Raisi speaks during a commemoration ceremony marking the anniversary of the 2020 killing of Soleimani Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images)
Reporting from Israel at the end of last year stirred various emotions in me, not least a constant feeling of mild claustrophobia. Not from the Hamas rockets that incrementally forced me to duck into bomb shelters, nor from the colossal Israeli response I heard thundering overhead. Rather, wherever I travelled, be it to Gaza’s fringes in the south or the Lebanese border in the north, I felt surrounded by Iran.
Right now, Iranian proxies — from Hamas to Hezbollah to its flunkies in Syria, as well as the Houthis — are attacking Israel and its interests. Iran has also kicked off against Pakistan, with the two spending recent weeks lobbing missiles and accusations at each other. It is, some might argue, illogical behaviour. Iran is regarded as generally belligerent, and it is. But as Iranians never tire of telling me, they have not invaded a country or started any wars for centuries. And Iran’s leadership is most certainly not illogical. So why all the violence?
All foreign policy is a product of domestic factors; the internal always creates the external. You cannot understand Brexit without understanding the conflicting personalities that fuelled it. And you cannot understand Iranian behaviour in the Middle East (and beyond) without understanding its corrupt, faction-ridden revolutionary dictatorship, and the degree to which these factors shape its foreign policy. At its core, Iran’s foreign policy rests on a doctrine of “forward defence”. Loosely speaking, it seeks to fight abroad so it doesn’t have to do so at home. It bases this strategy on two things: long-range ballistic missiles and proxy warfare using local groups. And it has proved successful ever since it was conceived in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War.
I have always considered those eight years to be the Islamic Republic’s War of Independence. So much of its identity was forged then. All nations are shaped by the accretive wisdom of their history and the unchanging determinants of geography (even if they often ignore one or both). For the Islamic Republic, much of what drives its policy was learned through its experience of being a revolutionary state that had to fight for its existence throughout almost all of its first decade. In particular, the War of the Cities in 1984, during which Iran found itself repeatedly struck by long-range Iraqi missiles with no ability to respond in kind, burned the need for a ballistic missile capability into Iran’s leaders. Now, 40 years later, missiles sit at the centre of Iranian deterrence and state pride. The second thing that the war taught Iran was the value of using proxy forces to fight your enemies. And key to that was a man named Qasem Soleimani.
Soleimani was the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) expeditionary Quds Force until the United States droned him in 2020. In his early twenties at the start of the war, he became commander of a volunteer force that was deployed to Iraqi Kurdistan — the centre of anti-Saddam separatist activity in Iraq — to work with the Kurds against Baghdad. It was his first taste of using foreign forces to attack an enemy by proxy, and it shaped him.
It was also, at least in spirit, the beginning of the Quds Force, which began life as “Department 900”, specialising in cross-border raids and recruiting Iraqis against Saddam. But as it grew, what made the Quds so effective was its understanding that two things were needed for the kind of leverage it sought. The first was pragmatism. Despite its Shia sectarianism, Tehran was happy for the Quds to find Sunni partners, from the Iraqi Kurds to the Afghan Northern Alliance to Hamas in Gaza. The second, and this was crucial, was the need to expand beyond the military realm. In Afghanistan, Soleimani became a quasi-diplomat, spending years mediating between the various factions — he ultimately became so vital to Afghan politics that the country’s first post-Taliban government might well not have emerged without him. By the time of the 2001 US invasion, Tehran held such political sway in the country that it was able to help Washington against their mutual enemy, the Taliban.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeDavid Patrikarakos paints a fascinating picture of Quds Force. It’s tempting to see it as an Iranian equivalent of Russia’s Wagner organisation. They have similarities and differences.
Both had leaders who died violently: Prigozhin was killed by Putin, Soleimani at the hands of the Americans. But then Quds works within the regime, Wagner attempted a coup.
Both are very effective at advancing their respective countries’ foreign policies, both are utterly unscrupulous, both give their principals plausible desirability. Both need to be handled carefully, otherwise they could start an unwanted war.
