Targeting Iran

I missed Robert Kaplan’s latest dispatch yesterday, but this passage is still worth flagging up:

“How do you fight unconventional, sub-state armies empowered by ideas? You undermine them subtly over time, or you crush them utterly, brutally. Israel, unable to tolerate continued rocket attacks on its people, has decided on the latter course. Our own diplomacy with Iran now rests on whether or not Israel succeeds. We need to create leverage before we can negotiate with the clerical regime, and that leverage can only come from an Israeli moral victory—one that leaves Hamas sufficiently reeling to scare even the pro-Iranian Syrians from coming to its aid. In defense of its own territorial integrity, Israel has, in effect, launched the war on the Iranian empire that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, can only have contemplated.”

When I visited Israel earlier last year, the question that most seemed to occupy the political classes was how to deal with Iran; particularly in light of fears that the theocratic regime will go nuclear during 2009.  There’s an inevitable sense, then, that the Israeli operation in Gaza is intended to send a message to Tehran, and that it can even be regarded as a first, preemptive strike against the “Iranian empire”.

This makes it even more crucial that Israel comes out on top.  Some sort of Israeli victory against Hamas – be it moral or military, partial or total – will surely improve the West’s hand in any diplomatic wranglings with Iran, and could thereby limit further destabilisation in the wider Middle East.  So far as the long-term’s concerned, defeat could well encourage the opposite.  As Kaplan so neatly puts it: “If he is smart, President-elect Barack Obama will now be quietly rooting for Israel”.