Peloni: Siegel provides an excellent review of the American Realignment towards Iran and against Israel and the attempts to mask this as being in the interest of Israel rather than in the interest of Iran.
Jacob Siegel | UNHERD | June 4, 2024
This past Memorial Day, as Americans honoured their war dead, the Biden administration was running interference for an Iranian regime whose Supreme Leader has described “death to America” as his official state policy. A report in the day’s Wall Street Journal described how the US was “pressing European allies to back off plans to rebuke Iran for advances in its nuclear programme”. This followed a confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that assessed Iran has increased its stockpile of enriched uranium to more than 30 times the limit set in the 2015 nuclear deal — enough to produce three to four nuclear weapons within a week, according to experts.
Theoretically, the news should have troubled officials in Washington, who often still speak as if they oppose the proliferation of nuclear weapons to rogue states that vow to destroy the US-led international order. So why, then, did the US block the effort led by its allies France and England to censure Iran? For the same underlying reason that has motivated White House policy since October 7: The Biden administration sees Iran as America’s main partner in the Middle East and the lynchpin of US grand strategy.
Washington’s de facto alliance with Iran, which began under the Obama administration and was revived by Biden, is the central fact of US foreign policy today. Iran is the decisive factor in most decisions the US makes in the region, including in relation to Israel. Yet White House officials know that stating this directly would create a public-relations disaster. Alas, most Americans stubbornly reject the idea of aligning their country with the Khomeinist state that has killed more than a thousand of their fellow citizens and continues to attack US soldiers and call for their deaths. Indeed, existing policies such as airlifting billions of dollars in cash to Iran and using taxpayer money to subsidise Iranian proxy forces, including Hezbollah and Hamas, would be decidedly unpopular if the government actually acknowledged them.
To get around this problem, US officials conceal the main axis of their strategy behind a veil of misdirection and innuendo. Is it an irony that America’s ruling party used deliberate deception to advance its project of US-Iranian alliance, as its leaders led a new crusade to prosecute “Disinformation”? No, it is a political strategy following the old maxim that the best defence is a good offence.
It was Obama who first envisioned a strategic “realignment” that would clean up the mess left by the Bush administration’s failed wars in the Middle East. The US occupation of Iraq — rather than empowering peaceful, democratic forces across the region as Bush advertised — had mainly benefitted Iraq’s neighbour, the Shia theocracy of Iran. In the Eighties, under the leadership of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq fought a war of attrition with Iran in which more than 1 million people were killed, including more than 100,000 civilians. It was the longest conventional war of the 20th century and one of the most brutal, with chemical weapons attacks by Iraq, numerous massacres of civilians, and Iran using children to clear minefields. When it ended, the war left significant divisions between Iraq’s majority Arab Shia population and the ethnically Persian Shia regime of Iran. It was only after American occupation forces disbanded Iraq’s Sunni Baathist government in 2003, triggering a spiral of insurgency and civil war, that policy makers in DC started to see Iran as the key to restoring order in the country.
In addition to former Baathists and Sunni jihadists, the Iraqi insurgency included a large number of Shia militias funded by Iran, some of them operating as direct proxies of the Iranian Quds Force. Given the proper incentives, the Americans reasoned, Iran could muzzle those groups and direct them to stop attacking American soldiers. More broadly, it was thought that Iran could play a crucial role in stabilising Iraqi politics by backing the leaders who Washington selected to run Iraq’s new democratically elected government. “To quickly make a government we allowed Shia exiles and Iranian proxies into the Iraqi government and turned a blind eye to Iran’s control of the Iraqi state,” writes Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who did multiple tours in Iraq before returning to the US and entering conservative politics where he advocates pulling American troops out of the Middle East.
Thus, despite Tehran’s ideological devotion to killing Americans and annihilating Israel, which has never dimmed, the belief in its value as a strategic partner grew within the US foreign policy elite. The moment to realise the idea arrived after Obama won re-election in 2012 and could pursue his most ambitious designs without worrying about voters. The Iran deal, which Obama saw as the centrepiece of his legacy, became the main priority of his second term. By the time the White House, led by its Iran envoy Robert Malley, began public negotiations in 2013 for the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), US officials had already been making secret entreaties to Tehran for several years.