I wonder if China is getting ideas…?
You could just as easily be talking about the US couldn’t you.. the only difference being thr US actually DOES start totally unwarranted wars all over the world!
I guessed that Raisi was appointed president with blatantly rigged elections because Khameneh was grooming him to be his successor. I’ll be relieved if it turns out he isn’t.
I read as far as: “You cannot understand Brexit without understanding the conflicting personalities that fuelled it.”
Then I stopped. Why waste a Saturday reading the opinions of a nonentity?
It was a good article – but the inclusion of a “Brexit” comment was very misguided.
And baffling? I carried on reading because I thought it might be explained, but no. Anyone who thinks Brexit was engineered by ‘personalities’ is up a gum tree. (Are we still allowed to say that?).
You could argue that as few states are genuinely “democratic” (in the sense that their governments make policy following the preferences of the majority of the electorate) then many policies boil down to the personal preferences/interests of the politicians involved (heavily influenced by their various campaign contributors, needless to say).
But this was another example of the author’s attempt to make Iranian politics different from politics everywhere else. The fact is, politics attracts machiavelian schemers vying for influence and power, whether in Iran, or Scotland, or anywhere else.
If you’re a decent person, there’s simply no way you’re going to be able to compete with unscrupulous people who will do anything to climb the slippery pole of power. Look at the absolute shower who have been running the UK, US, New Zealand, France, etc etc.
Well, in a way it was engineered- by Cameron. He just ended up with the opposite result of the one he intended.
As another article on this site pointed out earlier this week, Iran has a young population and the majority of it is fed up living in a pariah state under the thumb of the bullies who always rise to the top in autocratic regimes. That is the medium term story of Iran; not the palace politics described in this article.
Kindly contextualise the BLM riots for us.
One of the more ridiculous decisions taken by Blair & Bush was the Iraq war as it removed from the area the only force that stood up to Iran. Since the defeat of Iraq regime, chaos has reigned and an emboldened Iran has constantly caused trouble.
But Iraq is now governed by the US so nothing to worry about there right?
I think you’ll find that Iran has far more influence on the government of Iraq than the US does. If, indeed Iraq has a single unified government across the entire country.
But Iran’s merely played the cards it was dealt and in much the fashion that could have been anticipated. For everything that’s wrong with the Iranian regime (a very long list), they are responding to external pressures – much as they did during the Iran-Iraq War when then West decided that Saddam Hussein was the “good guy” and deserving our support.
Iran’s just another of the countries the West helped to screw up in the Middle East – along with Iraq, Libya and many others. It wasn’t all our fault. But we (post-WWII mainly the US) did some pretty stupid stuff. Iran could have been a strong, successful pro-Western country if we’d made different decisions from the 1950s onwards.
But it removed Saddam and destroyed Iraq, they then destroyed Syria and libya, next up is Iran, articles like this are written so you will support the next war
Reading the comments. It seems to be working, most people will never learn
Yes, clearly a lot of the Unherd herd are unfamiliar with Wesley Clark’s “7 countries in 5 years” confession.
Much of this piece was anodyne, out of context observations such as the “revelation” that the Iranian regime’s primary goal is the preservation of the regime… erm, hello, show me a government (or any institution) that doesn’t prioritise its survival and extension of power and influence.
Using proxies? Iran learned from the best of them… the West.
The mistake was not replacing Hussein, it was failing to find a pliant General to put in his place (with expanded federalism and minority rights).
They won the war and lost the peace because of the misguided idea that you can impose Western democracy in an Islamic country. As we’ve seen in Egypt and Turkey, when the majority of the population are fundamentalist Muslims, democracy is pretty much the worst possible gov’t.
The Bush II administration’s biggest blunder, perhaps in all of their 8 years, was to turn Iraq’s Sunni elites into bandits.
