Meet the Iran Lobby

Despite its allegedly immense power, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) failed to influence the president’s pursuit of the Iran deal, and also appears unable to rally sufficient opposition to it in Congress. By contrast, the much less well known National Iranian American Council (NIAC) has played an important behind-the-scenes role in orchestrating and campaigning for the deal. Lee Smith explains:

[NIAC’s founder Trita] Parsi deserves lots of credit for his victory, but he can’t cash his checks too publicly—because the American public doesn’t like Iran. Which in turn points up a major difference between the pro-Israel lobby and the pro-Iran lobby—both of which . . . make entirely legitimate use of the American democratic system to advocate for their respective points of view. Where NIAC differs from AIPAC is in its relation to American public opinion. . . . The pro-Iran lobby, [unlike the pro-Israel lobby], has no real base of popular support in America. . . .

One of the chief ironies of the ongoing debate over the Iran deal is that both defenders and detractors of a supposedly all-powerful “Israel lobby” have been wasting their breath over an entity that has notably failed to affect U.S. policy on a single issue of major concern over the entire course of Barack Obama’s six-year presidency—a record of unmitigated failure that would clearly condemn it to the black hole of Beltway irrelevance if not for the bizarre imaginative hold, and political utility, of the myth of a powerful conspiracy of Jews who secretly rule the planet.

Or perhaps it’s not an irony at all. Some of the loudest detractors of the “Israel lobby” are in fact paid staffers and partisans of the Iran lobby—an entity that, unlike the Israel lobby, has succeeded in radically altering U.S. foreign policy, with the help of the president and his advisers. Seen from a certain angle, the Iran lobby has pulled off the neat trick of using the specter of the Israel lobby to shift U.S. policy away from Israel and toward Iran—while actually succeeding at the same dark arts that it blames the Jews for employing. The Iran lobby used a combination of lobbying, donations, propaganda, and back-door personal connections to top policy-makers to . . . alter American foreign policy and align the United States with an oppressive authoritarian regime that is destabilizing the Middle East.

Read more at Tablet

More about: AIPAC, Barack Obama, Iran, Iran nuclear program, Politics & Current Affairs, U.S. Foreign policy

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