Harry Targ
Candidate Barack Obama’s most appealing campaign
promise in 2008 involved his pledge to transform United States foreign policy
from one relying on the perpetual use of force to one based upon the skillful
application of bargaining and negotiation, the traditional tools of diplomacy.
However, most peace activists were clear-headed enough to know that an Obama
foreign policy would not be anti-imperial but they hoped that the US would not
blunder into additional wars that would cost the lives and treasure of people
all across the globe.
Six years of Obama foreign policy have been mixed at
best. US troops are still in Afghanistan. The United States, under cover of
NATO, helped destroy the authoritarian but stable government of Libya, leaving
a fractured dysfunctional civil war in its place. Military advisors remain in
several countries. Drones have targeted alleged enemies in multiple countries.
And the United States has continued efforts to destabilize governments, for
example in Venezuela.
On the other hand President Obama has committed the
United States to a dramatic and significant negotiation process with Iran in
conjunction with nations in the United Nations Security Council and Germany,
the so-called P5+1. Iran has committed itself to a process of reducing nuclear
weapons capabilities in exchange for the end of economic sanctions. Nuclear
scientists believe the tentative agreement as reported is feasible and
desirable. Prominent voices from the foreign policy community regard the
agreement as significant; some say as significant as President Nixon’s
agreements with the former Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, both
in 1972.
But Obama’s opening to Iran, potentially his most
important foreign policy legacy, has generated outrage in the United States.
For the more open-minded, a careful assessment of the impending Western/Iran
agreement on the latter’s nuclear program needs to be examined referring to history, the contemporary Middle
East/Persian Gulf context and the possibilities of tension reduction
in the region that could come about because of the agreement. Finally, all of
these factors need to be evaluated in the context of the domestic politics and the
legacy of racism in the United States.
Historically the United States presence in the
Persian Gulf/Middle East region expanded with its establishment of a permanent
relationship with the region’s premier dictatorship and sponsor of violence,
Saudi Arabia, at the end of World War II. President Roosevelt agreed to provide
that country with arms and military support permanently in exchange for
perpetual access to oil. Since then the Saudi Arabian government, in
conjunction with other Gulf States, has funded terrorist actors in the region and
destabilized regimes regarded as threats to its regional hegemony.
In addition to US ties with the Saudi dynasty, the
United States supported the secular and brutal dictatorship of the Shah of
Iran. His power was solidified in a CIA backed military coup in 1953 that
ousted radical nationalist leader, Mohammad Mosaddegh, from power. The ousted
leader had promoted the Iranian nationalization of its own oil industry.
Subsequent to the U.S. coup, the Shah ruled his country with a heavy hand. By
1979, 70,000 political opponents were in Iranian jails and Iran had become the
fifth largest military power in the world.
Then the catastrophe happened: Iranian workers and
religious activists overthrew the Shah in 1979, thus threatening other regimes
friendly to the US such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt and the flow of oil from the
region to Europe, Japan, and the United States. US hostility to Iran escalated.
The US hosted the ailing Shah for medical treatment and after Iranian students
took US embassy personnel hostage, President Carter made it clear the United
States would not return the Shah to Iran to stand trial for his crimes nor
would the United States apologize for its role in putting the Shah in full
control of his nation. Also, after the Iranian revolution, the United States
gave large military support to Saddam Hussein’s military attack on Iran,
leading to the eight-year Iran/Iraq war that cost over a million lives.
Also the United States backed Israeli military
adventures against Lebanon and the Gaza strip where allies of Iran reside. Once
this history is included, the troubled US/Iranian relationship, stripped of the
conventional and overly-simplified narrative of Iran as a global supporter of terrorism
and driven by religious extremism, becomes more understandable.
