Mustafa El-Labbad analyses the context of a time of reckoning for Iran while Emad Mekay catalogues efforts of Washington's right-wing lobbyists and think tanks to prepare the way for war After Iran decided last week to resume research at a nuclear facility following a two- year moratorium, the mood in Washington looked eerily reminiscent of the months preceding the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, though with two differences. The first was that the word "Iraq" was replaced by "Iran". The second is that the high-riding rhetoric of the US establishment before March 2003 was absent, the administration speaking in restrained terms without clear threat of military action. Nonetheless, reading between the lines, efforts towards winning over a war-weary US public for a possible confrontation with Iran are well underway. The strategy was clearly at work this week with the spate of condemnations of Iran's nuclear programme drumming up fears among Americans. "This is an increasingly significant problem that the world is going to have to address," Vice President Dick Cheney told the Tony Snow radio programme on 11 January. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Iran "crossed the threshold" by reactivating its research work and threatened Tehran with isolation -- à la Saddam Hussein -- while not forgetting to sympathise with the Iranian people. "I would hope that seeing the very powerful reaction of the international community, Iran would now take a step back and look at the isolation that it is about to experience," Rice told reporters on 12 January. "The Iranian people, frankly, deserve better." Speaking in a joint press conference with conservative German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President George W Bush said a nuclear Iran was unacceptable and he singled out Israel for special US concern. "I want to remind you that the current president of Iran has announced that the destruction of Israel is an important part of their agenda, and that's unacceptable," Bush said. "And the development of a nuclear weapon, it seems likely to me, would make them a step closer to achieving that objective," he added. A number of influential US lawmakers soon flamboyantly joined the foray. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News Sunday that military intervention shouldn't be ruled out while Senator John McCain, another influential Republican, told CBS television's Face the Nation the same day that "the military option is the last option but cannot be taken off of the table." Behind this tough line from US decision makers came an array of cheerleading from think tanks, lobbying groups and media organisations -- the same network that was instrumental in rallying public support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Pro-Israel groups and organisations have been particularly vociferous in their lobbying for a more hard-line US position against Tehran. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which had only a month ago criticised the US position towards Iran as too lenient when the administration accepted a Russian proposal to defuse the crisis with Iran, has called for renewed effort to stop Tehran gaining nuclear technology. The group now fronts a special file on Iran entitled "Decades of Deception: Iran's Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons" on its Web site. Visitors are greeted with the lobbying group's pledge: "Iran must be stopped before it develops nuclear weapons." AIPAC is credited for pushing Congress and the administration towards a number of legislative initiatives hostile to Iran and for placing Tehran's nuclear programme at the top of the international agenda. Another pro-Israel group, the American Jewish Congress (AJC), says it too is intensifying efforts to convince the international community of the need to stand up against Iran. "The resumption of their nuclear programme is an affront to the international community, and a threat to Israel, and to every other nation in the range of their missiles," AJC President Paul Miller, said in a statement. "The international community must take the steps necessary to prevent Iran form developing nuclear weapons," he added. The American Jewish Committee, a third group, launched a new campaign this year to push world leaders to adopt a set of measures penalising Iran, some of them borrowed from policies buttressed by Israel and the United States on Saddam Hussein's regime for years under UN sanctions. These include convincing countries to recall diplomatic envoys to Tehran, expelling Iranian diplomats, suspending Iran from a range of international organisations, and imposing economic sanctions. Like the Iraq invasion scenario, a number of think tanks whose experts flood television stations and newspaper columns back this lobbying-cum-professional political activism sold to the US public as analysis. The Brookings Institution, for example -- an integral part of the intellectual padding of US foreign policy and whose Middle East programme is now increasingly pro-Israel -- devoted its email alert on Monday to what it calls "Iran's defiance". Some of the Washington-based institution's media-savvy activists, who had previously preached a military invasion of Iraq, have now urged Washington to consider military strikes against Iran. Kenneth M Pollack, director of research at the Saban Centre on Middle East Policy told a Congressional hearing in September that the US should study the possibility of waging a targeted air campaign aimed at Iran's nuclear facilities as a last resort. The Saban Centre is funded by a grant from Haim Saban, an Egyptian-born Israeli American billionaire who made his money in the entertainment business. Martin Indyk, a staunchly pro-Israel former US diplomat who once served as US ambassador to Israel, directs it. More obvious, perhaps, is the work of the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion for neoconservatives, and that of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an offshoot of AIPAC now advised by former US Middle East Envoy Dennis Ross. The two organisations cooperated in publishing a book last week: Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos by Michael Rubin, a researcher at the AEI, and Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Institute for Near East Policy. The book, an archetypal work of pro-Israel activism in Washington, urges the West not to take the Islamic republic's stability for granted and refuels Western concerns over ethnic and religious minorities, conditions for women in Iran, as well as the country's nuclear programme. Rubin has written in neoconservative publications such as the New Republic, The Wall Street Journal and The Jerusalem Post and Middle East Quarterly while Clawson hasn't shied in his media appearances from advocating military action against Syria and Iran. Similar to events preceding the Iraq war, the campaign is crunching up media space in America also. The right-wing editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal responded to Iran's resumption of nuclear research by drawing a vague link between Saddam Hussein and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "As we learned in dealing with Saddam Hussein, so too with Mr Ahmadinejad: Eventually, there's a price to be paid for trafficking in unserious consequences," the editorial read. More indicative of all is how William Kristol, editor of the neo-conservative publication The Weekly Standard, entitled in his column: "And now Iran."
