At the beginning of the Obama Administration, Norman Podhoretz wrote of his potential danger to Israel, and brushed off any suggestion that he could bring any serious pressure to bear on a Netanyahu government but descended into unmitigated hysteria when he identified the danger in the possibility of an American rapprochement with Iran.
This pattern has held and only accelerated ever since. Nearly all Israeli and neocon pronouncements about Obama’s Middle East policy invariably include an invocation of his inattention to the "existential threat" posed to Israel by Iran, with all the plodding and butchering of the English language to be expected of a transparent party line. Indeed, such an emphasis on the "existential" and "right to exist" is a novel Israeli creation – they were also responsible, at the height of the Second Intifada, for the appallingly Orwellian transformation of "terrorism" to "terror".
Why this obsession with Iran? To be sure, Ahmadinejad has been brilliant at playing Israel and its friends in the west like a fiddle – never forget that we are dealing with the civilization that invented both chess and backgammon. In his talk of the Holocaust and the status of "Holocaust denial", Ahmadinejad knows exactly how to push the right buttons to create the belligerence that he thrives on.
But what this also does for Israel is fill an extremely critical need, the need for a scapegoat. A scapegoat, that is, for all of its problems since the collapse of the Oslo process – the demographic crisis, the crisis of confidence, the extremely low standing in world opinion, and the effective abandonment of Zionism as an ideology. It’s not as though the Israelis are denying these problems – see Michael Oren’s "Seven Existential Threats" – but what Israel needs is someone to blame for them other than itself.
Most of all, what this requires is to keep the option of war against Iran on the table, for itself but most especially for the United States. Few today believe that there is now the danger of a direct American attack on Iran, but Israel can force the issue as long as it can credibly threaten to carry out an attack on its own, and in so doing bring America down with it. The bottom line is that there is no rational explanation for Israel’s desire to confront Iran; its behavior has been totally dictated by the need to have Iran as a scapegoat for all its problems.
The trump card Israel has had over America is in the portrayal of Iran as a new "Cold War" adversary, in other words, the idea that Iran is worthy of some sort of long twilight struggle to contain its ambitions. The idea that Iran is so worthy is ludicrous, but it is a powerful temptation to America after the template of an international "war on terrorism" has fallen so flat. It would seem that the champions of this idea such as Dennis Ross are even trying to manage to portray themselves as paragons of reason by contrasting such an approach to Iran with out-and-out war.
If the implication of this is also the neocon line that Obama "abandoned democracy" in Iran, then the wisdom of Obama’s ignoring their transparent pleas to speak out for the protesters becomes clear. As Pat Buchanan argued in his most recent syndicated column, America’s policy is working, with Iran remaining in its most severe internal crisis since the revolution, and an Israeli attack therefore only having the effect of bringing the people back to the regime. And that, tragically, is what Israel feels must happen. So that it can go on not dealing with its "existential threats".
