Iran Plays Long Game in the Middle East

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Iran has threatened to hold the United States and Great Britain “accountable” following a series of joint strikes by them in Yemen in response to recent attacks on ships carried out by the Tehran-backed Houthi militants in the Red Sea.

A coalition of eight nations, including Canada, have helped protect commercial vessels targeted by Houthis who believe they are linked to Israel. But the Houthis are part of a wider web, known as the “axis of resistance,” aimed at destroying the Jewish State.

When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Iran’s state-run media broadcast parliamentarians in Tehran rising from their seats to chant “Death to Israel” and “Palestine is victorious, Israel will be destroyed.”

Iran’s former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi stated in a January 22 interview on Russia Today TV that the confrontation between Iran and Israel will continue “even if a Palestinian state is established. I am referring to the proposed two-state solution. We can never recognize the plundering Zionist entity.”

Despite some doctrinal differences, the common thread weaving together Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen is the significant funding and support each gets from Iran. 

Hamas receives an estimated $150 million annually, Hezbollah $700 million, and Islamic Jihad tens of millions. And they are only the biggest in a network of 19 armed groups that Iran has established.

In addition, the current regime in Iran fields its own militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF). It trains the proxies’ militias in Iraq and Syria. They include Kataib Hezbollah, Harakat al-Nujaba, and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, which have launched dozens of attacks on American forces in Iraq, Jordan and Syria since mid-October.

“To counter Israel’s ability to threaten Iran, isolate Israel and, ultimately, help wipe it off the map, Tehran encircles it with a ‘ring of fire’ (as Israelis call it) by funding and arming its terrorist proxies with improved rockets, missiles, drones, and ground forces,” explained Jonathan Ruhe, Director of Foreign Policy at the JINSA Gemunder Centre for Defense and Strategy on Oct. 25.

So far Iran itself has been exempt from paying any price for all the devastation it is causing. It has not been struck at all: not the IRGC-QF bases, not the training centres, not its spy ships in the Red Sea. There have not even been any financial sanctions restored.

Yet, as Kian Tajbakhsh, a senior adviser at Global Centers Columbia University in New York, wrote in a Feb. 2 article in the Atlantic magazine, “Iran’s complicity with Hamas signals that the country has entirely broken with the West and abandoned any aspiration to seek even minimal rapprochement with the Western-led international order.” (Tajbakhsh was arrested in Iran in 2009 and spent more than a year in the notorious Evin Prison.)

Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum, in a Feb. 3 article in the Middle East Quarterly agrees. The recent killings of three U.S. servicemen and the missile attacks on Iraq and Pakistan “are the actions of a regime that’s out of control, operating far from the norms of the international system,” he maintains.

Barack Obama’s administration was the promoter of the idea that a truce with Iran, prioritizing the avoidance of military conflict above everything else, could persuade Tehran to curb its destabilizing actions in the region. This hasn’t worked out. Iran has never wavered from its commitment to the anti-liberal, anti-Western goals of the 1979 Islamic revolution that put it in power.

Theocratic Iran is a very strong state, make no mistake. I have refuted many times the wishful thinking expressed by many people that the regime is doomed. I remember while on an airplane from London to Montreal in September 1978 being told by a Canadian diplomat whom I knew that the revolutionaries wouldn’t manage to overthrow the Shah’s regime – a few months before they did just that. While working in Washington in 1985, a fellow journalist assured me it wouldn’t last another five years. That was almost four decades ago.

There is no denying Iran’s proxy forces are great value for money. They are far cheaper than Iran’s own conventional military, and more useful in the region’s many conflicts. Iran’s clerics were ecstatic when allied militias defeated both the Sunni Arab jihadists and the U.S. in Iraq, and relieved when they helped to save the Assad dictatorship in Syria in 2012.

Also, as Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, maintains in a Feb. 2 article, Tehran will surely keep pushing the envelope unless the United States or Israel pushes back far harder.

“Only something shockingly different – U.S. attacks against Revolutionary Guard targets inside Iran, and the openly declared threat of insurmountable American escalation,” he writes, “has a decent chance of convincing the clerics that the past is no longer prologue.”

The Islamic Republic has scored win after win all these decades and outmaneuvered the United States into accommodating its regional ambitions and allowing it to become a threshold nuclear-weapons state. This will have consequences that Washington must eventually confront if stability, let alone peace and prosperity, are to be hoped for in the Middle East.