Any country that’s conquered needs local rulers – the UK could’ve made this very clear to the Americans – and putting bounties on all the Iraqi generals’ heads removed that possibility. The resulting insurgencies looked horrible, splashed across the television, and ultimately led to Obama’s people surrendering the country.
This power vacuum, along with the “Arab Spring,” birthed ISIS and the Syrian civil war, along with gory uprisings throughout MENA and Islamic Africa.
It’s also worth mentioned that Chelsea nee Bradley Manning’s release of confidential US State Dept messages revealed appallingly corrupt regimes throughout the region, and led to civil strife from Tunis to Tehran, causing tens of thousands of deaths.
Baathist Iraq attacked six other countries, including Iran, gassed its own countrymen, and fought that vicious war with Iran, which killed over a million people. Iraqi agents came very close to assassinating a former US President, and defied UN weapons inspectors up to the very end, hinting that any invasion would be fended off by “weapons of mass destruction,” that we now know they’d lost or used up ages before.
The Iraqi Baathists – Hussein and his psychopathic sons at the top – were anything but agents of stability. They were, rather, uniquely destabilizing, which is what ultimately led to their demise.
Iraq went to war against Iran at the behest of the US, indeed they could only use chemical weapons against the Iraqis and the marsh arbs because Rumsfeld supplied them for use against the Iranians. He was an American poodle until the unfortunate misunderstanding with the us ambassador when he thought mistakenly that he had the green light to invade Kuwait.
under Hussein, Iraq was stable with a secular middle class. Under the Americans…
That’s a myth. Saddam thought he could take advantage of the chaos of the Iranian revolution to gain control of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway. A long running dispute going back decades. It wasn’t at the Americans behest.
But Saddams army wasn’t as strong as he thought and the Iranians not as chaotic and they counter attacked successfully. Saddams main international backer was actually the Soviets.
The Americans and the West mostly wanted to restore the pre-War status quo.
None of that justifies the outrageous US attack on Iraq by the Bush creature, the deceased Rumsfeld beast, or the countless other bellicose cretins who inhabit the US Administration.
Quite clearly ALL were acting at the behest of ‘Kosher Nostra’. No doubt IRAN will be next, and then Pakistan, Indonesia and so on. But ‘at the end of the day’ Israel will be driven into the sea, just as the Crusader Kingdom* was eight centuries ago. No ifs no buts.
More tea Vicar?
(* 1099-1303.)
So … You say there’s without doubt a Jewish conspiracy to attack Indonesia?
The other way round…………eventually.
This is high level hysterical garbage even by your standards. Despite facing two ways, to Arab public opinion and the “international community” with all the hypocrisy that entails, it is hardly a secret that Saudi Arabia and other states wants normalisation of relations with Israel.
“Driven into the sea” you say with glee. Well history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, the Jewish people unlike most other Bronze Age societies have maintained their identity despite huge persecution and in my mind have at least as much claim on territory in the “Holy Land” (“holy” by the way because of the Jews) as any other people of the region. They did not, unlike the Crusaders, conquer the territory but purchased land and then, understandably or not, were endlessly attacked by one or other force or state of the surrounding Arab Muslim world. Who, fortunately in my book, lost. As no doubt you’d agree, and as Golda Meir said, when Israel loses, no Israel.
Israel occupies a tiny sliver of land and is not about to conquer Mecca or Teheran. Had Jordan not misguidedly joined in the 1967 war, the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem would have remained in Arab hands; all.the inhabitants of that area did have citizenship, that of Jordan, which was itself part of the original British mandate in the region.
So, exactly why you seem to single out Israel as a state that ought to be destroyed is simply beyond me, but I fear the reason is pretty deeply rooted in European historical culture
Some very good points. When the British Mandate gave Jordan to the Hashemites, many who now call themselves Palestinian were indeed “Jordanian” citizens – on both banks of the Jordan. Curiously since losing the West Bank in ’67, Jordan does not seem to want it back! Similarly, Israel was hoping that letting Gaza do its own thing might enable its inhabitants to prosper on their own terms – especially considering the absolutely vast international aid they receive. Nope – they decided to invest in a big basement for Islamist fundamentalists instead.
