Editor’s note: Peter Bergen is a national security analyst for CNN, vice president of New America, professor of practice at Arizona State University, and host of the Audible Podcast.in the room” is also on apple and spotify. He is the author of “.The rise and fall of Osama bin Laden” The views expressed in this commentary are his own.read more opinion On CNN.
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Ostensibly, Saturday’s Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel comes two weeks after Israel launched an airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing at least seven officials, including the commander of the country’s Revolutionary Guards. It was a reaction to the murder.
But it is also a product of decades of building animosity between Iran and Israel, including its ally the United States, and the nature of the Iranian regime and the policies of the West since the United States. This was the result of both policy shifts and blunders. The Shah of Iran, allied with Israel, was overthrown by Islamists in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in 2006 that “a modern, strong, and peaceful Iran could become a pillar of regional stability and development.” “That can’t happen unless Iran’s leaders decide whether they represent a cause or a nation. Be it.”
Like other regimes driven by revolutionary ideology, Iran’s Ayatollahs have chosen to become a cause, exporting their influence and ideas to other countries and a range of extremist groups.
According to Karim Sajjadpour, an Iran expert I recently interviewed on the Audible podcast, the Ayatollah’s goals are threefold: expelling the United States from the Middle East, replacing Israel with Palestine, and creating a U.S.-led world order. It is to collapse the. In the room with Peter Bergen. ” These are not modest goals, but Sajadpour said the revolutionary fervor of Iranian leaders cannot be underestimated.
Iran’s campaign to oust the United States from the Middle East began in Lebanon in the early 1980s. At the time, Iran was backing a ragtag group of extremists in the Shiite-dominated south of Beirut who had founded the “Party of God” Hezbollah.
Using a then-unconventional suicide bombing method, they bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including eight CIA employees, making it the deadliest day in CIA history. Hezbollah also bombed a Marine barracks building in Beirut, killing 241 American soldiers.
These attacks by Hezbollah achieved their objectives. The Reagan administration withdrew all US troops from Lebanon. A wealthy young Saudi fundamentalist named Osama bin Laden was watching closely. He concluded that if he put enough military pressure on the Americans, they would withdraw from the Middle East.
After bin Laden’s al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, the United States effectively handed the Iranians a big gift. It was the overthrow of Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein, Iran’s sworn enemy, with whom Iran had fought a disastrous battle in 2003. A 10-year war in the 1980s.
After the fall of Saddam, Iraq suffered a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Iran introduced highly effective roadside bombs known as EFPs (Explosively Formed Penetrators) into Iraq’s war zone, injuring and killing hundreds of American soldiers. The US withdrew from Iraq in 2011.
The official US military history of the Iraq war concludes that Iran is the only winner of that war. This was the conclusion not of the vocal war critic Noam Chomsky, but of a group of dispassionate U.S. Army historians.
Norman Rule was the head of US intelligence on Iran from 2008 to 2017. Ruhl told me on the podcast “In the Room.” “Iran has a cookie-cutter approach across the region, but each country’s circumstances are different and cooking times vary.”
Syria’s civil war began in 2011, and Iran offered another opportunity for this run-of-the-mill approach by supporting the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad with billions of dollars in aid, Iranian advisers, and local Hezbollah forces. I looked at it. They are fighting for the Assad regime.
This comes as senior Iranian military leaders and advisers, such as those killed in the April 1 Israeli airstrike that triggered a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones against Israel on Saturday, continue to have a presence in Damascus. It explains that there is.
In Yemen, the Houthis have begun fighting the central government, with Iran training them and supplying them with missiles and drones, especially after Saudi Arabia, Iran’s rival for regional control, intervened in the Yemeni war in 2015. did. These are the same weapons the Houthis use against ships in the Red Sea, effectively closing shipping lanes to and from the Suez Canal and cutting off a vital route for global trade.
And then there’s Hamas. Christine Abizaid, director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, said Iran had no knowledge of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, but the U.S. Treasury Department says Iran has provided weapons and training to Hamas for several months. He reportedly offered $1 billion. .
Iran’s proxies in the Middle East currently exert more or less significant influence in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. These proxies are widely known as the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel and the United States, and they exert influence in an area stretching 1,500 miles from Lebanon in the north to Yemen’s Red Sea coast in the south. And now the Iranians are closer than ever to acquiring nuclear weapons.
The Trump administration’s most significant foreign policy failure was withdrawing from the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal, which prevented Iran from enriching uranium beyond about 4%. Nuclear devices require approximately 90% enriched uranium. Iran was in compliance with the terms of the nuclear deal before former President Donald Trump abandoned it, according to Trump’s own intelligence chiefs. The Iranians now reportedly have enough highly enriched uranium to power three weapons and are believed to be closer than ever to possessing a viable nuclear weapon.
Saturday’s drone and missile attacks on Israel were aimed at showing Israel and the region that the Iranian regime cannot be ignored and that Israeli attacks on military leaders in Damascus will be retaliated against. However, according to the Israeli military, 99% of the 300 drones and missiles launched by Iran have been intercepted, so a major war may not be triggered. Facing mass protests at home and undergoing a generational change, Iran’s theocratic regime has no choice but to retaliate for the attack on Damascus without triggering a major war with its two superior militaries: the United States and Israel. It is highly likely that they wanted to respond to the demands of the company.
The announcement was made by the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York. statement As the Iranian attack was underway, Iran responded to the attack on “our diplomatic facilities in Damascus” and said “the issue can be considered resolved.”
Of course, that does not mean that Israel considers the problem resolved. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to achieve his strategic goals in Gaza, which are to annihilate Hamas militarily and return the 100 or so hostages held by Hamas, and he remains unpopular with most Israelis. Although not well-liked, he would definitely benefit from the rally. The around-the-flag effect of portraying oneself as an active wartime leader. Of course, the Israeli public, which has just endured a barrage of Iranian missile and drone attacks, may also demand action to restore deterrence against Iran.
That’s why, even though President Joe Biden called Prime Minister Netanyahu on Saturday night to tell him that Iran’s attack was not successful and said the United States would not support any counterattack, It would be almost impossible not to react in some way.
And here, as the escalation of the regional conflict that the Biden administration has long sought to avoid continues to accelerate, everyone wonders where the red lines are and what could spark a major war with Iran. It is unclear whether this will happen, and the situation could get even worse.
The problem, as Abizaid pointed out in an interview on my podcast before Saturday’s attack on Iran, is that “everyone has a kind of general understanding of what these red lines are. “Events can change perceptions about whether a line has been crossed.” anytime. ”
On Monday, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani will meet with Mr. Biden at the White House. The talks come amid considerable pressure within Iraq to withdraw the 2,500 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq on a mission against ISIS.
The withdrawal of US troops from neighboring Iraq is an important goal of Iran, which has great influence over some Iraqi politicians.
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This poses a dilemma for both the Iraqi government and the Biden administration, as U.S. forces in Iraq have been a frequent target of Iranian-backed militias since the start of the Gaza war. These attacks stopped after the killing of three U.S. soldiers by an Iranian-backed militia in Jordan in January, but as the conflict with Iran begins to escalate, the attacks on U.S. military bases in Iraq are likely to continue. Attacks may resume.
Counterbalancing that, the last time the US withdrew all troops from Iraq was in 2011, and within three years ISIS had taken over much of the country, a history that most Iraqis do not want to repeat. is.
It will be interesting to see whether the Biden administration puts significant pressure on the Iraqi prime minister to keep American troops on the ground in Iraq, given the Iranians’ increasingly belligerent stance.
