In his address on the anniversary of the [Islamic] revolution last week, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad aptly expressed the essence of what his country deems to be the problem with the United States. He clearly said that he who controls the Middle East and its wealth controls the entire world. He thus explained that Iran which seeks to become a world power, will not allow the United States to control this region. What this implicitly means is that Iran desires to control this region alone, and with no other competitor, and for the region to be primarily dominated by the “Iranian nuclear nation”. In this sense, Iran deals with the issue of its nuclear program as being a minor issue within the tenants of this strategy, and behaves as though its possession of nuclear energy is a given, regardless of its purposes, and of the Iranian military and missile development programs. It is thus not without significance that Iran has intentionally shown a lack of seriousness in dealing with the outcome of its negotiations with the West, especially with its recent announcement of new Western proposals at a time when the “5+1” group is still waiting for Iran's response to its incentives plan. On the one hand, Iran - which has not yet presented any evidence regarding the nature of its nuclear program - relies on what it considers a difficulty on the part of the international community in reaching a consensus, in terms of imposing crippling sanctions that would effectively halt its nuclear program. On the other hand, it relies on threats to increase uranium enrichment levels to more than 80%, which in other words means that it will be within reach of building a nuclear bomb, should it have the desire to do so. At any rate, Tehran deals with the region as being an arena for its confrontation with the United States. And at the same time, it tests all kinds of weapons and missiles and conducts sea, air, and land war games, announcing its readiness to defend itself in the face of any offense, and that its response will not spare any location or site in the region. This effectively renders the region a hostage to the growing Iranian military power, especially since the Iranian leaders do not question for one moment their victory in any confrontation with the Americans or Israelis. In fact, the Iranian mobilization focuses on the fact that the West seeks to foment a major division at home, by manipulating the opposition that rejects the results of the recent presidential elections. It also [claims that the West] wants to undermine the revolution and the vilayet-e-faqih [clerical rule] regime - a regime that is based on hostility to the West. Iran also focuses on the fact that the West is preventing the emerging Iranian nation from fulfilling its interests in the region, thus picturing Iran as being the target of a continued Western attack, according to the premises of this mobilization. The Iranian regime thus claims to be exposed to a continued campaign by the West, all in order to legitimize its conduct, policies, power and even its very ‘raison d'être'. In this sense, and thanks to this attack, [the regime] survives and continues to exist and it is in its interest that this campaign never ends. All means and policies become legitimate as long as this campaign is still brewing. But the possibility of this political confrontation escalating into a military confrontation remains valid. On the one hand, this possibility is not seemingly worrying for the Iranian regime which believes that any damage inflicted on the country's infrastructure as a result of a military confrontation, will give it a serious momentum and empower it. On the other hand, [this damage] will provide it with new pretexts and justifications to expand the circle of its hegemony in the region which is threatened by the Iranian military machine in any confrontation. While Lebanon constitutes an arena for the Iranian-Western confrontation, what the Lebanese situation has entailed boosts Iran's belief that it is able to benefit from victimizing itself vis-a-vis the campaign by its enemies, in order to manipulate the use of power to consolidate the furtherance its interests.
