Iranian Prestidigitation
For those of you unfamiliar with the word, it is primarily a magic term that means sleight of hand. The magician tries, though assorted hand movements, to get you to watch meaningless actions so that you miss the moves that he does not wish you to see.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is proving to be a fairly good practitioner of the art. While the crisis rages in and around Lebanon, the world’s attention has been shifted away from the international dispute concerning the Iranian nuclear program. Nor are all of the world’s academic and media “experts” able to keep their eyes on what is actually happening in the Middle East. For example, anyone perusing Juan Cole’s “Informed Comment” weblog would see only the picture of Arab and world-other-than-U.S condemnation of the Israelis. That’s neither to say that the condemnation is not real, nor a major part of the story, but the more interesting and important elements of what is happening are to be found within the subtexts, which I have discussed in posts here and here.
Ahmadinejad wants the present crisis to be viewed in the Arab world and the West as nothing more than yet another Arab-Israeli dispute, in which the poor Arabs play the victims. That’s not to say that the Palestinians and the Lebanese are not poor, and are not victims. The problem is that there is so much more going on here and it is amazing how many people cannot see it.
If you want to understand what is happening, you have to avert your glance from the Iranian President’s left hand, and keep your eyes on his right. The Saudis can see what is happening. The Israelis see it. The Americans see it. And I suspect the Jordanians and Egyptians see it as well.
This is an inter-Islamic struggle for control of the “Palestinian problem.” Will the Arabs control that process, or the Iranians? Will states control that process or non-state actors? This is a life-and-death issue for states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan. The question may ultimately become: are the stakes so high that the Arab states might sell out Hezbollah or Hamas?
After a recent Arab foreign ministers conference in Cairo, Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa told reporters:
We all decided that the peace process has failed and that the mechanisms, proposals and committees were either deceptive or sedatives or contrary to the peace process, or handed the process over as a gift to Israeli diplomacy to do with as it wished. . . . This has led to and is leading to the collapse of stability in the Middle East. . . . So there is no peace process. . . . So we take it back to the United Nations, and maybe the date will be in September. . . .
Does this a signal to the Israelis that they have until September to do whatever it is they are doing? And by the way, we are coming up on the thirty-sixth anniversary of “Black September.”
However this crisis plays out, refuse to be distracted. Watch Tehran, Riyadh, and Cairo. Hamas, Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Syria are nothing but pawns, and the last three-named rabbits in Ahmadinejad’s hat.
