The Spectator, 2/2

The US has failed to stop Iran and its proxies

Nine years ago, with Vice President Joe Biden at his side, US President Barack Obama announced the Iran nuclear deal. Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime would eliminate its stockpile of medium enriched uranium, reduce by two thirds the number of its gas centrifuges, and enrich only to 3.67% for the next fifteen years. In return America would lift economic sanctions. It was ‘historic’, Obama said. The Iranians had been close to developing their first nuke. Obama’s agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, stopped them. ‘This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring about real and meaningful change – change that makes our country, and the world, safer and more secure’, said the then President from the White House lectern.

 Obama was wrong. If recent months are anything to go by, America’s diplomatic attempts to fix the Middle East have been an unmitigated disaster. The region isn’t safer, nor more secure. Why? Centrally, Obama’s nuclear deal was too narrow, leaving Iran room to develop the proxy military and terror groups that are now bringing misery to the Middle East.

Obama’s Democratic successor, Joe Biden, has done nothing to fix the mess. The main dividing line in the Middle East today is whether you’re on Iran’s side or not.

For a brief period, under Donald Trump, America’s Iran policy changed direction. Trump’s administration hammered the Iranian economy with sanctions that cut its oil exports by four-fifths, and devalued its currency by two-thirds. Four years ago this month, a US drone strike took out Qasem Soleimani – the second-most powerful figure in Iran, a man central to the regime’s proxy network. Trump said his ‘maximum pressure’ campaign would force Khamenei and the mullahs into submission, stop Iran making a nuclear bomb, and end the regime-sponsored terrorism. 

 But Biden’s White House has returned the status quo ante.  Prior to the deadly Hamas attack on 7 October, his administration was trying to revive Obama’s nuclear deal. US officials met with Iranian counterparts in Oman and in New York, all while Tehran’s proxies were carrying out rocket and drone attacks on US positions in north east Syria.  

Now, the illusion that the Iranian regime could be tamed and domesticated through inducements is collapsing in ruins. 

Over 160 attacks on US positions in Iraq and Syria have taken place since October 7.  This week, Iran’s campaign claimed its first fatalities.  Three US service personnel were killed in a drone attack at the Tower 22 outpost on the Syrian-Jordanian border.  30 more were injured, some with traumatic brain injuries. 

The US response to this wave of attacks has until now been muted. A drone strike killed Jawad al-Jawari, a senior official of the Nujaba movement, a key IRGC-linked militia in Iraq, on 4 January. It did nothing to stop Iran’s campaign.

It remains to be seen if the fatalities on the border will now lead to a more determined response.  Don’t be too sure.  Some reports have suggested that the attacks are leading the Administration to consider a rapid withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and Syria.  Such a retreat, if carried out, would be a historic mistake, projecting weakness at precisely the time when the opposite is needed. 

Further south, in the Red Sea, the Iran allied Houthis are still targeting commercial ships, despite US and UK strikes.  A British linked oil tanker, the Marlin Luanda, was struck by the Yemeni rebels on Saturday, in the latest such incident.  The Houthis are the thinnest of masks over the face of the IRGC. The Qader long range ballistic missile intercepted by Israel’s Arrow 2 defence system outside the earth’s atmosphere on 31 October was not built in a backyard in Saada by a north Yemeni tribal militia. The Wa’id drones attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea are direct copies of the Iranian Shahed 136 system.

 The Houthis’ attacks are guided by the Iranian intelligence gathering ship, the Behshad, which guides the Yemeni Islamist rebels’ strikes on ships that seek to switch off identifiers. The frigate Alborz, too, has now deployed in the Red Sea, in support of the Houthis’ operations.  Biden was asked recently if the strikes were ‘working’. His reply was telling: ‘Well, when you say “working” are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes,’ he replied.  Continuing at the current level and tempo is unlikely to produce results different to those already achieved (ie, none). 

Then there’s Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Lebanese Shia Islamists clearly want to avoid the punishment being meted out to Gaza, while still not leaving their southern ally to face Israel alone. This dictates the pitch of the fighting. But one should not overdo this ‘limited’ nature of the contest: some 170 Hezbollah fighters have died, including the senior commanders Wissam Tawil and Ali Hussein Burji. An IRGC commander, Razi Mousavi, and a top Hamas official, Saleh al Arouri, have also been killed.

Around 86,000 Israelis and over 100,000 Lebanese have left their homes in the zone of conflict. IDF sources tell me that they are satisfied with the performance of the military in this arena (9 soldiers have died). But the matter of the northern border can’t stay as it is; it has to be resolved which could mean an all-out war. ‘We are fighting an axis, not a single enemy,’ Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said recently. ‘Iran is building up military power around Israel in order to use it… They see what is happening in Gaza. They know we can copy paste to Beirut.’

