By LINDA HEARD, ARAB NEWS

If you believe that current hostilities between Washington and Tehran are all about Iran’s uranium enrichment program opening the door to a potential Iranian-made nuclear bomb engraved “Tel Aviv,” you’ve yet to peel the layers of this increasingly poisonous onion. Once you do, you’ll understand that fundamentally the feud is over which side gets to dominate the oil-rich Gulf region.

Before taking office, President Barack Obama was keen to initiate face-to-face talks with the Iranian leadership which he later failed to pursue despite having received a rather rambling conciliatory letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At stake is a major regional conflict, if not World War III, so one must wonder why the US president who was once keen to reach out to the Muslim world has swapped diplomacy for bellicosity.

There may have been a time when Obama fantasized riding into Tehran on a white horse, olive branch in hand, to end decades of enmity but he would have swiftly bolted that stable on being schooled that America’s strategic interests leave little room for warmth and fuzziness.

America’s appreciates allies as long as they submit to US diktats which the Iranian ayatollahs conceivably would never do as much of their standing at home and elsewhere rests on an ultra-conservative anti-Western ideology. For example, the Americans had no problem with their man Saddam Hussein until he became a liability and were happy to pander to the Shah until he got ideas above his station when he was unceremoniously dumped.

In one way, the US and Iran represent both sides of the same coin. It’s in the interests of both countries to keep up the enmity. In the absence of Saddam Hussein, Washington needs a regional bogeyman as a pretext to retain its mushrooming military bases and sell weapons to the tune of billions to Iran’s worried neighbors. And Tehran needs the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan” as a locomotive to distract public sentiment from anti-government discontent and to reinforce its ideological tentacles with anti-US/Israel proxy states and actors.

Likewise, Israel gains from having a belligerent state on its doorstep. As long as Israeli leaders can cite a major ‘existential threat” its exceptionalism and noncompliance with international laws and treaties can be excused. In reality, as various prominent Israeli intelligence figures have confirmed, Iran does not present a threat to Israel’s existence even it succeeds in producing nuclear weapons.

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