On October 3, 2023, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei addressed a large crowd of government officials and international visitors in Tehran. Khamenei called Israel a “cancer” and insisted that it would “die of [its] rage.”
Four days later, sirens sounded across southern Israel as thousands of rockets were launched from Gaza. More than 1,000 Hamas terrorists followed, breaching the high-tech Gaza border wall on motorcycles and jeeps, from the air on paragliders, and landing from boats on the Mediterranean coast. In the first 24 hours, the terrorists killed 1,180 Israelis and kidnapped 251 more in the deadliest and most heinous act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust.
During the first six months of the Gaza War, Iran followed its well-rehearsed terrorist playbook. It diplomatically pretended that it did not want to see escalation while at the same time rallying its proxy terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Shiite Iraqi militias to join Hamas in its assault on Israel.
But on April 13, almost two weeks after a highly effective Israeli raid killed seven senior officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard in an Iranian consular building in Damascus, Syria, Iran launched the most massive long-range retaliatory barrage of over 350 missiles and drones ever directed at Israel. It was also the first time that Iran had directly attacked Israeli territory from Iranian territory, but thanks to the cooperation of the United States and its Arab allies in the region, almost all of the missiles and drones were shot down. The few that got through did only minor damage to one Israeli military facility, while Israel’s retaliatory air strike on a military site in the city of Isfahan did serious damage to one of Iran’s Russian-made S-300 radar-guided anti-aircraft systems which protect Iran’s nuclear enrichment and other sensitive military sites.
As Israel’s systematic efforts to eliminate the threat from Hamas in Gaza neared completion in August, it successfully assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh who was staying at an official Iranian guesthouse in Tehran, a few hours after he had met with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian.
ISRAEL’S MILITARY SHIFTS ITS FOCUS TO HEZBOLLAH IN LEBANON
In mid-September, the Israeli military redirected its efforts to eliminate the near-daily attacks on northern Israel by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon. After launching a sneak attack using thousands of explosive booby-trapped pagers and 2-way radios that Israeli intelligence agencies had foisted on Hezbollah, the Israeli army launched a long-anticipated ground assault on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. Israel also succeeded in killing Hezbollah’s longtime leader. Sheik Hassan Nasrallah was both a major Lebanese political leader and one of Iran’s most important allies in the region.
Nasrallah, who spoke Persian and had lived for a time in Iran, had known Ayatollah Khamenei for many years and was the only major figure in the region who considered Iran’s supreme leader to be his spiritual guide. His loss was as much of a blow to Iran as it was to Hezbollah.
IRAN LOSES ITS DEFENSIVE “ACE IN THE HOLE”
For more than 40 years, Hezbollah had been Iran’s “ace in the hole,” the prototype and nucleus in Iran’s loose regional and worldwide network of mostly Shiite terrorist partners and proxies. Hezbollah’s massive arsenal of missiles was intended to be Iran’s first line of defense against a U.S. or Israeli attack. Destroying such a key asset had severely undercut Iran’s stature and power across the region, and, combined with the fall of Assad, it has created a major vacuum of power that Israel has already moved in to fill.
When Iran responded with another barrage of about 180 missiles on October 1, Israel and the U.S. again combined to shoot down most of the missiles. A few landed on one of Israel’s most important air bases, but it suffered only a moderate amount of damage and remained in operation.
SECOND ISRAELI ATTACK LEAVES IRAN VULNERABLE FROM THE AIR
Three weeks later, the Israeli military responded with a series of coordinated air strikes that eliminated most of Iran’s Russian-built anti-aircraft systems, which could not easily be replaced, leaving the country almost defenseless against future Israeli air attacks. The Israel air strikes also destroyed Iran’s main facilities for producing fuel for its ballistic missiles, the military drones that it has been supplying to Russia for its war against Ukraine, as well as one of Iran’s major nuclear weapons research facilities. It was intended as a stern warning to Iran’s leaders that Israel would not tolerate Iran’s further development of nuclear weapons.
Israel’s effective elimination of Hezbollah as a powerful covert Iranian striking force and the near complete defeat of Hamas undermined Iran’s long-term strategy for waging war against Israel using its proxies and seriously weakened Iran’s ability to project force against its other enemies in the region.
The rapid fall earlier this month of the Assad regime in Syria, which had been for the past decade under the joint military protection of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, was yet another serious blow to Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” strategy. It eliminated Syria’s role as a convenient overland transit route for Iranian military aid to Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as a potential staging area for future ground attacks against northern Israel along its long border with Syria.
LOSS OF SYRIA UNDERMINES IRAN’S “AXIS OF RESISTANCE” STRATEGY
Surely the last thing that Hamas’ leaders in Gaza, now mostly dead, wanted to do by staging a carefully planned surprise attack on southern Israel on October 7, was to trigger the region-wide unraveling of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” strategy, but that’s exactly what it did. The Hamas attack’s goal, a Hamas leader explained to the New York Times, was to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash” with Israel. The entire equation for fighting in the Middle East has been changed, but in Israel’s favor, not in the way that Hamas had intended.
After recovering from the shock and trauma of the October 7 attack, which initially succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Hamas leader in Gaza who planned it, Yahya Sinwar, the response of the Israeli military was devastating, killing to date more than 17,000 Hamas fighters, according to IDF estimates, accounting for more than half of Hamas’ initial fighting force. Israel’s military on the ground, in the air, and from the sea also wounded countless thousands more Hamas terrorists, and, sadly, a sizable number of civilian women and children, but substantially fewer than the deliberately false estimate of 45,000 being promoted by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry for public relations purposes.
The civilian residents of Gaza were forced to serve as captive and unwilling human shields for Hamas. Caught in the crossfire, and often left with nowhere safe to go, they died by the thousands, as Hamas had intended, despite heroic and noble efforts by the IDF to minimize the collateral damage. Many legitimate Hamas military targets had been deliberately embedded in Gaza’s heavily populated residential areas.
MOST OF HAMAS’ SENIOR OCTOBER 7 LEADERS ARE ALREADY DEAD
Fourteen months after the initial Hamas October 7 attack, the Hamas leaders who planned it, including Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Hamas’ leader in exile are all dead, but that is little comfort to the families of the more than 1,000 Israeli loved ones, military and civilian, who were cruelly massacred that day and hundreds more Israeli soldiers who fell since then while fighting to eliminate the terrorists still inside Gaza.
The only real consolation is the fact that Mohammed Deif’s post-October 7 efforts to inspire the Arabs living in Yerushalayim, Yaffo, Haifa, and across the West Bank to launch an uprising joining Hamas in its killing spree against Israeli Jews failed. While there was some uptick in the terrorist attacks in the West Bank, they were largely limited by the IDF’s prompt response, while Israel’s other enemies elsewhere in the region, except members of Iran’s Axis of Resistance, sat back and participated largely as spectators, albeit rooting for Hamas and Iran’s terrorist proxies.