Today’s context makes the story even clearer. The
Syrian civil war includes conflicts between anti-government factions supported
by the Saudis, the United States, the Israelis, and a government supported by
Iran and Russia. The Islamic State in Syria (ISIS), while a threat to Saudi
hegemony in the region, is also a movement in opposition to the Iranian-backed
Iraqi government, the Syrian government, and the horrific role the United States
has played in the region at least since the Iraq war. Violence in the region is
fueled by religious differences and the struggle for power between Saudi
Arabia, the Gulf States, the United States, and Israel versus Iran, the Syrian
regime, Shiite backed governments, supporters of the Palestinian people such as
Hamas, and Russia.
Given the enormous complexity of the history and
context of US/Iranian relations in a region plagued by colonialism,
neo-colonialism, the sixty year war between Israel and the Palestinian people
and the spread of violence between states and within states, any efforts to
negotiate tension-reduction and arms control and/or disarmament agreements
among key players is vitally important. Further, Israel already possesses
nuclear weapons. The seething caldron of violence and advanced weapons justifies
fears of escalating regional and worldwide nuclear war,
While Obama’s campaign and periodic rhetoric about a
more “pragmatic” foreign policy--negotiate rather than make war--has not been
fully realized, the negotiations begun between the P5+1 and Iran in 2006 and
expanded during the Obama administration, constitute an effort to defuse
escalation to war in the most volatile region of the world and most sensible
policy analysts endorse the effort. However, there is a domestic campaign in the
United States to derail the US/Iranian negotiations for at least four reasons.
First, a possible long-term agreement tying Iranian
dismantling of technologies that could be used to build nuclear weapons in
exchange for the end of harsh US economic sanctions against Iran puts diplomacy
ahead of force or the threat of force as the primary instrument of United
States foreign policy. This diplomacy first approach, called here pragmatism,
is fundamentally at odds with the neoconservative program articulated by
foreign policy influentials who have acquired undue influence in Washington DC since
the Reagan years. These are the Project for a New American Century elites, the
neoconservatives, the key decision-makers who launched the Iraq War. They still
believe the United States should use its military power to remake the world in
its image. The most extreme spokespersons from this point of view in recent
weeks have called for war on Iran.
Second, the pro-Israeli lobby is driven by the idea
that Israel must remain the regional hegemon and the United States has an
obligation to support Israel in every way, irrespective of the violence and
instability it creates. For them, United States foreign policy should be guided
in all its conduct by what such policy means for the state of Israel.
Third, a possible US/Iranian agreement can establish
a very “bad example” for the future of United States foreign policy. A shift
from guns, bombs, and drones first, to a foreign policy based primarily on
diplomatic activity might lead peace advocates to renew their call for cuts in
military spending. Neoconservative pundits and military-industrial complex
spokespersons often frame their analyses in terms of “planning for the next
war.” Preparation for war, they believe, should be the number one priority of
United States foreign policy.
Finally, negotiations between the United States and
Iran from the vantage point of domestic politics, that is Congress and the
electoral process, is only marginally about international relations. The first
priority of the United States Congress, presidential candidates, most of the Republican
Party, and a sizable number of Democrats is about opposing everything President
Obama does.
What gives fuel to this opposition in
contradistinction to the old foreign policy norm of “bipartisanship” has to do
with race. In addition to all the other factors noted above, racism has
motivated much of the politics of opposition since 2008. Candidate Obama
campaigned around the world in 2008 to enormous plaudits. In the United States
his global appeal challenged the whole history of racism that has conditioned
and distorted American political life. That is an extra burden this president
has had to face in his foreign policy practice beyond mere partisan disputes
about policy.
In the end, President Obama’s ability (with P5+1) to
pursue and achieve an agreement with Iran might determine whether the world
will see a global war in the coming years or declining violence in the Persian
Gulf/Middle East region.
The mobilization of the peace movement in defense of
a US/Iranian agreement, therefore, is a mobilization against the
neoconservative agenda of perpetual war, Israeli hegemony, the
military-industrial complex, and racism in the United States.
