice from the Israelists, Hebrew-speaking political appointees who have lived or studied in Israel, who have taken over the top three Middle East policymaking positions at the State Department.

The president does know he likes to be president and that's his basic motivation. And he wants—because the Israel lobby wants—Vice President Al Gore to succeed him. This requires money and media support from pro-Israel circles in the United States. So why not bar American companies from doing business in Iran and impose sanctions on any foreign company investing more than $20 million there—if this makes the government of Israel and its U.S. lobby happy?

Israel's Motivations

There is not much evidence that fear of Iranian rearmament motivates Israel, overwrought American media rhetoric about Iran's development of "weapons of mass destruction" notwithstanding. If Iran were really about to produce a nuclear weapon, Israel has between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads itself, according to news accounts. It could always bomb key Iranian facilities, even with conventional weapons, as it did when it attacked Iraq's Osiraq atomic facility near Baghdad in 1981.

The old alliance with Iran was immensely important to Israel.

Israel's military losses in its occupied zone in south Lebanon, however, are a very serious matter. There is growing domestic pressure in Israel to pull out of Lebanon. But Israel's present government is unlikely to allow this to happen. It would argue that one defeat of Israel by Arabs and Muslims would start a slow downhill slide.

If a changed Iranian government would stop supporting Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, however, the Israeli occupation could continue cost-free. And Israel's basic goal of getting all or a part of Lebanon's Litani River waters, the real reason for the occupation of south Lebanon, would remain within reach.

Of vital importance to all elements within Israel is re-establishment of the 1972-1978 de-facto alliance with Iran created during the regime of Iran's late Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. It brought secret Iranian oil sales to Israel to offset the Arab oil boycott, lucrative contracts in Iran for Israeli companies, and the glittering prospect of a major Israeli role in the international oil business.

The old alliance with a populous Iran (which now has some 68 million citizens), with its long history of anti-Arab bias, was immensely important psychologically to Israel. If the alliance were recreated, Israelis would have less to fear from the growing Arab population, which now is approaching 250 million, compared to Israel's population of 5.9 million people.

Thus at all costs Israel seeks to assure that relentless American pressure against Iran will continue. This, Israeli strategists believe, will convince Iran's current Islamic revolutionary government it can never develop its economy and escape from poverty unless it agrees to revive the Israel-Iran axis, which bracketed the major Arab oil fields and could threaten the owners.

New Iranian President Mohammed Khatami's calls for dialogue between Iranian and American private citizens are therefore especially unwelcome. If the Israelists who control the U.S. foreign policy apparatus lose control of the U.S.-Iran dialogue, Israel could lose control of American policy toward Iran.

Iran's Motivations

Iran presumably has the equivalent of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, strategists sufficiently experienced and intelligent to remember the past and peer into the future.

The Iranian "think tankers" will understand that present U.S. policy toward Iran is driven by the Israeli government, backed up by its principal Washington, DC lobby, the potent American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The Iranians recall the role of the intensely pro-Israel former national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, in persuading President Nixon to launch the earlier alliance by telling the late shah on May 23, 1972 that he could buy all the U.S. weapons he wanted other than nuclear arms.

Iranians also know that accepting the role of the U.S. surrogate brought a train of disasters to their country. And even the weakest analyst among Iran's policy planners will understand that a new Iranian alliance with an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Israel will, ultimately, lead to another war with the Arab world such as that between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988.

History proves that this is a war Iran cannot win. When Iranian forces began to get the best of Saddam Hussain's vastly outnumbered forces then, one by one the Arab oil-producing countries offered their support to Iraq to prevent an Iranian victory. In that war Iran eventually found itself alone, stripped of any Western support.

That support had begun more than a century earlier when the United States sent doctors and teachers in the 19th and early 20th centuries to help Iran. Also, after World War II in 1946, President Harry Truman had forced the Soviet Union to halt its attempted land grab in northwest Iran.

