In response to the release of State Department cables last week, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton noted that the cables highlight that “concern about Iran is well-founded, widely-shared, and will continue to be the source of the foreign policy that we pursue with like-minded nations.” The cables had exposed the fact that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s (dictator-)President Hosni Mubarak urged the U.S. to war with Iran in private conversation, all the while maintaining a façade of diplomatic courtesy towards Iran for their respective domestic audiences.
The day following, on DemocracyNow’s radio program, Noam Chomsky seized on this gap between public and private allegiances and noted the “profound hatred for democracy” contained in Clinton’s remarks, as she conflated the “widely-shared” concern with Iran’s phantom nuclear-weapons program among Arab dictators with the wider Arab world. Chomsky cited a recent Brookings Institute poll on the state of Arab public opinion, in which 57% of Arab respondents believed that Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon would be a good thing for the Middle East region, compared to just 21% who said it would not be a positive development. (Just as a side note, too: out of all the participating countries, Egyptian respondents believed that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would benefit the region the most (82% of Egyptians believed so) – a direct rebuke to Clinton’s conflation of the views of the U.S.-allied dictator Mubarak with those of his subjects.)
Moreover, respondents did have “widely-shared concerns,” just not at the targets Washington expects. When asked what two countries pose the biggest threat to the Middle East region, the overwhelming response was Israel (which polled at 88%) and the U.S. (which polled at 77%). Iran, meanwhile, came in a distant fifth as just 10% of respondents believed that Iran posed the greatest threat to the region. Results like this are anathema in U.S. policy circles – which gives all the more reason to prop up sympathetic U.S.-allied dictators who understand the threat of Iran “acquiring nuclear weapons” and who will, in private, support the U.S.’s sanctions regime.
What a shock to discover today, then, that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates echoed Clinton’s remarks and noted the “general support in the region for applying the sanctions and for doing what we can to make the sanctions effective.” Continuing, Gates said that there is a “broadly shared concern” with “Iran’s overall aggressive behavior with respect to Hezbollah and Lebanon and other places around the world.” Interesting, then, to recall that not more than two years ago, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah was polled as the region’s most admired leader, mostly due to Hezbollah’s ultimate defiance of Israel’s invasion in summer 2006. Meanwhile, in the Brooking Institute poll, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan polled at the top in the region’s most respected figure category, followed in order by Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Nasrallah rounding out the top four. (Sadly, the long-deceased Saddam Hussein polled better than President Obama.) It goes without saying that all of the names at the top acted in defiance of the United States and Israel in recent times, and the Arab world apparently responded to such defiance with quiet ovation and applause.
The Obama administration’s attempt to conflate the views of Arab dictators with those of their subjects is, as Chomsky noted, evidence of a “profound hatred for democracy,” but it is also one more example of the intense info-war being fought. The more Clinton and Gates beat it into people’s heads (and perhaps their own) that the world does all feel the same way the United States does about Iran and its so-far non-existent nuclear weapons program (and I mean the United States in the most narrow sense: its political class), then the more either political support or public apathy they will receive for a targeted regime of sanctions and then ultimate war on Iran.
Once again, then, we must fight this through our own targeted program, first informing ourselves, engaging and discussing with others, and then educating them on just who are the U.S.’s friends in the Middle East (a Saudi dictatorship that funds radical al-Qaeda-like movements; an Egyptian President that has committed one fraudulent election and human rights abuse after another; an Israeli apartheid regime that is engaged in a long-term project of ethnic cleansing; etc.) and what this means for Arab attitudes towards the U.S. Perhaps, then, we can start to identify the gulf between elite and public opinion here in the U.S. (where, unsurprisingly, public attitudes match those of Iranians when it comes to belief that “common ground” can be found between the two nations) and reconfigure U.S. policies on their basis.
