Iran has declared war on the rest of the world

Douglas Davis says that this conflict can be traced back to the transport via Damascus of a lethal consignment of weapons from Tehran to Hezbollah

The question is not why Hezbollah launched its attack on a routine Israeli military patrol along the Lebanese border on 12 July, but why it chose that specific time.

One thing is certain: the attack was neither random nor impulsive. On the contrary, it appears to have been carefully calculated and intricately planned. Certainly Hezbollah would not have mounted such an operation without the prior knowledge and approval of its patrons — Iran, which arms, trains and funds Lebanon’s Shiite radicals, and Syria, which serves as a conduit and provides essential logistical support.

In fact, the operation had probably been on the drawing board for several months. According to intelligence sources, a major weapons consignment destined for Hezbollah arrived at Damascus airport from Iran in March. That was just one month after Iran had ended its voluntary co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which included surprise inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Iranian consignment was transported in a military convoy through Syria and along Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to Hezbollah bases in south Lebanon. The convoy had received an official transit permit from the Lebanese government, which knew not only the precise nature of the shipment but also its destination.

The sources say the consignment included some 12,000 Katyusha rockets, as well as various other types of missiles. Of particular concern to Israel’s military strategists was the fact that the range of the new rockets had been substantially extended. They were capable of reaching Israel’s main port city of Haifa, possibly well beyond.

At the same time as the missile consignment was heading to Lebanon, an unnamed senior Iranian official said that his country would inflict ‘harm and pain’ on the United States and its allies, and vowed to ‘use any means’ to ‘resist any pressure and threats’ designed to curb Iran’s nuclear programme. The rhetoric was not empty.

One month later the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’, made the dramatic announcement that Iranian scientists had completed the nuclear fuel cycle and were enriching uranium, the essential ingredient for a nuclear weapons programme (Iran insists its uranium enrichment is for strictly peaceful purposes).

So why did Hezbollah wait until last Wednesday before unwrapping those missiles? Largely lost in the heat and dust of the attack and counter-attack was a brief statement issued in Paris on the same day by the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy.

The statement, on behalf of the foreign ministers of the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union, came five weeks after the group had asked Iran to resume negotiations with the IAEA over suspending its nuclear programme. There had still been no response from Tehran. ‘In this context,’ declared Mr Douste-Blazy, ‘we have no choice but to return to the United Nations Security Council and take forward the process that was suspended two months ago. We have agreed to seek a United Nations Security Council resolution which would make the IAEA-required suspension mandatory.’

That announcement, which had been anticipated in Tehran, is the likeliest trigger for last Wednesday’s attack. And the message that Tehran delivered in return, courtesy of its Lebanese proxy, was loud and clear: Iran would — and could — inflict ‘harm and pain’ on US interests; and not just in the Middle East. Hezbollah’s playground extends far beyond the region. It has a formidable global reach.

That was underscored in a report to the US Congress in January this year by the new American intelligence supremo, John D. Negroponte. He noted that Iran was perfectly capable of sparking a wide conflict if it felt threatened. Hezbollah, he added, is ‘Iran’s main terrorist ally, which has a worldwide support network and is capable of attacks against US interests if it feels its Iranian patron is threatened.’

Washington hardly needs reminding of Hezbollah’s lethality. Those members of Congress will not have forgotten that one of the first acts of the newly formed Hezbollah in 1983 was to launch a truck-bomb attack against the Beirut barracks of the US marines, who had been sent to the Lebanese capital on peace-keeping duties at the height of Lebanon’s civil war. The attack cost the lives of 241 US servicemen. But, as Mr Negroponte indicated, Hezbollah can also operate on an international stage.

In March 1994, for example, Thai security officials arrested a Hezbollah terrorist as he was driving a truck laden with explosives near the Israeli embassy in Bangkok. If the truck had detonated, it would have destroyed the entire embassy and blown away several hundred people. Three months later, in faraway Argentina, Hezbollah got lucky. Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese citizen and member of Hezbollah, drove an explosives-packed van into the seven-storey building in Buenos Aires that served as the Jewish community centre. Eighty-five people were killed and more than 200 wounded.

Much is riding on the outcome of the current conflict, not only for Israel but also for the rest of the world. Three important battles are now being played out in the context of the Israeli–Hezbollah–Hamas conflict. Each will have far-reaching international implications — for US–Russian relations, for Iran’s nuclear ambitions and, not least, for the globalised Islamic challenges that confront a slew of states in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East itself.

It was no surprise that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin hummed a distinctly different tune from that of his American guest at the G8 summit in St Petersburg last weekend. Over the past two years Russia has quietly moved from a position of co-operation with the United States to one of rivalry. While Mr Putin expressed himself in more nuanced terms than did his Soviet predecessors, the former KGB officer is staking a claim to superpower status –—bolstered by billions of dollars in oil and gas revenues — and to an independent position on a variety of international issues, including Middle East ones.

This was confirmed by Professor Stephen Blank in a major report published last month by the Conflict Studies Research Centre at the Defence Academy of the UK. Russian policy in the Middle East, says the professor, is increasingly animated by a determination to check American power and influence in the region. This determination is driven in equal measure by a ‘fierce desire’ for global-power status and recognition. And while the Russians are using the language and grammar of multipolarity, their policies are essentially no less unilateral than those of the US.

Quite apart from the fate of Mr Putin’s grand ambitions, the outcome of the exchanges across the Israeli–Lebanese border will provide Mr Ahmadinejad with a clear indicator of just how much (or, perhaps, how little) room he has for manoeuvre in his drive to become a full member of the ‘nuclear club’.

Finally, if Hezbollah is able to emerge with even a shred of military credibility from its encounter with Israel when the Security Council calls time, the outcome will be perceived as a huge victory for Islamism. It is a ‘triumph’ that is likely to carry the seeds of accelerated radicalisation, with possibly devastating consequences — not only for the West but also for a clutch of Middle East states that are already facing a burgeoning Islamist threat: Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and, of course, Lebanon itself.

Concern rather than outrage was the dominant theme at the hastily convened Arab League summit in Cairo last weekend. Arab foreign ministers, many of whom have now concluded that Israel’s enemies are theirs too, railed helplessly at the international community for failing to fulfil their promise to bring peace to their turbulent region.

The heady days of sterile Arab League rhetoric are coming to a close. The ritual denunciations of the Zionist entity are muted. The extravagant expressions of pan-Arab solidarity are barely whispered. A new reality is in the air. Hezbollah’s attack last week represents the opening salvo in Iran’s war against the West — and anyone else who stands in its way.
Douglas Davis, a former senior editor on the Jerusalem Post, is a member of the Middle East Writers’ Group