March 4, 2024
( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the midst
of Israel’s ongoing devastation of Gaza, one major piece of Middle Eastern news
has yet to hit the headlines. In a face-off that, in a sense, has lasted since
the pro-American Shah of Iran was overthrown by theocratic clerics in 1979,
Iran finally seems to be besting the United States in a significant fashion
across the region. It’s a story that needs to be told.
“Hit Iran now. Hit them hard” was
typical advice offered by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham after a drone flown
by an Iran-aligned Iraqi Shiite militia killed three American servicemen in
northern Jordan on January 28th. The well-heeled Iran War Lobby in Washington
has, in fact, been stridently calling for nothing short of a U.S. invasion of
that country, accusing Tehran of complicity in Hamas’s October 7th terrorist
attack on Israel.
No matter that the official Iranian
press has vehemently denied the allegation, while American intelligence
officials swiftly concluded that the attack on Israel had taken top Iranian
leaders by surprise. In mid-November, Reuters reported that Iranian leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei informed a key Hamas figure, Ismail Haniya, that his
country wouldn’t intervene directly in the Gaza war, since Tehran hadn’t been
warned about the October 7th attack before it was launched. He actually seemed
annoyed that the leadership of the Hamas paramilitary group, the Qassam
Brigades, thought they could draw Tehran and its allies willy-nilly into a
major conflict without the slightest consultation. Although initially caught
off-guard, as the Israeli counterattack grew increasingly brutal and
disproportionate, Iran’s leaders clearly began to see ways they could turn the
war to their regional benefit — and they’ve done so skillfully, even as the
Biden administration in its full-scale embrace of the most extreme government
in Israeli history tossed democracy and international law under the bus.
The gut-wrenching Hamas attacks on
civilians at a music festival and those living in left-wing, peacenik Kibbutzim
near the Israeli border with Gaza on October 7th initially left Iran in an
uncomfortable position. It had allegedly been slipping some $70 million a year
to Hamas — though Egypt and Qatar had provided major funding to Gaza at
Israel’s request through sanctioned Israeli government bank accounts. And after
decades of championing the Palestinian cause, Tehran could hardly stand by and
do nothing as Israel razed Gaza to the ground. On the other hand, the
ayatollahs couldn’t afford to gain a reputation for being played like a fiddle
by the region’s young radicals and so drawn into conventional wars their
country can ill afford.
The Adults in the Room?
Despite their fiery rhetoric, their
undeniable backing of fundamentalist militias in the region, and their
depiction by inside-the-Beltway war hawks as the root of all evil in the Middle
East, Iran’s leaders have long acted more like a status quo power than a force
for genuine change. They have shored up the rule of the autocratic al-Assad
family in Syria, while helping the Iraqi government that emerged after
President George W. Bush’s invasion of that country fight off the terrorist
threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In truth, not Iran
but the U.S. and Israel are the countries that have most strikingly tried to
use their power to reshape the region in a Napoleonic manner. The disastrous
U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and Israel’s wars on Egypt (1956, 1967),
Lebanon (1982-2000, 2006), and Gaza (2008, 2012, 2014, 2024), along with its
steady encouragement of large-scale squatting on the Palestinian West Bank,
were clearly intended to alter the geopolitics of the region permanently
through the use of military force on a massive scale.
Only recently, Ayatollah Khamenei
bitterly asked, “Why don’t the leaders of Islamic countries publicly cut off
their relationship with the murderous Zionist regime and stop helping this
regime?” Pointing to the staggering death toll in Israel’s present campaign
against Gaza, he was focusing on the Arab countries — Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan,
and the United Arab Emirates — that, as part of Trump son-in-law Jared
Kushner’s “Abraham Accords,” had officially recognized Israel and established
relations with it. (Egypt and Jordan had, of course, recognized Israel long
before that.)
Given the anti-Israel sentiment in
the region, had it, in fact, been rife with democracies, Iran’s position might
have been widely implemented. Still, it was a distinct sign of terminal tone
deafness on the part of Biden administration officials that they hoped to use
the Gaza crisis to extend the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, while sidelining
the Palestinians and creating a joint Israeli-Arab front against Iran.
