Diplomatic talks in recent months have so far failed to end the long-running standoff over Western demands that Tehran halts its nuclear programme, which the U.S., backed by Israel and the European Union, claims is used as a cover for hidden preparations aimed at producing nuclear weapons.
Many political experts linked the ongoing Israeli operations in Lebanon to the U.S. plans to forcefully put an end to Iran's nuclear programme.
They suggest that the ongoing offensive in Lebanon, which Israel started ten days ago following the capture of two of its soldiers by the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, would be used as a pretext for a U.S. military action against Iran, according to an editorial on Asia Times.
Israel-centered neo-conservatives argue that Hezbollah's raid earlier this month, in which its fighters captured two Israeli soldiers, was conducted in coordination with Iran, or at least with its approval and encouragement.
The U.S. mainstream media as well as key political factions, including liberal internationalists identified with the Democratic Party, seem to endorse this suggestion.
"The world needs to understand what is going on here," The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote last week, shortly after Israel began its operation in Lebanon.
"The little flowers of democracy that were planted in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories are being crushed by the boots of Syrian-backed Islamist militias who are desperate to keep real democracy from taking hold in this region and Iranian-backed Islamist militias desperate to keep modernism from taking hold," claimed Friedman.
Gregory Gause, who teaches Middle East politics at the University of Vermont, suggests that:
"In my reading, this is the beginning of what was a very similar process in the period, between [the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon] and the Iraq war,"
"While neo-cons took the lead in opinion formation then, eventually there was something approaching consensus in the American political class that war with Iraq was a necessary part of remaking the Middle East to prevent future 9/11s," he said.
"That strong majority opinion was bipartisan [and] crossed ideological lines - neo-cons supported the war, but so did lots of prominent liberal intellectuals," he said.
"I think it is very possible that a similar consensus could develop over the next few years, if not the next few months, about the necessity to confront Iran."
Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate approved a resolution that supports Israel's position and barbaric actions in Gaza and Lebanon without even calling for self-restraint.
The resolution also asked the American President George W. Bush to impose across-the-board diplomatic and economic sanctions on Tehran and Damascus.
Although officials at the Bush administration admit they have no evidence that Iran was directly in involved in Hezbollah's operation against Israel, they contend that the move was part of a "coordinated effort by groups allied with Iran to frustrate U.S. interests across the Middle East," The Boston Globe wrote today.
Iran's role in the Israel-Lebanon conflict has been a matter of debate since Israel started its offensive claiming it's aimed at rescuing its soldiers and stopping Hezbollah's rocket attacks.
"There has been a lot of connecting of the dots back to Iran," claims retired Colonel August Richard Norton, who teaches international relations at Boston University.
"This goes well beyond the [neo-conservative] Weekly Standard crowd; we've seen the major newspapers all accept the premise that what happened July 12 was engineered in some way by Iran as a way of undermining efforts to impede its nuclear program."
Also Graham Fuller, a former top Central Intelligence Agency and RAND Corporation Middle East expert, said that there has been a "buildup of domestic forces that now see Iran as inexorably at the center of the entire regional spider web".
"The mainstream is unfortunately grasping for coherent explanations, [and] the neo-con/hard right offers a fairly simple, self-serving vision on the cause of the problems, and their solution," Fuller said.
Americans seem adopting the same policy they pursued to topple the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussien, whom President Bush claimed, in the run up to March 2003 war on Iraq, is "the strategic domino whose fall would unleash a process of democratization, de-radicalization, moderation and modernization throughout the Middle East," the editorial added.
What began as a "kidnapping of Israeli soldiers" by the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah is now being seen by some senior Bush administration officials as a golden chance to move on with the U.S. plan in the region that includes a far larger struggle with Iran and Syria, specially that the capture of the two Israeli soldiers came at a time of mounting tensions between the two Mideast powers and the West.
"We would be idiots if we believed it was only about the Israeli captives," said Hazem Saghieh, a senior Lebanese columnist with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, told The Associated Press.
"The issue, at the end of the day, is all about Syria and Iran," Saghieh added.
Source: AlJazeera
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