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The Same War

What is Iran's Current Aim in Sparking the Middle East to Erupt?

Remember last month when the world was so focused on Iran's nuclear ambitions? Heard any talk about that recently? It's a way to distract attention from their pet nuclear project moving forward.

Minneapolis attorney Andrew Jacobson writes out a crystal clear summation of Iran's reasons for fomenting serious trouble for Israel at this particular moment in time, hosted at Powerline. This is his concluding points:

12. Hezbollah's, Hamas's and North Korea's provocations have all occurred within a week of the date that the Iran situation is referred to the Security Council for what will likely be further endless hand wringing and inaction by that feckless organization.

13. Only two countries have the military will (maybe) and capability (probably) to possibly stop Iran from moving forward with its nuclear program — Israel and the U.S.

So here is my observation/theory - Iran has orchestrated much (if not all) of the current unrest and violence in order to: (i) distract attention from its nuclear weapons program, (ii) tie down Israel militarily in order to reduce the chances that Israel could unilaterally (or in combination with the U.S.) launch a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, (iii) scare the American public (and politicians) into rejecting any unilateral military option against Iran for fear of further inflaming the Mideast (e.g., "Geez, we've already got huge issues in North Korea, Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, we can't possibly afford any further foreign entanglements" or "We better not do anything to Iran, we might further inflame the Mideast, threaten our oil supply and the U.S. economy" (Lord knows we don't want to pay $%/gallon for our SUV's)), and (iv) create world furor against Israel (and indirectly the U.S.), to further raise the stakes and international opposition to any unilateral military strikes.

Yesterday, I concluded my post, It's War, Says Israel with this statement:

The United States in Iraq and Israel on its two borders, are fighting tentacles of the same enemy.

This war against terrorism has become, clearly enough, the same war after all."

Today, Michael Ledeen devotes an entire column, The Same War, to this hypothesis:

No one should have any lingering doubts about what’s going on in the Middle East. It's war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted 'insurgency' in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable.

It is very good news that the White House immediately denounced Iran and Syria, just as Ambassador Khalilzad had yesterday tagged the terrorist Siamese twins as sponsors of terrorism in Iraq. For those who doubt the Iranian hand, remind yourself that Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of the mullahcracy (with Syria providing some supplies, and free run of the territory), and then read what Iraq the Model had to say yesterday, Wednesday:

Hizbollah is Iran's and Syria's partner in feeding instability in Iraq as there were evidence that this terror group has a role in equipping and training insurgents in Iraq and Hizbollah had more than once openly showed support for the “resistance” in Iraq and sponsored the meetings of Baathist and radical Islamist militants who are responsible for most of the violence in Iraq.

Ledeen, however, disagrees that the Iran motivation for fomenting chaos now throughout the mid east is the upcoming UNSecurity debate on its atomic ambitions.

There's a lot of fanciful analysis of the recent expansion of the war, revolving around a general 'why?' and a more specific 'why now?' Someone said that Iran was trying to distract world attention from the upcoming U.N. showdown over the mullahs' atomic program, which seems silly to me. A U.N. debate serves Iran's interest. It deflects attention from our growing awareness of Iran's centrality in Iraq, and the urgency of going after the regimes in Tehran and Damascus. That is where Iran's doom lies, not in the endless charade about the nukes...

Don't think for a moment that they worry about victims in Gaza or Lebanon. They are delighted to see Israel fighting on two fronts, because they will use the pictures from the battlefield to consolidate their hold over the fascist forces in the region. After a few days of fighting, I would not be surprised to see some new kind of terrorist attack against Israel, or against an American facility in the region. An escalation to chemical weapons, for example, or even the fulfillment of the longstanding Iranian promise to launch something nuclear at Israel. They meant it when they said it, don't you know?

Finally, we have Yossi Klein Halevi's article in The New Republic, Battle Plans:

The next Middle East war--Israel against genocidal Islamism--has begun. The first stage of the war started two weeks ago, with the Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the ongoing shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim; now, with Hezbollah's latest attack, the war has spread to southern Lebanon. Ultimately, though, Israel's antagonists won't be Hamas and Hezbollah but their patrons, Iran and Syria. The war will go on for months, perhaps several years. There may be lulls in the fighting, perhaps even temporary agreements and prisoner exchanges. But those periods of calm will be mere respites.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Alcibiades @ 10:14 AM