NOBODY LEFT TO RESCUE ASSAD
By the time the IDF and Israel’s intelligence worked their way down to the bottom of their accurate lists of senior Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian military and political leaders, assuming that such a distinction can fairly be made, there were few left still alive to lead an effort to rescue Bashar Assad from the pent-up wrath of the Syrian people towards the 50-year old family dynasty that he had inherited in 2000 from Hafez Assad, his equally ruthless and evil father.
After Hezbollah and Iran were forced to accept a ceasefire on Israel’s terms, Bashar Assad’s bloody Syrian empire crumbled in less than three weeks.
Both Iran and its allies and Russia were too preoccupied militarily, Iran by Israel and Russia by Ukraine, to spare any more of their forces or effort to save Assad’s rule. Russia, apparently for old times’ sake, did offer Bashar Assad and his family the option of a safe haven in Moscow, which was more than most of Assad’s Syrian supporters who were left behind got in the end. The luckier ones escaped over the border into the relative safety of Lebanon or Iraq, while those still stuck in Syria have good reason to be concerned over their fate at the hands of the new Syrian government.
CONFIRMING THE LAW OF UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES
As world affairs columnist Frida Ghitis wrote last week for Politico, “The aftermath of Hamas’ monumental [October 7] miscalculation is yet another Middle East lesson in the law of unexpected consequences.”
Iran’s leaders are now struggling to explain away their decision not to intervene to save their long-term Syrian ally from the humiliation of forced exile. Iran’s leaders also responded to their significant loss of deterrence against further attacks by Israel by vastly stepping up their capacity to create highly enriched (60% pure) uranium-235 as fuel for nuclear weapons, at its deep underground Fordo plant, as confirmed by a report last week by the U.N.’s nuclear monitoring agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
According to an estimate released by a U.S. intelligence source last week, Iran may already be in possession of enough highly enriched uranium to quickly build as many as 12 nuclear weapons.
Speaking to a French AFP reporter in Bahrain, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said by announcing a further acceleration of its uranium enrichment efforts, Iran was sending a “clear message” of protest after it was recently the subject of formal censure by the 35-member IAEA board of governors which approved a warning resolution brought by Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.
HOW WILL TRUMP REACT TO IRAN’S INCREASED NUCLEAR THREAT?
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the sharp expansion of Iran’s nuclear efforts has prompted President-elect Donald Trump to consider launching pre-emptive air strikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities, with or without Israeli participation. The possibility of a direct attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is in addition to Trump’s already announced intention to renew and intensify his first-term policy of imposing “maximum pressure” by imposing crippling economic sanctions on Iran shortly after he pulled the U.S. out of President Barack Obama’s deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
According to a Wall Street Journal report last week, Trump’s new “Maximum Pressure 2.0” strategy against Iran could involve at the high end a pre-emptive U.S. attack powerful enough to destroy Iran’s most vital nuclear facilities, in addition to ratcheting up and broadening existing U.S. economic sanctions left over from Trump’s first term. One of the prime targets would be Iran’s advanced uranium enrichment lab at Fordo which was built deep beneath an Iranian mountain in order to be immune to America’s largest bunker-buster bombs, such as the ones that President Biden has been withholding from Israel for the past six months for fear of their use against reinforced underground Hamas targets in Gaza.
Neither Trump nor Israeli Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu have provided more details about their enhanced strategy against Iran, but in November, after holding three calls phone to discuss the subject, Netanyahu said he and Trump now “see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components, and the danger posed by it.”
NETANYAHU AND TRUMP SEE “EYE-TO-EYE” ON IRAN
Other possible American military options to assist Israel in a regional war against Iran could include augmenting U.S. ground forces, warplanes, and ships stationed in the Middle East, even though the Pentagon is already suffering from a shortage of such major weapons and manpower. The U.S. could also begin selling even more of its advanced weapons to Israel, using its generous yearly grant of American military aid, such as the one-ton bunker-busting bombs that Biden has been withholding.
On the other hand, Israel has a history of buying America’s most advanced weapons and making them even more effective, such as the special version of the F-35 stealth fighter equipped with Israeli avionics. Israel has also invented all new weapons that are significantly better than the best American versions, such as the Merkava series of Israeli battle tanks, the “Iron Sting,” which are Israel’s recently developed precision-guided mortar shells, and the remarkably effective Iron Dome missile defense system, as well as Israel’s newer, longer-range David’s Sling and Arrow anti-missile systems.
ISRAEL AND IRAN’S LONG UNDECLARED WAR
While Israel and Iran have been conducting an undeclared war over Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program for the past two decades, direct air strikes against each other’s territory had been a red line that neither side had wanted to cross for fear that it would trigger a region-wide war involving the major powers. However, that line has now been crossed twice with two major exchanges of missile and air strikes, and Israel winding up the clear victor both times, recovering in the process much of the deterrence it lost on October 7. Meanwhile, Iran is being left to rebuild much of its shattered network of regional proxy terrorists and destroyed domestic air defenses or to come up with a whole new strategy for defeating Israel’s far superior military.
The explosive pager attack, the assassination of Nasrallah, and Israel’s systematic elimination of much of Hezbollah’s remaining upper echelon of leaders, effectively decapitated its command-and-control organization. At the same time, using precise intelligence information, the intense campaign of Israeli attacks on Hezbollah’s weapons depots and missile launching sites across Lebanon, including Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, reduced its military arsenals by as much as 80%, according to published Israeli military estimates.
In addition, if Iran seeks to attack Israel again after January 20, it will have to take into account the likely harsh reaction by the incoming Trump administration, which would almost certainly result in further losses to Iran and its weakened terrorist allies in the region.
WHY IRAN’S SHIITE RULERS SEE ISRAEL AS ITS ENEMY
Iran and Israel were not always mortal enemies. Israel and Iran had been active trading partners, with Iran serving as Israel’s major source of imported oil when it was being ruled by the pro-American Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. That was why, after the Shah was overthrown in 1979 by supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the United States and Israel became Iran’s new sworn enemies. The active efforts by Iran’s radical Shiite Islamic regime to attack and destroy Israel began with its intervention in Lebanon after its 1982 invasion of that country to defeat the Yasser Arafat-led PLO terrorist organization based in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps. The PLO had been staging deadly raids on northern Israeli communities involving suicide bombings, assassinations, and hostage-taking. Iran also began promoting the Palestinian cause as a way to win over the hearts and minds of the Middle East’s majority of Sunni Muslims, who otherwise had little reason to support the efforts of the religiously intolerant fundamentalist Shiite regime in Tehran to extend its influence across the region.
WHY THE OSLO PEACE PROCESS FAILED
The end of the long and bitter Iran-Iraq War in 1988, freed up Iran’s military capacity to attack Israel more seriously using its terrorist proxies to shield it from direct retaliation. A few years later, Iran did everything that it could to undermine U.S.-sponsored efforts to reach a negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ultimately leading to the Oslo peace process, which was based upon the ultimately unworkable two-state solution model.
