The War The White House Won't Talk About.

Gaza is just one battleground in a wider and bloodier war that the Americans, especially, are incapable of talking about openly and honestly.

Here’s the front page of the Weekend Post. Turns to a full page inside, which is online today.

There are a great many pretty lies that Europeans and North Americans tell themselves about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the Middle East. After the Simchat Torah pogrom of October 7, the accumulation of these comforting fictions over many years is making it extremely difficult just to describe what that ghastly event was really all about.

I attempted to wade through it all to provide a reader-friendly outline of the wider war in the Weekend National Post. I was assigned quite a lot of column-inch real estate to get at that bigger story. It went online on Monday, here. I put today’s Real Story backgrounder together on Tuesday to serve as an overview of the cartography described in the piece.

Better put your feet up.

I don’t want to indulge in the habit of blaming the Americans for everything bad that happens in the world. And I don’t mean to pick on the Americans here. It’s just that America matters, and in broad political terms, the United States is in a state of severe cognitive decline right now. In terms of Middle East policy, from a point several weeks before October 7, the United States government was already in a state of total paralysis.

We all have our excuses, our “narratives” about the agonies of Greater Middle East. Just as a for-instance, Canadians have allowed a self-flattering fiction to embed itself into the collective memory of the U.S. invasion of Iraq that goes like this: At great risk to diplomatic and trade relations with the United States, Prime Jean Chretien bravely defied George W. Bush and kept Canada out of the Iraq War.

Facts: The Americans neither expected us nor asked us to join, we were unable to commit any Canadian Forces ground troops anyway, and there was never any trade or diplomatic fallout from not doing what we weren’t asked to do and couldn’t have done anyway.

The American capacity for self-delusion, however, is really something to behold. They’re still telling themselves that their own peace movement ended the Vietnam War, as though Vietnamese insurgents had nothing to do with it. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army fought with Russian and Chinese backing and not an insignificant degree of popular support from the Vietnamese people. They lost more than a million fighters battling the U.S. forces. Long story short: The NVA & the Viet Cong won. Sorry, hippies.

[The latest: The Israeli cabinet has approved a deal with Hamas that would see the return of at least 50 hostages over four days of a ceasefire in exchange for 150 Palestinian women and minors held in Israeli prisons. The deal will allow fuel and an increase in humanitarian aid into Gaza].

The “Axis of Resistance”

As might be clear from the Post’s full front page, the primary belligerent in the war that Hamas kicked off, which has lately caused so much death and obliteration in Gaza, is the Khomeinist regime in Tehran.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are the Gaza divisions of the Khomeinists’ “axis of resistance,” which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi regime in Yemen, several Shi'ia militias in Iraq - notably Kata’ib Hezbollah - and most importantly Bashar Assad’s blood-drenched Baathist oligarchy in Damascus.

U.S. and Israeli officials reckon that Tehran provides Hamas with $70-$100 million in funding annually. Apart from the billions in subsidies to Gaza government operations from United Nations’ agencies, various charities and direct support from Arab states such as Qatar, Hamas is believed to bring in another $300-400 million through taxation, strong-arming. border control and other means.

For the best overview if Hamas fundings sources, I recommend this primer from the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists.

For a really deep dive into Iran’s ecosystem of proxy militias and entire divisions baked into the region’s military superstructure, here you go: Integration of Iran-backed armed groups into the Iraqi and Syrian armed forces: implications for stability in Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, Tehran already has the lion’s share of hard power, now that its Shia Coordination Framework has taken control of the government.

As for nominally non-state actors: All by itself, Hezbollah is in possession of about 150,000 Iran-supplied missiles pointed at Israel.

Three years ago, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Mohammad Reza Naghdi was already boasting that Tehran’s network of jihadi militias was “more dangerous than having an alliance with any army,” that its fighters were “scattered and unrecognisable” and that when they strike, “the enemy will not know who has hit it.”

As of yesterday evening, Iran’s constellation of proxy jihadist outfits have launched 81 missiles at U.S. bases and U.S-aligned forces in Iraq and Syria since October 7, according to tracking undertaken by the Washington Institute for Near East policy.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkin says U.S. intelligence has not uncovered evidence of Iran’s direct involvement in the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel, although senior Hamas officials were meeting with the Khomeinists’ IRGC in Beirut and Tehran in the days immediately prior to and after October 7.

The Wall Street Journal reports that senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials say Iranian security officials helped plan the surprise attack and gave the green light at a meeting in Beirut on the Monday before the Simchat Torah weekend.

Although hated at home, the Khomeinist regime is now more powerful abroad than it has ever been. As for who midwifed this monstrous state of affairs into existence, the inside headline on my Post analysis is brutally blunt: Obama's blunders created the Iranian threat terrorizing Israel. I’m not so sure “blunders” quite captures it.

