[R-G] Neo-cons Fine-Tune Iran Angle

[Anthony Fenton]

Published on Tuesday, February 26, 2008 by Inter Press Service
Neo-cons Fine-Tune Iran Angle
by Khody Akhavi

WASHINGTON - A new report published by the American Enterprise  
Institute (AEI) think-tank purports to show the reach and scope of  
Iranian influence across the Middle East, but stops short of drawing  
conclusions about Tehran’s intentions or grand strategy.

Co-written by AEI fellows Fred Kagan and Danielle Pletka, and Kagan’s  
wife, Kimberly, who heads the Institute for the Study of War, the  
report doesn’t offer much in the way of rhetorical grandstanding,  
doesn’t discuss Iran’s current nuclear programme, and fails to offer  
recommendations of how to counter Tehran.

But that’s not the point really, said the authors repeatedly during a  
panel discussion last Tuesday in the think-tank’s conference room.

“We endeavoured to take a look at what Iran is doing, not with a view  
to figuring out whether the regime in Tehran has particular  
motivations, not with a view to figuring out even necessarily what  
the regime’s strategy is, rather just to take a ‘clean’ — if you will  
— look at Iran’s reach,” said Pletka, vice president for foreign and  
defence policy studies at AEI.

The report, entitled “Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and  
Afghanistan”, describes the debate about the aims and the nature of  
power in Tehran’s regime as “charged”. Hence, drawing firm  
conclusions about a government that is opaque and rife with internal  
schism is “almost hopeless”.

Yet, it warns: “Much as America might desire to avoid war with Iran,  
continued Iranian interventions… might ultimately make that option  
less repulsive than the alternatives.”

The report relies entirely on open-source material, international and  
domestic media, non-governmental and government reports, as well as  
interviews conducted by Fred and Kimberly Kagan, who respectively  
visited Afghanistan and Iraq.

AEI has been home base for a long list of influential figures,  
including several former George W. Bush administration officials such  
as John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle. Having helped lead  
the effort to push public support for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq  
— including by creating influential advocacy groups such as the now  
defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) — AEI writers and  
scholars have turned their attention to Iran.

They have long been advocates for confrontational policy approaches,  
and until recently, open agitators for military intervention with  
Tehran. At an event last summer, neoconservative author Michael  
Ledeen said, “The [Iranian] leadership constantly tells its people,  
‘the Iranian people must prepare the rule the world’.”

“Everybody has convinced themselves that they can make a deal with  
Iran. We have been negotiating for 27 years, as if there have been no  
negotiations… there is no escape,” he said. “The only question is how  
best to defeat them.”

In November 2006, AEI fellow Joshua Muravchick began an opinion  
editorial in the Los Angeles Times with four words: “We must bomb Iran.”

But during the discussion last Tuesday, the report’s authors’ ducked  
questions about the possibility of air strikes against Iran before  
President George W. Bush leaves office next January.

“What I would say simply is that whatever your view about when or if  
air strikes will occur, air strikes are not a strategy, and we need  
to be thinking more broadly than that,” said Fred Kagan.

Kagan, a member of an influential neo-conservative family that  
includes father Donald and brother Robert, is widely known for his  
advocacy of the President Bush’s “surge strategy”, the increase of  
some 30,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq to provide security and breathing  
space for a political reconciliation between the country’s political  
parties.

AEI may have had the ear of the White House and Pentagon at one time,  
but since the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which said that  
Iran had decided to stop its nuclear weapons programme, the drive  
towards confrontation with Iran seems to have sputtered. The U.S.  
military remains overstretched, and in the upcoming presidential  
election, Republican candidate and “surge” advocate Senator John  
McCain will face a Democratic candidate eager to remove troops from  
Iraq and “end the war”.

While President Bush may share AEI’s view on Iranian malfeasance, his  
influence is waning. In a National Public Radio interview this month,  
Defence Secretary Bob Gates appeared to contradict his boss’s view  
that Iran posed a “threat”, instead saying that Tehran posed  
“significant challenges”.

“When I think of a threat I think of a direct military threat, and  
while the jury’s out in terms of whether they have eased up on their  
support to those opposing us in Iraq, I don’t see the Iranians in the  
near term as a direct military threat,” he said.

It seems the scholars at AEI have caught on, as they have attempted  
to shift the focus of the debate from Iranian motivations and  
intentions towards an “empirical study” of Iran’s influence. In the  
final analysis, it reflects a tactical shift away from openly beating  
the war drums as do scholars like Ledeen, whose most recent book is  
entitled, “The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for  
Destruction”, and towards an attempt to highlight the extent of  
Iranian influence in the region. The conclusion to be drawn is that,  
even without the nuclear issue at the forefront, Iran continues to  
exert a negative impact on U.S. interests.

By assembling an empirical study based on open-source information,  
the intention may be to provide a purportedly unvarnished account of  
Iran’s ability to compete with the U.S. for hegemony in the region,  
to challenge the compartmentalised view of the Iran-U.S. conflict, in  
a debate the authors argue has been “short on facts”.

But perhaps the authors should do some fact-checking of their own. On  
page three, the incorrectly identify the former President of Syria as  
“Hafez al-Hassad,” who died in 2006.

© 2008 Agence France Presse
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