Nukes, terror, Syria, Iraq, Hezbollah - Iran's tentacles are spreading
Iran has often used the nuclear program to distract from its real desire: Regional hegemony
By Seth J. Frantzman, Jerusalem Post, January 24, 2021
Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, July 2020 (photo credit: KHAMENEI.IR)
Israel is preparing a full-court press to discuss Iran’s threats
with the new US administration, according to various media reports.
National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat spoke on Saturday with Jake
Sullivan, his counterpart in the Biden administration, and Mossad head
Yossi Cohen is expected to travel soon to Washington to present Israel’s
concerns to his counterparts in the intelligence community.
The
discussions are expected to be wide-ranging. According to the report,
they will likely include Iran stopping uranium enrichment, ending
production of advanced centrifuges and stopping support for various
terrorist proxies and militias. The proxies include Hezbollah in
Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, as well as Iran’s threatening posture in Syria and Iraq. There are other concerns as well.
Sometimes
in negotiations, one side outlines its ideal demands at the outset to
get only some of them fulfilled at the end. This laundry list looks like
that. Throw enough problems at the wall, and surely the US and Israel
can work some of them out.
On
the other hand, what Israel is sketching out also looks a lot more like
an Iranian elephant in the room than just a nuclear problem. Iran has
often used the nuclear program to distract from its real desire: to
achieve regional hegemony.
The
nuclear program is just one part of a vast military-industrial complex
in Iran that involves advanced precision-guided ballistic missiles,
sophisticated drones, new naval assets and a coterie of militias across
the region.
Iran
funds and arms Hezbollah, including secret production facilities for
weapons. Iran has placed drones in Syria and even tried to put its
Khordad air-defense system there. It has moved weapons to the T4 and
Imam Ali bases and other centers in Syria. It is trying to move
precision-guided munitions production to Lebanon or Syria, has moved
drone and missile technology to the Houthis in Yemen, and in 2018, it
moved ballistic missiles to western Iraq.
Never
in history has a country taken such a multilayered approach so quickly
to try to place a footprint across the region. In contrast to Western
arms sales to countries in the Middle East, Iran has moved quickly to
deploy its systems across the region. It has acted in contravention of
international law, mining ships in the Gulf of Oman, attacking Saudi
Arabia with drones in 2019 and moving weapons illegally across sovereign
countries to illegal militias.
This is Iran’s method.
Iran’s
nuclear program is, therefore, not sui generis and has wrongly been
examined as its own entity instead of part of a larger Iranian game
plan. Iran has often enjoyed letting the world talk about the nuclear
program and the rate of enrichment and number of centrifuges, while it
focused efforts on putting its first military satellite in orbit and
improved its range of solid- and liquid-fueled missiles.
Iran
turns the nuclear program on and off depending on how it wants to heat
up negotiations. The program is a kind of bogeyman and form of blackmail
all rolled into one.
Over
the past several years, Israel’s focus shifted to deal with Iran’s
entrenchment in Syria. With relative quiet in Lebanon and Hezbollah
focused on the Syrian civil war, Israel has launched more than 1,000
airstrikes against Iran’s presence in Syria. Recent reports note Iran
may have withdrawn some IRGC assets from Syria, and that some militias
may be moving from Deir Ezzor and Albukamal in the northeast to across
the border in Iraq.
However,
reports have also noted increased threats from Yemen. The US designated
the Houthis as terrorists, which the new administration is expected to
review, and similarly designated militias in Iraq and key figures,
including Abu Fadak of Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq.
US officials also pressed to enable Israel more operational freedom to confront Iran’s militia presence.
This
happened, to some extent, after James Mattis left his role as secretary
of defense in 2018. It is believed that James Jeffrey and others at the
State Department pressed for more support for Israel in its campaign
against Iran in Syria.
That
means that between 2018 and the end of 2020 there was a kind of
hand-in-glove approach: Israel was the fist that hammered the Iranians
in Syria, and the US was the glove around the fist, encouraging and
supporting it. For the US, this was a win-win because the administration
could say it didn’t start any new foreign wars – it just outsourced
them to Israel.
For
defense experts, some of whom were reportedly skeptical about the
abilities of the F-35, there has been a boon as well, with three joint
training exercises between US and Israeli F-35 pilots last year.
According to an Al Arabiya report last May, Israel has used the F-35
against Iranian targets in Syria. The first reports of the F-35 being
used in combat date back to 2018.
Iraq’s
government and its pro-Iranian militias blame Israel for carrying out
airstrikes in July and August 2019 against Iranian militia targets in
Iraq. This caused tensions between Iraq and US air operations. It has
also caused the pro-Iran militias to look skyward.
An
explosion in Iraq earlier this month led militias to spread rumors of
another mysterious strike. That was proven to be false, but the initial
blame game illustrates how Israel is viewed. In the fall of 2017, Qais
Khazali, an Iraqi pro-Iran militia leader, went to Lebanon and said
Iraq’s militias would support Hezbollah if a war broke out with Israel.
Current
and future discussions with the Biden administration will focus on the
larger Iranian octopus spreading its tentacles across the region. How to
deal with that octopus and all its threats is the real hurdle. The
nuclear program is just the kind of distracting dress that the octopus
wears to distract from the larger looming problem.
Sputnik One says: We know already that the pro-Iran nuclear deal resumption Biden Administration has reached out to the Iranians & so its a matter of watching what Bidens national security & Defense Dept. team will be doing in the next 6 months to a year to determine if Biden is completely willing to sell out vital US national security interests with its allies & trading partners in the Middle East or not. My money is on Biden acting behind the scenes using the corrupt Kerry or some other Obama era flunky such as Valerie Jarrett who has deep ties to both Iran & Syria and are hostile both to Israel & the Saudis & Gulf States and Biden will do this whilst ordinary blue collar Americans are focused on Bidens plans to put them out of work whilst bringing millions more low IQ unskilled welfare migrants from South America, Africa & the Mid-East & creating for them a fast track to citizenship to ensure a Democrat majority in perpetuity within a decade or two.
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