Supported by
Thomas L. Friedman
America May Soon Face a Fateful Choice About Iran
Opinion Columnist
One of my ironclad rules of reporting in the Middle East is that sometimes you need to rereport a story to see things even more clearly than you did earlier. I’m having that experience with the Iran-Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, which could soon draw in the United States. It could not be more clear now that, while Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was triggered in part by reckless Israeli settlement expansions, brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners and encroachments on Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem, the terrorist assault was also part of a broader Iranian campaign to drive America out of the Middle East and America’s Arab and Israeli allies into a corner — before they could corner Iran.
Which is why if the current tit-for-tat conflict between Israel and Iran and Iran’s proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) escalates into a full-scale war — one that Israel could not fight for very long alone — President Biden could face the most fateful decision of his presidency: whether to go to war with Iran, alongside Israel, and take out Tehran’s nuclear program, which is the keystone of Iran’s strategic network in the region. Iran has been building that network to supplant America as the most powerful force in the Middle East and to bleed Israel to death by a thousand cuts inflicted by its proxies.
But America must always be wary about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is up to. As a former Israeli diplomat, Alon Pinkas, observed in Haaretz on Thursday, one has to wonder why Netanyahu chose now to assassinate the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran — in the middle of delicate hostage talks.
Was it just because it could (lord knows Haniyeh had a lot of Israeli blood on his hands), or was Israel “deliberately provoking escalation in the hope that a conflagration with Iran will drag the United States into the conflict, further distancing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the debacle of Oct. 7 — a calamity that to this day he has not been held accountable for.”
In Netanyahu’s nearly 17 years in power, Bibi has both aided and undermined American interests in the region. I would not trust Netanyahu for a second to put U.S. interests ahead of his own political survival needs — since he won’t even put Israel’s interests ahead of them.
But honesty also requires me to acknowledge that some things are true even if Netanyahu believes them. And one of those things is that Iran is the biggest indigenous imperial power in the Middle East, and through its proxies it has been dominating the politics of millions of Arabs living in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen — dragging their citizens into wars with Israel that few of them have any interest in. No leader in any of these Arab states today can make decisions hostile to Iran’s interests without fear of being killed.
Lebanon has not been able to appoint a president since Oct. 30, 2022, in large part because Tehran won’t allow an independent Lebanese patriot to be in charge there. Lebanon and Syria had to observe three days of mourning after Iran’s president died in a helicopter crash. Yup, three days of mourning for another country’s president. There is a name for that: Iranian imperialism.
Some things are also true even if Iran believes them, too. And one of those is that Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, have been quietly and effectively building a network of extensive alliances over the past few years to contain China and isolate Iran.
One is the new economic grouping called I2-U2, which includes India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S. And the other — even more important — is the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, known as IMEC.
IMEC was designed to foster tighter trade and energy supply links between the European Union and India — via U.S. allies on the Persian Gulf. The goal: to help India escape from China’s efforts to encircle New Delhi through its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative and to create a grand, pro-American geoeconomic alliance stretching from the E.U. through Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. all the way over to India that would also isolate Iran. The founding IMEC partners are the U.S., the E.U., Saudi Arabia, India, the U.A.E., France, Germany and Italy.
The American plan was to give military weight to these interlocking alliances by forging, at their heart, a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia that would also involve Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, provided that Israel agreed to make progress toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Once forged, this would mean that all of America’s Middle East allies would be operating as a counter-Iranian team — Jordan, Egypt, the U.A.E., Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in particular.
Iran knew it had to prevent this Saudi-U.S.-Israel deal or be strategically isolated. Hamas knew it had to prevent this deal because it could enable Israel’s integration into the Muslim world — in partnership with Hamas’s chief Palestinian rival, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and with Saudi Arabia.
How do we know Iran believed this? Because Iran’s supreme leader told us so four days before Hamas invaded Israel. It is rather chilling to read today this story in The Times of Israel from Oct. 3, 2023:
Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei said that Muslim countries that are normalizing with Israel are “betting on a losing horse,” state-run media reported Tuesday, as regional rival Saudi Arabia moves toward establishing ties with Jerusalem. Khamenei also predicted Israel would soon be eradicated, in an address to government officials and ambassadors from Muslim countries. … “The definitive stance of the Islamic republic is that the governments which prioritize the gamble of normalization with the Zionist regime will incur losses,” he said. … “Today, the situation of the Zionist regime is not one that should motivate closeness to it; they shouldn’t make this mistake.”
Whether or not Iran knew of the precise timing in advance, Iran surely saw Hamas’s invasion of Gaza as a way of isolating Israel and its American patron by forcing Israel to inflict thousands of civilian casualties to defeat Hamas’s underground network and undermine any Saudi-Palestinian-Israeli normalization. That is the larger story here.
How, though, will it end? In the past month Israel assassinated the senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr in Beirut; Hamas’s political leader, Haniyeh; and Muhammad Deif, the Hamas military commander, in Gaza. They were all obsessed with dragging their people into endless war to destroy the Jewish state.
But Israel killed the No. 1 and No. 2 leaders of Hamas before. The problem is, Hamas and Hezbollah are networks, and as the network strategist John Arquilla, the author of “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare,” once taught me, “In a network, everyone is No. 2.” Successors always emerge, often worse than their predecessors.
The only way to truly marginalize Hamas politically and isolate Iran regionally is for Israel to help empower the obvious and more moderate alternative: the Palestinian Authority, which has embraced the Oslo Accords and cooperates with Israel daily to try to keep a lid on West Bank violence — which Netanyahu knows very well but will not acknowledge because he wants to delegitimize any credible Palestinian alternative to Hamas so he can tell the world, and Israelis, that Israel has no partner for a two-state solution.
With that one chess move — embracing the Palestinian Authority — Netanyahu could cement the U.S.-Israeli-Arab alliance, put in place a Palestinian governing structure in Gaza that would not threaten Israel and isolate Iran and its proxies militarily and politically, making their bet on Hamas’s war an utter waste of lives and money. But Bibi would have to risk his governing coalition to do it, because his extremist far-right messianic partners oppose any deal with any credible Palestinians.
Bottom line: I believed early on in the Gaza war that these were the real stakes, but now they are crystal clear. What is not at all clear is what Bibi will do. Whose interests will he serve? His, Israel’s, America’s or Iran’s?
Because if Netanyahu made the right move now, it would leave Iran naked politically. Iran would no longer be able to disguise its goal to control the whole Arab world by hiding itself and its proxies behind the Palestinian cause. Iran has long been happy to let Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Iraqis and Syrians die “for Palestine” but never risk Iranians if it could avoid that. The crocodile tears shed by Iran’s clerical leaders for Palestinians are all a fraud — all just a cover for Tehran’s regional imperialist adventure.
Netanyahu can now pull back the curtain on the whole cynical play. But that would require him to put Israel’s interests ahead of his own political survival. Will he?
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
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