Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader and strategist responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, is dead, killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in a tunnel beneath his hometown of Rafah in Gaza.   Although the Biden administration (rightfully) congratulated Israel, both President Biden and Vice President Harris had previously demanded Israel not stage a major military operation in Rafah, where Sinwar and other Hamas leaders were killed. That advice matched the administration’s strategic wisdom throughout the conflict.   With Sinwar gone, the key questions now are: what is the endgame in Gaza? And how does Israel’s success in Gaza affect the current battle against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the future battle against the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Ebrahim Raisi, the hardliner jurist-turned-president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, died in a plane crash over the weekend after coming back from a ceremony marking a new joint dam project with Azerbaijan. Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who was also on board, perished in the crash as well.  Few Iranians outside the political system will mourn their deaths. Raisi, for instance, was a notorious, unapologetic defender of the Iranian regime and first got involved in its machinations in his mid-twenties. In 1988, he served on a panel that handed down death sentences for thousands of dissidents.

Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel Saturday night represents a dangerous escalation for three reasons. The first is its scale, some 300 drones and missiles. Second, it marks the first time the Islamic Regime has launched a lethal attack on Israeli territory from Iran itself, rather than through proxies. Most important of all is the combination of the first two: a major attack launched against Israel from Iranian territory. Although Israel, the US, the UK and, surprisingly, Jordan managed to shoot down nearly all the incoming drones and missiles, it was the thought that counts. And it was a very dangerous thought. Within hours, the Iranian attack changed the region’s strategic landscape.

The Biden administration seems to be bumbling on all diplomatic fronts these days. Not only is it trying to magic into existence a thaw in the US-China relationship, while Beijing is only throwing on the liquid nitrogen, but it's also trying to resurrect a version of the nuclear deal with Iran. Concrete details are scant, but reporting from both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal gives a decent sketch of what the White House is contemplating. It’s not pretty. Under the outlines of the agreement, the US would “avoid tightening sanctions,” stop impounding Iranian ships and release billions in cash currently frozen by US sanctions for humanitarian applications.

The recent events in Afghanistan have made us think we know what regime collapse looks like. Militias roaming the streets, soldiers scrambling to helicopters, up against the clock to escape the anarchy below. But in some instances, the reality can be far more mundane. Across from Afghanistan’s own border, another Islamic theocracy — Iran — is struggling to manage a dangerous water shortage. As one hardline Muslim regime arose in Central Asia this year, another could yet be at the very beginning of its fall. In July, during the worst drought in half a century and scorching heat of over 120°F, protests erupted in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan as a water crisis that has been slowly bubbling for decades hit boiling point.

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Get lost ayatollahs!’ ‘Death to Khamenei!’ The bravery of the anti-government demonstrators in Tehran is incredible, each one knowing that their actions could end with a bullet or a noose. I reached one through their favored encrypted app, Telegram, the interview arranged by a leading Iranian opposition group outside the country. ‘Elias’ — not his real name of course — is 25 and a postgraduate politics student in Tehran. The security forces were everywhere, he told me; everyone was very afraid. Still, he went on, ‘There is only one way this ends: toppling the regime.

Everybody knows Donald Trump is going to start a war. His critics have been saying so since his first year in office — remember the war with North Korea they predicted right after Trump tweeted about unleashing ‘fire and fury’ on the Little Rocket Man? That war didn’t happen. Nor did an insurgency break out when President Trump moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, an act that the Trump haters were certain would incite waves of violence and unquenchable turmoil. But maybe the third time’s the charm — maybe the killing of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Quds Force division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, in a US airstrike in Iraq will finally give the president’s detractors the war they’ve been anticipating.

Donald Trump continues to show that he is one of the boldest presidents in modern American history. He may also be the nuttiest. His decision to remove waivers on the purchase of oil from Iran has set America on an unwavering course for war with the Middle Eastern state. Like Franklin Roosevelt, who tried to starve Japan into submission by halting its imports of oil, Trump seems intent on trying to bludgeon Iran into submission by preventing it from exporting any crude. The problem is that the Iranians aren’t cracking. Instead, they are likely to double-down. Already they are threatening to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Trump will be in dire straits if Iran does that. A fifth of the world’s crude oil flows through it.

Donald Trump is a master of the obvious. This is why his foreign policy keeps surprising the status quo powers of American politics: the media, the bureaucrats, and the elected officials. Today, these wise monkeys are reeling at the news that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a ‘foreign terrorist group’, and that the IRGC ‘actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft’. Here’s something else that’s obvious. Since 9/11, the United States has staggered from one fiasco to another in the Middle East: the invasion of Iraq, the endorsement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the trashing of Libya, the incoherent response to the Syrian civil war, the humiliation of an effort to get out of the region through the ‘Iran Deal’.