Admiral Cosgriff, Commander of the US Fifth Naval Fleet, held out an olive branch to Tehran this week by suggesting that US and Iranian naval contacts (mimicking existing US-Chinese arrangements) would be useful once Iran (as alleged) had stopped dabbling militarily in Iraq.

Iran & Sea Lane Security

What is going on here is a shift of emphasis from confrontation (neo-conservatism) towards the primacy of energy and trade security. Collaborative management of the high seas alongside apparent enemies (China, Iran) is a rational and logical response to new economic pressures.

The analogy drawn by Admiral Cosgriff is with US-Soviet naval contacts during the Cold War. He supposes (we presume) that you do not have to love your neighbour or let him into your house to cut a deal on cutting the hedges between your properties.

Although his strategic concern is with security of sea lanes, the Fifth Fleet is also deeply concerned about small boat attacks, like that which targeted the USS Cole, and a distinction is drawn by the Admiral between the official Iranian navy and the Revolutionary Guard.

The former respond to US radio calls and the latter do not. The emergence of Revolutionary Guard speedboats without warning is the most likely cause of an incident that could escalate into blows that might lead to war.

The fear is not so much that the Revolutionary Guard will actually do anything stupid but that US mistaken defensive fire in fear of the damage and loss of lives could be taken as an offensive manouevre against Iran (with a rapid surge in the oil price the next day).

If the whole point of the navy is to secure cheap commodity flows, then a silly incident that boosts the oil price by $20 in a day is going to be a classic own goal for everyone except the oil producers - and even they are suffering from the strains of managing a volatile world economy.

Increasingly, the West sees the Revolutionary Guard as at the root of the problem in Iraq and behind any extension of threat to the rest of the Gulf.

The implicit suggestion in speaking direct to the career Iranian Navy is that, if conservatives can recapture control of their own country, the US will collaborate to ‘bring order’ to the region alongside rather than against Tehran.

Confused Messages on Sea Lane Protection

The increasing importance of sea-lanes to sustain the global economy has resulted in some important redeployments of Western navies - it underpins the British investment in its two new white elephants, its aircraft carriers.

As we will see, the 'real' news is generally very different from the 'churnalism' (to use Nick Davies' term) that is delivered to the wider public in order to get political traction for a policy or to launch a man or woman into office.

Not so many years (nay, months) ago, we were all being told that piracy was intimately connected to Al-Qaeda (whatever that is) and that Islamist terrorists would be hurling kamikaze ships at oil tankers - as excitingly portrayed in the film Syriana.

Weeks ago, we had a some highly convenient hostage incidents to advertise the sterling work that various naval contingents were undertaking against buccaneers who seemed less like terrorists and more like sea-going Arthur Daleys. Pure 'spin'.

But now, the story has moved on again. The nonsense about a potential link between terrorists and piracy is exposed by no less a source than the US Air Force. 

A USAF report concluded that, for technical and resource reasons, maritime terrorism is really not much of a threat at all – although the US Navy may beg to differ, given the effect of one small boat on the USS Cole.

Nevertheless, this is another welcome sign that common sense is breaking out as the Bush Administration drifts into the sunset.

The real reason for naval deployment was always energy security. Governments were just too frightened to tell us the truth in case it endorsed the wider truth that the West went to war in Iraq not for freedom but for oil.

Now that we all know that the threat from Islamist terrorism is exaggerated (though still a reasonable concern) and everyone bar the ship's cat wants cheap oil and low inflation, then it becomes respectable again to tell the truth.

Competing Spins Make Us All Dizzy

This brings us to another point of dissonance between what solid naval types may say and what politicians wish you (especially Americans) to believe. 

The problem with the media today is that the contradictions between 'spin' in one domain by one special interest rub up against 'spin' in another domain by another special interest.

In democracies, this happens most obviously when servants of the state acting for the state have one story and those who want to capture the state to give orders to the servants of the state offer us another story - and thus it is with US-Iranian relations.

Admiral Cosgriff was dismissive of ‘urban legend’ that the US would attack Iran this year and yet this 'urban legend' is simultaneously being encouraged by the political class back home. While solid military men talk peace, the politicians imply war - what is this nonsense?

Of course, neither Obama nor McCain (Clinton no longer matters) are saying in any way that they would support an attack this year or next but their language strongly implies that they could if they were in office and the finer points of their rhetoric will pass many others by.

The mood music from the Admiral is that the hysteria over war can be discounted while the mood music from the politicians is that war is an ever-present possibility. 

