The phrase “the Arab Spring” self-consciously echoes of the Prague Spring  which referred to the rapid flowering of the political culture of Czechoslovakia in early 1968 from orthodox communism to inchoate dreams of “socialism with a human face.” The Prague Spring was then crushed by the Soviet invasion of August 1968. The revolutionary emergence of humanistic hope lead directly to militaristic retaliation of reactionary fear.

And right now, the Middle East’s two most militaristic and ideologically aggressive governments–Iran and Israel–have more to fear than they did six months ago. Neither is an Arab country, which gives them even more reason to worry.

Israel has lost its best friend in the neighbhorhood, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who was willing served as the warden of the jail known as Gaza.  Israel’s strongest enemy, Iran, will soon restore diplomatic relations with Egypt. And Israel’s suffocation of Arab political rights seems no more attractive or tenable or inevitable than Mubarak’s.

Nervous Iran tests its missiles

Meanwhile, Iran has to worry too. The Islamic Republic crushed the abortive Green revolution of 2009, only to see the popular demands for accountable, participatory government spread across the region two years later. Not coincidentally, the Iranian government itself is wracked by another power struggle, this one between  President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Spiritual Leader Ayatollah Khameni, suggesting that dissatisfaction with the country’s theocracy has spread from liberal reformists to conservative populists. And Iran’s closest Arab ally, Syria, is trying to stave off a popular uprising that might turn into an armed rebellion.

Iran and Israel have long waged a war on words, and perhaps now is no different. Israel talks loudly about stopping the next international humanitarian flotilla to Gaza and fears Iran’s nuclear ambitions while Iran denounces another Western intervention in the region and  flaunts the big stick of its new ballistic missiles that is boasts can hit Israel.

But with two militarized governments feeling defensive and fearing emboldened democratic populations whose very existence is unprecedented and threatening,  the prospects for miscalculation, if not war, seem barely concealed.

“Our message in this drill is that our strategy is defensive, but our tactics are aggressive,” said an Iranian general on Monday.

“Iran’s tentacles extend to all those who are working against Israel,” said a top former Israeli intelligence official on Tuesday.  “In the next confrontation there is a likelihood that more than one front may erupt, and Tel Aviv will be turned into the front lines.”

It doesn’t sound good.

Now Ayatollah Khatami, Iran’s Supreme Leader for Life, wants to embrace Tunisia and Egypt’s revolution, saying the unrest is a replay of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

“I herewith proclaim to those (Western leaders) who still do not want to see the realities that the political axis of the new Middle East will soon be Islamic rulership and a democracy based on religion,” Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said.

Khatami, a religious autocrat, want to claim the legitimacy of the Egyptian uprising without accomodating modern secular democratic movements in his own country. Its no surprise that Tunisa and Egypt’s opposition movement do not not take Iran as their model.

Why do you think  that Fars, a government controlled news agency , carries not a single story about Egypt right now?

Feeling queasy: Egyptian President for Life Hosni Mubarak (Photo courtesy AllVoices)

For example, U.S. diplomats have long known that Gamil Mubarak, son and heir-apparent of President for Life Hosni Mubarak, is “deeply unpopular.” But to say so publicly was considered a threat to the credibility of Cairo-Tel Aviv alliance on which U.S. Middle East diplomacy has depended since 1979. The American taxpayers were not supposed to get the memo about Gamil Mubarak. Now, thanks to Julian Assange, it sits in the inbox.

The Palestine Papers may prove even more influential on U.S. Middle East policy, at least in the short term. The reaction to the  1,700 documents, posted on Al-Jazeera, about the U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian peace talks may well depose unpopular Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and formally end the U.S.-backed “peace process” that began on the White House lawn in 1994.  The implosion of U.S. policy is just one aspect of the U.S. loss of credibility in the region. JCS chairman Mike Mullen says a Palestinian state is a “cardinal interest” of the United States. Yet the United States has never had a less credible  proposal for how to achieve one. U.S. policy is somewhere between disarray and disappeared.

As Ali Abunimah notes in the Christian Science Monitor, the Palestine Papers show that “the United States is, to put it mildly, actually rather incompetent at evaluating its own credibility among those it seeks to influence” and “completely out of touch with the grim realities it has helped create in the region and unprepared to deal with the consequences.”

