Juan Cole, professor of Modern Middle East history and a prominent expert on the region from the University of Michigan, was featured at Trinity College’s Larkin-Stuart Lectures over two evenings last week. A frequent contributor to the PBS NewsHour, Professor Cole joined The Varsity for a frank discussion of the new Iraq, the meaning of Iran’s nuclear program, and recent changes in the Near East.

The Varsity: In a 2004 article you suggested that if America were like Iraq it would include the U.S. Air Force regularly strafing Philadelphia, and insurgents having turned Salt Lake City into a no-go zone. How would you update this scenario?

Juan Cole: The situation in about half of the country is virtually unchanged. The open conflict has subsided in an artificial way, in favour of U.S. withdrawal and filling of that vacuum by what are essentially security forces recruited from militias. But that piece was written before Mosul went into rebellion, when 4,000 police resigned.

If what were going on in the centre-north of Iraq were going on in the United States, it would look like a Mad Max movie. And the North American public really doesn’t have a firm grasp on how bad the situation really is. The American government-and some of the right-wing American press-deliberately obscures how bad the situation is for political purposes.

V: They would say there is a lack of balance in the coverage, highlighting the negative and ignoring the positive.

JC: That’s quite frankly propaganda. The fact is that if we thought about North America, in what city would it be acceptable for the mayor to say, “Well, yes we are having bombings that kill eight or nine people every other day, but remember, we did paint our schools.” Would that fly here in Toronto?

V: Looking next door at Iran, if the United Nations does impose economic sanctions over its nuclear program, would those restrictions realistically be able to stop it?

JC: Oh, no. An oil state can face a boycott down. Petroleum is a fungible commodity-it’s easily transformed into cash, it can be bartered for other things. A large country like Iran which borders Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan, and Turkey, and Iraq, and the Gulf….I mean this is a pirate’s heaven, and the likelihood that you could stop the petroleum from being smuggled is very low. So the regime would certainly be able to get enough money to continue its scientific program if it so desired.

V: In that case, let’s assume then that if the sanctions fail, and-

JC: Could I just say one thing? No evidence has been presented by anyone that Iran has a serious nuclear weapons program. The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, which came out last fall, suggests that even if the general world environment were permissive for Iran to have access to all the materials it would need and so forth, its program is a good ten years away from being able to make a bomb.

So I’m trying to suggest to you that the crisis that we are facing at the moment is in large part a manufactured one. I think it’s just an attempt to put Iran in a particular position, and it’s being done in a frankly cynical and prevaricating way.

V: Do you see the current disarray in the Middle East as a step forward or a slide backwards?

JC: I think things are very unstable and I’m worried. It’s not irrelevant for the world. If you’ve got major instability there, you’ve got major instability in the oil and financial markets, the potential for high inflation, and all of this could easily throw the world into a deep recession.

The worst of all possible worlds has developed in Israel and Palestine, with the most hardline groups coming to political power on both sides-groups, by the way, that don’t represent either Israeli or Palestinian public opinion

Iraq is a mess. The maneuverings of politicians in the Green Zone which we and the press concentrate on are not the most relevant thing to the situation. I’m glad to see Saddam gone. I’m glad to see little Lebanon get more independence. But I really think that these objectives could have been worked on in a way that didn’t threaten to destabilize the region.

Juan Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, can be seen at www.juancole.com