In 2009, the Brookings Institute Saban Center for Middle East Policy issued a report entitled, WHICH PATH TO PERSIA? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran, written by a bunch of ex-US defence, National Security Council, State Department, AIPAC and CIA members. The revolving door between US government agencies, such think tanks, Zionist lobbying groups and academia allows for expanded career options for such people as well as wrapping government policies in “independent” clothing. The work was financially supported by the two foundations set up by right-wing oligarchs to further their agenda after their death, with the Saban Center itself being set up in 2002 from an initial grant by an Israeli American billionaire film and television producer (who has stated that his one issue is support for Israel). The Brookings Institute itself takes money from the usual roster of oligarch funded Democrat-oriented foundations, internationally focused corporations, the US government, and selected foreign governments such as Qatar. It has a board of trustees which predominantly represents the financial sector, including private equity. Such is the reality of the leading US foreign policy think-tank/internationalist fraction of the ruling class front, where the ruling class and its foreign policy and political courtiers can freely mingle.
After spending many words attempting to talk around the fact that the main Iranian “problem” is that they will not say “uncle” to the US global policemen and have the temerity to follow their own interests in the region and oppose Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing, the authors lay out some basic options. Of course, no mention is made of the illegal CIA/MI6 coup that overthrew the democratically-elected Iranian government in 1953, the US backing for the Iraqi War against Iran (when Saddam was a “friend” not a “monster”) of 1980 to 1988, and the illegal invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003 – both nations bordering Iran. No reason at all for Iran to question the US motives and have a general dislike of US foreign policy!
Dissuading Iran – Diplomatic Options
This section basically treats Iran like some simplistic child, where a series of punishments and incentives can be used to have Iran behave in a way more beneficial to the US. Basic mafia stuff, the “silver or lead” approach, you can imagine the mafia don calmly, “sympathetically” and psychopathically stating “eh, better to be my friend rather than my enemy, just kiss the ring”.
The result of this was the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which never really benefitted Iran. Trump did Iran a favour by cancelling it and bringing in the “Mother of all Sanctions”, helping the Iranian populace to understand the true nature of the US.
The Engagement Option
This would involve the US treating Iran as another sovereign state that has a right to its own interests and that any agreement between the two nations must involve a middle ground and respectful relations. The authors were never really serious about this option, and you can tell the discomfort that they themselves have with it. Iran is never to be viewed as another sovereign state that must be treated with respect, and the US can never be accepted to commit to non-intervention, issue security guarantees, and cease insulting the Iranian state and government. Such things would be a sign of weakness from the US Global Policeman! Also, it wouldn’t go down well with the Israelis, and feeling threatened they may “need” to illegally attack Iran. No discussion of the US letting Israel know that any such behaviour would not be tolerated.
Disarming Iran – The Military Options
Now we get down to the reality, the open discussion of the US waging an illegal, unprovoked war against a nation that has never threatened it. The US mafiosi fist hidden behind the glove of diplomacy and fancy words.
· Going All The Way – Invasion
It is incredible how a Washington Think Tank can openly discuss a war crime, the unprovoked invasion of another nation. The utterly sociopathic discussion in this section is that Iran is too clever to provide a clear provocation that the US could use as an excuse for an invasion. Without that, the resistance of the vast majority of the US public, European and Middle Eastern nations would just be too problematic for the US.
The discussion then continues into the deluded, as it is suggested that a force of the size used to invade Iraq could also deal with Iran, a much bigger nation, with a population four times the size, and with a much more rugged interior. All without the support of the Middle Eastern nations that was so important to the Iraqi invasion. The populations of Iraq and Afghanistan could be expected to react furiously to their nations being used to stage another imperial invasion. Some actual common sense and reality then reappears as the scale of the force needed to occupy a nation of over 90 million is considered. This would be no easy overthrow and implementation of a Shah, as all of those structures have been wiped out. So a no-go option.