In addition to those positive examples of Western intervention, however, there had been several that were negative. Reza Shah Pahlavi had been forced out by Britain and Russia in 1941, to be replaced by his weakling son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. American military equipment then flowed through Iran to save the Soviet Union from Hitler's invasion. The move was good for Russia, but the result was that Iran was saddled with an uncertain leader of poor judgment.

In fact, in 1953 when the shah was forced into exile by Iranian nationalist followers of Mohammed Mosedegh, the shah was brought back by the United States. By thwarting a popular political development in Iran, the U.S. move made the explosion that followed inevitable.

So did Israeli and U.S. machinations (under Kissinger) to pressure the Iraqis by combining with Iran to provide secret support to Kurdish rebels in the vicinity of Iraq's northern oil fields.

To end the pressure, Iraq signed a treaty with the shah in 1975 to share sovereignty over the Shatt al-Arab River, Iraq's only real outlet to the sea. This created such bad blood that after the 1978-1979 Iranian revolution had deposed the shah, Iraqi President Saddam Hussain attacked Iran in 1980. In the eight-year struggle that followed, Iran lost 600,000 dead, and Iraq lost at least half as many soldiers as well.

The late shah had done everything wrong. He neglected his economy, he bought grossly excessive quantities of military equipment, his family became immensely rich and corrupt, and he literally would brook no criticism, torturing and often executing political critics. When the popular revolution of both religious and secular opponents broke out, he was astonished. So were many of his American backers, who for 10 years, at the insistence of the shah, had maintained no contacts with the Iranian opposition.

The conclusion of most contemporary analysts of Iranian affairs, inside and outside Iran, is that a new alliance with Israel would once again endanger Iranian interests. Maintaining reasonably good relations with Iran's Arab neighbors is the only sensible course for the future.

In the same vein, help to Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, fighting Israeli occupation in south Lebanon, could never be abandoned as long as the Israeli occupation of Lebanon continues. The guerrillas are fellow Shi'i who historically have suffered persecution, just as have Iranians. On that ground alone, the Israeli-American campaign to force Iran into a new alliance with Israel is bound to fail.

But on geopolitical grounds the joint campaign already has failed. The only question is when it will be abandoned.

President Khatami has opened a new pipeline to bring gas from Turkmenistan. France's Total Company has contracted to develop Iran's huge South Pars gas field. Moreover, both Turkey and Iran have approved plans by Royal Dutch Shell to study the feasibility of constructing a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Iran to Turkey.

The cheapest way to get Caspian-basin oil and gas to the big Asian market is across Iran to saltwater ports. U.S. support for an alternative scheme for running a pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India already has run afoul of American women's groups upset with mistreatment of women by the fundamentalist Taliban, which now controls most of Afghanistan.

The Position of France

France was happy to pick up the contract to develop Iran's Sirri oil field in the southern Persian Gulf after President Clinton voided a contract to do so by Conoco, a partially American-owned company. The U.S. government may still huff and puff, but it is not so stupid as to take on the entire European Union by imposing sanctions against French companies.

Some of the U.S. media tried to cry shame that France and others are interested in making money in Iran. But this comes with ill grace from the United States, since President Clinton himself frequently has been on the telephone urging foreign leaders to buy U.S. goods.

Russia's Motivations

The United States seemed for a time to have forgotten that Russia and Iran are no longer next-door neighbors. So Iran no longer needs to fear Russia. Ironically, since the United States obviously has been trying to prevent Caspian-basin oil and gas from crossing either Russia or Iran, the two old enemies have interests, or enemies, in common.

The fact that Iran accepted Russian participation with France in developing Iran's South Pars gas field symbolizes Iran's and Russia's new friendship.

The only real questions remaining are how and when the United States will abandon its unworkable Israeli-drafted policy to, once again, turn Iran into a puppet of the United States and its Israelist foreign affairs establishment.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.