CNN Fareed's Global Briefing -October 26, 2023 : Iran's Dangerous Game

 

Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good   Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here.   October 26, 2023

Iran’s ‘Dangerous Game’ As analysts wonder if the Israel–Hamas war will expand into a broader regional conflagration, one country looms over that speculation: Iran.   “If you blow too hard on the embers, don’t you risk of getting burnt in a headwind?” Ghazal Golshiri and Madjid Zerrouky write for Le Monde. “Faced with what they perceive as an unprecedented weakness on Israel’s side, the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran are walking a tightrope: they want to emphasize this weakness while avoiding a direct armed confrontation with the Jewish state.”   A longtime supporter of Hamas, Iran attracted speculation after the Palestinian terrorist group (and governing authority in Gaza) launched its horrific attacks on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. At The Atlantic, veteran Middle East journalist Kim Ghattas soon suggested that Iran’s unseen hand may have been at play. To date, no direct evidence has emerged publicly to suggest Iran had a role or a say in Hamas’s attacks, and Iran’s supreme leader has said his country was not involved. But Ghattas noted that Hamas is part of Tehran’s “axis of resistance,” a network of militant groups it supports, stretching from Iran to Gaza.   In recent years, Iran and Israel have engaged in a “shadow war” across the region featuring assassinations and proxy forces, as UCLA political scientist and Middle East expert Dalia Dassa Kaye detailed in Foreign Affairs in February. Ghattas and others seemed to view Hamas’s attacks as potentially a part of that semi-covert conflict. “That’s what makes a northern front, including Iran’s proxy Hezbollah, well within the realm of possibility,” Steven A. Cook said in a recent Council on Foreign Relations video on the Israel–Hamas war, referencing concerns that Hezbollah could attack Israel and open a new fighting front on Israel’s northern border.   As fears of a wider conflict simmer, The Economist warns that Iran is playing “the Middle East’s most dangerous game,” noting the decades of effort Tehran has spent building up its regional proxies. “Iran’s goal right now, as it has been over the past decade, is not to provoke outright war with the West and its allies but to sow uncertainty and instability,” the magazine asserts. “Just as it has hovered on the threshold of becoming a nuclear power, so it maintains strategic ambiguity with the axis (of regional proxy forces). … The present crisis shows the opportunities and problems of Iran’s approach. It has long sponsored Hamas but did not appear to know in advance about its attack on Israel on October 7th, according to Western officials familiar with the matter. Yet it has sought to capitalise on Hamas’s atrocities and mobilise the axis of resistance. … Iran’s shadow war is a delicate game and it is not clear that the country can control its proxies.”

If Israel Faces a 9/11 Moment, Does Hamas Also? Israel faces a 9/11 moment, various commentators have written: It suffered an attack reminiscent of al Qaeda’s World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, in scale and in the horror inflicted. US President Joe Biden warned Israel not to be “consumed” by “rage” as the US was after 9/11, as some commentators suggest Israel could be provoked into a strategic blunder reminiscent of America’s post-9/11 wars.   But there’s another 9/11 analogy that focuses on Hamas.   Grim as it is to call any mass murder and kidnapping a “success,” Hamas did achieve its plans, as New America senior fellow Nelly Lahoud writes for Foreign Affairs. Similarly, Lahoud writes, al Qaeda met with operational success on 9/11—success for which it was unprepared. “Bin Laden’s plan … completely backfired,” Lahoud writes. “Contrary to his expectations, Washington quickly responded to the September 11 attacks by launching a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan to root out his group, and it largely succeeded.” In a recent Foreign Affairs essay examining al Qaeda’s “catastrophic success,” Lahoud examined (before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks) the dimensions of al Qaeda’s strategic backfire in 2001. Rather than inspire similar attacks and launch a global jihad, bin Laden’s terrorist group was quickly “crippled” by a vast US response. Its leaders were killed or captured, and al Qaeda sank into management troubles as its global influence waned.   In the new essay, Lahoud wonders if Hamas will meet a similar fate. “For now, Hamas will likely continue to double down on its rhetoric and sing the praises” of its massacres, Lahoud writes. “But in the years after his attack, bin Laden found that most regional jihadi groups proved to be a liability to global jihad, and that their indiscriminate attacks ‘repulsed’ Muslims. Hamas, too, might be unnerved and potentially eclipsed if the conflict assumes a regional dimension.”

Does Israel Have a ‘Window of Legitimacy’ to Hit Hamas? Provoked into war by Hamas’s horrific massacres, Israel faces criticism for a military response that is costing Palestinian civilian lives. Does it enjoy a finite “window” of international “legitimacy” to eliminate Hamas, as it intends to?   At The New Yorker, Mosab Abu Toha shares firsthand experience of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, underscoring the terror and desperation civilians are feeling: “That night, around 8:30, a blast lights up the apartment where we have taken refuge. Dust fills every corner of the room. I hear screams as loud as the explosion. I go outside, but I can hardly walk because the lanes are filled with stone and rebar. My brother-in-law’s car, about fifty metres away, is on fire. Nearby, a house is burning. On the second floor, which no longer has any walls, I can see an injured woman hanging over the edge of the building, holding a motionless child.”   Noting calls for Israeli restraint, The Economist writes: “The best way to try to extend Israel’s ‘window of legitimacy’ with its Western and Arab allies would be to signal that it is prepared to participate in some kind of plan for the Palestinians if it succeeds in removing Hamas. … Israel’s lack of a plan for the Palestinians could also now compromise its ability to sustain a long campaign.”   Such a plan, of course, would be difficult to form. As various analysts including The Economist have written, it’s not clear that the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority would be willing or able to govern Gaza, and difficult diplomacy would be needed to cobble together viable Arab sponsors for a post-Hamas governing authority in Gaza.

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