The region had already been moving
in a somewhat different direction. Last March, after all, Iran and Saudi Arabia
had begun forging a new relationship by restoring the diplomatic relations that
had been suspended in 2016 and working to expand trade between their countries.
And that relationship has only continued to improve as the nightmare in Israel
and Gaza developed. In fact, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi first visited the
Saudi capital, Riyadh, in November and, since the Gaza conflict began, Foreign Minister
Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has met twice with his Saudi counterpart. Frustrated
by a markedly polarizing American policy in the region, de facto Saudi ruler
Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei resorted to
the good offices of Beijing to sidestep Washington and strengthen their
relations further.
Buy the Book
Although Iran is far more hostile to
Israel than Saudi Arabia, their leaderships do agree that the days of
marginalizing the Palestinians are over. In a remarkably unambiguous statement
issued in early February, the Saudis offered the following: “The Kingdom has
communicated its firm position to the U.S. administration that there will be no
diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is
recognized on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the
Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops and all the Israeli occupation
forces withdraw from the Gaza Strip.” Significantly, the Saudis even refused to
join a U.S.-led naval task force created to halt attacks on Red Sea shipping by
the Houthis of Yemen (no friends of theirs) in support of the Palestinians. Its
leaders are clearly all too aware that the carnage still being wreaked on Gaza
has infuriated most Saudis.
In late January, President Raisi
also surprised regional diplomats by traveling to Ankara for talks on trade and
geopolitics with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, another sign of his
country’s changing role in the region. At the end of the visit, while signing
various agreements to increase trade and cooperation, he announced: “We agreed
to support the Palestinian cause, the axis of resistance, and to give the
Palestinian people their rightful rights.” That’s no small thing. Remember that
Turkey is a NATO member and considered a close ally of the United States. To
have Erdoğan suddenly cozy up to Iran, while denouncing Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Gaza as a Hitlerian-style genocide, was an
unmistakable slap in Washington’s face.
Meanwhile, Iran, Turkey, and Russia
recently issued a joint communiqué that “expressed deep concern over the
humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and stressed the need to end the Israeli
brutal onslaught against the Palestinians, [while] sending humanitarian aid to
Gaza.” From the Biden administration’s point of view, Moscow’s bombing of
civilian sites in Ukraine and Iran’s role in crushing Sunni Arab rebels in
Syria had been the atrocities that needed attention until Netanyahu suddenly
pulled the rug out from under them by upping the ante from mere atrocities to
what the International Court of Justice has ruled can plausibly be labeled a
genocide. One thing was clear: Washington’s long struggle to exclude Iran from
regional influence has now visibly failed.
Iran’s Rising Popularity
At the Gulf International Forum
(GIF) last November, Abdullah Baaboud, a prominent Omani academic, said that
there had been a “very strong condemnation of Israel from Iran and Turkey,
embarrassing some Arab countries that are not using the same language. My worry
is that this conflict is leading to the empowerment of Turkey and Iran among
the Arab public.” GIF’s executive director, Dania Thafer, concurred. Of that
public, she said, “Grief and anger have reached unprecedented levels,” and
added, “with each photo out of Gaza, Iran gains more influence across the
region.” In short, at remarkably little cost, Iran is unexpectedly winning the
battle for regional public opinion and its standing in the Arab world has risen
strikingly. Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States has been indelibly
tarnished by Washington’s full-throated support for what most in the region do
indeed see as a merciless slaughter of thousands of children and other innocent
civilians.
A recent opinion poll of Arabs in 16
countries, conducted jointly by the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., and the
Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar, found that 94% of
them considered the American position on Israel’s war “bad.” In contrast, a
surprising 48% of them considered the Iranian position positive. To grasp just
how remarkable such a finding was, consider that a Gallup poll conducted in
2022 found that Shiite Iran’s name was mud in most Sunni Arab countries and
approval of its leadership fell somewhere between 10% and 20%.
In recent months, Iran has made
striking use of the weakness of Washington’s case in the region. While the
State Department likes to contrast Iran’s “dictatorship” with Israel’s
“democratic character,” only recently foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani
observed, “The disaster in Gaza removed the mask from the face of the so-called
advocates of human rights and showed the extent of vileness, brutality, and
lies hidden within the nature of the Israeli regime, whose supporters used to
refer to [it] as a symbol of democracy.” Although Iran has among the world’s
worst human-rights records, Netanyahu has even managed to take the focus off of
that.
