Gaza conflict a template for US policy on Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran is surrounded by nuclear weapons in Pakistan, India and Israel, by hostile states, separatist nationalities and terrorist groups. That it should itself pursue nuclear power and weapons – or wish to keep that option open in the face of another, continuing existential threat from the US – is therefore not at all surprising. Recall again that in 2003 its leaders made a credible offer to the US for a settlement between them, exchanging a US security guarantee for suspending its nuclear programme and supporting the Arab League’s offer to recognise Israel if it withdrew to 1967 borders.

The offer was turned down by the Bush administration at the height of its “axis of evil” imperial phase. Thereafter, Iran turned further to proxy actions and allies – in Iraq, with Syria and by stepping up its sponsorship of Hizbullah and Hamas. It was in realisation of these threats that the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate concluded Iran did not yet have weapons of mass destruction and could be open to a grand bargain.

That influenced the approach of Robert Gates, appointed Bush’s secretary of defence early in 2007 and kept on by Obama. He warned that “while Iran cannot attack us directly militarily, I think that their capacity to close off the Persian Gulf to all exports of oil, their potential to unleash a significant wave of terror in the . . . Middle East and in Europe and even here in this country is very real”.

Some of the Obama team see the merits of a deal with Iran to help forward his military policy in Afghanistan. They believe Iran is amenable to an ambitious dialogue drawing all these issues together. It may be necessary to recognise Iran cannot be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons, but it can be deterred or contained. Its leaders have an interest in normalising relations with the US and Europe and despite their engrained factionalism could deliver such a bargain, including Israel, Hamas and Hizbullah.

Against that, several other of Obama’s key appointees, including Hillary Clinton and his possible Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, have opposed any such scenario. Their response to the Gaza operation is crucial. Will they welcome Israel’s effort to eliminate Hamas or see that the organisation’s survival threatens to reinforce radical jihadism and therefore talk to it to stop that?

Israeli claims to alter relations between moderation and extremism come straight up against the facts of occupation and resistance which tilt the balance the other way. And if Hamas collapses, Gaza would probably become a failed state.

In Israel, too, there is a debate between those who, as the historian Gershom Gorenberg puts it, “want to destroy Hamas and those who see it will be necessary to negotiate with it if Israel is to become a part of the Middle East and not a garrison state in perpetual conflict with it”. He says: “We have to be prepared to signal that we will deal with a Palestinian national unity government that includes Hamas, as much as we might not like that, because we can’t negotiate with the Palestinians without Hamas.”

pgillespie@irishtimes.com