{"id":1535011,"date":"2024-03-05T06:55:14","date_gmt":"2024-03-05T06:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=315151"},"modified":"2024-03-05T06:55:14","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T06:55:14","slug":"is-tehran-winning-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/03\/05\/is-tehran-winning-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Tehran Winning the Middle East?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by hosein charbaghi.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the midst of Israel\u2019s ongoing devastation of Gaza, one major piece of Middle Eastern news has yet to hit the headlines. In a face-off that, in a sense, has lasted since the pro-American Shah of Iran was overthrown by theocratic clerics in 1979, Iran finally seems to be besting the United States in a significant fashion across the region. It\u2019s a story that needs to be told.<\/p>\n

\u201cHit Iran now. Hit them hard\u201d was typical\u00a0advice<\/a>\u00a0offered by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham after a drone flown by an Iran-aligned Iraqi Shiite militia killed three American servicemen in northern Jordan on January 28th. The well-heeled Iran War Lobby in Washington has, in fact, been stridently calling for nothing short of a U.S. invasion of that country, accusing Tehran of complicity in Hamas\u2019s October 7th terrorist attack on Israel.<\/p>\n

No matter that the official Iranian press has vehemently\u00a0denied<\/a>\u00a0the allegation, while American intelligence officials swiftly\u00a0concluded<\/a>\u00a0that the attack on Israel had taken top Iranian leaders by surprise. In mid-November,\u00a0Reuters<\/a>\u00a0reported that Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei informed a key Hamas figure, Ismail Haniya, that his country wouldn\u2019t intervene directly in the Gaza war, since Tehran hadn\u2019t been warned about the October 7th attack before it was launched. He actually seemed annoyed that the leadership of the Hamas paramilitary group, the Qassam Brigades, thought they could draw Tehran and its allies willy-nilly into a major conflict without the slightest consultation. Although initially caught off-guard, as the Israeli counterattack grew increasingly brutal and disproportionate, Iran\u2019s leaders clearly began to see ways they could turn the war to their regional benefit \u2014 and they\u2019ve done so skillfully, even as the Biden administration in its full-scale embrace of the most extreme government in Israeli history tossed democracy and international law under the bus.<\/p>\n

The gut-wrenching Hamas attacks on civilians at a music festival and those living in left-wing, peacenik Kibbutzim near the Israeli border with Gaza on October 7th initially left Iran in an uncomfortable position. It had allegedly been slipping some\u00a0$70 million<\/a>\u00a0a year to Hamas \u2014 though Egypt and Qatar had provided major funding to Gaza at Israel\u2019s\u00a0request<\/a>\u00a0through sanctioned Israeli government bank accounts. And after decades of championing the Palestinian cause, Tehran could hardly stand by and do nothing as Israel razed Gaza to the ground. On the other hand, the ayatollahs couldn\u2019t afford to gain a reputation for being played like a fiddle by the region\u2019s young radicals and so drawn into conventional wars their country can ill afford.<\/p>\n

The Adults in the Room?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Despite their fiery rhetoric, their undeniable backing of fundamentalist militias in the region, and their depiction by inside-the-Beltway war hawks as the root of all evil in the Middle East, Iran\u2019s leaders have long acted more like a status quo power than a force for genuine change. They have shored up the rule of the autocratic al-Assad family in Syria, while helping the Iraqi government that emerged after President George W. Bush\u2019s invasion of that country fight off the terrorist threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). In truth, not Iran but the U.S. and Israel are the countries that have most strikingly tried to use their power to reshape the region in a Napoleonic manner. The disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and Israel\u2019s wars on Egypt (1956, 1967), Lebanon (1982-2000, 2006), and Gaza (2008, 2012, 2014, 2024), along with its steady encouragement of large-scale squatting on the Palestinian West Bank, were clearly intended to alter the geopolitics of the region permanently through the use of military force on a massive scale.<\/p>\n

Only recently, Ayatollah Khamenei bitterly\u00a0asked<\/a>, \u201cWhy don\u2019t the leaders of Islamic countries publicly cut off their relationship with the murderous Zionist regime and stop helping this regime?\u201d Pointing to the staggering death toll in Israel\u2019s present campaign against Gaza, he was focusing on the Arab countries \u2014 Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates \u2014 that, as part of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner\u2019s \u201cAbraham Accords,\u201d had officially recognized Israel and established relations with it. (Egypt and Jordan had, of course, recognized Israel long before that.)<\/p>\n

Given the anti-Israel sentiment in the region, had it, in fact, been rife with democracies, Iran\u2019s position might have been widely implemented. Still, it was a distinct sign of terminal tone deafness on the part of Biden administration officials that they\u00a0hoped<\/a>\u00a0to use the Gaza crisis to extend the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia, while sidelining the Palestinians and creating a joint Israeli-Arab front against Iran.<\/p>\n

