Fuelling nationalism in Iran is sure to backfire

World View: Richard Perle, doyen of hardline US neoconservatives, told The Chicago Tribune in April 2003, just after the invasion of Iraq: "We could deliver a short message [ to other hostile regimes in the Middle East], a two-worded message: 'You're next'."

Despite the intervening failures in Iraq and the growing disenchantment of American public opinion with them, the policy supported by Perle and his associates of transforming the Middle East into a democratic region sympathetic to the US has not diminished. The Bush administration and the powerful lobbies which support it are now concentrating their attention on Iran.

Commentators such as Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, detect remarkable similarities with the build-up to the Iraq war .

Writing in Foreign Policy he lists them: the vice-president gives a major speech devoted to the threat. The secretary of state tells Congress it is the most serious global challenge the US faces. The secretary of defence says Iran is the leading supporter of global terrorism. The president blames it for attacks on US troops in Iraq. Although intelligence agencies say the nuclear threat from Iran is 10 years away, the director of intelligence is much more ominous. A new national security strategy highlights pre-emptive attacks and emphasises the Iranian threat.

To cap this, Perle is quoted as saying there is nothing in Iran that could not be put right by a couple of dozen B52s. Cirincione says he has changed his mind about whether the administration is seriously considering a military attack on Iran by striking similarities between the unfolding strategy and the successful campaign for the Iraq war.

Iran is being linked to 9/11 by repeated claims that it is the principal source of world terrorism. It is said to be at a point of no return in the enriching uranium. It is being linked to attacks on US troops in Iraq.

All these assertions are highly questionable. But they highlight a policy of preparing opinion for military action if diplomacy fails. Cirincione calls for the information on Iran's nuclear plans to be declassified. "We cannot let the political and ideological agenda of a small group determine a national security decision that could create havoc in a critical area of the globe. Not again."

Similar warnings come from other well-informed sources. Charles Kupchan and Ray Takeyh, of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, summarise the new Iran policy in the International Herald Tribune: "Washington will rely on coercive diplomacy - sanctions backed by the threat of military strikes - to rid Iran of its nuclear programme, while simultaneously trying to foment regime change in Tehran." There are reports that the Pentagon is studying how to provoke ethnic minorities in Iran into rebellion and Iranian accusations that US and British forces help them.

This approach is certainly ill-advised and based on a fundamental misreading of Iran's perceptions. It is bound to backfire because it feeds Iranian nationalism. They have good historical reason to be suspicious of great power warnings, having been a stomping ground for successive imperial adventures throughout the 20th century. The more intense the US pressure, the more intransigent Iran's response.

The country is surrounded by nuclear weapons - in India, Pakistan, China, Russia, and Israel. A confrontation would rally Iranians around an authoritarian regime, further inflame anti-US anger in the Middle East and probably accelerate the Iranian nuclear programme.

Such considerations play into the international diplomacy on Iran. This week China and Russia rejected the idea of sanctions at a meeting of the Security Council's permanent five states and Germany in Berlin. Dai Bingguo, China's deputy minister for foreign affairs, said they feel "there is already enough unrest in the Middle East. It's in no one's interest to increase that unrest." Intriguingly, given the parallels with 2002-3, only Jack Straw supported the US on sanctions.

The statement issued was much weaker than that drafted by the US, deleting its reference to an Iranian nuclear weapons programme as a "threat to international peace and security". Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, said "sanctions are a bad idea. We are not facing an imminent threat. We need to lower the pitch."

The small ideological group in favour of targeting Iran is the subject of a polemical paper by Stephan Walt and John Meirsheimer, two prominent US international relations scholars, entitled "The Israeli lobby and US foreign policy". Published on a Harvard website and in the London Review of Books, they say the lobby has captured US policy on the Middle East and is at variance with US interests. Both authors are realists who analytically prioritise security and national interests.

The US has "set aside its own security and that of many of its allies" to advance Israeli interests, largely through pressure from the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), allied to Christian fundamentalists and influential Jewish neoconservatives like Perle. They complain about think-tanks that think only one way about the Middle East. Rather than Israel and the US sharing a position in the "war against terror", they say the US has a terrorism problem because it is allied with Israel and is not even-handed in the region.

There has been a huge furore about the paper. Its authors are accused of bias, bigotry and lying. Meirsheimer says the protests prove their case. "We argued in the piece that the lobby goes to great lengths to silence criticism of Israeli policy as well as the US-Israeli relationship, and that its most effective weapon is the charge of anti-Semitism . . . even though both of us are philosemites and strongly support the existence of Israel. Huge numbers of people know this story to be true but are afraid to say it because they would be punished by pro-Israeli forces."