The Iranian interest in the Israeli-Hamas war
In my analysis yesterday of the geopolitical dimension to the Hamas attack on Israel this past Saturday, I mentioned Iran en passant as a beneficiary insofar as it is inconceivable that the pending Saudi-Israeli normalization of relations that was being brokered by Washington will proceed to successful conclusion, and that normalization would have been very prejudicial to Iranian interests.
This opens the possibility to a separate examination of whether cui bono helps us to understand that Iran was more than an idle bystander in the preparation and execution of the Hamas attack. And that takes us to published remarks on my essay of yesterday by former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman to the effect that the geopolitical dimension of the Israeli-Hamas conflict means for him possible spread of the conflict across the region rather than its repercussions on U.S. budgetary disputes and further aid to Ukraine.
However, all of these questions are intertwined. So far the regional spread has been limited to cross border artillery and rocket exchanges between Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and the Israeli Defense Forces. But it is easy to foresee outbreaks of violence between Israeli and Syrian troops at their common border. And behind all these minor flash points there is the simmering hostility between Iran and Israel that will have a global impact if the United States and Israel should decide to pin responsibility for arming and abetting the Hamas forces on Iran.
Let us remember that back in July, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to reporters about the possibility that NATO military materiel sent to Ukraine had already been illegally diverted to Palestinian terrorists, he identified Iran as the broker. In this light, it makes more sense to interpret Joe Biden’s sending a U.S. aircraft carrier and other naval vessels closer to Israel as preparations for an attack on Iran than for preparations to attack the Hamas urban guerillas in Gaza.
There is even wild speculation in some social media that the U.S. will now use the pretext of Iranian aid to Hamas to bomb Iranian nuclear installations, with either conventional or tactical nuclear arms. The logic and the timing should be seen in the context of restoring U.S. credibility to the Saudis as their security umbrella, while removing the threat of a nuclear empowered Iran from the region.
With its foreign policies since taking office failing one after another, in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, the Biden administration is like a cornered rat that will strike out in all directions in the desperate attempt to appear to be a winner before the electoral campaign in the States begins in earnest.
Against these thickening clouds of war over the region and potentially over the world, Russia also enters the picture as a global power, not the “regional power” that Barack Obama foolishly called it. Any U.S. threats to Iran cannot and will not be ignored by Moscow. The simple days of gunboat diplomacy that Biden’s latest directives evoke are long gone.
I close out this essay with a look at what Russian state television was showing in its coverage of the Israeli-Hamas war by its veteran war correspondent Yevgeni Poddubny, who has been transferred from Donbas to their Middle East bureau. What he and the rest of the Vesti news team put on the screen has not yet passed censorship in Washington and London: that is to say, scenes of losses by the Israeli military in the Saturday attack, and not just scenes of civilian casualties, such as video of the kids who were murdered by Hamas fighters at a music festival near Gaza that has filled the reportage on BBC, Euronews, CNN.
On the military side, what Poddubny was reporting on looked very much like what he left behind in Donetsk. There were the supposedly invincible latest generation Israeli tanks set ablaze, there were images of Hamas drone attacks, there was a report that Hamas captured more than 20 Israeli tanks in an incursion against an IDF military base. They showed images of the hang gliders carrying Hamas fighters from the sea onto Israeli shores. With advanced lethal materiel in their hands and with the highly sophisticated tactical direction that the entire multifaceted attack by the Palestinians has demonstrated, it is clear that Israeli attempts to take Gaza by a ground campaign are going to resemble the fighting for control of Bakhmut and not the Desert Storm campaign beloved by American generals.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023