What IF Iran Is Behind the Burgeoning Regional War?
Via hilzoy via Glenn Greenwald, I found this description of Mubarak’s attempts to broker peace between Hamas and Israel.
"Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday told the Cairo daily AlAhram that he had drafted an agreement for the release of abductedIsraeli soldier Gilad Shalit, but that it had been scuttled by outsidepressure on Hamas.
"I would not be revealing any secrets by saying I had writtenportions of a dignified resolution to the soldier crisis," Mubarak saidin the interview.
According to the Egyptian leader, Israel promised to releasenumerous Palestinian prisoners, and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal andPalestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had both been told.However, the agreement was not implemented due to pressure on Hamas.
"Then Hamas was pressured and entities I do not want to nameintervened in the mediation. This blocked the impending agreement,"Mubarak said."
To my mind, it’s the most concrete evidence I’ve seen that Iran or Syria is stage-managing the growing chaos in the Middle East.
Billmon has had some of the best analysis of the current situation, in which Israel seems to have painted itself into a corner, and Hezbullah with the backing of Iran seems bent on demonstrating that the consequences of an attack on Iran might be more serious than people have been thinking.
He also quotes from Ha’aretz this am, demonstrating that even faced with falling rockets the Israeli press and intellectuals have much more moral courage than folks do here:
Thanks Mimikatz, I haven’t made it over to Billmon yet. But yes, he’s been smack on on this.
Billmon’s latest post is cogent. If you have been overconfident about your military superiority you might do what the IDF is doing, because they seem to be all over the place. However international reaction is more of a brake on the IDF than it was on our troops during Vietnam, and the public wants the rockets to stop more than to bomb Lebanon into the stone age.
I read the entire story about Hezbollah’s links to Syria and Iran in the NYT yesterday and was skeptical because of your post, emptywheel! There was little new information in the story.
I would also say that the IDF knows full well that there are two peoples claiming the same place. But the Arabs have a history of not wanting to share the place any more than the Jews do. Even if there was a secular state encompassing the two peoples, Hamas stands for a religious state for one people. Radical Islam would continue to pose a danger to that state.
I can no longer find the story but it claimed that the Iranian foriegn minister in Syria said that a cease fire should happen and a prisoner exchange. Isn’t this similar to the Egyptian plan?
But about Hezbollah showing unseen military capacities he is 100% right. There is no flame war on Kos! I stumble around searching for meaning in life.
Brilliant editorial
I will take a stab at what sgiff wrote. A proposal acceptable to both sides would probably include a prisoner exchange, but what types of prisoners and how many Israel will release would be a difference between proposals.
Ledeen needs a movie made about him. He is just unbelieveable. He’s the kind of person you’d say would need to be invented if he didn’t exsist; but I suspect that he really doesn’t exsist except in his own fevered imagination. I can’t quite believe he takes himself completely seriously (although he would certainly have us do). There’s always something ineffably bogus about him. It is so canny of you to focus on him, EW.
Thanks for the good post, as always.
Haaretz has currently got a story that the Iranian foreign minister is having talks with the Syrian government. No results were published.
jonnybutter
I keep waiting for them to discover something with Ledeen’s name in it in the dossiers they’ve found in Italy, in the SISMI journalist’s apartment. It would make for a good deal of amusement, in any case.
I was skeptical of claims of Iranian involvement, just because the neocons and the Israelis are always looking for an excuse for the US to attack Iran. But I heard a report this weekend from the BBC correspondent in Beirut, discussing the regional press, who said that the Lebanese newspapers generally assume that Hezbollah is being directed by Iran and Syria. That doesn’t make it true, of course, but it makes me less skeptical.
Thanks for the answer 4jkb4ia. This is the story I saw. http://english.aljazeera.net/N…..E981BF.htm
Now the JPost has got it…
â€Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Monday that a cease-fire and an exchange of prisoners would be acceptable and fair in the Israeli-Lebanese conflict…On Sunday, Lebanese officials said that Israel had sent the terms of a possible cease-fire through Italian mediators. The terms were the release of two captured Israeli soldiers, and a Hezbollah pullback to roughly 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Israeli-Lebanese border.â€
Interesting that, as far as I’ve seen in brief surfing, only Syria and Iran are defending Hezbollah. I suppose it’s too much to hope to see a concerted effort by ME countries to oppose Iran’s plotting.
Well, Saudi Arabia has come out against Iran, but it would, since if Iran’s stunt succeeds, Iran may replace Saudi Arabia as both the regional powerhouse and (because it would gain nominal control of the souther Iraqi oilfields), the swing oil producer in the world.
And places like Bahrain, which has a big Shiite population, oppose it because a regional war led by Iran might seriously destabilize its country.
And Iraq is going to oppose it. Nominally at least. Because it is still home to a hundred thousand American troops.
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