I don't write about the Lobby and Iran much on this blog. Even though there's no question that the Lobby supports aerial devastation of Iran, hatred of Iran is a bi-partisan near-consensus, and I don't think the Lobby is what will push America to war with Iran, if indeed we end up attacking it. Given the power differential, America's orders to Israel for a stay of bombardment shouldn't be surprising except to those who advocate a mono-causal analysis of the Empire's foreign policy (and that one cause in this fantasy is that prime mover, the Israel Lobby). Those suggesting that Israel or the amorphous Lobby is the determinant of American policy on Iran will be able to explain to me why it was that chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, and Secretary of State Clinton were in the Middle East in the last few days informing Israel that it had better not attack Iran. Israel is a fantastically terrified garrison state, eager to bomb the smithereens out of Iran--Haggai Ram writes of the “exaggerated or misplaced anxieties” which have succeeded only in scaring the Israeli public “out of its wits." A witless terrified country reacts with violence, unless told to do otherwise by its financier.
Still, American policy is headstrong and blind. Headstrong because it can not tolerate an independent Iran that refuses to vet its foreign policy with the empire, which includes the ability to be nuclear-capable without being nuclear-armed, probably Iran's goal. And blind because it thinks that the regime is weak enough that destabilization will uproot it from the society within which it is embedded. Not a chance, say the Leveretts. Even those in the midst of reverie and with considerably less grounded visions of what the green movement is and isn't, like Farhang Jahanpour, note that
a definite segment of Iranian society - members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and the basij militia, intransigent clerics and their circles, the devout lower classes - do have a major stake in the system and think that they have nowhere else to turn.
...
A foreign assault, which would unite all Iranians behind a power they hate, could yet give it an infusion of strength
Ahmadinejad has declared that the Iranian government will survive any assault. Violence can take the form of missiles. And it can also take the form of hardened economic sanctions that force the immiserated population onto reliance on the strongest and most resilient segments of societal power. "Targeted sanctions" are high-quality mental masturbation for the technocrats and bureaucrats who won't be living under them. In the real world, they don't exist. They always harm the population, and there's no reason to think they will work in the case of Iran considering the near-consensus on its right to atomic energy. As Kayhan Barzegar writes,
Yet, from the perspective of Iran’s elite, any negotiations between Tehran and Washington
which might cause Iran to deviate from the long-term project of an independent nuclear fuel cycle would be an untenable strategic mistake.
Translation: Threats won't work. Anyway, there is always room for more negotiations before resorting to economic warfare. But since America has no intention of allowing Iran to get within reach of nuclear weaponry, it probably will put in place harder sanctions. And barring a sociological miracle in American politics--wise leadership--sanctions could escalate to warfare, having nothing to do with the Lobby and everything to do with the fumbling foreign policy of a clumsily inept Empire. Failure of imperial means almost never incites re-assessment of imperial ends until the means start to cost us too much, or start to have truly genocidal costs amongst the victims, which is when American liberals start to get a little queasy. As Madeline Albright stunningly put it, "the price--we think the price is worth it." 500,000 brown corpses? No one said Empire doesn't entail a boom in the mortuary business in the global South. But a couple million bodies gets uncouth.
The question is not if the Iranian establishment will cede control over the possibility of having nuclear capability to the West. The question is if the West will come to its senses. Not likely. At best.
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We have a very similar perspective about this, and, during Obama’s presidency, I have become more fearful of an attack, for the reasons you mention here, plus the temptation to use it as a distraction from domestic concerns.
Appreciate the kind comments on my SWP post, and I haven’t forgottten about finding time for you to be interviewed on KDVS about the Gaza Freedom March.