· The Osiraq Option – Aistrikes
As with an invasion, “Airstrikes launched without some act of Iranian aggression would likely find little public support anywhere outside of Israel”. Aw shucks, committing war crimes is so complicated without some “provocation” to hide behind! Operation Northwoods anyone, Gulf of Tonkin, Babies thrown out of incubators, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Niger Yellow Cake? In the end this option looks bad because of the Iranian ability to retaliate asymmetrically, the impact on US soft power, the probability of only short-term impacts to Iran, and the immediate cessation of any diplomatic options.
· Leave it to Bibi - Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike
This is the “devious bastard” option and tells us so much about the real role that Israel plays in the Middle East for the US. Use the paranoia of the Israeli people toward Israel, continuously stoked by its leaders, to get them to attack Iran. The problem is that Israel has a relatively small air force, and would have to overfly other nations (Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey) as well as a good chunk of Iran. In addition, Iran and most other nations would never believe that US had nothing to do with such an attack; Israel provides no plausible deniability.
Toppling Iran – Regime Change
· Velvet Revolution
Ah yes, colour revolution, a “Velvet Revolution”. The low cost and risk option. Problem is the Iranian people continue to support their government even under severe sanctions, just like in Cuba. So, this really is not an option, and has been seen to fail a number of times in Iran in the past few years.
· Inspiring an Insurgency – Supporting Iranian Minority and Opposition Groups
The option successfully carried out in Libya in 2011, and then Syria until stopped by Russian and Iranian intervention. Problem is that the Iranian state and government have much more overall legitimacy than that of Libya, the state has extensive resources to resist infiltration and the Iranian people are majority Persian and united by Shia-Islam. The Kurds have been well disciplined by the Iranian state, and the neighbouring countries are very much interested in keeping the Kurds weak. Iran is also not just a quick hop from Europe across the Mediterranean.
· The Coup – Supporting A Military Move Against The Regime
Of course, any government that the US doesn’t like is labelled as a “regime” or “authoritarian”, let’s forget that there are regular elections in Iran and widespread support for the religious elders. The authors immediately give the game away “because the evidence suggests that it would be hard to move the Iranian people to revolution—even though this would be the best way to effect real regime change—and because supporting an insurgency seems unlikely to achieve regime change quickly, if at all, some Americans have explored the possibility of encouraging a military coup.” The authors understand that the chances of a successful military coup are close to zero, and even if successful it could easily ignite the Iranian population against it.
Deterring Iran – Containment
This is the “all the other option suck so we will just have to cut Iran off from the world Cold-War style” option. As noted by the authors this has been the default US policy for many decades. This section continues with the US propagandist statements that Iran is hell bent on gaining nuclear weapons when the Iranian state has explicitly stated its opposition to such weapons. Of course, no concerns about Israel having developed nuclear weapons, that doesn’t count as nuclear proliferation and certainly won’t destabilize the region; Israel has never mentioned a certain “Samson Option”. Why should Iran not have a Samson Option given the unending aggression of the US and Israel toward it, it certainly seems to have worked for North Korea?
This is the current US policy toward Iran, one that has failed spectacularly in the past decade aided by other US foreign policy mistakes and a more assertive China. The Western presence in Afghanistan is gone, and Iran has gained great influence in Iraq and Syria through its efforts to stop the foreign destabilization of the latter and to destroy ISIS in both. It is also the Shia-Muslim pole for the majority Shia-Muslim population of Iraq. In addition, with the help of Russian and Chinese diplomacy it has made peace with Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern states. At the same time, the “mother of all sanctions” against Russia has freed that country to work much more directly with both Iran and North Korea; including providing modern aircraft and air defence systems to Iran as well as supporting both nation’s military industrial complexes as a customer. At the same time, China has made commitments to very significant investments in the nation. Iran in 2024 is many times stronger and better positioned than Iran in 2009. As with Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Belarus, Kazakhstan and even Russia, if the US had come as a true friend it could have formed a winning coalition but instead of a new Marshall Plan there would only be arrogance and aggression. The result is that it now faces a BRINCISSTAN going from strength to strength while it becomes more and more embroiled in the Israeli ethnic cleansing project to the detriment of its own national interests.