It would be nice to think that America was sophisticated enough to offer us an example of the old 'good cop, bad cop' routine but we all know that American government communications are wholly unsophisticated in dealing with anything that does not play well in Peoria.

No, this is just democracy at work - with its chaotic approach to the truth proving the point that "if you sell two messages, you sell neither".

Obama and McCain At War

The clash of aggressive home boy rhetoric with an attempt at the pacification of moderate sentiment in Tehran from the front line in a potential war zone has to be seen in the context of the emergence of Iran as a political football between the Obama and McCain camp.

Obama must now claw back the votes that Clinton holds as a foreign policy rightwinger. McCain sees his opportunity in ratcheting up his American patriotic message and in building on radical right wing attempts to present Obama as weak and pro-Muslim.

Obama is the first choice of the rest of the world by far but there is a sort of world-weary acceptance that he has to talk the utter nonsense of maintaining the military option against Iran because of the foreign policy ignorance of the American electorate.

Needless to say, he was entrapped into a rightish rhetoric by having to accept an invitation to address AIPAC whose power must suggest to many outside America that it really does run the country. We all fight against paranoid conspiracy theory in politics. AIPAC does not help us.

AIPAC

Considering the actual number of Jewish voters in the US, the power of the Zionist lobby group AIPAC might be considered a mystery. Jews are 2.1% (that is half the size of London) of the entire US population and are mostly rather liberal in persuasion.

The mystery continues until one realizes that their networks are central to media coverage, urban sentiment in general and to political fund-raising – and that AIPAC is part of the most effective mass lobby organization of modern times. This is not conspiracy theory but fact.

AIPAC is a massive ‘astro-turf’ operation that brings fear to every Editor and politician who wants to get elected. To be fair, it is not working in a vacuum. Pro-Israel sentiment is embedded in American culture, even if AIPAC and its networks can sometimes overplay their hand.

Three times Obama had to show obeisance to AIPAC at their major meeting this week by repeating the phrase “I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon”.

Reasonable from Israel’s perspective, it still shows once again that a particularly obtuse donkey, American foreign policy, is being led by its tail, a small state on the West's eastern boundary with a population not much bigger than the Jewish population inside the US.

US Politics - Subsidiary to Israel

Israel seems to have got used to treating Washington as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

To force a future President to direct the massive firepower and economic dominance of the US towards preventing one nation from having a tool of war that the US had actively encouraged both Pakistan and Israel itself to own is a pretty impressive show of power.

And all the more notable for their still being no real evidence that a) Iran actually intends to build the Bomb and b) would dare be the first to use it since the Americans destroyed the populations of two Japanese cities in 1945.

The issue here is not Israel's right to do anything it can to stop even the possibility of Iran holding the Bomb but its ability to mobilise 2.1% of the population of another country to bend sovereign foreign policy to its will.

Nevertheless, Obama has still insisted on diplomacy as a preliminary to any use of military force.

This puts him on the side of the angels (if doves are angels) but also suggests that his Administration will be using up its credit up with Europe and other allies to defend what is rapidly becoming part of America’s sovereign territory in all but name.

Non-Jewish American families whose sons die defending Israel in an assault on Iran or indeed anywhere else might reasonably question whether they should do so when the territory in question does not pay taxes to Washington nor is signed up to the US Constitution.

Meanwhile, European support for Israel is growing and is linked to the rightward turn of European politics and the hysteria over migration, Islamism and ‘Western values’.

Europeans should perhaps be asking their own questions about the influence of AIPAC since even the dovish Obama strategy could make them more than complicit, even actively engaged, in a regional war if talks fail.

What Obama Might Do

Obama is beginning to look distinctly less attractive as a world leader if he means what he says when he speaks to AIPAC, although we persist in believing that he is sincere in his belief that diplomacy is vastly preferable to armed conflict.

Our predictions are that he will seize the moment if Ahmedinejad is ousted in March 2009 for talks and that a track designed to engage the US in a comprehensive Peace Settlement in the Levant involving Syria will be on the agenda.

The terms of political trade will move against Israel’s ‘hawks’ and a ‘faux-withdrawal' (leaving significant bases behind) from Iraq will be timed with rapprochement with Iran.

Well, that’s the theory! It all rather assumes that the Iranian clerical establishment enforces a peaceful hand-over of power to economic conservatives in Tehran and that the boisterous quarrelsome Israelis see sense domestically.

