October 02, 2024
The Fury of History
The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union ended dramatically not because of a military conflict or international crisis, but because of internal domestic politics: Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms inside the Soviet Union led not to rejuvenation but to the dismantling of the communist system itself, and that, as we know, changed the world.
The postmodern Middle East may experience a similar fate. The military conflict between Israel and Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Arabs can have lulls and ceasefires, but ultimately cannot truly end until there is change inside Iran. This historical process has only quickened because of the current war in Lebanon, which pits Israel against Iran’s most militarily powerful proxy force, Hezbollah.
Even manifestly unpopular regimes do not end on their own. There has to be a trigger.
The assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September, followed by Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon, further undermines Iran, whose decades-long project in Lebanon may be turning to ashes. The regional war just ahead of us will ultimately focus on Iran itself and its military-security complex. Iranian territory will be less and less off-limits.
Its clerical regime, in power since 1979, defines the region’s era to an extent much greater than even Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, himself a historical life-force who will echo for far longer than the unmemorable mediocrities that now govern Europe and the US. But it is Iran, a country of 88.5 million and an ancient cluster of Persian civilisation (rather than many Arab countries, which are merely vague geographical expressions), that holds the key to the current regional war. Energy-rich Iran provides the money, the military training, the brilliant tactics and the dynamic ideology of revolutionary nihilism (which combines a radical Islam with an anti-Semitic fascism) that has allowed Hamas and Hezbollah to become what they are today. The older Arab-Israeli conflict over historical Palestine was a conventional contest over states and territory. But the introduction of clerical Iran has given the struggle a tiers-mondiste quality, further infused with a millenarian religious call for the annihilation of an entire people.
Read the full article from The New Statesman.
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