Tomgram: Ira Chemus, Obama 's Risky Middle East Fantasy!

Had you searched for Israel, nuclear weapons at Google News in the wake of President Obama's recent trip to the Middle East, you would have gotten a series of headlines like this. Obama: Iran, more than a year away from developing nuclear weapon (CNN), Obama vows to thwart Tehran's nuclear drive, the Times of Israel, Obama: No nuclear weapons for Iran, US, Israel increasingly concerned about construction of Iran's plutonium producing reactor, Obama says there is still time to find diplomatic solution to Iran nuke dispute: Netanyahu hints at impatience, Iran's leader threatens to level cities if Israel attacks, criticizes US nuclear talks. By now, we're so used to such a world of headlines, about Iran's threatening nuclear weapons, and its urge to wipe out Israel, that we simply don't see how strange it is. at the moment, despite one aircraft carrier task force sidelined in Norfolk, Virginia, theoretically because of sequester budget cuts, the US continues to maintain a massive military presence around Iran. That modest sized regional power, run by theocrats, has been hobbled by ever tightening sanctions, its skies filled with US spy drones, its offshore waters with US warship. Its nuclear scientists have been assassinated, assumedly by agents connected to Israel, and its nuclear program attacked by Washington and Tel Aviv, in the first cyber-war in history. As early as 2007, the US Congress was already ponying up hundreds of millions of dollars for a covert program of destabilization that evidently involved cross border activities, assumedly using US special operations forces, and that's only what's known about the pressure being exerted on Iran. With this, and the near apocalyptic language of nuclear fear that surrounds it, has gone a powerful, if not always acknowledged, urge for what earlier in the new century was called regime change. Who can forget the neocon quip of the pre Iraq invasion moment: Everyone want to go to Baghdad, real men want to go to Tehran? And all that of this is due, so we are told, to what remains a fantasy nuclear weapon, one that endangers no one, because it doesn't exist, and most observers don't think that Tehran is n the process of preparing to build one either. In other words, the scariest thing in our world, or at least in the Middle Eastern part of it, if you believe Washington, Tel Aviv, and much reporting on the subject, is a nuclear will o the wisp. In the meantime, curiously enough, months can pass without significant focus on or discussion of Pakistan's expanding nuclear arsenal.