Kaplan on Gaza Maimon Schwarzschild

Robert Kaplan, writing in the Atlantic, is characteristically shrewd about the Gaza fighting:

[I]n testimony to the sheer power of audacity and of ideas the mullahs in Teheran hold more sway in Gaza today than does the tired, Brezhnevite regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Gaza constitutes the western edge of Iran’s veritable new empire, cartographically akin to the ancient Persian one, that now stretches all the way to western Afghanistan, where Kabul holds no sway and which is under Iranian economic domination.  Israel’s attack on Gaza is, in effect, an attack on Iran’s empire...

Iran’s message of anti-Semitism and hatred toward the United States plays well across sectarian lines in the Sunni Arab world... Sunni Arabs hate their own rulers, but despairing of changing their own lot, they channel that hatred toward us: thus the potency of the Iranian message. A nuclear weapon will only supply Iran with more prestige among the Arab lumpen faithful.

And yet the one place where Moslems are cynical about Iran is in Iran itself, where the regime relies on a narrow base of support amid a state that (despite its vast oil reserves) is in economic shambles. Thus, the supreme irony of the Middle East is that the place where anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are least potent is in the Iranian heartland. Public opinion-wise, Egypt and Saudi Arabia constitute more dangerous territory for us than Iran. Iran’s benign relationship with the Jews, in particular, stretches from antiquity through the reign of the late Shah.

The Greater Middle East hangs on a thread: it could either explode into direct warfare between Israel and Iran, or it could evolve for the better after the Teheran regime is undermined by public opinion, triggered at least initially by continued low oil prices. Given the historical record, the current level of hostility between Israel and Iran may not be the last word in regional geopolitics. For there are cataclysms to come, and the real battle for the soul of the region may be fought in Iran itself.

For the moment, now that Israel has launched a war, we need it to succeed, rather than be compromised by the kind of ceasefire that allows Hamas to regroup. If that happens, our leverage with Iran will be further reduced, with negotiations yielding little. But once Israel does succeed, then we will need to bear down on it hard, in the service of negotiations with both Arabs and Iranians. If he is smart, President-elect Barack Obama will now be quietly rooting for Israel.

Kaplan is the author of The Ends of The Earth, which is both a superb book of travel writing and a primer on the history and culture of the African and Asian countries where Kaplan travelled.  His thoughts about Iran and the Jews in his current Atlantic piece echo some of the themes in his book.  Kaplan has an exceptionally good sense of the world.  His conclusion - the importance of Israel's success in Gaza - in sobering.  Read the whole Atlantic piece.

Comments

[Eric Rasmusen]

I bet Moslems in Gaza are cynical about Iran too, but dissent is a lot more dangerous in Gaza.

The general point is good though: ideas matter, and especially the ideas you can get across to people with guns.

[Troll900]

Kaplan has a tendency to the hyperbolic. He's kind of a military groupie too. He saw a US empire in the US getting a Mongolian platoon in Iraq. I find Kaplan entertaining too, but I just don't think he's credible when he talks about empires and clashes of civilizations. He clearly wants to be Aristotle to some US President/Alexander. Sometimes a squalid conflict over a patch of desert is just that. There was an op-ed article in the NYT I think on the 13th by an israeli that talks about the Hamas-Iran connection.