Under the auspices of preventing Iran from getting the bomb, the Obama administration set about weakening its former allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The two countries that had been the main pillars of America’s security architecture in the Middle East were now seen as obstacles due to their opposition to the US embrace of Iran. To deal with them, the Obama administration went on the attack. The White House spied on members of Congress who it suspected of coordinating with Israeli officials to oppose the Iran deal, a move that, in 2015, still looked like an unprecedented use of the US intelligence agencies in partisan politics. On another track, the State Department funded Israeli non-profit groups working to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, exceptional generosity was being shown to Iran. Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, repeatedly blocked the FBI from arresting Iranian terrorists in order to protect the JCPOA, according to agency whistle-blowers. In a leaked email between two FBI agents from 2015, one complains: “We are all beside ourselves on asking the field to stand down on a layup arrest, however as it stands right now we all have to sit back and wait until the US and Iran negotiations resolve themselves.”
To stifle criticism at home, the administration used friendly mouthpieces in the press to smear anyone opposed to the pro-Iran realignment as a neocon trying to drag America into another war. In the softer voice that Obama deployed in the rare, carefully selected moments when he articulated his strategy, he insisted that boosting Iran would be good for the whole region, including the Israelis, by forcing everyone to get along. This would produce a new geopolitical “equilibrium” Obama told The New Yorker in 2014, between “Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare”.
Obama’s comments were made in the midst of the Syrian civil war, but some months before active warfare broke out in Yemen between Iran’s Houthi proxy and the Saudis. Nothing that happened, however, neither Assad’s gas attacks in Syria nor Iran’s increasingly aggressive use of its proxy forces, shook his prevailing faith in the new US-made Middle East. If anything, Iranian military expansionism seemed to redouble Obama’s commitment, as came across in his statements from a press conference in December of 2015, where he spoke of allowing “the Iranians to ensure that their equities are respected”. In other words, American power would now defend Iran’s right to proxy armies in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, so long as they operated within the US regional framework, which set limits on the acceptable levels of violence and terrorism.
Volatile contradictions inherent in Obama’s progressive imperial order stoked a backlash against the realignment and presented a technical problem. How should the White House deal with critics who threatened to undermine their plan for transforming the Middle East? The answer Obama chose was to embrace offensive information operations, otherwise known as mass propaganda, as a legitimate tool of domestic politics.
“We created an echo chamber,” Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, admitted in 2016 to the writer David Samuels. Coasting off the cultish enthusiasm for Obama among America’s progressive elites, the White House recruited non-profit groups and friendly press outlets to lend a false air of independent credibility to administration talking points. Still a relatively new technology at the time, social media proved immensely important in achieving this effect. Twitter synchronised the various narrative purveyors in the echo chamber, connecting them to the public and to each other in a feedback loop that translated political agendas into “objective news”.
It is not too dramatic to say that the Iran deal echo chamber inaugurated a new era of American politics driven by party-directed propaganda. It established the informational networks that allowed the Democratic Party to repeat the formula in the future. And indeed, this is precisely what has happened, in a pattern recurring at increasingly frequent intervals ever since: in, to name but a few, the false claims that Russia “hacked” the US election to anoint Donald Trump, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was an act of Russian disinformation, and most recently in relation to Gaza.
In the context of pervasive, party-directed attempts to control politics through messaging, let’s examine the current US role in the Middle East and the Israel-Hamas war. The official story goes like this: Joe Biden came into office as the greatest friend Israel ever had, a Zionist so committed to the cause he would have personally invented Israel if the Jews hadn’t come up with the idea first. A champion of the Abraham Accords, Biden was pushing to expand them by bringing Israel into a historic new treaty with Saudi Arabia. If there was a criticism of Biden, it was that in his enthusiasm for Israel’s security and the prospect of Arab-Israeli peace he had neglected the Palestinians, who, fearing they might be cast forever off the historical stage, sought to regain the world’s attention by lashing out in the regrettable actions of October 7. But once the war started, it was back to point one with Biden offering maximum support to his stalwart ally Israel.
So, what is this grand strategy? Apart from extermination of the Jews and maybe a few pesky Arabs, there is no obvious target in sight.