The peace process never recovered from Yasser Arafat’s refusal to accept the very generous peace offer from then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack at the President Bill Clinton-sponsored 2000 Camp David summit. Instead, Arafat launched the Second Intifada which took the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians, and destroyed support for a two-state solution among the vast majority of Israelis.
During the five years of the Second Intifada, U.S. military interventions in the Middle East wound up weakening two of Iran’s Sunni Muslim competitors for regional dominance, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. At the same time, the Shiite leaders of Iran saw the increased U.S. military presence in the region as a threat, resulting in Iran’s increased efforts to drive both the U.S. and its primary ally, Israel, from the region by increasing its military support for its proxy network, and expanding it to include Palestinian terrorist organizations. It also led to the acceleration of its nuclear arms development program, which was illegal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, in order to serve as a bargaining chip and further deterrent against attack.
THE ORIGINS OF THE FLAWED 2015 IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL
In late 2006, the Security Council of the United Nations responded with Resolution 1737 which imposed international sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program. These hurt Iran’s economy, but not enough to disrupt its nuclear efforts and its efforts to disrupt its Sunni Muslim regional enemies.
When the pro-democracy movement known as the Arab Spring touched off a bloody civil war in Syria in 2011 that threatened to overthrow Bashar Assad, who had been a long-time ally of both Iran and Russia, the two countries combined to provide the Assad regime with large numbers of Hezbollah shock troops, under Iranian command, and Russian air power. Together, they ruthlessly crushed Assad’s enemies with indiscriminate attacks on both military and civilian targets. But the fighting largely subsided after 2015, when the intervention, by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, turned the war in Assad’s favor, and kept Assad in power and in control of the capital city of Damascus and western Syria’s other large cities for almost a decade.
THE PRICE ASSAD HAD SYRIA PAY FOR RUSSIAN AND IRANIAN SUPPORT
In return for their support, Assad permitted Iran and Hezbollah to strengthen their positions inside Syria including military bases and arms production facilities, and cooperation in the transportation of Iranian arms across Syria to Iran’s allies across the region, and particularly to Hezbollah despite Israeli efforts to disrupt the flow. As a result, Iran was also able to ensure that Hezbollah remained the dominant force in Lebanon, further expanding the group’s already impressive arsenal of rockets with longer-range precision-guided missiles, and enhancing Iran’s ability to project military power across the Middle East.
For Russia’s help, Assad provided Russian President Vladimir Putin with the use of Syria’s air base at Hmeimim in northern Latakia province, from which Russian warplanes have continued to pound the remaining concentrations of Assad’s Syrian enemies, as well as a port at Tarsus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, from which Russia projects its naval power. Russia’s use of the Tartus port dates back to 1971, during the Cold War era, but in 2017, as a token of his appreciation for its military support, Assad granted Russia a 49-year lease, free of charge.
Over the weekend, commercial satellite photos caught at least two Russian Antonov AN-124 jumbo cargo jets loading up some of its heavy military equipment to bring it back to Russia. Another satellite photo taken over the Tartus base showed no Russian vessels in the port. However Syrian sources told Reuters that Russia was not pulling out of its two main bases in Syria and currently has no immediate intentions of doing so.
The two bases are important components of Russia’s global military presence. The Tartus naval port is Russia’s only Mediterranean repair and resupply hub, and the Hmeimim air base is a major staging post for Russia’s military and mercenary activities in Africa.
HOW PRESIDENT OBAMA PERSUADED NETANYAHU NOT TO ATTACK IRAN
While over the past two decades Israel’s leaders watched Iran’s military advances and regional influence with growing concern, the Obama administration succeeded in dissuading Israeli Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu from launching a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear program in 2012, and offered instead to tighten the American sanctions on Iran’s economy. Those enhanced sanctions unexpectedly proved to be so effective that Iran’s leaders ultimately requested negotiations with the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China on limiting its nuclear program. Those talks ultimately led to the deeply flawed 2015 Iran nuclear deal, negotiated by then-Secretary of State John Kerry with the support of President Obama. The agreement, which did not have the legal force of a treaty as it never could have gotten the constitutionally required Senate two-thirds majority needed, survived a highly contentious congressional review despite ferocious lobbying against it by Netanyahu and his government, and most American supporters of Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel had been conducting a highly creative and reasonably effective covert war against Iran with the help of its highly efficient intelligence network inside Iran. Israel, with U.S. cooperation, conducted the Stuxnet computer cyberattack that sabotaged Iran’s high-speed uranium-concentrating centrifuges, assassinated some of Iran’s key nuclear scientists and military officers, and revealed stolen Iranian archival records that demonstrated to the rest of the world the full extent of Iran’s nuclear activities, which it had tried to hide.
At the same time, Israel was conducting a covert bombing campaign against Hezbollah and Iranian military targets across Syria. Israel stepped up and finally took public responsibility for the air strikes against targets in Syria in 2017, and further expanded them in 2019 to include air strikes on Iranian weapons depots in Iraq, and Hezbollah missile production facilities in Lebanon.
TRUMP’S FIRST “MAXIMUM PRESSURE” CAMPAIGN WAS NOT SUCCESSFUL
After Trump in 2018 pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and launched his first “maximum pressure” campaign to force Iran into negotiations to correct the serious flaws in the original agreement, Iran responded by supporting a series of attacks on U.S. allies in the region, including strikes on sensitive Persian Gulf oil shipments and major Saudi oil production and refinery facilities. The attacks did not force Trump to give up on his maximum pressure campaign against Iran, but they did serve as a warning to America’s militarily vulnerable regional allies that Iran could force them to pay a heavy price for their support by the U.S.
But the balance of power across the region began to shift dramatically when Hamas attacked on October 7 of last year. The heavy mostly civilian casualties that Israel suffered because its military had been caught by surprise and unprepared made Israel look vulnerable, at least initially. But because Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had kept his plans for the attack a closely held secret, even his Iranian supporters were also caught by surprise and somewhat annoyed because they had been planning a similar attack on northern Israel using Hezbollah’s fighters in southern Lebanon.
According to a Jerusalem Post report, when Hezbollah leaders asked Sinwar to hold off on the attack from Gaza for a while to give Iran and its partners time to prepare for it, Sinwar responded by insisting that the attack was a Palestinian operation and that Iran had to find its own balance between “defending Palestine” and “preventing an escalation.”
WHEN SINWAR REFUSED TO WAIT IRAN AND HEZBOLLAH HELD BACK
When it became clear that part of Israel’s initial military response to the Hamas attack was to reinforce its defensive forces in northern Israel, Hezbollah’s leaders and its Iranian masters decided to confine themselves initially to sporadic daily missile strikes at targets along Israel’s northern border meant to serve mostly as a diversion. But the Hezbollah missile attacks were successful enough in harassing the civilian Israeli population in the region that they prompted at least 60,000 Israelis to flee their homes for safer areas in central and southern Israel, but not near Gaza.