As Arab civil society turns on U.S.-backed dictatorships, President Obama faces a fundamental test: Can he align the U.S. policy with Arab civil society while still preserving the special relationship with Israel? Many Israelis are assuring themselves that Egypt is not Tunisia. But  what if it is? The Angry Arab predicts the Obama administration will back President Mubarak in launching a Tianamen Square-style crackdown to disperse the burgeoning demonstrations in the street.

Feeling bolder: Egyptian reformist leader Mohamed ElBaradei (Photo courtesy of Palestinian Pundit)

More likely, U.S. policymakers are already calculating how to cut their losses and head off the presidential candidacy of M0hamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who so irked the Bush administration for his accurate observation that Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons.

ElBaradei is a rather dour technocrat who chose a career in the global civil service rather than toil in Mubarak’s satrapy. He has shallow roots in Egyptian civil society but is the most plausible presidential possibility internationally, which makes pro-Israeli policymakers in Washington just a little bit nervous.

For what’s at stake in the streets of Cairo is not just the future of Egyptian democracy but also the future of Israeli influence on U.S. foreign policy.

Would a democratic post-Mubarak Egypt align itself with Israel to perpetuate the Gaza blockade? Mubarak did not hesitate. ElBaradei probably would, if only because of the need to bring the politically conservative, non-violent Muslim Brotherhood into a post-dictatorship government. (Hamas, the governing party of Gaza, is an offshoot of the Brotherhood. Unlike its parent organization, Hamas has not renounced violence.)

Would Egypt certainly countenance a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities? Mubarak probably would have. As chief of the IAEA, El Baradei made clear in 2008 that he would resign if Iran was attacked and that he thought such an attack would be unmitigated folly.

The conundrum that Washington faces is that as Mubarak gets weaker, so does Israel. That’s the new reality facing President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, and its no longer secret.

With the Wall Street Journal and others reporting this week that the Stuxnet computer virus temporarily shut down Iran’s uranium enrichment, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization saracstically dismissed the story to  IRNA as “rumor.” A former top U.N. nuclear inspections officials says Stuxnet might well be responsible but cautions  there is “no evidence” to  support the claim.

But the change in Iranian comments seems revealing. The Fars News Agency in Iran today offered what it described as “new details about the West’s cyberattack.” While describing the media reports as a “propaganda stratagem,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman also said “Stuxnet is in a league of its own” as a virus.

Not coincidentally, the single biggest Iranian news agency, IRIB, today played up the boast of nuclear chief,  Alik Akbar Salehi, that the West had been caught “off guard” by Iran’s recent nuclear gains.  That sounds like counter-messaging.

The Iranian statements this week differ notably from those issued  in September which claimed the virus has affected only staff computers at the Bushehr nuclear power plant but not the computers that run the reactor.

The conservative Telegraph in the U.K. has credited an “Israeli cyber unit” with developing the virus. So has the liberal Haaretz in Israel.

In the tech world, P.C. World polled a group of security consultants familiar with the code who “all agree that Stuxnet was built by a very sophisticated and capable attacker — possibly a nation state — and it was designed to destroy something big.”

Resist reacting to tanks, bullets and shells. We must not pick up rocks. The path to justice, freedom, democracy and human rights requires flowers not blood.

This Lebanese opposition commentator is right to sense that the combined interests of Sunnis and Christians in Lebanon (a fractious minority) do not rank high on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s regional agenda–at least not as high as seeking a front line ally in the campaign against nuclear Iran.

Now Taiwan is a channel for Tehran’s nuclear technology needs, says AP Enterprise.

As long as Iran’s internal opposition continues to agitate, there is less of a likelihood of a military strike. But if, by 2011, the opposition movement has faded, and Iran is defiantly moving forward — toward a weapons capability — the likelihood of such a strike goes up significantly.

– SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Plus: WOS surveys Middle East reaction to Hilary’s most forceful intervention yet on the issue of Iran.

Max Boot recently endorsed the argument of former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who wrote last year in the formerly liberal Washington Post,  that

… the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people.

Writing the Weekly Standard, former general Thomas McInerney said:

The destruction of Iran’s military force structure would create the opportunity for regime change as well, since it would eliminate some or all of Ahmadinejad’s and the mullahs’ ability to control the population. Simultaneously or prior to the attack, a major covert operation could be launched, utilizing Iranian exiles and dissident forces trained during the period of diplomacy.

Shades of those “exiles” and “dissident forces” who were  successfully deployed at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and Baghdad in 2003.

It is worth noting that WOS finds few  such illusions in the Israeli media.