Here’s Kaveh Shahrooz, a leading Iranian-Canadian human rights jurist and democracy activist: “The Hamas battle is a relatively minor theatre in the larger war waged by Iran.” Shahrooz is correct on the facts. “Until you deal with the Iran question, Middle East peace and stability in the wider world will be increasingly disrupted by Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in the failed state of Lebanon, the Houthi war in Yemen and the ongoing mass murders carried out by the Assad regime in Syria.”

Israel will know no peace and there can be no “two-state solution” so long as the regime remains unmolested in Tehran. And regime change is exactly the thing so desperately sought by the millions of brave Iranians who have risen up, time and time again, against their Khomeinist overlords.

This is not a plea for either an American or an Israeli military operation aimed at toppling the regime. It is merely an acknowledgment that the United States and the Europeans will need to finally and fully abandon the Obama-era delusion that the Khomeinists can be a reliable partner in the matter of nuclear containment or any other issue.

“You have a population in the country that wants democracy and is open to the west and is open to Israel,” Shahrooz told me. “Let’s make use of this incredible resource that’s at our disposal. The people in the streets of Iran are not equivocating. They want this regime gone.”

The Obama doctrine was revived by Biden and blew up in his face

It doesn’t please me to point out that the “Obama Doctrine” is largely the reason why the Khomeinists have been able to wage the wider war against the world’s liberal democracies, against Arab democrats, and against the Iranian people.

It’s a doctrine derived from Obama’s hubris. It’s what he intended his signature foreign-policy legacy to be: the shoring-up and persistence of the Khomeinist regime against recurring pro-democracy uprisings, in aid of the regime’s elevation by bribery and sanctions relief to the status of an America-friendly “balancing” power against the region’s Arab states.

This was always a delusion, but entire careers and reputations were built around it at senior levels of the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy establishment.

In their zeal to keep the mullahs at the P5+1 (the five UN Security Council members plus Germany) nuclear-talks table, the Obama-Biden wiseguys would go to any lengths, even after it was obvious to everyone that the arrangement in the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA) would not block Iran’s pathway to a nuclear bomb.

It was “one of the worst unforced strategic errors in the history of U.S. foreign policy,” according to the Foundation for Defence of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz. I’d say so too.

The Trump administration walked away from it. But the Biden administration walked right back into it again with the intent of reviving the JCPOA, bringing back Obama’s lead negotiator, Robert Malley, to run the show.

A longtime critic of Israel and avid enthusiast for detente with Tehran, Hamas and Damascus, Malley is now at the centre of a massive scandal involving classified material ending up in the hands of his interlocutors in Tehran. We’ll come to that in a moment.

It is impossible to fully calculate the damage done by the Obama policy down through the years. Just one consequence was that Bashar Assad was allowed to get away with crossing that 2012 “red line” on the use of chemical weapons against his own people. The following year, Russia and Iran were invited by the White House to assist Assad in the work of reducing Syria to a human abattoir - half a million dead Arabs - and the largest disgorging of refugees since the Second World War - six million Arabs.

All that, just to keep the Khomeinists chatting with the P5+1 group, which Tehran had threatened to leave if the NATO countries went ahead with a no-fly zone to stop Assad from bombing his own cities into dust and corpse heaps.

It’s enough to make a guy want to join an Al Qaida farm team

To be fair, Obama’s policy was not amenable to everyone in his administration or in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party.

Obama’s senior Syria adviser, Frederic Hof, resigned over it. Obama’s former ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, also resigned in disgust. Obama’s policy was publicly opposed by Ryan Crocker, Bill Clinton’s former ambassador to Syria, Obama’s own anti-ISIS coalition leader General John Alan, and of course the Syrian National Council, the Syrian Coalition of Revolutionary Opposition Forces and roughly 100 Syrian non-combatant organizations.

One of the saddest conversations I’ve ever had with any of the brave young men and women who rose up against Assad unfolded on a hilltop post in Northern Syria. A young Kurdish guerilla asked whether I could explain why Obama had squandered three years of opportunity to rid the world of the hated Assad regime, and why Obama was so untrustworthy in his dealings with the America-friendly and pro-democratic Free Syrian Army.

I didn’t know what to tell him.

The American approach only got uglier under Trump, but by then, the young fighters from the FSA had left in droves to sign up with the gang that had the best guns and the most money: the Al Qaida affiliate Jabhat al Nusra. In my meetings with the FSA underground in Amman, Jordan, it was made clear to me why the defections couldn’t be staunched.