For the next year, the Israeli war against Hamas dragged on in Gaza, despite American criticism of the high civilian death toll, and with no apparent end in sight. Meanwhile, hope continued to fade for the return of the estimated 96 remaining Israeli hostages still held in Gaza, alive or dead. But Israel’s successful conquest of the last major Hamas stronghold in the city of Rafah, and the establishment of Israeli control over the notorious Philadelphi smuggling corridor along the Gaza-Egyptian border, meant that Israel no longer needed to fear a full-fledged two-front war, and could reposition its forces to fully confront the other members of Iran’s axis of resistance who had also been attacking Israel, starting with Hezbollah.
ISRAEL HAS BEEN PREPARING FOR WAR IN LEBANON SINCE 2006
The Israeli military had been preparing for the war with Hezbollah since soon after it became apparent that the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War was not going to be enforced by the international community and that the multinational UNIFIL peacekeeping force and the Lebanese Army were not going to make any serious effort to prevent Hezbollah from re-arming and turning most of southern Lebanon again into a Hezbollah military base for attacking Israel.
By this October, the balance of power in the region had clearly changed. The general region-wide Islamic uprising against Israel that Hamas leader Sinwar had expected would be triggered by his audacious October 7 attack mostly failed to materialize. The harassing missile fire from Hezbollah in the north, the Houthi rebels far to the south in Yemen, and Iraq’s Iran-backed Shiite militias from the east, failed to divert the IDF from its primary goal of destroying Hamas as a military threat. The Biden administration, despite some annoying reservations over the inflated Hamas estimates of civilian casualties in Gaza and delays in the delivery of humanitarian supplies, mostly kept up the flow of sophisticated American armaments to the IDF, even in the face of Hamas’ highly successful global antisemitic PR campaign, which cynically portraying itself as the victim of Israeli genocide in response to the war that Hamas had started on October 7.
By the start of this past October, the list of Iranian, Hezbollah, and Hamas leaders that Israel had killed across the region, including Hezbollah leader Nasrallah himself, was very long. The remnants of Hamas still alive in Gaza were in hiding. Badly demoralized Hezbollah forces across Lebanon were in full retreat. Iran’s second mass missile attack on Israel launched on October 1 had also failed.
On October 16, Sinwar himself, who had been on the run for more than a year, was spotted in a Rafah apartment along with two other Hamas members by a routine Israeli patrol and was subsequently killed in a firefight. The identity of his dead body had to be confirmed by Israel using dental records and DNA samples.
ISRAEL’S SECOND VICTORY LEAVES IRAN VULNERABLE AND EXPOSED
On October 27, Israel’s second retaliatory air strike on Iran was so successful that Netanyahu boasted, “Israel has greater freedom of action in Iran today than ever before. We can reach anywhere in Iran as needed.”
Combined with the ongoing attacks on the Houthi rebels in Yemen by the United States and the British in response to Houthi attacks on international shipping in the region, the swift collapse, after 54 years, of Syria’s Assad family dynasty has transformed the Middle East’s strategic and geopolitical landscape by further crippling what little remains of Iran’s “axis of resistance” to Israel.
But for Ayatollah Khamenei and Israel’s other sworn enemies in Iran’s radical Shiite leadership, the defeat of Iran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, the attacks on the Houthis, and most recently, the fall of Iran’s longtime Syrian ally, Bashar Assad, are unimportant, because the Iranian leaders still believe, as an article of their Islamic faith, that Israel’s destruction is only a matter of time. “The world and the region will see the day when the Zionist regime will be clearly defeated,” Ayatollah Khamenei declared in early November.
Is that false bravado? Perhaps.
ISLAMIC IRAN’S RESILIENCE
But as Suzanne Maloney, the director of the Foreign Policy Program of the Brookings Institute writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, “Over the past 45 years, Iran’s leadership has navigated many significant setbacks with surprising agility. Two of the secrets to the regime’s success are its tendency to embrace aggression under pressure and its readiness to play the long game: to retrench or pivot as necessary, to creatively deploy its limited resources and relationships, and to engage in asymmetric attacks to achieve leverage over more powerful adversaries. . .
“In January 2020, the Trump administration assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force — the branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in charge of managing relations with Iran’s allies and proxies. At first, the killing seemed like a symbolic and operational disaster for Tehran, given just how key Soleimani was to its foreign policy. Yet his death ultimately had little enduring effect on the strength, durability, or efficacy of Iran’s axis of resistance. Similarly, in 1992, when Israel killed Abbas al-Musawi, Hezbollah’s leader at the time, it paved the way for the ascension of Nasrallah, who proved to be a far more effective and deadly adversary. A month later, Hezbollah retaliated by orchestrating the deadly bombing of Israel’s embassy in Argentina.”
According to Maloney, “A weakened Iran is not necessarily a less dangerous Iran.”
She notes that another danger signal is that, “for the first time in two decades, important voices within the country are openly calling for Tehran to embrace nuclear weapons. . . [and] hard-liners in Iran’s parliament have publicly asked Khamenei to reconsider his religious decision that forbids the development of nuclear weapons.”
HOW WILL IRAN’S LEADERS RESPOND TO PRESIDENT TRUMP 2.0?
Much will depend on Iran’s reading of the changes in U.S. policies towards Israel and the region that Trump has promised when he takes office in January. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has publicly lambasted President Joe Biden and his administration for seeking to impose restrictions on the way Israel has prosecuted its war against Hamas in Gaza, and backing up those threats by deliberately withholding certain weapons that the IDF badly needs on the battlefields of Gaza and southern Lebanon. D-9 armored bulldozers and 2,000 lb. blockbuster bombs are needed to destroy enemy command centers and other targets buried deep underground, and Israel has no other sources of supply for these.
Trump may also decide to take off the gloves in U.S. military strikes against the Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq which have attacked U.S. forces stationed in the area. These forces are still fighting the remnants of ISIS, and the Houthis in Yemen, who have been attacking international shipping trying to use the Suez Canal, in addition to the ongoing missile and drone attacks by both the Iraqi militias and the Houthis on Israel.
There is no reason to suspect that Trump’s strong support for Israel throughout his first term in office, and his hostility toward Iran’s actions to support terrorism and disrupt the region will change when he enters the White House again in January.
GROWING SIGNS THAT HAMAS IS READY FOR PEACE ON ISRAELI TERMS
Meanwhile, last week, Adam Boehler, Trump’s incoming special envoy for hostage affairs, made a low-profile visit to Israel amid media reports of “significant progress” in the current round of negotiations to secure the release of the remaining Israeli and American captives in the coastal enclave.
Boehler’s visit comes as a senior Israeli official told Hebrew media that Hamas could be willing to drop some of its long-held demands to reach a deal, feeling the pressure from the public deadline that president-elect Trump has placed on putting a finished ceasefire/hostage release plan in place before he takes office on January 20.
