Muslims, Muslims and Jews

“Hit Iran and hit them hard.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R/S.C.)

When I was just turning 13, my mother and her new US Department of State diplomat/husband took our family to Beirut, Lebanon. It was to be our home for the next 4 years. As our ship pulled into the harbor early on a January morning, I could hear the strange (to me anyway) calls of the Muslim faithful to prayer, a haunting sound emanating from the many minarets in the city.

Although Lebanon then was primarily a Maronite Catholic country, there was a healthy mix of various Muslim sects as well: Sunni, Shiite, Druze, etc. Designed shortly after independence from the French Vichy government in 1943, confessionalism was the constitutional structure, assigning specific offices to designated faiths. The President had to be Maronite, the Prime Minister Sunni, the Speaker of the Parliament Shite, etc. with powerful families dominating each religious faction.

They got along. Their kids played together. The currency was backed by gold. The beaches and hotels were among the best on earth. Literacy was high, and while Arabic was the main language, half the population also spoke French. I loved my time there. Enjoyed the food and cherished the welcoming and most friendly people.

Yet there were realities that planted seeds of later destruction. Jealous eyes from neighboring Syria, coveted control over the country. There were fetid “refugee camps,” filled with Palestinians pushed out of Israel after the formation of that Jewish state in 1948. Nobody wanted the Palestinians, and they were relegated to these horrible “camps.” Powdered milk, barbed wire and open sewers defined these “camps,” and the thought of allowing these Palestinian to assimilate was non-existent. Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian autocrat who combined his country with Syria into the short-lived United Arab Republic, found keeping Palestinians in refugee camps gave him a rallying cry to unite the entire Arab world against the “usurping” Israel. The pot was simmering. When it boiled over into decades of civil war, Lebanon became a failed state.

Traditionally, Shiites were born in the 7th century as Islam was planting its Middle Eastern roots. Resenting the Koranic literalists (Sunnis under a caliphate), Persian Muslims rebelled and showed their disdain for these “tribal” conquerors by adopting a mystical form of Islam where the interpretation of the Koran was relegated to their single and supreme leader, the Imam. This Shia belief system represented heresy to Sunnis. In the 9th century, the 12th and last Imam simply disappeared. Leaderless, the Shiites became weak, and the sect unraveled, remaining (to this day) about 20% of the world’s Muslims. Until 1979, when a cleric living in Paris (the Ayatollah Khomeini), led a successful rebellion in Iran against the Shah (a brutal, secular dictator planted as Iran’s leader by Western powers), trapping US diplomats in their Tehran embassy for 444 days. This new Shiite state declared its primary enemy, even worse than the surrounding Sunni nations, to be the “Great Satan,” the United States.

Contrary to average American expectations, Iran’s legacy of academic excellence and educational priorities gave that nation an edge against its more primitive neighbors. With massive oil reserves and a strategic location, Iran was very much the superior society compared to the oil rich Saudi monarchy. Even an eight-year war with Iraq (a Sunni led nation with a very large Shiite population) almost immediately after the formation of the Iranian theocracy, failed to thwart Iran’s growth… with the ultimate goal of becoming the greatest regional power… driving the West, particularly the United States, out of the region. Though he and his successor never gave themselves the “Imam” title, Khomeini was effectively the new Imam.

While the United States remained convinced for decades that Iran’s theocracy would fall, it thrived. Israel was conflated with the US. And while Iran’s Shiite roots were heretical to most Sunni Arabs, with desperate people – a very good definition of Sunnis living in and those purged from Israel (Palestinians) – Iran saw its opportunity in their cause. Even as anti-Western, anti-Shia ISIS rose in Shiite-led Syria to protect the 80% Sunni majority in that country, as regional conflict exploded, Iran continued to grow in power and military superiority.

Iran was clearly en route to having nuclear weapons, although the limited 2015 UN Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) successfully contained that ambition by treaty. In 2018, the Trump administration, mistakenly believing it could extract a more severe lid on Iran’s increasing desire to dominate the Middle East, terminated the US commitment to the JCPOA. The US withdrawal gave Iran a greenlight to accelerate its efforts to dominate the Middle East, now with a set of sophisticated surrogates – from the Hezbollah’s control of Lebanon, to embracing Iraq as a fellow majority Shiite country, to Shite Houthis in Yemen and Sunni Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank. Tehran was funding and providing military aid to her surrogate children. And to Tehran, Israel represented a massive US presence in the Middle East… and needed to be purged.

As the United States was attempting a détente between Israel and the Saudi monarchy, an alliance that severely threatened Iran, the October 7th murderous Hamas attack on Israel was a convenient anti-American destabilizer in the region. As almost everyone assumed, and as Hamas correctly projected and provoked, Israel would respond with excessive force. Hamas had no concern for innocent Palestinians, a belief that it seems to share with an angry Israel as IDF forces pounded and destroyed Gaza, killing tens of thousands.

While Iran probably did not control the timing, Israel’s overkill response was playing into Iran’s plans. Each of her surrogates listed above, with the excuse of supporting Palestinians, escalated attacked on regional shipping… and lots of US targets. After a drone hit a US army installation in Jordan, killing 3 and injuring dozens of our soldiers, in the early days of February, the US struck multiple targets in surrogate hands (above pictures), trying to prevent a direct war with Iran. Would we be successful? Here’s LA Times columnist Doyle McManus (February 5th) with a realistic assessment:

“[O]ver the long run, Iran and its proxies are almost certain to regroup and look for new opportunities to attack U.S. military installations and other American interests in the region… The powerful Revolutionary Guard forces are too deeply committed to the goal of expelling the United States from the Middle East to stand down for long. The guard’s Quds Force has spent decades training and equipping pro-Iran militias in nearby countries.

“Moreover, the militias in western Iraq and eastern Syria targeted by the airstrikes have their own reasons for continuing to fight: Expelling the United States from the area is their political brand too… ‘They’re not robots entirely controlled by Iran,’ said Vali Nasr of Johns Hopkins University. ‘They have become the representation of anti-Americanism in Iraq. Every strike and counterstrike strengthens that [status].’”

“And the continued presence of more than 6,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, Syria and Jordan — a deployment many Americans probably forgot about until the Jan. 28 drone attack killed three at a desert base — still offers a tempting list of targets…….” As Israel’s main supplier of weapons, the rising global chorus accusing Israel of war crimes and genocide views the United States as a co-conspirator.

We’ve never fully understood the Middle East, have generally granted Israel’s leaders whatever they have requested; thus, we and are now mired in yet another Middle East conflict. Younger Americans, showing anger against Israel’s explosive efforts against Gazan Palestinians, are at odds with older generations that totally support Israel. Biden’s campaign is seeing the risks within his own party. We are painting ourselves into a corner with no good options.

I’m Peter Dekom, and those American politicians demanding immediate massive direct strikes against Iran have no idea how much such a conflict would cost us at every level, and how the resulting spike in the price of oil just might tank our deficit and trigger a global recession.