The only major power that still remains unreconciled to Israel is Iran.
The removal in 1979 of the Shah of Iran was as justified as was the forcible removal in 2003 of Saddam Hussein. President George H.W. Bush listened in 1991 to those in the Middle East who did not want to replace the Sunni (albeit with a heavy Tikrit overlay) regime of the Iraqi strongman with the inevitable Shia-led alternative. They were aware that any genuinely popular government would have the Shia in key roles, and to them, that was anathema. Voters in the US recognized Operation Desert Storm for what it was, unfinished business, and turfed the 41st US President out of office in the 1992 presidential poll. Had George H.W. Bush taken out Saddam Hussein in the manner that his son George did in 2003, he may well have coasted to a second term, given that in both foreign and domestic policy, he was overall an effective leader. Unfortunately, focused as son George W Bush was on removing the man “who wanted to kill Pappy”, the 43rd US President took his eye off the growing threat to US primacy posed by the PRC and its ally, the Wahhabi International. The fall of Saddam Hussein ensured a second term for George W. Bush, even though every one of his military conquests became disaster zones. US President George W. Bush ranks along with Bill Clinton in empowering PRC’s march towards global primacy, as well as in being ineffective in stamping out the violence unleashed by Wahhabi extremism, even though on record both administrations opposed both threats. It would take more than a book to enumerate the policy errors that led the often gallant women and men of the US military into failing to stamp out any of the extremist foes they had been sent to oppose. Not that this prevented their superiors in Washington from claiming that even victories won by other powers was the consequence of US actions. The understandable trait (in the context of bitterly contested election cycles) of taking credit for someone else’s efforts was recently manifested by the Biden administration claiming credit for the Israel-Gaza ceasefire that had been brokered by Egypt. Its leader General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had not been granted even the courtesy of a phone call by the newly installed 46th President of the US when the ceasefire was announced in both Jerusalem as well as Gaza.
Biden should abhor the example of Trump, who abruptly shifted gears less than two years before his term ended, from a wholesome stance of opposition to the Wahhabi International into serving as a facilitator of that PLA-linked threat to global stability, even sacrificing the Syrian Kurds to Erdogan. President Trump subsequently sought to betray the Afghan people by giving oxygen to that Clinton protege, the Taliban. Judging from not the still confusing words but the more deliberate recent deeds of the Biden White House, Biden’s error of repeating the mistake made by Trump seems to have been understood. The need is for the Afghan National Army to be provided the data, weapons and air support needed to make as short work of the Taliban, just as the Northern Alliance did during 2003-04, before political correctness set in within NATO and caused harmful policy changes designed to socially engineer the Afghan military and government at the cost of effectively dealing with the threat posed by the Taliban and associated groups such as Daesh. President Biden did not cause the problems that he is facing in Af-Pak and the Middle East, but so far, his declared policies are doing the reverse of retrieving the situation from the hell into which his predecessors have left much of either region.
This columnist had been pleasantly surprised that Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei permitted Iran’s President Rouhani to sign in 2015 the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal. Except for absurdists such as those in Clinton’s time who sought to make the NPT “last for eternity”, it is clear that the JCPOA gave breathing time to the rest of the world to engineer (through an expansion of engagement) changes in the siege mentality that has overlaid (often with reason) so many of the actions of Iran. While it is a fact that armed groups hostile to the State of Israel have long been assisted by Tehran, it is forgotten by elements of the international community that the regime in Iran is itself battling an existential threat of greater magnitude than that posed by Iran and the collection of regimes and armed groups that seek to change what is permanent, the existence of the State of Israel. A country that is the ultimate refuge of the Jewish community. The advances in science, literature and technology for which the Jewish community is responsible, together with the horrible fate that was long endured by the Jewish people, especially in Europe, provide an undeniable moral basis for the existence of Israel. Given the civilisational linkages between the Persian and the Arab peoples with the Jewish community, it is a welcome fact that more and more countries in the Middle East are accepting in their diplomacy and commerce that Israel is an unalterable segment of the Middle Eastern mosaic. Those states who believe (or pretend to) that Israel can be erased are placing the future of their countries in jeopardy by arousing the ire of the countries close to Israel. About the only major power that still remains unreconciled to what it terms in official communications as the “Zionist entity” is Iran. This stance is principally owing to the miscalculation made by Ayatollah Khomeini, which was that embracing the Reverse Crusader cause of seeking to extinguish Israel would make him irresistible to Muslims across the world. Unfortunately for Ayatollah Khomeini’s efforts at becoming the hero of the Muslim Ummah, few in that large and hugely important group care enough about recovering the lands handed over to Jewish immigrants since the 1930s to have a gravitational pull strong enough to draw them towards Khomeinism and its attendant fantasy of seeking the elimination of the State of Israel. While the founder of the political system of clerical supremacy over the state (which lacks the sanction of theology) was obdurate, his successor Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seems a tad more flexible. The sooner the present Supreme Leader of Iran accepts that the future of the youth of his country mandates acceptance of the immutable reality of the State of Israel in the Middle East, the better will be the trajectory of a country that has a civilisation going back several thousand millennia. Thanks to his own actions concerning regional policy (and also to the damage caused by Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran soon after the fall of the Shah) Ayatollah Khomeini brought misery to the people he ruled. Should President Biden return to the JCPOA as implemented by President Obama, it would benefit both Iran as well as the entirety of the Middle East. When and if the original JCPOA becomes operational again, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be well advised to abandon the monumental error of seeking to extinguish the ultimate refuge of a historically persecuted people, Israel.