In a public statement Trump made on December 2, the President-elect warned that “If the hostages are not released before January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume office as president of the United States.” Those who are responsible for holding hostages will be severely punished as well as “those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America,” Trump added. “Release the hostages now!”
TRUMP AND NETANYAHU — THE ODD COUPLE
Over the weekend Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu issued a video statement describing a “very friendly, warm and important” phone call he had with President-elect Donald Trump.
The prime minister then added, “We discussed the need to complete Israel’s victory [in Gaza] and spoke extensively about the efforts we are making to bring our hostages home. We are working tirelessly to bring back our hostages [in Gaza], both the living and the fallen.
“Let me add that the less we discuss this, the better, and so, with Hashem’s help, we will succeed.”
Trump and Netanyahu also discussed their concerns about the still fluid security situation in Lebanon and Syria.
In his statement, Netanyahu boasted, “A year ago, I said something simple: We [Israel] would change the face of the Middle East, and we are indeed doing so. Syria is not the same Syria. Lebanon is not the same Lebanon. Gaza is not the same Gaza. And the head of the Axis [of Resistance], Iran, is not the same Iran.
“We are working today forcefully and with due consideration in order to have security regarding all the countries of the region and in order to have stability and security on all of our borders,” the prime minister stated, adding that challenges to Israel remain in finishing the fight against Iran’s “bloodied proxies [Hamas and Hezbollah].”
Netanyahu also emphasized that Israel has “no interest” in a confrontation with the incoming Syrian rebel regime, stressing that Israel’s policies towards the regime will be entirely determined “according to the reality on the ground.” He also noted that, for decades, up until the very recent fall of the Assad regime, “Syria was an active enemy of Israel.”
“Together with Defense Minister [Israel] Katz, I have directed the IDF to thwart the potential threats from Syria and prevent terrorist elements from taking control close to our [northern] border,” the prime minister stated. Meanwhile, “Over the course of several days, we have destroyed the [military] capabilities that the Assad regime took decades to build.”
NO ISRAELI TOLERANCE FOR RE-ARMING HEZBOLLAH
Netanyahu said, “I would like to both clarify and warn: We [Israel] are committed to preventing the rearming of Hezbollah. I unequivocally declare to Hezbollah and to Iran: In order to prevent you from attacking us, we will continue to take action against you as necessary, in every arena and at all times.”
Meanwhile, outgoing President Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also visited Israel last week and said he believes that such a ceasefire/hostage release deal for Gaza may be close, because Israel has signaled it was ready, and there were also encouraging signs of movement from Hamas.
“It might not happen, but I believe it can happen with political will on both sides,” Sullivan said after meeting with Netanyahu.
Sullivan said he also planned to visit with the leaders of Qatar and Egypt who have been involved as go-betweens in the talks that “would start bringing those hostages home. It would also allow for a massive surge in humanitarian assistance [in Gaza],” Sullivan added.
Sullivan said that he has also been engaging with President-elect Trump’s choice to succeed him as National Security Advisor, Republican Congressman Mike Waltz, to bring him up to speed “in a professional and serious way on all the issues that affect the State of Israel.”
At a press conference in Tel Aviv, Sullivan dismissed suggestions that Netanyahu was waiting for Trump to take office before accepting a deal on Gaza.
“No, I do not get that sense,” Sullivan said “I got the sense from the prime minister [that] he is ready to do a deal [now. In our talks,] my goal will be to put us in a position to be able to close this deal this month.”
WHISPERS OF A GAZA PEACE DEAL IN THE MAKING VERY SOON
“I can’t make any promises or predictions to you, but I wouldn’t be here today if I thought this thing was just waiting until after January 20,” Sullivan added.
The Wall Street Journal and the Jerusalem Post both reported separately last week that Hamas has agreed to yield to two of Israel’s “key demands” for a ceasefire/hostage release deal. The reports say that Hamas has dropped its insistence on a permanent ceasefire and a complete Israeli withdrawal of its troops from Gaza, including the sensitive smuggling route known as the Philadelphi Corridor which runs along the Egyptian border. The Journal reports that the deal now under consideration was proposed by Egypt and backed by the U.S., and “seeks to build on the momentum generated by the ceasefire in Lebanon.”
As with prior such deals, the hostage return portion of the agreement would also enable a specified number or agreed ratio of Palestinian prisoners being held by in Israel prisons to be released.
Sullivan said that seven of the hostages still being held in Gaza were American citizens, although four of them were believed to be dead. He also said that Hamas’ negotiating attitude appeared to have softened following the ceasefire deal that halted Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon because it made it clear to Hamas leaders that they could no longer expect much military support in its fight for survival against Israel from Iran and its proxies.
According to Sullivan, Israel’s success in killing Hamas’ top military and political leaders, including Sinwar and Dief, who organized the October 7 atrocity, has had an impact, as well as the almost total destruction of Hamas’ military forces in Gaza, which started on that October 7 with 24 fully trained and equipped battalions.
But Sullivan also cautioned that “Whether [the deal] does get done still depends on both sides signing on the proverbial dotted line.”
Speaking to reporters during a visit to Jordan last week, Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken echoed the administration’s backing of Israel’s campaign to destroy the dangerous weapons left behind by fleeing Assad Syrian army troops to prevent local terrorist groups from getting them.
“The Israelis have been clear about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it,” Blinken told reporters at Amman’s King Hussein International Airport. “I think across the board, when it comes to any actors who have real interests in Syria, it’s also really important at this time that we all try to make sure that we’re not sparking any additional conflicts,” the Secretary of State added.
AN EARLY TEST FOR THE TRUMP 2.0 MIDDLE EAST POLICY
Meanwhile, an early test of the second Trump administration’s policies in the Middle East will be its role, if any, in the formation of a new government to replace the Assad regime in Syria. While Trump publicly stated that the civil war in Syria is “not our fight” when Assad’s forces first began to lose their grip with the fall of the northern city of Aleppo on November 29, the U.S. undeniably does have a strong interest in the new Syrian government’s attitude towards Assad’s former allies, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.
Trump will also have to determine the U.S. attitude towards the Turkey-backed head of the rebel army that deposed Assad. He is the leader of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia, Ahmad al-Sharaa, better known by his military nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani. His forces include members of several other anti-Assad groups who control pockets of territory across Syria and many of them also have ties to al-Qaeda or other known terrorist organizations.
A $10 MILLION U.S. PRICE ON THE HEAD OF SYRIA’S NEW LEADER
Abu Mohammad al-Julani has been on the U.S. State Department’s terrorist list since 2013 due to his former ties to al-Qaeda, with a $10 million price on his head for information leading to his capture. But in recent years, Julani has been trying to rehabilitate his image. He claims that he has learned the necessary lessons from the failures of al-Qaeda and ISIS by becoming a much more pragmatic kind of Islamist leader, and that he now aspires only to bring about the “liberation of Syria from its oppressive [Assad] regime.”
