{"id":59512,"date":"2026-05-31T06:48:05","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T14:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=59512"},"modified":"2026-05-31T07:40:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T15:40:06","slug":"the-iran-obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/31\/the-iran-obsession\/","title":{"rendered":"The Iran Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author\u2019s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n

I was reading an old Atlantic Monthly<\/em> from November 2007 and came across this quote:<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve got to be patient and committed [in Iraq], but we\u2019ve got to multitask\u2026 We\u2019ve got to talk about Iran \u2013 Iran is more dangerous than Iraq \u2013 and we have got to get the job done in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That was Rudolph Giuliani, speaking as a Republican presidential candidate in July 2007.<\/p>\n

Back then, the saying was that everyone wants to go to Baghdad but that real men want to go to Tehran. Weirdly, neither Iran nor Iraq had anything to do with the 9\/11 attacks in 2001. What those countries did have was oil \u2013 and lots of it.<\/p>\n

The Iran obsession persists, of course, and it\u2019s shared by both political parties. When she ran for president in 2024, Kamala Harris identified Iran as the greatest adversary<\/a> the United States faced in the world.<\/p>\n

The truth is that neither Iran nor Iraq posed a direct or imminent threat to the USA. What each country possessed was an enormous amount of oil and political leaders who didn\u2019t want to kowtow to U.S. economic imperatives.<\/p>\n

A joke I learned circa 1975 involving calculators (fairly new back then) remains revealing of what drives the American obsession with the Middle East. It goes like this: 142 Israelis fight 154 Arabs over 69 oil wells for 5 years. Who wins? Punch 14215469 into your calculator, multiply by 5, then invert your calculator.<\/p>\n

The result, which was amusing when I was about twelve years old:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Shell Oil!<\/p>\n

Of course, U.S. and British meddling in Iran dates back to 1953 with the overthrow of its democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh so that British oil interests wouldn\u2019t be threatened by efforts to nationalize Iran\u2019s huge oil reserves.<\/p>\n

Which brings me back to 1975 and one of my favorite movies, Three Days of the Condor<\/em>, and a little honesty about what Americans expect from the CIA. I\u2019ve always loved the speech near the end by CIA deputy director Higgins, played memorably by Cliff Robertson:<\/p>\n