Iran has scored a staggering victory in the Middle East with the Gaza War. It has managed to belittle and destabilize its mortal enemy Israel, long seen as a political and military powerhouse in the Middle East. And at little or no cost to itself.
With GDP per capita today ranking it 120th in the world and less than 4% of Ireland’s, Iran is for all purposes a nonentity. So, how did this happen? What are the consequences?
First, a little history. Iran is the world’s longest running continuous civilization, dating back at least 6,000 years. It was the home of the first agricultural developments 7,000 years ago which allowed us to scale from tribes to nations. These people have been around for a very long time; they’ve seen it all.
Second, some geography. A glance at the map shows that for all its 6,000-year history, Iran has been at the intersection of major trading routes connecting the Caspian, Black and Mediterranean Seas and the Indian Ocean and all the economies attached to them. Thus, Iranians could trade goods from The Orient, South Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Empires came and went. But, no one else was similarly situated. Iran alone still exists. Though now poor and unhappy with its status.
Like The Center of Everything (“China” in English) under Xi Jinping, Iran wants its rightful ranking and power back. For both, nuclear force is the way to do this.
Had our political leadership understood the last three paragraphs, it would, as Publius recommended seven years ago, have offered free trade in exchange for denuclearization. Iranians, with their trading history would have jumped at the chance to extend their ancient network across the Atlantic and Pacific at the same time. The Mullahs would have been tossed. Iranians would be rich, their prestige restored.
But, Dumb Don, who cannot read Publius’ three paragraphs and would not be able to understand them even if read to him, went the other way. In 2018, he pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear pact with Iran. Now Israel is paying the price and will keep paying for many centuries.
What happened? How did Iran pull this off?
Painfully simple.
In the Camp David Accords of September 1978, Israel and Egypt worked out a peace deal in which Israel returned control of the Sinai, which it won in the Six Day War of 1967, to Egypt.
But, Egypt refused to take back densely populated Gaza and sealed its own border with the place to keep the Gazans out. In doing so, it carefully and very, very cynically, embedded a powerful bomb of enmity inside Israel. Publius remembers well understanding at the time that all Egypt had to do was sit back and wait for the thing to go off. The longer it took, the bigger the explosion would be. Israel would be destabilized without Egypt having to lift a finger. Revenge.
Not complicated and to this day completely obvious to all parties involved and to every country in the world with even the smallest interest in what is going on.
Only months later, in early 1979, revolution hit Iran, bringing in a Mullah-managed, Israel- and U.S.-hating theocracy. The Iran Hostage crisis hit later that year and Iran’s divorce from the west was complete.
So also was Iran’s divorce from economic opportunity and its historic path to growth through global trade. Whence its miserable standing today. A Mullah-designed road to failure. Which became evident in the protests of 2011-12 and ten years later in the Masha Amini protests of 2022.
Faced with economic failure on such a massive scale, the Mullahs, like Xi Jing Ping and Vladimir Putin, needed a major distraction to focus its people elsewhere. The Gaza Bomb was perfect.
The place is so unstable that, like Egypt, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority were forced to leave it long ago. Radical Islamists, Hamas, took control, making the Gaza Bomb even more dangerous.
All Iran had to do was arm Hamas and sit back and wait. It could see what Hamas and everyone else could see. Israel had made a staggering misjudgment that Iran could easily leverage to destabilize the country for centuries to come.
For the four and a half decades following Camp David, all Gazans had to do was look across the fence to see that Israel did not do what the map told it to do. Place a 50-mile wide exclusion zone along its Gaza border to minimize casualties among Israelis when the Gaza Bomb went off.
Which it did on October 7th.
Israel responded with the full ferocity that the Mullahs expected, destabilizing itself politically and geographically and subverting its global image. Whatever the outcome, Israel is stuck with Gaza, the eternal enmity of its people and of Israel’s immediate neighbors, and with a vastly diminished position on the world stage. No cost to the Mullahs.
Joy in Tehran.
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