OPINION:
Iran’s aging political leadership apparently has too much time on its hands. It insists on increasingly risky foreign adventures while discontent piles up at home. Iran’s rial currency is at its lowest level against the dollar in history. Restive ethnic and religious minorities and water shortages in the provinces are causing near-daily demonstrations, and an increasingly discontented majority population of people under 25 years old are demanding domestic change. That kind of atmosphere has bred revolutions in many nations in the past.
Now, the Israelis claim to have proof of Iranian duplicity in hiding their nuclear aspirations from the rest of the world. This will likely add fuel to the Trump administration’s allegations that the nuclear agreement with Tehran is a deeply flawed deal. Despite the problems at home, the old men in Tehran insist on stirring pots of conflict in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen; they are playing a very dangerous game.
Iran wants to be seen as a champion of minority Shiite populations in the region. Supplying weapons to the Houthis in Yemen is fairly low risk; frankly, nobody in the region but the Saudis cares. Giving weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon is riskier, but so far arming Hezbollah hasn’t been seriously contested by the Israelis. Placing overt Iranian bases in Syria is another matter.
The Israelis have already bombed some of the existing installations as a not-too-subtle warning to Iran of where the line in being drawn. These strikes have killed Iranian personnel; so far, the Iranians have kept those casualties low key, but word gets around. A major attempted Iranian kinetic strike by armed drones and/or missiles will likely result in a very lethal Israeli response which would likely involve a temporary Israeli incursion into Syria designed to eradicate the Iranian bases.
In such a conflict, the Iranians would be logistically overextended in Syria. Iranian leaders don’t seem to understand what that means. Iran is separated from Syria by hundreds of miles of roads and sea lanes that the Israelis can easily interdict. The logistics situation would be dire from Day One. Israel has short supply lines to Syria and would rapidly gain ground and air superiority. Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force prisoners and equipment would be paraded through Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the world to see.
It is very unlikely that the Russians will risk a major regional war to pull Iranian chestnuts out of the fire and the Syrian government would be of limited help, if any. The old men in Tehran would be faced with the humiliation of backing down or doubling down with missiles and airstrikes. That is a lose-lose proposition.
Two American presidents have wisely tried to keep out of the Syrian quagmire except to deal with ISIS and the Syrian use of chemical weapons.
The ultimate victims of Iran’s foolish behavior in the Middle East will be the Assad regime and Lebanon’s southern Shiites who are ruled by Hezbollah. Whatever gains the Syrian government has made will likely be erased by an Israel-Iran war on Syrian soil. Lebanon’s southern Shiite community would benefit much more from open borders, trade and tourism with Israel than it will from getting rockets and unmanned armed aircraft from Iran and getting bombed for acting as surrogates. Hezbollah and the Assad regime are both malign actors. A pox on both of them.
The idealistic young Turks of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps who stormed the American Embassy in 1979 are now thick-waisted old men getting rich by running a superfluous military-industrial complex. The young millennials who they would send to war in Syria are going to be very skeptical of participating in a jihad to save a marginally Shiite Arab regime from its own people.
So how should the United States deal with Iran? There is an old military maxim that says, “When your adversary is in the process of shooting himself in the foot, don’t interfere.” The United States needs to sit this one out. We do not have a dog in the Syrian fight. If Israel can prove that Iran is cheating on the nuclear deal, we should get out of it and slap on more sanctions. The gerontocracy that runs Shiite Persian Iran will never transform their nation into a Middle East superpower. It will be outnumbered by the Sunni Arabs, outfought by the Israelis and eventually overthrown by its own young people.
• Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel who lectures at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
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