As I watched the videos of the horrific attacks on innocent civilians in Israel and the absolute bloodthirstiness of Hamas, I was reminded of my conversation in Kyiv with Maryan Zablotskiy, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, and his off-color description of an “Axis of A**holes” operating around the world, attacking the innocent, seeking to destabilize and attack free countries, and conquering territory.
It is not quite true that every one of America’s enemies works together. But they all share interests and often find ways to cooperate when it suits those interests.
The Wall Street Journal confirmed what everyone suspected Sunday — that the beastly men of Hamas pulled the trigger on this massacre of unarmed civilians, but the Iranians trained them, put the weapons in their hands, helped them aim, and gave the order:
Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War — those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
Apparently, U.S. news organizations can get senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah to confirm things that our intelligence community cannot confirm. Or perhaps members of the Biden administration don’t want to admit that the U.S. intelligence community is confirming these statements.
It is difficult not to notice that the Biden team will quickly believe the worst about its Republican opponents, but, at least in the first 48 hours of this crisis, the administration bent over backward to give the Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt. As if Hamas was going to plan the biggest, most deadly, and most audacious attack on Israel in its history without Iran having any hand in it at all.
Since the moment Biden took office, he and his team have been hell-bent on resuscitating the Iran nuclear deal, and have held to their fervent belief that the U.S. can somehow have a stable and productive relationship with a country whose parliament regularly chants “death to America.” The Iranian regime cannot state its beliefs any clearer, and our leaders keep insisting, “Oh, you don’t really mean that. You seem reasonable, and I’m sure we can work this out.”
With attitudes like this on display, you might think that some of the people advising the Biden administration on its Iran policies were working for the Iranian government. Actually, two of them were.
The administration had a happy narrative of success that was a casualty of Hamas’s attacks this weekend. “What we said was, we want to depressurize, deescalate, and ultimately integrate the Middle East region. . . . The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” national-security adviser Jake Sullivan said at The Atlantic Festival on September 29.
Look closely enough, and you can find ties between almost all our foreign-policy problems and threats.
Hamas is a subsidiary of Iran. Back in 2019, the U.S. State Department calculated that the Iranian government sends $700 million annually to terrorist groups including Hamas; earlier this year, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant estimated that Iran sends Hamas $100 million per year. One report indicated that Iranian support for Hamas had ballooned to $360 million per year, or $30 million per month.
At the beginning of the year, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said in an interview with Al Jaezzra that Iran paid a total of $70 million to the Palestinian group to help it develop missiles and defense systems. (Note that Qatar gives Hamas $30 million per month in “stipends for families, fuel for electricity, and to help pay public sector wages.” As we will discuss below, any money that you don’t spend on non-weapon expenses frees up money to spend on weapons.)
This weekend, you could find lots of Americans spitting hot fire over the Biden administration’s decision to unfreeze $6 billion in seized Iranian funds as part of a hostage-release deal. A wide-scale attack on Israel like this must have required massive funding and arms. Administration sources and friends insist that money can only be spent on humanitarian purposes, and hand-wave away the counterargument that money is fungible — that if Iran knows it is getting $6 billion for humanitarian expenses, it frees up $6 billion in the budget for more support of terrorism. (The Editors, September 14: “This White House is just an easy mark.”)
But we should remember that Iran gets money from a lot of places beyond unfrozen accounts.
China is Iran’s largest trading partner; by itself, that’s not surprising as it was our largest trading partner for a long stretch until Mexico overtook it last month. But Chinese government policies help keep the Iranian economy afloat and minimize the impact of sanctions. China is importing more and more Iranian oil, sending it through Malaysia. The two countries are expanding their military cooperation, and the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian navies conducted joint drills in the Gulf of Oman in March.