Two lively democracies in the region and one lively democracy that just happens to be a superpower must all see sense in the next nine months or so.

In the US, Obama has to see through the delicate handling of ‘red neck’ sentiment in one of the most ignorant (in foreign policy terms) mass electorates in the world as a precondition for his talk/talk strategy. He is not being given much help by the Clinton camp.

McCain’s strategy is not really so very dissimilar. In his case, with the old neo-con machine disappointed at Giuliani’s performance breathing down his neck, his political theatrics at AIPAC had to be even more robust than Obama's against Iran. 

McCain's speech amounted to a crowd-pleasing declaration of economic war that could almost have been a gift to Ahmedinejad’s nationalist rhetoric in his own pitch to remain President in 2009 - such are the mysterious ways of democratic politics.

But, hey, the task was to keep Jewish money and votes flowing and not to try and deal with a complex post-imperial mess – and, of course, neither candidate can do anything unless they are in office.

The Temporary Suspension of International Affairs

There will be a great deal of cynical yawning over all this in the region and in Europe with Chancelleries accepting that everyone will be talking utter nonsense in America for another six months until the real business of international politics can then start again in Q1 2009.

This happens every four years or so (sometimes we get a break for four years when an incumbent is a shoo-in). We are all sitting here waiting, crossing our fingers and twiddling our thumbs while this impressive war machine gets redirected.

The fear, of course, is that someone will utter some irrevocable nonsense that halts everyone in their tracks - and if there is such an irrevocable nonsense concerning the region, you can sure as hell track it back to the blindly self-interested coterie that is AIPAC.

Both candidates have already competed on one bit of nearly irrevocable nonsense – the status of Jerusalem. Even Bush has left the status of Jerusalem on the talks agenda. Even Olmert’s advisers have raised the prospect of conceding part of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

But McCain simply asserts that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided" while Obama is interpreted as having made a similar ‘clear statement’ on Jerusalem, much approved of by leading liberal Zionists.

McCain has pitched for the 2.1% and its funds while Obama has tried to make it easier for the majority liberals within the Jewish community to stick with him and not use the defeat of Clinton as an excuse for switching sides against an 'appeaser'.

But what has Obama actually gained by kow-towing to this excessively powerful open conspiracy (yes, that is what it is) at the expense of the vast mass of the American people. Just a neutralization of Zionist rhetoric, that is all.

A line has been drawn that guarantees that AIPAC’s formidable machine will not be used against the Democrat candidate as he struggles to win over a right wing working class to peace initiatives.

Yet AIPAC and its networks will be watching every move of Obama and they will jump on the first sign of weakness. It has put him in hock to the Zionist lobby because he dared not say what much of the rest of the world thinks - Israeli influence on global affairs is disproportionate.

AIPAC has now emasculated him on the Middle East before he has even started. Perhaps he should have had the courage to expose them for what they are – a minority using unfair advantages of cash and connections to pervert American foreign policy to self-destructive ends.

Such an heroic-existentialist revolt would have been a crash-and-burn exercise. The only hope is that the ritual kow-tow to this lobby is a means to an end, the prelude to real dialogue in the region and not a sign that America has learnt nothing from the last eight years.

We Decide To Be Defensive

By the way, if you are a Zionist and object to our remarks as anti-semitic, forget it. I won't be brow-beaten like the average American Editor. But the power of the lobby has forced even us to become defensive.

There is not an anti-semitic bone in this author's body. He has worked directly and happily with many Jewish interests in inter-faith projects and in business. The Holocaust framed this writer’s personal centre-left anti-fascist politics and he accepts that Israel is a fact on the ground.

We also like the idea of a single secular state in which Jews and Arabs can live harmoniuosly together but know that it is not going to happen and that the Two State Solution is a solid, decent compromise in which both sides are going to have to give up something of their history.

We also assert in no uncertain terms that atrocities against ordinary Israelis are morally repugnant. What we refuse to do is kow-tow to the myth that a Jew must be a Zionist or that the Holocaust was a sort of indirect justification for the Naqba. 

Nor will we accept that any lobby for a foreign country should twist the politics of another sovereign country without protest, nor that mass action lobbying should be tolerated when it descends to the bullying of politicians and editors.

End of story except this - no Israeli can be blamed for encouraging AIPAC. If there is a fault, it lies in the weakness of Americans in allowing a foreign country, any country, to set its internal agenda. We British should know of which we speak, as both perpetrators and victims ourselves.

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