Iran orchestrating Hamas/Hezbollah attacks

Edward Luttwak lays out the case. (full text not officially online).

Iran's leaders have apparently decided to reject the Western offer to peacefully settle the dispute over its weapons-grade uranium-enrichment program...

So, instead of waiting passively for the inevitable retaliation, Iran's leaders decided to trigger a Middle East crisis of their own by organizing recent attacks against Israel. Their aim is to discourage the U.S. and the Europeans from starting another crisis vis-à-vis Iran -- after all, financial markets and everyday politics in Europe can only tolerate so much.

Iran's moves were prepared in a series of meetings with its local allies, both Hamas of Palestine and Hezbollah of Lebanon.

Khaled Mashaal, the overall Hamas leader who remains safely in Damascus under Syrian protection, travelled to Tehran at one point, where he received about $50-million in cash. Although an offshoot of the (strictly Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood, whose financial supporters in Saudi Arabia loathe Iran's Shia ayatollahs, Hamas evidently decided to co-operate in Iran's scheme. It was already cut off from Western funding because of its refusal to recognize Israel, and it was diplomatically isolated. Hamas acted by increasing rocket attacks on nearby Israeli territory and by launching a raid across the international border into Israel in which two soldiers were killed and one was captured...

Evidently, [Hezbollah leader] Sheik Nasrallah felt compelled to serve Iran's strategy....

Israel's political aim...is to destroy Hezbollah's much-desired position as a legitimate Lebanese political party, by exposing it as the paid agent of Iran, serving foreign interests at grievous cost to Lebanon.

So does Con Coughlin.

...However much the Hizbollah leadership might claim to be a legitimate, democratically elected political party, the reality is that it is, and always has been, a proxy of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who finance, train and equip the militia as a means of maintaining a permanent security challenge to Israel's northern border...

...Hizbollah has been allowed to develop what in effect amounts to a state within a state, with its own well-equipped private army - all of it funded by the Iranians. It was rockets provided by the Iranians that were used in the initial diversionary attack that preceded the kidnapping raid. And senior Israeli military officers are convinced the anti-tank weapon used to destroy their Merkava tank, with the loss of its four-man crew, originated from Iran, not Lebanon...

It is also well known in both Beirut and Jerusalem that Hizbollah does not act without first consulting its paymasters in Teheran...

For the ayatollahs in Teheran trying to find a way out of their nuclear difficulties, what better way to divert the world's attention from their nuclear-enrichment programme than to provoke a fresh Middle East crisis between Israel and its neighbours?

Charles Krauthammer identifies the "root cause".

Just Tuesday, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, writing in The Post, referred to Israel as "a supposedly 'legitimate' state"...

He made clear what he wants done with this bastard entity. "Contrary to popular depictions of the crisis in the American media," he writes, "the dispute is not only about Gaza and the West Bank." It is about "a wider national conflict" that requires the vindication of "Palestinian national rights."

That, of course, means the right to all of Palestine, with no Jewish state. In the end, the fighting is about "the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967."

In 1967 Israel acquired the "occupied territories." In 1948 Israel acquired life. The fighting raging now in 2006 -- between Israel and the "genocidal Islamism" (to quote the writer Yossi Klein Halevi) of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them -- is about whether that life should and will continue to exist.

Mark C.

Update: The Lebanese prime minister implies that Iran and Syria are involved:

When asked by CNN what role Syria or Iran may have played in the current crisis, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said it would be "strange" for Hezbollah to have "done this alone."

More on Iran:

Two missiles fired from Lebanon toward the northern Israeli city of Haifa were "made in Iran," Israeli military sources said.

Posted by markc at July 14, 2006 10:19 AM