As @AF says, Israel is a very insignificant sliver in a vast Arab/Islamic region. If I were to remind us of Mr Borges’ comment and suggest that this conflict is a little like two bald men fighting over a comb, it would be right to claim that the comment doesn’t quite characterise the unholy fight over the holy land. Nonetheless, I think it does capture some of the absurdity of the huge focus on Israel and Jews and of course Palestinians. But are there not so many much larger and more deserving problems for the world’s bloodthirsty media to focus everyone’s attention on?
Spoken like the true Trotskyite you are Fisher!
And to think even the rampantly anti-Semite Corbyn creature had to fire you! Your hypocrisy is simply staggering, but ‘playing to the gallery’ was always your forte is it not?
Back to East Croydon station with you, you’ll be far happier there I can assure you.
Articles like this are the reason I subscribe to Unherd. Excellent.
Agree. Remember the BBC used to provide detailed international analysis like this before it dumbed down.
Indeed. In today’s BBC4 news the ICJ preliminary judgement barely got mention even though the implications are that the UK (+US +EU of course) are aiding and abetting a genocide.. minor news. The US response was to cut off aid to UNRWA on spurious allegations of UNRWA members being part of Hamas, ie part of the govt. of Gaza!
Dumbed down indeed! The day the UK is accused of …’genocide makes it onto page 3 alongside the nude while Jurgen Klopp’s decisions makes the headlines! Yep, dumbed down is too mild a term for it!
Very good point.
BBC? What’s that?
Pre 1956.
Broadcasting Bullshit (for the) Conservatives
What a hilariously stupid remark.
That has to be a joke, right?
This observation alone is worthy of attention. It is a measure of the BBC’s growing irrelevance that I look elsewhere – ie UnHerd – for analysis and insight.
Articles like this are the reason I’m thinking of cancelling my sub
Bye bye.
Why?
Didn’t know whether to upvote or downvote!
A big Iran fan?
No you won’t. People like you and Oh’M’y are paid to be here so your empty threats never land. JUST GO.
A piece that mentions Soleimani repeatedly and bemoans the supposed ‘chaos’ of Iran’s influence without raising the fact that he was murdered by the USA would be astonishing if it wasn’t so much par for the course around here.
I’m sorry that the author feel’s surrounded by Iran when he’s trotting around Israel – I wonder how he thinks the locals feel with the US illegally occupying a third of Syria, or refusing to remove themselves from Iraq despite their requests for them to leave? Rank propaganda as per.
Yes and let’s not forget America’s (and Britain’s) prevention of Mosaddegh’s plans to nationalise oil in 1953, militarily overthrowing a democratically-elected government and installing the deeply unpopular Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose decadence and misrule created the conditions for the Iranian revolution that established the very theocracy at the core of all these Middle Eastern wars today.
They did the same again in Guatemala the next year in 1954 (this time it was too much for another country to own its own fruit) and again in Congo, South Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Iraq etc. The American empire was not one of colonies but of short-lived, unpopular puppet regimes. The more I compare it to other empires the more it seems to be one of the most stupid and short-sighted global regimes the world has ever seen (although I’ll admit that their intervention in the Balkans might have been helpful).
Very true and, as a result, very unpopular. Such is the fate of truth tellers on UnHerd! Treat those downticks as badges of honour!
Thanks for the accolade LO – I think my record is about 50 in an afternoon. I also don’t have too much regard for most of the readership on here (put them in charge and you’d probably have an impoverished, blazing world at war, but hey at least we’d have no more universities, trans people or climate activists, thank god).
But I also don’t want to troll; instead I’m after those rare but not impossible moments where some common ground is found with another person with reverse views who’s willing to listen and I feel a bit more listening goes on here than on other forums?
Amen to that.. but it’s hard you know.. as well as loving our enemies we gotta love the blind, narrow-minded, armchair warriors as well! I know.. must do better!
