The NYT propagandist David Sanger wrote a weekend piece about The Larger Game in the Middle East: Iran:
The Obama team holds no illusions about Colonel Qaddafi’s long-term importance. Libya is a sideshow. Containing Iran’s power remains their central goal in the Middle East. Every decision — from Libya to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria — is being examined under the prism of how it will affect what was, until mid-January, the dominating calculus in the Obama administration’s regional strategy: how to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and speed the arrival of opportunities for a successful uprising there.
The second part of the graph is easy to understand. It is always about Israel and thereby its perceived archenemy Iran.
But if that is so why take on Gaddafi at all? The Iranians do not like him very much. They supported intervention against him:
The Iranian Foreign Ministry official expressed worries about the ongoing violence in Libya and called on the international community to move to put an end on the use of force against the civilian protesters.
So if it is all about fighting Iran, why start a war on Libya?
The Sanger piece mentions a possible demonstration effect of weapon capabilities. But showing off U.S. capabilities in warfare will not impress Iran. Those are well known and, besides that, Iran's defense relies on asymmetric warfare where those capabilities have little use.
This leaves me with two possible interpretations.
First: There is a different demonstration effect in the Libya operation. The instrumentalization of the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) to intervene in a civil war situation. Inciting some violent demonstrations on the ground and published videos of the repressing government response would usually not be enough to allow a UN intervention. But a UN intervention under the R2P dogma was exactly what was achieved under those circumstances against Libya. Libya might thereby set a reference case for an eventual R2P "intervention" war on Iran.
Fitting to this are signs that the U.S. is no longer pushing about Iran's civil nuclear program and is instead using "human rights" as a new international pressure point against it. Clinton recently released another statement on human rights in Iran. She pressed the UN Human Rights Council to name a special rapporteur for human rights in Iran which it eventually did. (No such rapporteur seems to exists for any of the much more brutal U.S. sponsored kingdoms in the Persian Gulf). Could this be part of a U.S. initiated international media campaign to emphasizes alleged human rights violation in Iran to later push for an "R2P" UNSC resolution, citing the Libya model, to intervene in Iran?
The second interpretation is that the war on Libya is just a diversion for the international media. The real war is taking place in the Shia majority parts in west Persian Gulf, especially in Bahrain where the Saudis are helping to brutally suppress an uprising which, if it would win, could lead to a more Iran friendly government there. Writing in Asia Times Pepe Escobar points to such a deal.
Of course both these points could be part of Sanger's "Larger Game in the Middle East". Then again, there could be no plan at all and that "larger game" could be all just empty propaganda.