Why ARE We So Worried About Iran?

Gwynne Dyer in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1-23-05):

Seymour Hersh's article in last week's New Yorker about American forces carrying out reconnaissance missions in Iran to locate hidden Iranian nuclear facilities, presumably in order to be able to destroy them all in a surprise attack, may be "riddled with errors," as the White House promptly alleged. It may be entirely true. And either way, it may have been deliberately leaked by the Bush administration to frighten Iran. But what was really revealing was the U.S. media response to it.

There seems to be hardly anyone in the mainstream U.S. media who is willing to question the assumption that Iranian nuclear weapons would be, say, 10 times more dangerous than Chinese nuclear weapons. Yet China is a totalitarian Communist dictatorship while Iran is a partially democratic country struggling, so far unsuccessfully, to rid itself of the clique of deeply conservative mullahs who have dominated defense and foreign policy

Why is Iran seen as such a threat? There was never an equivalent panic at the prospect of Chinese nuclear weapons. And it's not just that China was too big to think of attacking, whereas Iran is just right: 70 million Iranians in a country three times the size of Iraq is a very big chunk to bite off militarily, especially since the United States already has Iraq on its plate.

It's not even as simple as the fact that Iran is Muslim, and that Americans have got really twitchy about Muslims with nuclear weapons since 9/11. They have, but there is no public anxiety in the United States about Pakistan's nuclear weapons, let alone any agitation for some sort of "pre-emptive attack" to destroy them -- and this despite the fact that a senior Pakistani nuclear scientist was caught selling nuclear weapons technology and knowledge to other Muslim countries, almost certainly with the complicity of some official circles in Islamabad.

Iran is not a "crazy state." In the 25 years that the mullahs have been in power, they have not attacked any neighboring state. When Iraq invaded Iran in the 1980s (with American encouragement and support), they fought a bitter eight-year war to repel the invasion but accepted a negotiated peace that simply restored the status quo.

They backed their fellow Shias in southern Lebanon in their long resistance to the Israeli occupation and continue to help them today -- but if that is support for "terrorism," it is only in the specific context of Arab resistance to Israeli military occupation The only incident of international terrorism in which there was ever suspicion of Iranian involvement was the bombing of a American airliner over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988, allegedly in retaliation for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner in the Gulf by a U.S. warship -- but the Lockerbie attack was eventually pinned on Libya instead....

So why this apparent haste in the Bush administration to attack Iran now, and why the seeming enthusiasm for such a hare-brained project in wide sections of the U.S. public (or at least of the media that claim to speak in their name)? Edward Luttwak, the military historian and strategic analyst who is renowned in Washington for his maverick views, recently described US foreign policy post-9/11 almost as an exercise in emotional physics. Never mind all the elaborate strategic plans and projects of the neoconservatives, he implied; what really drives all this is just push-back....