@Liam & @Desmond – Hasbara is as Hasbara does. The problem with the downvotes though is that after a day or so the comments by default are restricted to ‘Most voted’ and our well-informed sense will be filtered out.
Yes there’s no point writing your own comment unless you’re early to an article (anchoring effect sometimes works out and you end up shaping the thrust of the conversation by being first to comment) But generally better to respond to a comment higher up which you want to build on or (and this admittedly happens more often if it’s high up) that you feel needs challenging.
I enjoyed this essay because the author did a good job IMO of showing how Soleimani shaped Iran’s military and foreign policy. It was something new to me. The author did say the U.S, killed him. However, the essay was about Iran, not the U.S.
Denigrating other posters and making sweeping generalizations, is never a good look either.
You’re right JV, but I don’t think that makes the criticisms unwarranted. We’re not addressing the article on its own terms that’s true: i.e. its point that Iran’s internal politics are an important part of its foreign policy (). But it’s precisely those terms that do not make sense here if you take a longer view of Iran’s history (namely by dating it from the US-UK coup against Mosaddegh’s plans for oil nationalisation in 1953).
Instead the author begins the story with the 1980 Iran-Iraq war and so can more easily claim that ‘all foreign policy is a product of domestic factors; the internal always creates the external.’ We just think this doesn’t check out if you date Iran’s unrest and ultimate hostility to the west back to that 1953 coup and the installation of the unpopular Shah who provoked the revolution – which in that light is decidedly not only a product of ‘domestic factors!’
And yes you’re right about denigration – I don’t know the whole readership of Unherd of course, but I suppose when you get called far left for suggesting more sensible state regulation of failed privatised industries (esp. if it’s by someone who doesn’t appear to have read what you’ve written) or being called ‘anti-semitic’ for criticising Israel’s ‘foreign policy’ against Gaza, it’s sometimes hard not to develop a contemptuous attitude but it’s true that that will only further toxify political conversation.
Yes, USA was fighting communism and when you fight vile commie scum, you can not be too squimish about methods.
Your little world tour fails to mentioned hundreds of millions killed by communist regimes in China, Russia, Cambodia.
None of the regimes supported by USA was as vile as these listed above.
Happy dreams comrade…
So you think the USA fought those ‘commie scum’ successfully? Give me some examples (bar South Korea and the Balkans) where American intervention has achieved its goals.
And yes my extensive world tour makes my point just fine – I said stupid and short-sighted, not evil or murderous (though I think a case can be made for the latter when you look at how some US soldiers in Iraq gratuitously killed civilians from the safety of their helicopters). The end of the age of America is not something I relish. I don’t think the alternatives are better. I like many of the espoused values of the US. I just wish they’d been wiser with the power they had and not splurged it all on generally unnecessary wars of greed and hypocrisy that alienated both the world and many of their own citizens.
In your haste to spread your propaganda you obviously did not read the article,
“Soleimani was the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) expeditionary Quds Force until the United States droned him in 2020.”
Ah, a nice new word “droned” to add to the US favourite “neutralised”.. on old language we would say ‘murdered’.
In the old language, it’s “assassinated”, or, since Soleimani was a soldier on active duty, merely “killed”. It’s rare to read of soldiers being “murdered”. “Droned” as a word is in the same class as “shot”, “bombed”, “shelled”, “torpedoed”, etc., and I don’t recall seeing a moral objection to those.
Sadly, although I subscribe to UnHerd, I seem to be in a 2nd class category where I can reply to others but not write a fresh comment if my own. Were I able to, I would have said, with reasons, why I think the article overstates factions within the elite as “chaos”: obviously Iran is far from internal collapse
You’re right – I did blink & I missed it. It was such a little detail of the piece when it should have been absolutely front and centre. ‘Droned him’ was such a casual term for an act of murder with such huge geopolitical ramifications. As for my ‘propaganda’ are the US currently occupying a third of Syria or not? Have the Iraqis requested that the US remove their troops from the soil or not? Otherwise the only other thing I refered to was the authors feeling of being surrounded – I can’t speak to the veracity of that – but would say that I thought it was the leftie likes of me who were supposed to be the snowflakes these days.
