The Gathering Iran Delusion

An unintentional consequence of capturing and killing Saddam Hussein is that conservatives don't have Saddam Hussein to kick around any more. If Saddam didn't turn out to be the Hitler figure threatening to "take over the world," who is going to be the villain to "test American resolve," justify new military adventures, and provide the easy victories that conservatives crave. Neither Osama bin Laden (hiding in Pakistan) nor Moqtada al-Sadr seem to pass the super-villan test. So who is going to be the next target of right-wing delusion? We already have an answer. It's IRAN! While absorbing the horrors of American failure in Iraq, the right-wing media apparatus has also been pumping up "the Iranian threat." Indeed, Iran is a logical choice for the new "enemy." Because their Shiite theocracy actually is antagonistic to the United States and the West, the Iranians provide all kinds of statements that right-wing propogandists at places like the American Enterprise Institute can work up into a state of Nazi-like expansionism.

Here's a good example of Iran delusion-making in a Dec. 21 article Michael Ladeen of AEI. "With Ahmadinejad [the Iranian president], the mullahs [the actual leaders of Iran] bared their fangs to us. Convinced they were winning in Iraq, foreseeing the destruction of Israel, the domination of Lebanon, a jihadist reconquista in Afghanistan and the expansion of their domain into the Horn of Africa, they gave us the face of the unrepentant conqueror. He's played his role well, and he will continue to play it."

This has all the hallmarks of right-wing delusion. Most pointedly, there is the characterization of President Ahmadinejad as a Hitleresque "unrepentant conqueror." Indeed, Ahmadinejad has made several provocative statements concerning the Israelis, but Ladeen overlooks the important fact that no Iranian army has attacked or conquered anyone since Ahmadinejad took office. Given Iran's paltry defense budget of $6.2 billion in 2005, it is also unlikely that the Iranians will attack anybody. More importantly, it's unlikely that the Iranians would defend themselves very well if the U. S. attacks them. To compare, the U. S. had a defense budget of $419 billion for 2005 (more than 67 times the Iranian budget). It's also well known that the Iranian military are still using the 70's vintage American military equipment that they inherited from the Shah regime.

Of course, Ladeen and the other right-wingers who promote the "Persian Menace" know all this. Nevertheless, pumping up a cream puff like Iran into a world-class fighting machine is the standard method of right-wing delusion. For the right, the point is to have enemies who can be beaten without much effort or much domestic controversy in the U. S. Bush's people and pundits on the right all knew that the Saddam regime was weak even though they were promoting the fictional "bio-terror" threat posed by the Iraqis. That's much of what made attacking Iraq so attractive to the right.

The same is the case with Iran. The conservatives are promoting an attack on Iran know that the Iranians are not capable of retaliating against any American attack. Guys like Ladeen see an attack on Iran as a chance for the right to have its military aggression without paying a real price. In other words, attacking Iran would be the conservative utopia that attacking Iraq was supposed to be.

Second, there is a domino theory in which Iran conquers all the way from the Persian Gulf to Somalia and Ethiopia (the horn of Africa). That's the same domino theory that had the Vietnamese Communists moving on Australia soon after the fall of Saigon and Saddam Hussein (the last and now late embodiment of Hitler before Ahmadinejad) conquering his way across Africa, South America, and Mexico before reaching Texas. Or was that New Orleans. Every bit of Ladeen's scenario is either clownish exaggeration or wholly false. The Iranians are not "winning in Iraq" because they're not part of the struggle in Iraq. As a result of two elections, the U. S. handed the Iraqi government to political parties like SCIRI and Dawa that have long-standing ties to Iran. The Shiite parties in Iraq are winning, but that does not mean that Iran is winning in Iraq.

The same goes for the other scenarios. If there is a "jihadist reconquista" in Afghanistan, Iran won't be involved because the Iranians have been just as much enemies to the Taliban as they were to Saddam Hussein (with whom they fought an eight year war). Of course, Ladeen knows this, a fact that gives the whole scenario an aura of dishonesty as well as delusion. As has already been mentioned, Iran has no assets which would allow them to "destroy Israel," "dominate Lebanon," or conquer (unrepentently) through the Arabian peninsula and on to the Horn of Africa. Ahmadinejad has talked about the desirability of wiping Israel off the map, but if talk were conquest the U. S. would have conquered Syria and Iran by now. After all, administration neo-cons have been talking about "regime change" in these countries for at three or four years now.

Of course, proving that the Iranians are not a Hitler-like threat is not enough. American right-wingers are "unrepentently" bent on instilling the idea that the Iranians have replaced Saddam Hussein as a remorseless threat to American interests and national security. As they did with Iraq in the run-up to the invasion, the right-wing will exaggerate and lie to make their case, relentlessly repeat their lies as long as they have any credibility, and then make up new lies when the old ones no longer work. If the right-wing can sell the Iran delusion, they think they'll be able to salvage some part of their war-mongering foreigh policy despite the disaster in Iraq. That's why it's necessary to keep exposing the lies and distortions of the Iran delusion before the right leads us into yet another foreign policy disaster.