What the US and Israel really want from Iran

Al Jazeera

9 hours ago

In his 2002 testimony to the United States Congress, then former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told US lawmakers that an invasion of Iraq was necessary for winning the 'war on terror' and preventing Iraq and terrorist groups from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. He further claimed that the war would be quick and would usher in a new age of Western-friendly democracy, not just in Iraq, but across the region, including Iran. Neither proclamation was true.
As many experts and officials already knew before the 2003 invasion began, Saddam Hussein's regime did not have weapons of mass destruction and held no ties to al-Qaeda. The war was bound to cause widespread devastation, instability, insecurity, unspeakable suffering, chaos and the breakdown of governance. And that is what happened. Iraq today is at best a fragile state with enormous economic and political challenges.
After Israel and then the US attacked Iran earlier this month, many analysts rushed to comment on how the two allies have supposedly failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq war and are now repeating the same mistakes in Iran. These analyses would have been accurate had the actual goals of the 2003 invasion been to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and to establish democracy. But they were not.
For the US and Israel, the desired outcome of the war was an Iraq that would not pose any resistance to the Israeli settler-colonial project in Palestine and its role as an agent of US imperial power in the region. This is also the desired outcome in Iran today.
Just like the claims about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq proved completely false, the claims that Iran was on the 'verge of' developing a nuclear weapon have no grounds. No real evidence that Tehran was in fact close to gaining nuclear capabilities has been put forward. Instead, we have been presented with a truly unmatched level of hypocrisy and lies.
Here we have a situation where two nuclear powers – one which stands out as the only state in history to use, not once but twice, a nuclear weapon and another that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has a mass-murder-suicide type of nuclear doctrine – are undertaking illegal 'pre-emptive' aggression under the guise of stopping nuclear proliferation.
Clearly, the US and Israel are not after Iran's nuclear programme. They are after Iran as a regional power, and that is why regime change has already been floated in public.
In addition to multiple statements from Netanyahu, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, and other Israeli officials, US Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz have also called for toppling the Iranian government. On Sunday, US President Donald Trump joined the calls for regime change in Iran with a post on social media.
The Iranian people are now being encouraged to 'stand up' and fight for their 'freedom'. But freedom and democracy in Iran are certainly not what Israel and the US aim for. Why? Because a free and democratic Iran would not serve their interests and accept the brutalities of a settler-colonial project in its vicinity.
They would rather see Iran return to the violent, tyrannical monarchy under the Pahlavi dynasty, which was overthrown in a popular revolution in 1979, or any other political force willing to do their bidding.
If that doesn't happen, Israel and the US would rather have a fragmented, weak, chaotic, destabilised Iran, marred by a civil war. That would suit their interests, just as a war-torn Iraq did.
Weakening regional powers in the Middle East and spreading instability through subversion and aggression is a well-established policy goal that the political elites in Israel and the US have jointly embraced since the 1990s.
A policy document called Clean Break, authored by former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle and other neoconservatives in 1996, outlined this strategy of attacking Middle Eastern states under the pretext of preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to secure Israel's strategic interests.
Perle et al did not come up with something radically new; they simply built on the well-known imperial strategy of sowing division and chaos in order to facilitate imperial domination.
But this strategy is not without risks. Just like the collapse of the Iraqi state paved the way for violent non-state actors to emerge and for Iran to solidify its position as a regional power challenging US-Israeli interests, a weakened or fragmented Iranian state can result in the same dynamics.
On a more global scale, the actions of the US and Israel are encouraging more countries to pursue nuclear weapons. The lesson that states are drawing from the US-Israeli aggression on Iran is that nuclear weapons are necessary to acquire precisely to prevent such attacks. Thus, we are likely heading towards more proliferation as a result of this war, not less.
The Israeli state does not seem to be concerned about proliferation as long as the chaos and destruction it spreads in the region allows it to achieve its strategic goal of eradicating the Palestinian struggle once and for all, and ending all resistance to its settler colonisation project. Israel, in a nutshell, wants the entire region on its knees and will stop at nothing to achieve that objective. This is because it does not really have to foot the bill of regional instability.
By contrast, US interests are directly impacted when the Middle East descends into chaos. A dysfunctional Iraq or a weakened Iran may serve the US in the short term, but in the longer term, the instability can disrupt its grander plans for control of global energy markets and containing China.
The rest of the world will also feel the ripple effect of this unjustified aggression, just as it did after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Given the brutal, decades-long fallout of that war, the global response to the US-Israeli aggression against Iran has been self-defeatingly subdued; some European countries have appeared to endorse the attack, despite the many negative economic impacts they could face as a result of this war.
If governments truly desire to make the world a safer place, this complacency with imperial violence needs to end. It is past time that they come to the sober conclusion that the US and Israel are agents of destruction and chaos by virtue of their racist colonial design.
The Israeli settler colonial project is an unjustifiable project of displacement, expulsion and genocide; US imperialism is an unjustifiable project of robbing people of their resources, dignity and sovereignty.
To establish peace and stability in the Middle East, the world needs to put pressure on Israel to give up its settler colonial project and become part of the region through a decolonial existence with the Palestinians in a decolonised Palestine; and to compel the US to release its iron grip on the region, allowing its people to live in freedom and sovereignty.
This is the only way to avoid perpetual chaos, instability, suffering and pain.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.