The report authors propose a “clever” mix and match flexibility, but this is more a show of their own ignorance and arrogance than of any real foreign policy genius. That can only generally be found in the halls of power of Russia, Iran, China and some other non-Western nations.
The Authors, Not Much Insight Gained in 15 Years
Kenneth Pollock complaining below about the US “disengagement” from the Middle East, and the huge gains made by the Iranians in the region. Of course, Iranians still “bad” and every force that takes action against US foreign policy interests being an agent of Iran, the classic “Iranian-backed” propagandist moniker. And poor little Israel frightened by big bad Iran. He has a complete misreading of the Saudi-Iranian agreement, seeing it as the Saudis biding their time until the can better deal with Iran; delusional. Then even more delusions that there is increasing unrest in Iran that threatens the state. He has certainly not developed any real insight into, and understanding of, Iran in the years since the report; but then again, he is not paid to do so. Then blaming the Iranians for not re-entering the JCPOA when it was the Americans that kept moving the goal posts and escalating the demands. Classic Council for Foreign relations BS.
Martin Indyk also doing the CFR graft. His latest book, eulogizing Obama, is published by the Brookings Institute.
Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University (the closest thing to a deep state establishment foreign policy university anywhere in the US) and a senior advisor to the US State Department, as well as still being at Brookings. He has shown his very well-developed ability to identify an intellectual dishonest gravy train with his new book, Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Power Terrorism. Here he is on the shill-circuit:
Zionists stealing people’s land, jailing and torturing them, murdering them en masse with bombs and shells, and ethnically cleansing them – not important to him. The US murdering people around the world, “nothing to see here move on” as he may say. BUT WHITE SUPREMACIST TERRORISM, when racism in the US is at its lowest ebb, we really have to worry about. And Jan 6th was an attempted insurrection! What next, Putin conspiring with the WHITE SUPREMACIST TERRORISTS! Grifters will grift.
Suzanne Maloney has written this baloney in the establishment foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs. Still shilling at the Brookings Institute, now a Vice President and Director of its Foreign Policy Program! Shilling for the oligarchs can be a nice little earner, even after 15 years of utter foreign policy failure.
Michael O’Hanlon wrote a 2010 book entitled Toughing it Out in Afghanistan, supporting Obama’s Afghanistan surge; how did that work out? He still works for the Brookings Institute, and writes book published by them; what a comfortable little careerist niche. His latest is just another scare mongering screed about Russia and China, shilling for the oligarchs and the MIC; the latter of which will always need more money to hold back the threatening (insert currently identified bad country name(s) here).
And finally, we have Bruce Riedel who seems to have an amazing level of productivity in producing forgettable foreign policy books, from America and the Yemens: A Complex and Tragic Encounter (2023), to A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq (2022), to Jordan and America: An Enduring Friendship (2021), to Beirut 1958: How America's Wars in the Middle East Began (2019), to Kings and Presidents: Saudi Arabia and the United States since FDR (2017), to JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War (2015), to The Prince of Counterterrorism: Washington's favorite Saudi, Muhammad bin Nayef, is the scourge of al-Qaida and Iran but no friend of those who want to see major reforms in the kingdom (2015), to What We Won: America's Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-89 (2014), to Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the Brink and Back (2013), to The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (2008). All published by the Brookings Institute for which he works, while also being a professor at Georgetown. A very comfy grift, and also the active creation of an “expert” that conveniently fully supports the deep state and oligarchic line. Here he is discussing Jordan’s enduring vassalage friendship; compradors can be such wonderful friends!
The Jordanian Hashemite royal family were an instrument of British foreign policy and it was the British who installed them as the rulers of what was then Transjordan. They smoothly moved from British vassalage to US vassalage. In 1958 the British vassal Hashemite royal family of Iraq was overthrown by a coup. Unfortunately, no such thing has happened in Jordan.
