[YNet] Iran is spending billions of dollars to enact a four-part strategy to dominate the Middle East. The plan has been in place for years and is now showing clear-cut results.
On September 26, 2020, Commodore Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — the regime’s sponsor of non-state armed groups — provided some figures about Iran’s effort to erect a "Resistance Front" to confront Israel and oust the United States from the Middle East.
Interviewed on Iran’s state TV channel Ofogh, he was asked, "From the beginning, when we got involved in the Resistance Front, how much do you think we spent? The numbers are very low, a lot less than the war (with Iraq which he put at $19.6 billion between 1980-1988) but the results (have been significant)."
Of course, this and many other statements of Iran’s officials must be taken with great skepticism. For example, Iranian lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh was quoted by Iran’s media in May of that year as saying that Tehran might have spent between $20 billion and $30 billion just on its involvement in Syria, where Iranian-backed forces and militia have propped up the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The U.S. State Department estimated that Iran spent more than $16 billion on support for the Assad regime and its proxies between 2012 and 2020. In 2018, the U.S. Treasury disclosed that Hezbollah had been receiving $700 million a year from Iran, making up 70% of the terrorist army’s revenues.
Similarly, Yahya Sinwar, the Gaza head of Hamas, declared in 2017 that "Relations with Iran are excellent, and Iran is the largest supporter of the Izz ad-Din al Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s military wing) with money and arms."
However, like Iran, Hamas is likely manipulating the data. For example, in 2020, the U.S. State Department concluded that Iran had provided more than $100 million annually to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. However, an Israeli "security source" was quoted by Reuters on October 13, 2023, as indicating that Iran had significantly increased funding for Hamas' military wing "in the past year" from $100 million to about $350 million a year.
Whatever the exact figures, this question naturally arises — what did Iran accomplish through these malign "investments?"
The short answer is that Iran’s money financed a highly productive strategy to project its power in the Middle East at the expense of Israel and the United States. The goal is twofold— by carving a zone of influence, the Islamic Republic is seeking to protect the Shia regime from the surrounding Sunni-dominated countries.
So far, they only succeeded in Western Universities. And, in April, IDF have shown that they're a bunch of monkeys.
...The use of proxies in war is a practice with long historical roots. The Iranian innovation in this respect is not only the development of multiple proxy forces spread over a large geographical area, but also intensive effort to coordinate between them so they can collaborate operationally during conflict.
Today, Iran can boast of its proxy forces operating in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Increasingly, there are signs of two other Iranian-sponsored fronts emerging in the West Bank and Jordan. All these fronts are involved in attacks on Israel and some are also fighting to eject the U.S. from the Middle East.
...As Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei put it on June 3, the Hamas October 7 onslaught on Israel had happened exactly at the moment the region needed it, when there had been a plan "by the U.S., Zionist individuals, their followers and some of the region’s countries to change the equation in the region... Operation Al-Aqsa Flood [Hamas’ codename for the October 7 attack] disrupted the Zionist regime’s comprehensive plan to dominate the politics and economy of the entire region of West Asia, and there is no hope that they will be able to revive this plan."
Interestingly, the Palestinian Authority Presidency indirectly confirmed Iran’s proxy strategy of using other agents for its own purposes when it denounced Khamenei's comments the same day. It issued a statement saying that the Palestinians "are the first to be affected by this war (in Gaza) which has shed their blood" and that Khamenei’s comments "clearly announce that (Iran’s_ goal is to sacrifice the blood of Palestinians and to destroy Palestinian land."
Secondly, Iran’s proxies have been built up as a deterrent vis-a-vis Israel and the U.S. Hezbollah especially serves as Iran’s "second-strike force" in case Israel dares attack its nuclear installations.
...Importantly, the use of proxies is not only for the purpose of shielding Iran from possible retribution and affording the mullah's deniability. The maneuver provides a strategic advantage. Proxy use allows Iran to flaunt the rules of war while shirking responsibility as those doing the actual fighting are "autonomous" subnational groups.
The targets of this strategy, which are uniformly states, are in turn confronted with another difficulty associated with engaging in asymmetric warfare. Accordingly countries, especially those signed on to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, are expected to follow the rules of war even when fighting terrorist armies even though the latter are bound by no such commitment.
Otherwise the subhuman scum of Western "elites" - from gensec of UN down to an, effectively, illiterate American students - run riot.
...The Western-crafted rules of warfare are the cornerstone of the Islamist battlefield tactic which systematically uses them to its advantage. It is unclear to what extent Islamists break the rules of warfare as an indication of their general rejection of the Western "world" or because of tactical necessity given the asymmetry in the military balance. Still, it is indisputable that Iran-sponsored jihadist armies like Hamas and Hezbollah take the Western norms of conflict as signaling their enemy’s weakness and irresolution if not downright dimwittedness.
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