The essay was about Iran, not the U.S. or geopolitics in the Middle East. It was about Iran.
Indeed, the inconvenient truth.. very unwelcome by so many UnHerd readers.. facts like those you list just bet in the way of naivety, gullibility and propaganda addiction.
“Soleimani was the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) expeditionary Quds Force until the United States droned him in 2020.”
What part of that sentence do you not understand?
He understands it
But then you come along and fail to understand his point
Learn to read.
Author clearly stated that Iranian general was “droned” by USA.
One less scumbag in the world is fine by me.
One less scumbag who did more than anyone to defeat ISIS. A casual referenfce to him as being ‘droned’ that completely minimised and downplayed the significance of the event – essentially an act of war, completely against International Law, but yeah – it’s the Iranians who are fermenting all this ‘chaos’. I must remember to speak more slowly and clearly to youse lot.
Of course if Iran or Hamas murder people for political reasons then it is perfectly legitimate, and you yourself have completely transcended all ideological prejudices.
Cretin
Does the following sound plausible to anyone?
“…And you cannot understand US behaviour in the Middle East (and beyond, almist worldwide) without understanding its corrupt, faction-ridden AIPAC+MIC oligarcal control, and the degree to which these factors shape its foreign policy. At its core, the US foreign policy rests on a doctrine of “forward defence”. Loosely speaking, it seeks to fight abroad so it doesn’t have to do so at home. It bases this strategy on two things: long-range ballistic missiles and proxy warfare using local groups (such as Ukrainians Israelis etc). And it has proved successful ever since it was conceived in the 1980s (under Henry Kissinger)”
All I did was juxtapose the US for Iran and add a few words of clarification for evidence. Any takers?
Too close to the truth Liam
Kissinger was part of the Nixon administration in the 70’s, not the 80’s, so that’s wrong purely as a factual matter. The idea of “forward defense” in US policy-making comes from the post-9/11 environment, “fighting over there so we don’t have to fight them here” is a Bush era rationalization of the war in Iraq. So apart from getting the entire timeline and factual basis of your remarks wrong, you might be handwaving at a point.
Archie (a jackaroo in the west Australian outback, soon to enlist in the ANZAC light horse): “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” Peter Weir’s movie Gallipoli.
I would have said their “forward defense” approach is what was behind all their foreign military excursions from Vietnam to Central America and beyond.
The fact that he got the decade wrong is immaterial to the point he was making: that you could substitute “US” for “Iran” and it was just as true. In fact, even more apposite, given the US’ much longer history of empire-building, use of proxies, and meddling in the affairs of other countries… and not just in its own region, unlike Iran.
As for timing of the US’ “forward defence”, what would you call its involvement in Viet Nam but a version of the “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”? Or WWI, with Wilson’s idiotic slogan “making the world safe for democracy”?
The only difference is, the US-UK block is directly responsible for the mess in Iran today due to the 1953 coup, their support for the Shah and imbecile behaviour in response to the emergence of the evil Iranian regime – when, for a change, American intervention and a regime change did make sense, they fkd it up.
On contrast, the US situation and it’s overseas “strategy” is all of its own creation.
This is true.
Laugh, if the coup didn’t happen, maybe it would be a lot worse now? And the US didn’t invent geopolitics.
I am afraid your analogy is not very convincing.
For a start USA allies you quote and there are many others (like Poland, Baltic States etc) are democratic, internationally recognised states.
Iran proxies are terrorist organisations which like Hezbollah undermine political and economic structures of host countries.
I think you’ll find that the US and its “allies” have been terrorising far more people than Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran.
Take a look at who signed up to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, bombed Libya and Yemen back into the stone age, and supplied training, intel, logistics and weaponry (and even air support) to actual Jihadis in Syria, and it’s not even close, all our “democracy” notwithstanding.
