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Jewish World Review April 11, 2008 / 6 Nissan 5768 Why Ahmadinejad smiles By Caroline B. Glick
The story is important regardless of whether it is true. It is important
because it says something important about the nature of Iran's relationship
with Syria. Specifically, it says that Iran views Syria as a vassal state.
If Teheran were not convinced of its control of the Syrian regime, it would
never have dared to publish a story that places the Assad regime in an open
confrontation with Saudi Arabia. An even partially independent Syria would
never go along with such an open challenge to Saudi Arabia.
Syria of course is not Iran's only proxy in the Arab world. There is the
Hamas regime in Gaza as well. Thursday the Intelligence and Terrorism
Information Center released an in-depth report on Hamas's military build-up
since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005. The report notes that
Hamas receives arms and funding from Iran and Syria and sends its fighters
for extending training at camps in Iran and Syria.
By directly supporting Hamas and by supporting Hamas indirectly through
Syria and Hizbullah, Iran has successfully transformed Gaza into a
wholly-owned subsidiary of Iran. While Hamas may have independent interests,
the fact is that any independent will Hamas may have had at one time has
become entirely subservient to Teheran. This is so because Teheran has
rendered itself Hamas's indispensible ally and protector. Without Iran,
Hamas would have no staying power.
Then there is Lebanon. The weak Siniora government, which was brought to
power by the anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian March 14 democracy movement three
years ago, is clearly no match for Iran and its proxies. Presidential
elections have been held up for five months due to Hizbullah's Syrian- and
Iranian-ordered refusal to agree on a compromise candidate. The Siniora
government needs Hizbullah's agreement because Iran's proxies have murdered
a sufficient number of cabinet ministers and members of parliament to take
away Siniora's parliamentary capacity to elect a successor to Syrian-puppet,
former president Emil Lahoud.
The assassination of political opponents in Lebanon of course began in
earnest with the March 2005 assassination of pro-Western and pro-Saudi
former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. This week in Washington Senator Arlen
Specter asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to comment on an
interesting Syrian offer. According to Specter, during Jordanian King
Abdullah's visit to Washington last month, he suggested that Syria might be
willing to rein in Hizbullah and Hamas in exchange for an offer of immunity
for President Bashar Assad in the UN's probe of Hariri's murder. Rice
rejected the offer, but that is not what is interesting.
What is interesting is that Syria would feel comfortable making what amounts
to a confession of control over Hizbullah and Hamas. While at first glance
the Syrian offer seems to contradict the assertion that Syria is an Iranian
proxy, it actually does no such thing. It shows that Iran is willing to
shuffle some proxies around in order to protect other ones. To protect Assad
for instance, Iran may be willing to have Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal
temporarily decamp to Teheran or Qatar or Bahrain. While such a move would
have absolutely no impact on Iran's continued control over its proxies, it
could neutralize the UN tribunal's threat to the Syrian regime.
To sum up, through its proxy strategy, Iran has taken control of Syria, has
paralyzed and is increasingly calling the shots in Lebanon and has effective
control over Gaza from which it can attack Israel and Egypt at will. And of
course, it is the primary sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq.
Led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the Sunni Arab states are well aware of
Iran's proxy strategy for attaining regional dominance, and they are not
pleased. The partial boycott of the Arab League summit in Damascus last
month was the Sunni Arab states' symbolic way of showing their displeasure
with Iran's domination of Syria and Lebanon. On a more operational level,
this week the Syrian media reported that the Syrian oppositionist National
Salvation Front run by the Muslim Brotherhood and former Syrian vice
president Abd al Halim Khaddam will launch an anti-regime satellite
television channel in a few months. Presumably wealthy Gulf kingdoms are
bankrolling the project. Strategically, the Sunni Arab states have voiced
varying degrees of interest in building their own nuclear programs to
compete with the Iranian nuclear program
But diplomatic snubs, jihadist television stations with anti-regime bents,
and loud plans to build nuclear reactors will not suffice to defeat Iran or
even to slow down its bid for regional domination. And the fact is that the
Sunni states are aligned with most of Iran's policies. They keep Iraq at
arm's length and loudly criticize US operations in the country. They
continue to back Hamas and ostracize Israel. And they have taken no
substantive stands against Hizbullah's subversion of the Siniora government
since the end of the Second Lebanon War.
The main reason that the Sunni Arab countries cannot contend with Iran is
because their publics share Iran's jihadist ideology. And their publics
share Iran's general jihadist ideology because the Sunni states have
indoctrinated their publics to believe in jihad through their
state-controlled media. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and their Sunni Arab brothers
are in no position to argue with Iran publicly or to confront Iran's Arab
proxies because they can't explain to their own people why Iran's bid to
destroy Israel and dominate the world in the name of Islam is a bad thing.