As a sign of this new pragmatism, Julani has instructed his fighters to allow Assad’s prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, to continue running the Syrian government on a caretaker basis, and providing essential public services until he is ready to formally hand them over to the new Syrian government which has yet to fully emerge. That is in sharp contrast to the ISIS approach, which would have been to carry out mass executions of the soldiers and officials of the previous government and assume total control.
Sunnis like Julani represent about 74% of Syria’s population, including Arabs and Kurds. They are followed by Shiites, who make up 13%, including the Assad family’s Alawite sect. After them come the followers of various Christian sects, who make up 10%, and the smallest are the Druze tribes who make up 3% of Syria’s total population. It remains to be seen just how tolerant Julani will be towards Syria’s minority religions, especially the Kurdish fighters who, with several hundred American troops, have continued to battle the remnants of ISIS in eastern Syria and whose goal is to establish an autonomous enclave on Syria’s northern border. Turkey’s outspokenly anti-Israel president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the main state backer of the HTS militia, sees Syrian Kurds and their desire for political autonomy as a separatist terrorist threat to the security of his own country.
TURKEY’S ERDOGAN WANTS TO BE THE NEXT MUSLIM WORLD LEADER
After years of Erdoğan’s failed attempts to gain Turkey’s admission as a member of the European leadership, he now aspires to become a leader of the Islamic world, which he demonstrates by his extreme hostility towards Israel. According to former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, Erdogan and his Qatari allies have been supporting Islamist groups throughout the Middle East, in competition with the Iranians to define what kind of Islamic democracy should prevail in Muslim lands: Iran’s intolerant radical Shia fundamentalist model or Turkey’s somewhat more moderate form of Sunni Islamic government.
According to Ben-Ami, “Although Syria’s rebels have much to thank Israel for in creating the conditions for their success, Israel harbors no illusions about [the friendship of] its new [Syrian government] neighbors. Al-Julani was born in Syria’s Golan Heights (hence the name Julani), which Israel captured in the 1967 [Six Day] war, and whose [Israeli] annexation and sovereignty was recognized by President Donald Trump in 2019.”
IDF PREVENTIVE AND DEFENSIVE MEASURES IN SYRIA
As soon as it was clear that the Assad regime had collapsed, the Israeli military moved quickly to occupy the post-Yom Kippur War internationally negotiated demilitarized border zone on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border, but the IDF was also careful to cooperate with the largely ineffective international UNIFIL peacekeeping force still deployed in the area. The IDF also launched a brief but intense series of air strikes that destroyed an estimated 80% of the heavy military equipment, including fighter jets, helicopters, naval vessels, missile stores, weapons manufacturing sites, and illegal chemical weapons stores that had been abandoned by Assad’s fleeing army, to prevent the weapons from falling into the hands of Israel’s many enemies who remain in Syria.
Over the weekend, the London-based, independent Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that Israel had conducted 446 airstrikes on leftover weapons across Syria since the fall of Assad’s regime.
Ironically, a group of local dignitaries from the Druze village of Hader on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border asked Israel last week to annex their locality so that they would be safe from any attacks by one of the Islamic terrorist groups still active in the area.
The Israeli military has also been ordered by Defense Minister Israel Katz to continue its “temporary” occupation of the Syrian side of Mt. Hermon overlooking Damascus as a security precaution for the rest of this winter or until the new governing situation in Syria is further clarified.
Last Sunday, Katz told a Knesset budget committee that Israel’s defense budget allocation for the new year must be further increased “in the face of growing threats” and to make sure that “Israel must be able to defend itself, on its own, against any threat,” including the longest continuing war in Israel’s history against multiple enemies which is not yet finished.
Visiting the Israeli troops occupying a portion of the Syrian side of the Golan Heights over the weekend, IDF Chief of Staff General Herzi Halevi declared: “We are not interfering with what’s happening in Syria. We have no intention of running Syria.”
In a video of his remarks released by the IDF, Halevi explained that Israel had to take steps to ensure the security of Israeli citizens in the north because “there was an enemy country here.” He was referring to Syria’s attacks on Israel despite the U.N.-sponsored armistice agreement of 1949 defining the initial borders between Israel and Syria. This was followed by Syrian attacks in the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel responded by seizing the strategic Golan Heights overlooking northern Israel, and again during the 1973 Yom Kippur War when a powerful surprise Syrian tank attack lasting 100 hours almost resulted in Israel’s loss of the Golan Heights, leaving nearly all of northern Israel exposed.
General Halevi went on to say that while Assad’s Syrian army has now collapsed, “there is a threat that terror elements will come here, and we advanced so… [they] won’t settle close to the border with us.”
Meanwhile, smaller contingents of Israeli troops continue to find isolated groups of fighters and weapons caches across Gaza revealed by the continued Israeli destruction of Hamas’ huge underground tunnel network in which they have been hiding. Israeli troops in the north are also finding and destroying larger caches of Hezbollah anti-tank missiles, assault rifles, RPG grenade launchers, and mortar shells, as well as other weapons hidden in South Lebanon’s dense and mountainous terrain.
SOME BELIEVE THAT THE SYRIAN DEVIL YOU KNOW IS BETTER
While many in the Middle East cheered the fall of the rightfully notorious Assad regime, according to Ben-Ami, some “U.S. allies in the region. . . would have liked to see Assad remain in power. . . [because] he was a known quantity — and better than an Islamist rebel-led government, however moderate it claims to be.”
In his first public statement since fleeing from Damascus to Moscow where he sought safe haven with the other members of his family, Syria’s overthrown dictator Bashar Assad claimed that he had wanted to stay on at the Russian air base at Hmeimim, Syria, and fight after the rebels captured the capital on the morning of December 8, but instead the Russian military evacuated him forcefully from the air base after it came under rebel attack.
“At no point during these events did I consider stepping down or seeking refuge nor was such proposal made by any individual or party,” Assad said in the English version of his statement. “The only course of action was to continue fighting against the terrorist onslaught.”
A spokesman for the current transitional caretaker Syrian government reacted to Assad’s statement by saying that “the Assad regime is finished with no return” and that Russia “should reconsider its presence on Syrian territory as well as its interests.”
NEW SYRIAN LEADERSHIP SEEKING LEGITIMACY FROM THE WEST
He also said that the U.S. and other countries should reconsider the designation of HTS as a terrorist organization because of its former affiliation with al-Qaida because that designation is no longer “right” or “accurate.”
Biden administration officials have confirmed that they have had unofficial contacts with the leadership of the HTS coalition concerning the safe return of American citizen Travis Timmerman who was released from one of Assad’s jails after the regime collapsed.
The Syrian transitional government’s spokesman added, “Kurds are one of the components of the Syrian people and we are very keen that this group has its rights protected. The social fabric in Syria is a source of strength and not weakness. But we affirm that we don’t want any part of Syria to be separated.”