Losing the Middle East,
Washington-Style
Iran’s allies in the region include
Iraqi Shiite militias like the Party of God Brigades (Kata’ib Hizbullah), which
first gained prominence in the struggle against the ISIL terrorist group from
2014 to 2018. Those were years when the regular Iraqi army had essentially
collapsed and was only gradually being rebuilt. Washington was also focused on
destroying ISIL then and so developed a wary de facto alliance with them in its
campaign to crush that “caliphate.” In January 2020, however, President Trump
was responsible for the drone assassination of the group’s leader, Abu Mahdi
al-Muhandis, along with Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, just after their
arrival by plane at Baghdad International Airport in what was evidently an
attempt to prevent them, through the Iraqis, from forging an agreement with
Saudi Arabia to reduce tensions with Iran.
That assassination led to a
long-running, low-intensity conflict between the Shiite militias of Iraq and
the 2,500 remaining American troops stationed there. With the onset of the Gaza
conflict last October, the Party of God Brigades began launching mortars and
drones against Iraqi military bases hosting American soldiers, as well as
against small forward operating bases in southeast Syria where some 900 U.S.
military personnel are stationed, ostensibly to support the Syrian Kurds in
mopping up operations against ISIL. After more than 150 such attacks, on
January 28th one of their drones hit Tower 22, a support base where U.S. troops
were stationed in northern Jordan, killing three American soldiers, while
wounding dozens more.
Iran’s leaders generally back those
Shiite militias, but whether they had anything to do with the attack on Tower
22 remains unknown. Officials in Tehran did, however, immediately recognize the
danger of escalation once American troops had actually been killed. And indeed,
the Biden administration responded with dozens of air strikes on bases and
facilities of the Party of God Brigades in Iraq and Syria. Washington Post
reporters were told by Iraqi and Lebanese officials that Iran had actually
urged caution on the militias with clear effect. Their attacks on bases hosting
U.S. troops ceased. At the same time, the Iraqi parliament and government
complained bitterly about Washington’s violation of the country’s sovereignty,
while heightening preparations to force the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops
from their land. In other words, President Biden’s fierce backing of Israel’s
war, his decision to increase weapons shipments to that country, and his
bombing of pro-Palestinian militias may have led to the achievement of a
longstanding Iranian aim: seeing American troops finally leave Iraq.
Meanwhile, in southern Lebanon,
where the militant group Hezbollah has been exchanging occasional fire with
Israeli forces in support of Gaza, according to the Post reporters, one
Hezbollah figure told them that Iran’s message was: “We are not keen on giving
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any reason to launch a wider war on
Lebanon or anywhere else.” Wars are unpredictable, and the Lebanon-Israeli
border could still erupt dramatically. Moreover, Iranian pleas for restraint
appear to have had far less effect on the Houthi leadership in Yemen’s capital
Sanaa, leading to an ongoing American and British bombing campaign on that city
and elsewhere in that country that has so far done little to stop Houthi
missile and drone attacks against ships in the Red Sea.
So far, however, despite the
Republican urge to devastate Iran, that country’s leaders have taken deft
advantage of the butchery in Gaza (in which the Israeli military has killed
more civilian noncombatants each day than belligerents have in any other conflict
in this century). The ayatollahs have significantly increased their popularity
even among Arab and Muslim publics that had not previously shown them much
favor. They have strengthened their relationship with the Shiites of Iraq and
may be on the verge of finally achieving their goal of ending the U.S. military
missions in Iraq and Syria.
They have also achieved closer ties
with Turkey, while improving relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf
Arab oil states. In doing so, they have distinctly blunted the Biden
administration’s aim of isolating Iran while tying the wealthier Arab states
ever more firmly to Israel through arms and high-tech deals.
In addition, through its backing of
and weaponizing of Israel in these last grim months, Washington has made a
mockery of the human rights talking points that the U.S. has long deployed
against Iran. In the process, Joe Biden has done more than any recent president
to undermine both international humanitarian law and democratic principles
globally. With 94% of Arab poll respondents viewing American policy in the
region as “bad,” one thing is clear: for the moment at least, Iran has won the
Middle East.
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