A Mideast Moment of Hope

The commentariat’s bleak verdict depends on lazy readings of recent history.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-mideast-moment-of-hope-6913c3a7?mod=WTRN_pos5

By 

Barton Swaim

If all you knew about the war in Iran is what you read in the American and European press, you might conclude that the U.S. has never prosecuted a war so ineptly as it has this one. In fact, nearly the opposite is true.

Iran’s rulers have been on the job for a month, their predecessors having died on Feb. 28. The U.S. has destroyed most of Iran’s navy and neutered what remains of it. Its air defenses no longer exist. Some large part of its ballistic missiles have been used, destroyed or damaged; its capacity to build more is nearly at an end. Iran’s nuclear program—central to the regime’s identity—lies under rubble. Israeli strikes have inflicted havoc on the Islamic Republic’s internal repression apparatus. The regime’s terrorist proxies appear quiet or on the run, suggesting a shortage of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders telling them what to do.

Most of America’s and Europe’s news media, meanwhile, sift through the details to find evidence of U.S. incompetence. The administration didn’t plan for missile and drone strikes on its bases. The war benefits Russia. It benefits China. War planners didn’t count on Iran’s closing the Strait of Hormuz. On and on.

These claims deserve attention, though dispositive they are not. The war obliged the U.S. to ease sanctions on Russian oil, but the destruction of Russia’s chief client in the Middle East creates problems for Moscow that far outweigh any short-term boost in oil revenue. The complaint that a war in Iran “distracts” the U.S. from Chinese aggression rests on the truism that a nation’s attention is finite: All wars distract. As for the strait, its remaining open would have been the real surprise.

You have to assume some of this relentless pessimism stems from the belief, familiar after a decade, that whatever Donald Trump does must lead to disaster. That’s a sorry way to get at the truth. But the smallness and lockstep defeatism of so much commentary on the war also stems from the normal human tendency to interpret today’s big thing as another version of yesterday’s. A lazy cyclical view of events sets in. The Iran war is like the Iraq war, which was a version of the Vietnam War. All sooner or later end in chaos and failure.

History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes, as the maxim has it. But it rhymes infrequently. Linear thinking can enlighten where cyclical doesn’t. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein and attempt to replace his regime with a democratic government failed to remake the Middle East in the way its planners hoped. But the removal of Iraq as a global mischief-maker set in motion a longer and wider remaking in which the Arab Gulf states moved closer to the U.S. and Israel to thwart the remaining menace, Iran.

Since then, for a host of complicated and mostly unforeseeable reasons, disparate circumstances across the region incline, slowly, in a promising direction. Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has undertaken the risky work of Westernizing the kingdom and abandoning the cynical policy of funding radical madrasas abroad to buy off the Islamists. The regime of another implacable enemy of the West, that of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, unexpectedly collapsed in 2024, an event made possible by Israel’s degradation of its guarantor, Iran. No one knows which course Syria under Ahmed al-Sharaa will choose, but for the first time in a half-century its government appears to want amicable relations with the U.S. and Israel.

Lebanon, also for the first time in decades, makes progress in ridding itself of Hezbollah, weakened as that jihadist terror group is by the travails of its backers in Tehran. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, breaking a taboo against so much as acknowledging Israel’s legitimacy, gestures toward a settlement with the Jewish state for the purpose of disarming Hezbollah.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain grow daily more committed to the work of defanging or toppling Iran, beginning with the forcible opening of the Strait of Hormuz. In the background lie the Abraham Accords and the recognition by the Gulf Arab states that their survival depends as much on commerce with the West, including Israel, as it does on oil. Bahrain and the U.A.E. are signatories. Saudi Arabia hints that joining isn’t unthinkable.

It’s notable that the foreign-policy mandarins in the U.S. and Europe either opposed or scorned each of the big events that made possible this moment of hope—the Iraq war, the Abraham Accords and the kinetic strikes on Iran first by Israel and then by the U.S. The mandarins preferred Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, which failed to pacify Iran and explicitly did nothing to curtail its exportation of terror.

A stabler and more commerce-driven Middle East has an immeasurably greater chance of emerging after the Islamic Republic falls, or anyway falls to its knees. Everything depends on what a fractured and abused Iranian populace can do when the bombs stop dropping. No one knows, although one may reasonably surmise, based on Israeli competence so far, that the regime’s opponents will have access to weapons and intelligence.

Another reasonable inference: Iran’s rulers, whoever they are at this point, would rather die than relinquish their ambitions at the hands of the Great Satan. They may get their druthers in the end.