Iran Might Have Miscalculated in Gaza - Walter Russell Mead
Most news and commentary describes the war in Gaza as the latest brutal episode in the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. That is one dimension, but from the perspective of world-power politics, it isnt the most important. What really matters in the Middle East is the battle between Iran, increasingly backed by Russia and China, and the loose and uneasy group of anti-Iranian powers that includes Israel and the American-backed Arab states... But so far, from a global perspective, the most important fact is that Iran isnt getting what it wanted from the war. Irans objective in arming, training and encouraging Hamas wasnt solely to cause Israel pain. The real goal was to disrupt the gradual deepening of the strategic ties between Israel and its most important Arab neighbors.
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Sunni Arabs have long viewed Iran as a religious rival and a security threat. More recently, as Irans march to hegemony left a trail of ruined countries and bloody corpses, suspicion solidified into terror and loathing. Tehrans support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria is responsible for many times more deaths and refugees than all the Israeli-Palestinian wars combined. Irans support for Hezbollah converted once-prosperous Lebanon into a poverty-stricken Iranian satellite. Tehrans allies keep Iraq in a state of miserable unrest while Iranian support for Houthi forces in Yemen drove one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time.
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Tehran hoped to disrupt the emerging anti-Iran bloc in the Middle East. The idea was that Hamass dramatic attacks would electrify public opinion in the region against Israel, the U.S. and the Arab rulers willing to work with them. This, Tehran hoped, would drive a wedge between the Arabs and Israelis as Arab rulers sought to placate their angry publics by abandoning any plans to work closely with Israel. So far, this plan has failed. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have all signaled that they intend, once the storm has passed, to go on working with Jerusalem for a safer, more stable Middle East. Worse from Irans point of view, the Arabs are committing to a revived form of Palestinian governance that can exclude Irans proxies from both the West Bank and Gaza.
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Instead of dividing Israel from the Arab states, the Hamas attacks reminded sensible people across the Middle East how important it is to hold Iran in check. The Gulf states need stability, and Iran and its murderous proxies are mortal threats to the economic future that Arab rulers want and their people need.
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