How 1979 Set Back the Islamic World

A half-century ago, writes Michael Totten, the Muslim world was less repressive and the Middle East less riven by war and political disfunction than it is now. All of that changed in the fateful year of 1979, argues Kim Ghattas in her recent book The Black Wave, due to three events: the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the siege of Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The second of these, which is also the least known, was a standoff between some 300 Islamist insurgents and the Saudi government, as Totten explains in his review:

In an effort to appease [this] armed insurrection, the Saudi government sharply reversed what precious little social progress had been made [in previous decades], and, in a revolution from above, transformed the country into an even more regressive and repressive place than it already was. The Saudi and Iranian governments, once grudging allies, became sworn, bitter enemies determined to export their own revolutions to the whole Muslim world, across the Middle East and beyond, including to Afghanistan, which coincidentally had just been invaded by the Soviet Union.

The results can be seen in the chaos in Syria and Iraq, the Saudi-Iranian proxy war in Yemen, and elsewhere. Nor has the Jewish state been spared, adds Totten:

The Iranians have . . . chosen to back non-Shiite Palestinian militias and terrorist organizations not because the ayatollahs have any warm feelings for the drinkers and womanizers in the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Sunni fundamentalists of Hamas, but because the Iranians, as Shiites and Persians, hoped to win support as the hegemons of a Sunni Arab-majority region by hitching a ride on the anti-Zionist train, a move that was particularly effective after Egypt had betrayed that cause by signing a peace treaty with Israel. “Who would wipe the shame from the forehead of Arab men now?” Ghattas asks rhetorically.

For more than a decade now, every Arab state but Syria has inched closer to a cold peace with Israel. But Iran and its proxies soldier on, even though the Palestinian cause has always been foreign to Iranians, one that barely registered as a blip before the 1979 revolution, when Iran and Israel were still allies.

Moreover, Ghattas’s account gives the lie to some of the enduring myths about the roots of Middle Eastern disfunction:

Those who choose to blame the Arab-Israeli conflict or American foreign-policy blunders for most of the Middle East’s ills are drastically wide of the mark. Syria’s civil war, which scarcely involves Americans or Israelis and emphatically involves the Saudis and the Iranians (and the Russians), exposes the blame-America and blame-Israel crowds as the blinkered fools that they are. Ghattas barely touches on this in her book, but she doesn’t have to. It’s obvious.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Afghanistan, anti-Americanism, Iran, Islamism, Israel-Arab relations, Middle East, Saudi Arabia

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF