How much is Iran driving the conflict in the Middle East? Alex Vatanka on the Islamic Republic’s relationship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—and the tension between its ideology of revolution and instinct for self-preservation.
The war in the Middle East seems to be changing dramatically.
After Hamas’s brutal and shocking assault on Israel last year, Israel responded with a devastating bombing campaign and ground offensive into the Gaza Strip that’s lasted since—and now includes the killing of Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar. Last month, however, Israel began taking its fight to Hamas’s ally Hezbollah, the powerful militia and dominant political party in Lebanon.
On September 17, thousands of pagers belonging to Hezbollah’s members exploded in Lebanon and Syria. The next day, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies also blew up. Then, on September 27, Israel assassinated the party’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a bombing raid on southern Beirut. And now, Israel has begun a ground offensive into southern Lebanon and stepped up its airstrikes in south Beirut and other Hezbollah bases. It’s full-scale war on Israel’s northern front.
Meanwhile, the United States is stepping up its involvement, too. On October 18, American B-2 stealth bombers carried out strikes in Yemen against purported underground weapons stores belonging to the Houthis, who’d been launching missiles at Israel to support Hamas.
Together, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—who refer to themselves as the Axis of Resistance—have one main thing in common: They get most of their money and weapons from Iran—and Iran is now getting more directly engaged in the conflict itself. On October 1, it fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel—though Israel managed to intercept nearly all of them—in what Iran called “self-defense” against Israel’s recent spate of assassinations of Axis leaders.
Exactly what is Iran’s role in this whole conflict?
Alex Vatanka is the director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute and the author of The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran: The United States, Foreign Policy and Political Rivalry Since 1979. Vatanka says that ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Tehran has followed a single strategy: It arms and funds its proxies to keep up pressure on Israel—and to keep any armed conflict as far away as possible from Iran. Yet now the battle is threatening to come to Iranian territory, leaving the regime in Tehran with a momentous decision to make. It can either stick to its longstanding, unyielding stance against the very existence of Israel, or it can make the compromises necessary for its survival …
Michael Bluhm: How do you see Iran’s involvement here?
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