The Organic Intellectual Grift
Using Gramscian terminology, the above are examples of organic intellectuals who serve a given class (in their case the US bourgeois capitalist elite ruling class) by moulding the hegemonic cultural beliefs and discourse to support the interests of that class. The Brookings report, their many books (the majority published by Brookings) and establishment media appearances, and their conversations with other intellectuals and politicians is the process of hegemonic cultural creation; a process carried out at an advanced stage in the US.
For this service to the ruling class, these organic intellectual grifters are paid well and provided with a significant amount of societal legitimacy and respect through the institutions that support them, and those institutions actively work to support their careers as societal influencers. To keep these benefits the grifters must continue to grift, as any slippage into revealing actual truths or disagreeing with the ruling class interests publicly may very quickly have them disciplined or even expelled. This reality has been seen with two of what were leading foreign policy intellectuals, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, when they published their book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Very quickly, they went from trusted insiders to being in the penalty box. More recently, Mearsheimer has publicly stated what the Israeli actions in Gaza really are, and gone off script in other areas - actions which have pushed him further into the “unreliable” status for the ruling elite; to be sidelined away from the establishment media and the halls of power.
The long-time grifter Medhi Hasan has shown that years and years of establishment grifting will not protect you from a few weeks of going against the ruling class narrative, especially if it is done in front of a very public audience. Publicly telling truth to power can be very toxic for very lucrative and comfy ruling class supporting grifts.
As the Democratic and Republican parties, the uni-party, has travelled politically rightwards from the 1970s onwards the mainstream media has followed the ruling class like a good little puppy. This is because the MSM is owned and controlled by a very small number of the ruling class, the “free press” has never been free but always predominantly owned and controlled by the rich and powerful.
Along with this rightward drift has come the incremental shedding of problematic voices as the mainstream media discipline has come to mirror that of the Soviet Union. First of all independent “progressive” or “left wing” commentators were removed in favour of wall-to-wall ruling class serving organic intellectuals. Then even individuals with very highly-rated shows, but with problematic connections with the truth, were expelled. In 2003 Phil Donahue, host of the extremely popular Donahue Show, was fired by MSNBC - a company owned by defence contractor General Electric - for his truthful reporting, opposition to the Iraq War and guest choices in the run up to the that War. By the 2010s, mainstream media foreign policy guests were predominantly ex government officials, military officers, security services personnel and politicians; not even predominantly compliant academics could be trusted. In the late 2010s this went one step further, with the actual hiring of such people as the media’s own commentators - a merging of the state and the media. At the same time, the internet has been progressively purged of dissenting voices.
There is still ruling class work to do though, as shown by contributors on TikTok utterly destroying the Zionist narrative with respect to the Palestinian genocide and ethnic cleansing. The response has been a well-funded campaign to create a legion of remunerated ruling class TikTok grifters to overwhelm the independent voices, as well as increasing calls to ban what has increasingly become one of the few sites where open political discussion still finds a home.
Interestingly, Youtube provides a warning about the content of the following video that you have to click through. Content which simply covers the actions of Zionist groups in attempting to bribe TikTokers to provide supportive content. There is nothing in the video that needs to be “age restricted”:
TikTok has now started to shadow ban, and even outright ban, users that go against the ruling class and Zionist narratives in an attempt to not be shut down. Sites such as Meta, Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook have already widely purged such accounts. So much for the new “free speech” X/Twitter:
Such is the battle for the maintenance of the hegemonic culture, as ruling class interests veer further and further away from the interests of the majority of US citizens, and an intra-ruling class conflict exposes some of the reality of ruling class corruption and venality. The ruling class certainly seems to be losing some of its control over the younger US generations, as with support for Zionism and the state of Israel.
Good one Roger.
It's all out there in plain sight.
I don't know how people are still taken in by this. Barry Posen wrote a report in 1993 if I recall correctly that turned out to be the script for the current Ukraine fiasco, although that too hasn't panned out as planned.
Mike Pompeo stated, "we lied , we cheated, we stole." Henry Kissinger stated, "It may dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
Why does no one in the West believe them?
What a mindset! Is it really so much to ask the USA to have respectful relationships with other countries? I guess so when wearing colonialist, hegemonic blinkers.