REPLACEMENT HEZBOLLAH LEADER HOPES FOR A SYRIA RECOVERY
Meanwhile, Naim Qassem, who was selected by Hezbollah as its new leader replacing Nasrallah, admitted in a speech televised in Lebanon that the group had lost its direct arms ground re-supply route from Iran through Syria with the toppling of Assad’s regime, but sought to minimize its significance.
He said that Hezbollah “cannot judge these new forces until they stabilize” and “take clear positions,” but added that he hoped that the Lebanese and Syrian people and governments could continue to cooperate in fighting “Israel as an enemy and not normalize relations with it.”
“Yes, Hezbollah has lost the military supply route through Syria at this stage, but this loss is a [mere] detail in the resistance’s work,” Qassem said.
He also said that if the new Syrian regime does not permit Hezbollah’s Iranian supply route to “return to normal, we could look for other ways.”
NEW SYRIAN LEADER ASKS THE IDF TO STOP ITS PREVENTIVE ATTACKS
HTS leader Julani also sat for an interview with a Syrian TV news channel over the weekend declaring that Israel has “no more excuses” to carry out airstrikes in Syria and that the recent IDF attacks on the abandoned arms that Assad’s army left behind have crossed red lines and threaten an escalation in the region.
However, Julani added that his group did not seek further conflict in the region.
Previously, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu also sent a video message to the new regime being formed in Syria declaring that the IDF had bombed the military targets and equipment left behind by the retreating Syrian military of the Assad regime “so that they won’t fall into the hands of the jihadists.”
“We have no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of Syria,” Netanyahu said, “but we certainly do intend to do what is necessary to ensure our security.” He added Israel was ready in principle to establish peaceful relations with Syria’s new rulers but wouldn’t hesitate to attack if it threatened to attack Israel or if the new government allowed Iran and its proxies to reestablish their military presence in Syria.
In his later televised interview, Julani appeared to address some of Netanyahu’s stated concerns by saying that Syria is exhausted by years of civil war and that at this stage it does not want to be dragged into conflicts with others that may lead to further destruction, because Syria’s reconstruction and stability are his main priorities.
He stressed the importance of Syria’s new leaders’ ability to abandon their previous “revolutionary mentality” and the need to establish modern institutions, guarantee the rule of law, and respect the rights of all Syrians.
Julani also delivered a scathing condemnation of the Assad regime and promised to soon produce evidence of its “enormous theft” from the Syrian people, and how it turned Syria into “a farm for Iranian greed.”
THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA IN SYRIA IS STILL AN OPEN QUESTION
While Julani mentioned the limited Russian air strike campaign against rebel forces during the days just prior to the collapse of Assad’s regime, and said that it had raised fears of a repeat of the scorched earth scenario of the war in Gaza, he was careful to leave open the option of future friendly relations with Moscow, and ambiguously declared that the regime change now in progress in Syria offers an opportunity for both sides to re-evaluate current ties in a way that serves common interests.
On the other hand, Julani conceded that Syria’s close involvement with Iran had posed a danger to the country’s security, but added that even though, “We were able to end the Iranian presence in Syria. . . we are not enemies of the Iranian people.”
But Julani is no doubt aware of the visceral hatred that many Syrians now bear for the Iranians who treated their country like an expendable pawn over the past 40 years. During that period, Syria served as Iran’s central command post for that portion of the Middle East. Iran enjoyed ready access to all of Syrian territory as well as its shipping ports and airports.
WHY MANY SYRIANS HATE IRAN
Iran controlled Syria’s military bases, missile factories, tunnels, and warehouses that served as the supply chain for its network of terrorist organizations across the region. Iran funneled everything through Syria, including weapons, cash, and logistical support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and terrorist groups operating on the West Bank and in Iraq.
“Syria was a linchpin to Iran’s regional plan, the encircling of Israel in a ring of fire,” Matthew Levitt, the director of the counterterrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told the New York Times. “The axis of resistance was a three-legged stool of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, and [without Syria] it no longer stands.”
He noted that Iran is also dependent upon Syria economically because it purchased Iranian crude and refined oil, defying the existing U.S. sanctions on the export of Iranian oil and refinery products.
IRAN’S SUPREME LEADER DEEP IN DENIAL OVER THE LOSS OF SYRIA
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, in his first public comments about the regime change in Syria, took a much harsher tone by illogically blaming Assad’s downfall on the United States and Israel whom he called “aggressors,” as well as Turkey for its support of the HTS-led rebel coalition,
But flying in the face of the facts on the ground in Syria, with young and old, men and women celebrating the downfall of the tyrannical rule of Assad by dancing in the streets chanting, “Freedom,” Khameini declared that “the territories [now] occupied [by Assad’s enemies] in Syria will be freed by the brave young people of Syria. Have no doubt that this will happen.” He also illogically predicted that Iran’s “resistance” to Israel and the United States would spread widely across the region, and Iran would grow stronger.
Nevertheless, the New York Times reported that the widespread open criticism by some of Iran’s most well-known people and journalists of the country’s support for the failed Assad regime was unprecedented for such a closed totalitarian theocracy.
Rahman Ghahremanpour, a political analyst based in Tehran, told the NY Times, in a telephone interview that “Iran wants to move toward a direction that would eventually normalize its relations with Syria, but it’s going to be very difficult. The priority right now is to make sure Syria does not turn into a base against Iran and a launchpad to attack its interests in Iraq or Lebanon.”
QUESTIONS FROM ITS PEOPLE THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT CAN’T ANSWER
Alireza Mokarami, an Iranian veteran who fought in Syria’s civil war on Assad’s behalf, and who now runs a local Iranian news site, asks Iran’s leaders in a widely circulated essay, “Why were you spending billions of dollars of oil revenues that belong to the Iranian people on Assad until the very end if he wasn’t even listening to you? At least on the topic of Syria, stop lying and be honest with the people.”
Iran’s Islamic leaders are at a loss to explain to Iran’s long-suffering people why their government wasted an estimated $50 billion on Syria over the past decade, according to a Jerusalem Post report, and why their government lied to them when it said that the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would be deployed to rescue Assad from collapse within 24 hours of his first major military defeat at the hands of the Turkish-backed Syrian rebel coalition, the fall of the northern city of Aleppo.
Supreme Leader Khamenei himself also owes an explanation to the “fourth generation of the revolution.” They are the radical Iranian Shiite youth who volunteered to go to Syria, in response to the ayatollah’s public request that they support Assad’s regime and safeguard Syria’s Shiite holy places.
Iran’s propaganda machine has swung into high gear to blame a series of Assad’s “newly discovered failures” for the fiasco rather than Iran’s cynical and selfish abuse of its long-term relationship with Syria. These start with Syria’s failure to “fire a single shot at the Zionist regime for half a century,” Assad’s alleged “turn to the West, and receipt of economic incentives from the UAE on condition that he disengage Syria from its pivotal role as the distribution hub of Iran’s Axis of Resistance.” But the most laughable Iranian excuse of all for its failure to rescue Assad from regime change was his resistance to Iran’s advice to promote “Syrian democracy,” “fix Syria’s difficult economic situation,” “the weaknesses of his army and the state infrastructure,” and “the suffering of the Syrian people after five decades of Assad family dictatorship.”
