A fascinating article in Sunday's New York Times by Iranian Karim Sadjapour provides some insight into how Iran uses Arab Muslims in its war against Israel.
Until now, Iran’s interests have been served by the Arab status quo:The longer I live here and the more I read, the more convinced I am that it is Islam that is responsible for Israel's dispute with the Arabs.
frustrated populations ruled over by emasculated regimes incapable of checking
Israel, and easily dismissed as American co-dependents. A conversation I once
had with a senior Iranian diplomat is instructive.
He complained, justifiably, about Washington’s excessive focus on military
power to solve political problems. I posed a simple hypothetical: What if,
instead of having spent several billion dollars financing Hezbollah, Hamas and
Islamic Jihad over the past three decades, Iran had spent that money educating
tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites to become doctors,
professors and lawyers? Wouldn’t those communities now be much better off and in
a much stronger position to assert their rights vis-à-vis Israel?“
What good would that have done for Iran?” he responded candidly. (He
himself had a doctorate from a British university.) “Do you think if we sent
them abroad to study they would return to southern Lebanon and Gaza to fight
Israel? Of course not; they would have remained doctors, lawyers and
professors.”
Iran, in essence, understands that it can inspire and champion the region’s
downtrodden and dispossessed, but not the upwardly mobile. Its strategy to
dominate the Middle East hinges less on building nuclear weapons than on the
twin pillars of oil and alienation.
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