Where were you yesterday Liam old chap?
This is so déjà vu.
Fair comment and maybe largely true. It isn’t working very well though. Division is worse than ever. I think the military industrial complex drives a lot of the US policy.
Seems pretty accurate to me – there are the quotes of the likes of Adam Schiff saying this explicitly. There’s also the RAND papers proposing drawing the Russians into ‘their own Afghanistan’ and elsewhere. One difference though is the speed with which Iran & Pakistan de-escalated things (unsurprisingly missing from this Unherd piece) – took them a week. Or how they, with Chinese help, have achieved a rapprochement with the Saudis. The neocons pulling the strings in the US have no reverse gear – the Iranians do appear to have one.
Thanks, Liam, you nailed it!
“It bases this strategy on two things: long-range ballistic missiles and proxy warfare using local groups (such as Ukrainians, Israelis etc).”
You forgot to mention its saber-rattling Naval force which cant even seem to handle a rag-tag bunch of Houthis in speedboats.
Kissinger in the80s?
Very informative essay. Thank you.
Outstanding article. I can’t test exactly how much of it is true but it’s deeply convincing.
When you consider how poor and divisive the standard of debate is about the Middle East it is refreshing that we have some journalists able to explore the complexities.
Know your enemy….
What a fine example of Western Doublespeak!
The author presents no shred of evidence for Iranian aggression, instead relying entirely on the anti-Iran prejudice expected from all dutiful English-speaking British and Americans. While all the actual evidence points toward the US and its UK and Israeli helpers as the real schemers in Middle East geopolitics. The US has never got over its irritation for Iran’s revolution and subsequent US loss of control over that strategic territory (as well as its oil). Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis may be allied with Iran, but they make their own decisions; the attack on Israel by Hamas was in no way guided by Iran.
Mr. Patrikarakos can string together a lot of sentences, but he doesn’t know how to make an argument. Because that would require factual evidence. Overall, a colossal waste of electrons.
“The attack on Israel was in no way guided by Iran.”
What were you saying about the writer having not a shred of evidence? Without Iran, there is no Hamas or hezbollah. As Saddam had its Baghdad Bob, the mullahs appear to have their Tehran Tom.
Right. When you have no rational reply, shoot at the messenger!
His reply was entirely rational, unlike your wonderfully incoherent er, message.
Spot on.
Excellent and interesting article, one of increasingly few on Unherd. Much content is now frankly dull. Don’t think I’ll be renewing my sub.
Separately – I see that subbing on Unherd has become as non-existent as everywhere else. ‘Hamas rockets that incrementally forced me to duck into bomb shelters’?? Incrementally means ‘bit by bit’. I presume the writer meant increasingly or repeatedly.
I’m sorry, but any analysis of Iranian behavior that does not consider the fact that the clerics who have imposed their will on Iran are not orthodox Shi’ites, but ta’jiliyan or “hastener” Shi’ites, who think that by fomenting a chaotic conflict between Islam and “the infidels” they can hasten the return of the 12th Imam and the Last Judgement, does not start from a sound understanding of the situation and is of minimal worth.
Good article. I think correct to highlight that Iran is far from unified, strong and stable internally.
The succession problem is interesting. It’s too much to hope that it ends like England in 1659 when the Protectorate came to a peaceful end as it ran out of competent leadership.
Having been to Iran (shortly before 9/11), it’s not at heart the extremist country we often imagine it to be. And none of the people I met (admittedly a small sample and not typical) really wanted the government they had. It has the potential to be a stable, moderate country in a rather unstable region – and might have developed into one if we’d interfered a bit less.
The obligatory Brexit reference – “You cannot understand Brexit without understanding the conflicting personalities that fuelled it” – is both unnecessary and arguably misguided. The forces that drove Brexit were bigger and more fundamental than mere personalities. It feels like confusing tactics with strategy.
deleted