The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by WikiLeaks

Author:WikiLeaks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

11. Iran

Gareth Porter

The US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks represent a massive trove of documentation on US relations with key Middle Eastern regimes that would not have become available to journalists and scholars for decades but for the existence of the WikiLeaks channel. These cables cannot match the much more thorough and authoritative coverage provided by the declassified archival documents that are published by the US Department of State in its Foreign Relations of the United States volumes decades later. They are not top-secret documents and do not reveal the specifics of high-level policy decisions.

Nevertheless, the cables add an important dimension to our understanding of how the US national security state manages key interests in the Middle East. They provide glimpses of policy pursued by the State Department and by US and allied diplomats, and in particular of how other actors responded to signals from US administrations, and thus fit into the larger scheme of US policy. They also reveal contradictions between public rhetoric and the actual calculations and posture of the US and allied diplomats in pursuing US policy.

It is obviously impossible to discuss all the dimensions of US Middle East policy, much less all of the historical episodes on which cables can be found, within the scope of this chapter. The choice of issues covered here reflects the author’s view that the triangular relationship involving the United States, Israel, and Iran represents the central dynamic in US policy toward the region. The WikiLeaks cables provide many glimpses of how US diplomacy was conducted in relation to the Iran nuclear issue, which became a central US foreign policy concern in the Bush and Obama administrations. They also shed new light on how the United States accommodated the interests of Israel, and the extent to which that accommodation impinged on broader US diplomacy in the region. The cables shed important new light on how the US dealt with the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in relation to the Iran nuclear issue.

Arms sales have long played a central role in shaping US policy toward client regimes in the Middle East and South Asia, from Iran to Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. The cables help to illuminate the connection between US policy toward Iran and the interest of the Pentagon and their contractors in military sales—especially missile-defense technology sales—to its Middle East allies.

The Israel factor pervades the formulation and implementation of US Middle East policy. The domestic political power of the Israeli lobby imposes obvious constraints on the ability of any US administration to carry out a fully independent policy in the region, whether the issue is Middle East peace or Iran’s nuclear program. And US support for the continuation of Israeli military dominance in the Middle East is the primary nexus between that domestic interest group and US Israel policy. The heavy hand of domestic politics in US diplomacy is very much in evidence in the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables.

Three striking themes emerge from the diplomatic conversations revealed in the

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