The argument for defection to the anti-ISIS jihadi front went like this: Because of his capitulation to Iran, President Obama had effectively become an accomplice and collaborator with Bashar Assad. The NATO countries had been reduced to indifference and even complicity in the Baathist regime’s atrocities, easing their dirty consciences by taking in refugees. At least Jabhat al Nusra was fighting both the Assadists and ISIS.

“In the Syrian reality, people know who is against us and who is for us. Jabhat al Nusra is helpful to us,” a young FSA organizer told me. “I have met with them personally to find the truth. . . Everybody knows that the western world will do nothing to help us. The people of Syria are sure now that the western world is of no use to them at all.”

Still crazy after all these years

It was almost the first thing Joe Biden did when he walked into Oval office. He revived Obama’s delusion, appointing Malley, the key architect of the preposterous deal John Kerry put to the P5+1 group, as his special envoy to Iran and the top official on all Iran-related matters.

O’Malley was appointed on January 28, 2021. It took a little more than two years for the entire enterprise to collapse in scandal and espionage. By this past summer the entire White House Iran “policy” was in disarray. The mayhem is ongoing. It involves revelations about the penetration of a crippling Iranian influence operation in and around Washington, and an FBI investigation into Malley’s conduct. O’Malley was stripped of his security clearance and made to quietly disappear from sight in July.

It was against this backdrop of foreign-policy chaos at the highest levels of the U.S. government that Hamas made its move on October 7. To make matters worse there was chaos, incompetence and incoherence at the highest levels of Israeli politics, too. Benjamin Netanyahu’s unprecedented “judicial reform” plans had brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets. It was a mass movement, like the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and 2020.

But it was the American paralysis that worked most effectively in favour of Iran’s “axis of resistance” on October 7.

The scandal behind that paralysis was broken open by the investigative project Semafor (Inside Iran’s influence operation) and the news and analysis platform Iran International (Inside Tehran’s Soft War: How Iran Gained Influence In US Policy Centers).

In my judgment, this is journalism of Pentagon Papers calibre. For a more user-friendly account of the revelations l highly recommend the New York Times’ Bret Stephens, Iran’s Captive Minds.

A key figure in the Semafor investigations was the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon, author of The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals That Reshaped the Middle East.

Among other things, what Solomon revealed in The Iran Wars was that Obama made himself a hostage of his own inducements to the Khomeinists. He kept quiet about the the 2009 uprising in Iran, for fear of upsetting key figures in the regime. In secret talks in Oman, John Kerry was made to understand that if the U.S. interfered with Bashar Assad in Syria, Tehran would sabotage Obama’s JCPOA agenda. So Assad remained off-limits.

All through the Obama years, the Khomeinists built up their proxies and destabilized Arab countries without hindrance, and repeatedly crushed Iranian protests and rebellions to no particular consequence in the NATO capitals. In October last year, during the height of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, Malley revealed that none of the regime’s brutality, scheming or plotting had changed his view of the Khomeinists’ approachability.

On October 22, 2022, Malley described the Iranian rebellion as merely an effort by Iranians to have the government “respect their human rights and dignity.” So here was Biden’s senior official on Iran denying that what the movement wanted was the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, and not just less bad behaviour from it.

The implications were clear. The Iranian people wanted the regime gone. The Biden administration didn’t; the U.S. government just wanted the regime to be nicer, for appearances’ sake.

A furious Masih Alinejad, probably the most prominent figure in the Iranian diaspora (Iran had sent agents to assassinate her in a plot broken up by the FBI earlier this year) got up a petition calling for Malley’s removal. Within three days the petition had 136,786 signatures under it.

“Iranians no longer believe human rights can be protected under the current theocratic regime. Countless reports and videos of the protests in the past five weeks have amply documented that most Iranians have long crossed the Rubicon and simply reject the Islamic Republic,” the petition stated.

“Yet, although the White House has condemned the crackdown, U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Malley and his deputy, Mr. Jarrett Blanc, have shown little appreciation or empathy for Iranian societal aspirations. Both Mr. Malley and Mr. Blanc have lost credibility. Even Mr. Malley’s team have abandoned him. Former U.S. diplomat Dan Shapiro resigned from the team and commented recently, ‘for the Iranian people to have freedom there is no way around regime change,’ which contrasts Malley’s recent statements.”

Biden stuck with O’Malley right up to the FBI moving in on him. It’s unclear now whether O’Malley will ever get his security clearance back, or even another comfortable position with a high-society think tank.

“Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

That’s the organizational principle of the Iran-backed Ansarullah regime in Yemen, the Houthi wing of Tehran’s axis that came to power over the corpses of 375,000 Yemenis. This is not to suggest that the Saudi-backed coalition arrayed against Ansarullah cared to scruple much over the deaths of Yemenis, either, by missiles fired by fighter jets or by starvation. But there we are.