Russia and Iran have never been closer; the Russian war effort runs on Iranian-manufactured drones, which gives Tehran more cash to send to its multiple terrorist groups surrounding Israel. As the European Council on Foreign Relations summarized, “Tehran’s military contribution to Russia’s war effort has made an enormous difference to Russia’s ability to persevere in a difficult conflict. Iran, once a secondary player, is now one of Russia’s most significant collaborators in the war in Ukraine.”
A bunch of those Iranian drones are actually manufactured in Syria. North Korea is sending artillery to Russia to use in Ukraine. China comes to the economic rescue of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela. Serbia, backed by Russia, built up military forces on its border with Kosovo.
The Council on Foreign Relations notes that all over Africa and what we used to call the Third World, “China and Russia are either directly promoting militaries’ returns or helping them consolidate their influence once armed forces have already gained greater power — in other words, pouring fuel on the fire of remilitarization and, in China’s case, definitively trying to create an alternative world order to that led by the United States.”
As I noted after my conversation with Maryan Zablotskiy, the Russian government, its mercenaries, and its allies stir up trouble all over the globe. It’s not just in Ukraine; it’s in Georgia, Moldova, Syria, all over central Asia, the Central African Republic and Sudan, and in the recent coup in Niger.
Oh, and the Taliban in Afghanistan is eager to sell captured U.S. arms to anyone willing to pay. As Foreign Policy magazine laid out in July, “It’s a new arms race — and it’s threatening global security. The Taliban, allies of if not quite affiliates of al Qaeda, are at the center of a global smuggling web that earns billions of dollars from heroin and meth. Now they appear to be funneling small arms to like-minded extremists inspired by their victory.”
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we are witnessing the failure of deterrence; the “rules-based international order” that the Biden team keeps talking about is in tatters. This morning, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt writes, “The world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries — and political groups like Hamas — are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire.”
Hamas rapes and slaughters hundreds of innocent people at the Supernova music festival in southern Israel. Russia invades Ukraine, and China is preparing for the conquest of Taiwan. No one is afraid of the West anymore; no one expects the arsenal of democracy and our allies to show up, guns blazing, in response to some outrageous provocation or massacre or invasion anymore.
Blame it on the images of the Afghanistan withdrawal, blame it on neo-isolationist attitudes taking root all across the West, blame it on amoral Western financial elites who look at brutal autocracies and see just another way to make a buck. (Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya in January 2022: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?”)
Maybe blame it on the United States having a geriatric president who attended a barbeque in the Rose Garden for the White House executive staff last night.
Zablotskiy called what we’re facing the “Axis of A**holes.” You may not like that particular term, but we need some label for increasing opportunistic cooperation between Russia, China, Iran, other rogue states such as North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
Considering how everyone involved in this malevolent network has the resume of a demon, I’d say the “Axis of the Devils” fits. It’s been a theme in the fiction work the past few years.
Somewhere in the Gaza Strip, there are innocent Palestinians — just ordinary folks, trying to get through the day, make a living, and raise their families. But if you live next door to a Hamas bomb-making hideout or weapons depot, or let terrorists run your territory, you’ve made a choice to live with an extremely high risk of fatal consequences. It’s hard to know if Palestinians could live any other way than they do now — a de facto terrorist state — as they are ruled by terrorists and sometimes terrorized themselves. If there were a Palestinian Martin Luther King, Hamas would have killed him because it doesn’t want competition or a threat to its power.
Years ago during the Cold War, Sting sang, “Do Russians love their children too?” If you raise your children to believe they have no higher calling in life than to be a suicide bomber, I’d argue you don’t love them. A report in March found, “Teachers and schools at the United Nations agency that runs education and social services for Palestinians regularly call to murder Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism.”
Think about how many great potential doctors, scientists, businessmen, engineers, architects, and artists the Palestinians have lost because their society told those children the best thing they could do with their lives was blow themselves up and take some Jews with them. Life for the Palestinians could be completely different, and better, than it is now — but for that to happen, they collectively would need to make completely different, and better, choices.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 