The attraction of Iran's jihadist ideology for so many Muslims has also
helped Iran expand its army of proxies. Acting as the *avant guard* of
global jihad, Iran has collected otherwise adversarial terror groups in
their hours of need and has transformed them into Iranian proxies over time.
After the al Qaida leadership fled Afghanistan in late 2001 for instance,
many of its leaders received sanctuary in Iran from which they continued to
operate.
The late al Qaida in Iraq commander Abu Musab Zarkawi received medical care
in Iran and entered Iraq from Iran. He received his operational orders from
the al Qaida leadership in Iran.
In a recent interview with the Qatari *Al- 'Arab* translated by MEMRI, Ahmad
Salah al-Din, who serves as the spokesman for the Iraqi Sunni jihadist group
Hamas-Iraq alleged that al Qaida in Iraq today is wholly subservient to
Iran. Salah al-Din claimed, "We found Iranian [currency], *toman* at an Al
Qaida headquarters that we uncovered. We have also captured Iranian weapons,
not to mention audio and video recordings containing announcements by Al
Qaida fighters that they had received training in Iranian military camps and
that Al Qaida wounded were being transported to Iran for medical treatment."
So too, Iran has a long history of collaboration with Fatah dating back to
the early 1970s when Ayatollah Khomeini's future revolutionary leaders
received training in PLO camps in Lebanon. In 1999, as Yassir Arafat geared
up his terror armies ahead of the launch of his terror war against Israel in
2000, Iran began funding Fatah terror cells. Today, after sponsoring Hamas's
rout of Fatah in Gaza last June, Iran no longer needs to deal with Fatah
leadership. Through Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah it controls Fatah terror
cells directly.
Iran's policy of combining a proxy war strategy with a popular revolutionary
ideology is almost an exact reenactment of the Soviet Union's Cold War
strategy for fighting the US. Two things however distinguish Iran's war
against the West today from the Soviets' war against the West in the
twentieth century. First, Iran is much less powerful than the Soviet Union
was. Second, the Iranian regime is far less open to deterrence than the
Soviets were. As David Wurmser, Vice President Richard Cheney's former
Middle East advisor noted recently at an address before the
Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, the Iranian regime is motivated by a
messianic ideology with a strong apocalyptic component. This renders useless
the threat of mutually assured destruction.
The other main distinction between the Soviet war against the West and the
Iranian war against the West is that the US-led West embraced a dual
strategy of confrontation and containment against the Soviets. Today, the
same US-led West follows no coherent strategy for contending with Iran.
The only battleground where Iranian proxies are directly confronted today is
in Iraq. After the 2006 Iranian proxy war against Israel, the US largely
abandoned its support for the Siniora government. Hizbullah has been
permitted to rebuild its forces and its arsenal and to reassert control over
much of South Lebanon and to extend its control north of the Litani River.
Rather than confront Hamas, at the US's insistence, Israel has done nothing
to prevent Hamas's military build-up in Gaza or even to prevent it from
continuing its missile campaign against the Western Negev. Then too, by
supporting the defeated Fatah leadership, the US and Israel are indirectly
strengthening Hamas. During the Arab League summit, Fatah leader Mahmoud
Abbas announced that he spends some 58 percent of his US, Israeli and
European budget on paying the salaries of 77,000 officials who serve under
the Hamas regime in Gaza. So by funding Fatah which supports Hamas, Israel
and the US are strengthening Iran's control of Gaza through its Hamas proxy.
They are also facilitating the weaker Fatah's incremental absorption into
the Iranian axis.
As for Syria, both Israel and the US consistently ignore the fact that Syria
is no longer and independent actor. By effectively adopting the
Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group's recommendations from 2006, the Bush
administration and Israel give credence to the notion that Syria will
moderate its behavior if Israel surrenders the Golan Heights and so
encourage Iran to continue its aggression by seeming to reward it. Then too,
while allowing Sunni Arab states to support the Muslim Brotherhood as a
presumed counterweight to Iran, Israel and the US ignore the repeated pleas
of Syrian Kurds for assistance in their campaign to overthrow the Syrian
regime in favor of a federal, anti-Iranian democratic state. The Syrian
Kurds receive no assistance from either the US or Israel in their own bid to
set up a pro-democracy satellite television station to broadcast into Syria
even as they are violently repressed by the regime.
In the absence of a strategy of confronting Iran either directly or through
its proxies, the only coherent course that remains is one of containment.
But this option is raft with danger. With Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's announcement this week that Iran is now introducing 3,000
upgraded centrifuges to its Natanz nuclear installation, it is clear that
international sanctions have had no impact on Iran's quest for nuclear
weapons. It is also clear that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it will be
impossible to confront its proxies who will operate under Iran's nuclear
umbrella.
So as Iran progresses forward with its grand strategy for regional hegemony,
the West dithers and so assists it. No wonder Ahmadinejad is always smiling.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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