In my Post piece I led with that Ansarullah slogan and with the threats from the Tehran’s Yemeni proxy, which go back months before October 7. Largely overlooked in the laser focus on the Gaza front, which is occasionally distracted by Hezbollah missile barrages fired into Israel from Lebanon, the Ansarullah regime declared war on Israel immediately after October 7, launching a series of long-range missile and suicide drones in Israel’s direction.

This is no small matter. The Houthis’ arsenal is far more deadly than the rockets available to Hamas.

Nine months before the Simchat Torah massacres, Ansarullah’s Brigadier General Abdallah Al-Jafari warned that the Houthi missiles were capable of reaching Tel Aviv as well as the United Arab Emirates. Two weeks before the horrific Hamas invasion of Southern Israel, Ansarullah paraded its Iranian-supplied weaponry in Sana’a.

A few days before I filed my Post analysis, Ansarullah had warned that it would target any Israeli-linked marine traffic in the Red Sea, a critical global shipping route that links the Suez Canal with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea via the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait, adjacent to Yemen. A few hours after I filed to the Post, the Yemenis seized a massive cargo ship, the Galaxy Leader, which was headed from Turkey to India.

This was no crude act of piracy. It was a sophisticated operation involving helicopter-borne commandos who quickly boarded and seized control of the ship and captured the ship’s crew. The Galaxy Leader is Bahamian-flagged, British-registered, contracted through a Japanese firm and partly owned by the Israeli industrialist Abraham Ungar.

Why can’t we talk about this stuff openly and honestly?

Partly it’s because Euro-American culture has become susceptible to even the crudest anti-Israel propaganda, having been enfeebled by the retreat of great swathes of what used to be its intelligentsia into a frivolous cool-kids loathing of everything the liberal democracies have built up over the generations.

Partly it’s because it is taken as a gospel truth that there was no American president worse than George W. Bush in the matter of Middle Eastern affairs, and after all, nobody but an unlettered hillbilly would be critical of the dashing Barack Obama.

It’s a type of politics, or posture, or style that requires an animus towards Israel that approaches and often crosses into high-fashion antisemitism and apologetics for barbarism in the cause of “resistance” to “settler colonialism.”

It’s also a testament to the success of the hybrid warfare that China, Russia, Iran and Iran’s proxies have been waging across the western world. With control of their own state media, an often sympathetic hearing in the liberal democracies’ legacy media and access to global social-media platforms, traffickers in the anti-Zionist “narrative” have been injecting propaganda through the Euro-American digital bloodstream like it was fentanyl.

The organizers of some of the biggest “pro-Palestine” rallies across Canada are directly affiliated with the Iran-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“The deluge of online propaganda and disinformation is larger than anything seen before,” according to New York Times investigators. The Tel Aviv social-media intelligence firm Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 anti-Israel “bots” online since October 7.

In a single day, roughly one in four accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X (Twitter) posting about the Israel-Hamas war appeared to be fake, Cyabra found. During the 24 hours following the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast - the explosion of a Hamas missile in a parking lot that was almost universally reported at the outset as an Israeli airstrike on the hospital that killed hundreds - a third of all accounts tweeting about it were fake.

So, who in the American political class will make a noise about something like the catastrophic Obama-era policy in Yemen?

The Trump-addled Republicans won’t, for the same reason that Americans can’t have an honest conversation with themselves about President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, in August 2021.

In that debacle, Biden simply replicated Donald Trump’s own Qatar-brokered plan to put knives in the backs of the Afghan people, so there’s only so much hay the Republicans can make of that. In the case of Barack Obama’s incompetent handling of Yemen, it was Obama’s “model” for coping with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and it led directly to the Houthis’ seizure of the Yemeni capital. The Trump administration simply doubled down on it. So what are the Republicans going to say about all that? Nothing.

Gosh, why would Hamas do such a thing?

There has been a lot of fascinating speculation about how Hamas managed to do what it did on October 7, and why Hamas did what it did when it did.

Quite plausibly, the massacres and the thousands of rockets were in aid of sabotaging the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords and rapprochement in relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. President Biden says that was what Hamas was really going after. “They knew that I was about to sit down with the Saudis.”

Could be. It could also be the Hamas simply knew that it’s quartermaster and chief armourer in Tehran would be well pleased with a bloody Israel-Hamas conflagration and it wouldn’t be easy for the Biden administration to admit that it had been suckered, just as the Obama administration was suckered beforehand.

“Starting with Obama himself, supporters of the Iran realignment have never been open and honest with the American people about their true convictions,” Michael Doran, director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East and a senior fellow with the conservative Hudson Institute, wrote last summer.

“To advance their policy, they have always relied on misdirection, obfuscation and half truths.”

I wish I hadn’t reached pretty much the same conclusion.