The region had already been moving in a somewhat different direction. Last March, after all, Iran and Saudi Arabia had begun\u00a0forging<\/a>\u00a0a new relationship by restoring the diplomatic relations that had been suspended in 2016 and working to expand trade between their countries. And that relationship has only\u00a0continued to improve<\/a>\u00a0as the nightmare in Israel and Gaza developed. In fact, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi first visited the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in November and, since the Gaza conflict began, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has met twice with his Saudi counterpart. Frustrated by a markedly polarizing American policy in the region, de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Iran\u2019s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei\u00a0resorted<\/a>\u00a0to the good offices of Beijing to sidestep Washington and strengthen their relations further.<\/p>\n

Although Iran is far more hostile to Israel than Saudi Arabia, their leaderships do agree that the days of marginalizing the Palestinians are over. In a remarkably unambiguous\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0issued in early February, the Saudis offered the following: \u201cThe Kingdom has communicated its firm position to the U.S. administration that there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops and all the Israeli occupation forces withdraw from the Gaza Strip.\u201d Significantly, the Saudis even refused to join a U.S.-led naval task force created to halt attacks on Red Sea shipping by the Houthis of Yemen (no friends of theirs) in support of the Palestinians. Its leaders are clearly all too aware that the carnage still being wreaked on Gaza has\u00a0infuriated<\/a>\u00a0most Saudis.<\/p>\n

In late January, President Raisi also surprised regional diplomats by\u00a0traveling<\/a>\u00a0to Ankara for talks on trade and geopolitics with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, another sign of his country\u2019s changing role in the region. At the end of the visit, while signing various agreements to increase trade and cooperation, he\u00a0announced<\/a>: \u201cWe agreed to support the Palestinian cause, the axis of resistance, and to give the Palestinian people their rightful rights.\u201d That\u2019s no small thing. Remember that Turkey is a NATO member and considered a close ally of the United States. To have Erdo\u011fan suddenly cozy up to Iran, while denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s war on Gaza as a\u00a0Hitlerian-style genocide<\/a>, was an unmistakable slap in Washington\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Iran, Turkey, and Russia recently issued a\u00a0joint communiqu\u00e9<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cexpressed deep concern over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and stressed the need to end the Israeli brutal onslaught against the Palestinians, [while] sending humanitarian aid to Gaza.\u201d From the Biden administration\u2019s point of view, Moscow\u2019s bombing of civilian sites in Ukraine and Iran\u2019s role in crushing Sunni Arab rebels in Syria had been the atrocities that needed attention until Netanyahu suddenly pulled the rug out from under them by upping the ante from mere atrocities to what the\u00a0International Court of Justice<\/a>\u00a0has ruled can plausibly be labeled a genocide. One thing was clear: Washington\u2019s long struggle to exclude Iran from regional influence has now visibly failed.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s Rising Popularity<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the Gulf International Forum (GIF) last November, Abdullah Baaboud, a prominent Omani academic,\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that there had been a \u201cvery strong condemnation of Israel from Iran and Turkey, embarrassing some Arab countries that are not using the same language. My worry is that this conflict is leading to the empowerment of Turkey and Iran among the Arab public.\u201d GIF\u2019s executive director, Dania Thafer,\u00a0concurred<\/a>. Of that public, she said, \u201cGrief and anger have reached unprecedented levels,\u201d and added, \u201cwith each photo out of Gaza, Iran gains more influence across the region.\u201d In short, at remarkably little cost, Iran is unexpectedly winning the battle for regional public opinion and its standing in the Arab world has risen strikingly. Meanwhile, the reputation of the United States has been indelibly tarnished by Washington\u2019s full-throated support for what most in the region do indeed see as a merciless slaughter of thousands of children and other innocent civilians.<\/p>\n

A recent opinion\u00a0poll<\/a>\u00a0of Arabs in 16 countries, conducted jointly by the Arab Center in Washington, D.C., and the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar, found that 94% of them considered the American position on Israel\u2019s war \u201cbad.\u201d In contrast, a surprising 48% of them considered the Iranian position positive. To grasp just how remarkable such a finding was, consider that a\u00a0Gallup<\/a>\u00a0poll conducted in 2022 found that Shiite Iran\u2019s name was mud in most Sunni Arab countries and approval of its leadership fell somewhere between 10% and 20%.<\/p>\n

In recent months, Iran has made striking use of the weakness of Washington\u2019s case in the region. While the State Department likes to contrast Iran\u2019s \u201cdictatorship\u201d with Israel\u2019s \u201cdemocratic character,\u201d only recently foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani\u00a0observed<\/a>, \u201cThe disaster in Gaza removed the mask from the face of the so-called advocates of human rights and showed the extent of vileness, brutality, and lies hidden within the nature of the Israeli regime, whose supporters used to refer to [it] as a symbol of democracy.\u201d Although Iran has among the world\u2019s worst human-rights records, Netanyahu has even managed to take the focus off of that.<\/p>\n

