The current flare-up in the Middle East has for the moment shifted Iran to the background. But you can be sure that once the immediate violence ends and we return to the stalemate of Israel enforcing a cruel blockade and siege of the people in Gaza that has caused such hardship, proponents of a military attack on Iran will be back, relentlessly beating the drums for yet another war.

Such a war is being relentlessly promoted by Israel and the neoconservatives in the US and their main argument has been to depict the Iranian leadership has being made up of irrational, religious fanatics who are capable of doing something crazy at anytime. This is their basis for calling for the overthrow of the government of Iran and its replacement with one that is friendly to Israel.

In the November 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine (not available online), Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett have an important article titled The Mad Mullah Myth: The dangers of misunderstanding Iran’s strategy where they systematically dismantle many of the justifications used by the US to support its current cruel policy of crippling sanctions on Iran and the case being made for war with that country. The article is well worth a trip to the library to read.

In their article, the Leveretts make the following points:

In the more than thirty years since the Iranian Revolution, Western analysts have routinely depicted the Islamic Republic as an ideologically driven, illegitimate, and deeply unstable state… Allegations of the Iranian government’s “irrationality” are inevitably linked to assertions that it is out to export its revolution across the Middle East by force, is hell-bent on the destruction of Israel, and is too dependent for its domestic legitimacy on anti-Americanism to contemplate improving relations with the United States.

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If Western political elites were to make an effort to understand Iran and its motivations, they would discover that the Islamic Republic has shown itself to be a highly rational actor in the conduct of its foreign policy.

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Tehran’s support for terrorism is another persistent theme in Western narratives. Yet the most comprehensive study of suicide terrorism to date, Robert Pape and James Feldman’s Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It, has determined that there has never been an Iranian suicide bomber. While Iran backs groups that the United States considers terrorist organizations-Hezbollah and Hamas-or that have threatened American military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, its support for such groups is concentrated in theaters where the United States, Israel, or Sunni states allied to Washington are working to undermine important Iranian interests.

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If Westerners looked soberly at the record, they would discover that Iran is not aggressively exporting revolution.

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Likewise, Iran is not out to destroy Israel. One of the more pernicious legends about Ahmadinejad is that he threatened to do so-a claim so entrenched in mainstream Western discourse as to seem to be a fact. But the claim is false, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intelligence minister admitted in April 2012. It is based on a poor translation of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered in October 2005, shortly after he became president, and was given international currency by irresponsible articles in the New York Times and other news outlets.

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Westerners should consider that, from Tehran’s perspective, Israel is effectively at war with the Islamic Republic. Israeli officials regularly threaten to use force against it, and Iranians know that Israel is sponsoring a wide range of covert actions against their country, including assassinations of its scientists and lethal terrorist bombings.

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But for many years now [Iran] has defined its diplomatic and national security strategies in largely nonideological terms, on the basis of national interests that are perfectly legitimate: to be free from the threat of attack and from interference in its internal affairs; to have its government accepted by its neighbors and by the world’s most militarily powerful state. For more than twenty years, the Islamic Republic has shown itself to be capable of acting rationally to defend and advance these interests. Americans may not like Tehran’s strategic and tactical choices-its links to political factions and their associated militias in Afghanistan and Iraq, its support for Hamas and Hezbollah, its pursuit of nuclear-fuel-cycle capabilities. But these choices are far from irrational, particularly in the face of continuing animosity from Washington.

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Stereotypes depicting Iran as an aggressively radical country are not merely wrong but, worse, dangerous, because they skew Western thinking toward the inevitability of confrontation… For if the myth of the Islamic Republic’s irrationality is not dispelled, the Western belief that war with Iran is inevitable will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many other commentators have made similar points. But the Leveretts cannot be dismissed by the warmongers as know-nothing peaceniks. According to his Wikipedia page, Flynt Leverett, now a professor at Penn State University School of International Affairs, was from March 2002 to March 2003 “the senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council. Prior to serving on the NSC, he was a counterterrorism expert on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, and before that he served as a CIA senior analyst for eight years.” Hillary Mann Leverett served in the George W. Bush Administration where “she worked as Director for Iran, Afghanistan and Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council, Middle East expert on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, and Political Advisor for Middle East, Central Asian and African issues at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. From 2001-2003, she was one of a small number of U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qa’ida and Iraq.”

With direct US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, there may be a greater temptation to think that the US has the freedom to start yet another war. As long the Israel lobby and neoconservatives is the US keep promoting war with Iran, and as long as the White House and Congress feel cowed by them and repeat those threats, the prospect of war increases. As John Quiggin said:

But if we started any analysis of international relations with the assumption that war will end badly for all concerned, and that the threat of war will probably lead to war sooner or later, we would be right most of the time.[My italics-MS]

To prevent war, we must begin by countering the rhetoric that leads up to war.