WHY ASSAD NEVER GOT THE MILITARY AID HE WAS EXPECTING
The real reason for Iran’s failure to deliver timely military aid to Assad was much simpler. When Iran sent its first emergency planeloads of military cargo and reinforcements to Syria, Israel threatened to shoot them down even before the planes reached Syrian airspace, so they were immediately ordered by their superiors to turn around and fly back to their bases in Iran.
ANGRY IRANIANS KNEW WHAT THEY WERE SEEING IN SYRIA
When ordinary Iranians who could see what was happening in Syria also started publicly disagreeing with the ayatollah’s unrealistic analysis, Khameini reacted with outrage. He called the critical statements “a crime” because they were sowing fear among the Iranian people. Within a few hours, Iran’s Islamic judiciary announced a criminal investigation into all of Iran’s prominent public figures and news outlets that had been leading the criticism, including a former member of Iran’s parliament who revealed that the debt owed by the bankrupt Syrian government to Iran amounted to about $30 billion.
Privately, five unnamed Iranian officials told the New York Times that since the Assad regime had fallen, many of their government colleagues were still reeling because they realized that Iran had lost everything it had invested in Syria over the past 40 years in just 11 days. They said that the Islamic regime was struggling to find any way forward with Syria’s new government and were willing to accept even the lowest level of diplomatic presence if Syria’s new leaders allowed it. But two of the Iranian officials feared the embarrassment of having all of Iran’s diplomatic ties to Syria cut and its embassy there shuttered.
On the other hand, even the still new leadership of Hamas felt obligated to risk alienating Iran’s Supreme Leader and losing his support by issuing a public statement congratulating the Syrian rebels on their victory and declaring that Hamas was standing up for the Syrian people.
HEZBOLLAH IS TALLYING UP ITS HEAVY LOSSES
Meanwhile, the Times of Israel has reported that, according to sources close to Hezbollah, “the terror group believes the number of its fighters killed by Israel in the last year could be as high as 4,000, the vast majority of them during the last two months of intensified ground fighting,” starting in late September.
“Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel since October 2023 resulted in the deaths of 45 civilians, in addition [to] 80 IDF soldiers and reservists [who] have died in cross-border skirmishes, attacks on Israel, and in the ensuing [IDF] ground operation. . . in southern Lebanon,” according to the news report.
According to IDF statistics, since Hezbollah joined with Hamas in attacking Israel in October 2023, Israeli forces have struck over 12,500 Hezbollah targets [in Lebanon], including 1,600 command centers and 1,000 weapons depots.
While Israeli attacks on the hidden caches of Hezbollah arms that it discovers in Lebanon continue, the ceasefire in Lebanon which began in late November has largely held despite some alleged violations of the terms of the truce. The relative quiet has encouraged some of the 60,000 displaced residents of northern Israel to start returning to their abandoned homes, except for the nearly 3,000 homes and buildings in northern Israel that have been damaged by Hezbollah attacks.
Meanwhile, the ceasefire leaves Hezbollah’s fighting strength severely weakened, and its members demoralized and without seasoned leaders, while searching for ways to recover from its losses.
TRUMP PREFERS A PEACEFUL SOLUTION TO IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROBLEM
While there is no doubt that Trump is still very supportive of Israel, and said clearly during his 2024 presidential campaign that he was determined to terminate Iran’s nuclear program, he insisted that he wants a negotiated solution rather than through regime change in Tehran. He also said that after reaching a negotiated agreement he wanted Iran “to be a very successful country.” Trump also backed up that statement by sending his confidant, Elon Musk, to meet with Iran’s U.N. ambassador in November.
As he did during his first term as president, Trump is likely to start his regional negotiating efforts with the Gulf States, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which has already been working with the Biden administration toward a post-war governing agreement for Gaza involving a non-Hamas affiliated Palestinian government and enabling reconstruction efforts to begin.
No doubt, the rest of the Arab world would certainly welcome an agreement that prevents a destructive full-scale war between the U.S. and Israel on one side, and Iran and its terrorist proxies, possibly including the Russians, on the other. But there is no shortage of other bad actors in the region who would want to act as spoilers to foil any such agreement.
TRUMP’S BELLIGERENCE COULD GIVE HIM A NEGOTIATING ADVANTAGE
On the other hand, Trump may be better equipped than Biden to achieve such an outcome because of his reputation for volatility and ruthlessness. As Maloney writes in her Foreign Affairs article, “If Trump reinstates meaningful economic pressure on Iran and gives Israel some additional leeway for military action, he might better demonstrate U.S. capabilities and thus force Iran to reverse its current, uncompromising policy positions. A muscular U.S. approach has paid dividends in the past with an Iranian leadership whose foremost interest is in regime survival. Such an approach would likely be an improvement over that of the Biden administration, which relied almost exclusively on conciliation that Iran saw as weak and desperate. . .
“Forging this deal will still be extremely difficult to achieve. . . [because] Iran’s leadership is steeped in antagonism toward both Israel and the United States, and the regime’s investment in its nuclear program and proxy network has been key to its survival strategy. . .
“[On the other hand,] Netanyahu, for his part, has found that a maximalist military approach yields spectacular strategic dividends along with domestic political benefits,” Maloney concludes.
LOWERING ENERGY COSTS NEEDS PEACE IN UKRAINE AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine policies will also have an impact on the success of his domestic economic policies. He has promised to “drill, baby, drill,” ending the Biden administration’s war on domestic supplies of oil and natural gas in the expectation of drastically lowering the cost of energy to American consumers and businesses. But that will only work if significant foreign sources of energy, such as oil and natural gas from Russia and Iran are no longer restricted by sanctions.
TRUMP’S TWO-STAGE PRO-ISRAEL STRATEGY
That is one reason why Trump has informed Prime Minister Binyomin Netanyahu that upon taking office, he would not support any effort by Israel to annex large portions of the West Bank, as some of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners have publicly suggested. Trump’s immediate goal is to end the war in Gaza, which he hopes that the Biden administration will be able to accomplish before he takes over the White House. He then wants to persuade Saudi Arabia to sign onto the Abraham Accords, clearing the way for a regionwide negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and enabling relative peace to return to the Middle East without any further serious U.S. military involvement.
Once that is accomplished, Trump and his strongly pro-Israel foreign policy team can be trusted to renew his first-term support for Israel’s territorial rights in Yerushalayim and the West Bank, Israel’s strong self-defense arguments for remaining in control of the Golan Heights, and re-affirming Israel’s diplomatic legitimacy in the international community and the United Nations. This is despite the typical double standard arguments and false Palestinian claims designed to undermine Israel’s security and support from Western-style democracies.
