ABSTRACT
Intelligence specialist Scott Ritter contends in this chapter that the Israeli lobby, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), exercises unparalleled influence over American foreign policy, even as it acts as a de facto agent of the state of Israel. As a result, Israel’s contentions that Iran poses a threat to Israel and that Iran possesses a nuclear weapons program, while unproven, have nonetheless defined US policy toward Iran, to the detriment of US interests in the Middle East. Ritter suggests that the United States would do better to stop perceiving Iran as a regional threat and instead concern itself with stabilizing relations and granting diplomatic recognition to Iran, lifting the unilateral American economic embargo, and establishing programs of cultural and economic exchanges that would go further in moderating Iranian society than does any program of containment and destabilization. Furthermore, the United States should view the Iranian nuclear-energy program favorably, for it would allow Iran to export more energy as the world’s hydrocarbon energy resources dwindle. Another of the dangers of undue Israeli influence over American policy is that the relatively minor conflict between Hezbollah and Israel is sometimes construed as a war by proxy between Iran and the United States, thus conferring a global significance on the conflict that it does not merit. Ritter argues that Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization but a legitimate organ of political expression of the Lebanese people in response to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982. By casting the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as grander than it is, the United States and Israel make that conflict harder to resolve while also unnecessarily increasing the possibility of a larger conflict between the United States and Iran.