In the last two weeks, in addition to killing the three US service personnel, Iran bombed three countries: Pakistan, Syria and Iraq.

Teheran is still trying, meanwhile, to insure itself against interference with its nuclear program. Late last year an IAEA report indicated that Iran possesses 22 times the amount of enriched uranium permitted, and enough uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity to build three atomic bombs.

Lastly, the Iranian regime is waging silent war, alongside its kinetic operations. In September last year, it emerged that Ariane Tabatabai, a Pentagon official who worked with Biden’s chief Iran negotiator, Robert Malley, was part of a shady group of pro-Iranian academics and researchers called the Iran Experts Initiative. Tabatabai checked with Iran’s foreign ministry before attending policy events and conferences. ‘[I] will keep you updated on the progress’, she wrote in one email to them.  Other members of the IEI wrote newspaper articles for Iranian officials.

Tehran’s goal is clear.  It is not solely regional hegemony. Iran wishes to replace the post-Cold War US-led security architecture in the region with a nexus dominated by itself, alongside other anti-western forces, specifically Russia and China.

 The Middle East is as a result of this effort at its highest point of tension in years.

 Washington has tried to confine the conflict to Gaza since 7 October, and to contain rather than confront Iran’s proxies who have taken advantage of the fractured nature of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Clearly, it hasn’t worked. While the focus has been on Israel, Iran’s wider ambitions and activities have been ignored.

 The US might now have no choice but to respond with more force to not only the Houthis, but Iran more directly. Until now, the Administration has appeared determined to telegraph to Iran that no such options are under consideration. Rather, it seeks to let the Iranians know that the US desires only to return to the pre October 7 situation.  “Nobody’s looking for a conflict with Iran,” reassured White House Spokesman John Kirby, after the US struck Iranian munitions dumps in Syria in late October 2023. “No intention nor desire to engage in further hostilities”  said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, after the same operation.

 The Iranians appear to interpret such statements as invitations to continue and intensify attacks. 

Iran is paying close attention to the US’s support for Israel to see if it wavers. Biden is entering an election year and has already upset his progressive Democrat base. Any sign of the US’s resolve waning will also empower Gaza’s Islamist authority, which, while having sustained massive damage since the war began has not yet been destroyed.

The US’s enemies are no doubt satisfied watching the post-Cold War US designed security architecture of the Middle East region come under sustained attack.  Russia is an emergent strategic ally of Iran: Moscow sells the Iranians advanced weapons systems such as the S-300 air defence system. It relies on its partner in Teheran for the drone and missile supplies needed in its grinding war of aggression in Ukraine. The two are strategic partners in Syria, too. Moscow is undoubtedly hoping that the attention now demanded by the challenge in the Middle East will permit it to push further forward in Ukraine at an opportune moment.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the past stressed the personal rapport he had built up with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the better to ensure Israeli freedom of action in Syria, where Russian forces are also deployed.  As of now, the Israel-Russia deconfliction channel in Syria remains intact, according to Israeli security sources.  But the more general direction of Russian strategy in the region – toward greater alliance with enemies of the west – is clear. 

 China, too, which quietly enabled Iran to get through the brief period of US ‘maximum pressure’ under Trump by maintaining oil purchases, is waiting and watching in the wings. Beijing tends to avoid noise in its Middle East activities, but in addition to its role as the main receiver of Iranian crude oil exports, it has been conducting joint annual naval exercises with the Iranians and Russians since 2019. Chinese and North Korean weaponry has turned up in surprisingly large quantities in the hands of Hamas fighters in Gaza in recent weeks. China failed to clearly condemn the massacres of the 7^th of October.  Its call for a ‘larger-scale, more authoritative and more effective international peace conference’ on Gaza appears designed to place Beijing within the broadly pro-Palestinian camp, while avoiding a major rift with Israel.  China’s practical moves on the ground matter more, however, than these first unsteady steps in regional diplomacy.  Perhaps most importantly, should the West falter again in the Middle East and in Ukraine, this will provide a no doubt well noted lesson for the Chinese regarding their own ambitions toward Taiwan.

 Israeli and western failure to understand the nature and the potency of the marriage of political Islam from below and the Iranian regime from above, allowed the danger to build in plain sight.  A major challenge is now being mounted, on three fronts, to the Middle-East order as it has existed since the 1990s. The killings of the three US servicemen at Tower 22, and the recent Iranian missile attacks on Kurdish northern Iraq and on Pakistan further confirm it – this is a regime out of control, operating far from the norms of the international system.  Efforts to normalize the Iranian regime and its regional role through temptation  and inducement failed. Containment and passive defence haven’t worked, either. The fallout could yet still be a large-scale conflict that will engulf the entire region – and potentially beyond.