Losing the Middle East, Washington-Style<\/strong><\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s allies in the region include Iraqi Shiite militias like the\u00a0Party of God Brigades<\/a>\u00a0(Kata\u2019ib Hizbullah<\/em>), which first gained prominence in the struggle against the ISIL terrorist group from 2014 to 2018. Those were years when the regular Iraqi army had essentially collapsed and was only gradually being rebuilt. Washington was also focused on destroying ISIL then and so developed a wary\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0alliance with them in its campaign to crush that \u201ccaliphate.\u201d In January 2020, however, President Trump was responsible for the drone assassination of the group\u2019s leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, along with Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, just after their arrival by plane at Baghdad International Airport in what was evidently an attempt to prevent them, through the Iraqis, from\u00a0forging<\/a>\u00a0an agreement with Saudi Arabia to reduce tensions with Iran.<\/p>\n

That assassination led to a long-running, low-intensity conflict between the Shiite militias of Iraq and the 2,500 remaining American troops stationed there. With the onset of the Gaza conflict last October, the Party of God Brigades began launching mortars and drones against Iraqi military bases hosting American soldiers, as well as against small forward operating bases in southeast Syria where some 900 U.S. military personnel are stationed, ostensibly to support the Syrian Kurds in mopping up operations against ISIL. After more than 150 such attacks, on January 28th one of their drones hit Tower 22, a support base where U.S. troops were stationed in northern Jordan,\u00a0killing<\/a>\u00a0three American soldiers, while wounding dozens more.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s leaders generally back those Shiite militias, but whether they had anything to do with the attack on Tower 22 remains unknown. Officials in Tehran did, however, immediately recognize the danger of escalation once American troops had actually been killed. And indeed, the Biden administration responded with dozens of air strikes on bases and facilities of the Party of God Brigades in Iraq and Syria.\u00a0Washington Post<\/em><\/a>\u00a0reporters were told by Iraqi and Lebanese officials that Iran had actually urged caution on the militias with clear effect. Their attacks on bases hosting U.S. troops ceased. At the same time, the Iraqi parliament and government\u00a0complained<\/a>\u00a0bitterly about Washington\u2019s violation of the country\u2019s sovereignty, while heightening preparations to force the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from their land. In other words, President Biden\u2019s fierce backing of Israel\u2019s war, his decision to\u00a0increase weapons shipments<\/a>\u00a0to that country, and his bombing of pro-Palestinian militias may have led to the achievement of a longstanding Iranian aim: seeing American troops finally leave Iraq.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in southern Lebanon, where the militant group Hezbollah has been exchanging occasional fire with Israeli forces in support of Gaza, according to the\u00a0Post<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>reporters, one Hezbollah figure told them that Iran\u2019s message was: \u201cWe are not keen on giving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any reason to launch a wider war on Lebanon or anywhere else.\u201d Wars are unpredictable, and the Lebanon-Israeli border could still erupt dramatically. Moreover, Iranian pleas for restraint appear to have had far less effect on the Houthi leadership in Yemen\u2019s capital Sanaa, leading to an ongoing American and British bombing campaign on that city and elsewhere in that country that has so far done little to stop Houthi missile and drone attacks against ships in the Red Sea.<\/p>\n

So far, however, despite the Republican urge to devastate Iran, that country\u2019s leaders have taken deft advantage of the butchery in Gaza (in which the Israeli military has\u00a0killed<\/a>\u00a0more civilian noncombatants each day than belligerents have in any other conflict in this century). The ayatollahs have significantly increased their popularity even among Arab and Muslim publics that had not previously shown them much favor. They have strengthened their relationship with the Shiites of Iraq and may be on the verge of finally achieving their goal of ending the U.S. military missions in Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n

They have also achieved closer ties with Turkey, while improving relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab oil states. In doing so, they have distinctly blunted the Biden administration\u2019s aim of isolating Iran while tying the wealthier Arab states ever more firmly to Israel through arms and high-tech deals.<\/p>\n

In addition, through its backing of and weaponizing of Israel in these last grim months, Washington has made a mockery of the human rights talking points that the U.S. has long deployed against Iran. In the process, Joe Biden has done more than any recent president to undermine both international humanitarian law and democratic principles globally. With\u00a094% of Arab poll respondents<\/a>\u00a0viewing American policy in the region as \u201cbad,\u201d one thing is clear: for the moment at least, Iran has won the Middle East.<\/p>\n

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The post Is Tehran Winning the Middle East?<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the midst of Israel\u2019s ongoing devastation of Gaza, one major piece of Middle Eastern news has yet to hit the headlines. In a face-off that, in a sense, has lasted since the pro-American Shah of Iran was overthrown by theocratic clerics in 1979, Iran finally seems to be besting the United States in a More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Is Tehran Winning the Middle East?<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,204],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535011"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1535011"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1539332,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535011\/revisions\/1539332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1535011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1535011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1535011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}