The defeat of any of Iran's proxies is always a good thing. It weakens Iran's ability to project its power beyond its borders, and it drains Iran of the money and, crucially, the manpower to cause havoc in the Middle East. For example, how many Iranian Quds Force intelligence officers—its elite corps of terrorist organizers—were chewed up in Iran's failed attempt to establish the Mahdi Army as its theocratic puppet regime in Baghdad? Those are losses from which Iran will not easily recover.
But it is also correct to point out that, on a larger strategic scale, the defeat of Hamas is not a major defeat for Iran:
On Sunday, Iranian analyst Amir Taheri reported the conclusions of a bipartisan French parliamentary report on the status of Iran's nuclear program in Asharq Alawsat [a London-based Arabic-language newspaper]…. The report asserts that this year will be the world's final opportunity to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons…. [I]t is possible that Iran ordered the current war in Gaza for the same reason it launched its war in 2006: to divert international attention away from its nuclear program….
And if this is the case, then even if Israel beats Hamas (and I eat my hat), we could still lose the larger war by again having allowed Iran to get us to take our eyes away from the prize.
This is a good reminder that the real story is not the war against Iran's proxies, but the war against Iran. Glick's conclusion is a warning about the danger of fighting that war with a Cold War strategy, striking only at the proxies and never at one's real opponent. Israel may be constrained by its small size from waging war against Iran directly, so it may have no choice in fighting a slow and indirect Cold War (though it could still do so far more effectively).
But the United States has no such excuse.
READ MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment