11 Apr Israel, Iran, and the Internet
We’re pretty sure that we’ve already worn out the “they’re the same picture” meme, but that leaves us with a conundrum. We don’t want to bore you guys by doing the same shtick over and over, yet today, we have two stories that appear, superficially, to be entirely unrelated but that are, in fact, intimately connected – the exact situation for which that meme was created. What to do…what to do…
Maybe we’ll just give the meme a rest. Perhaps, as this couplet of stories suggests, it’s good, sometimes, to “touch grass,” as they say, and get away from the interwebs.
In any case, our first story today comes from Sunday’s Jerusalem Post:
A week of attacks on Israel, including rockets fired from Lebanon, Gaza and Syria, represents the manifestation of an Iranian strategy to confront Israel with multiple threats on different fronts. Although different groups may be behind the attacks from those places, these groups are likely all linked to Iran. The groups involved include Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and others that may go by different or new names, but which are proxies of Tehran.
Iran has long sought to bring its conflict with Israel to the Jewish state’s borders. Its backing of Hezbollah and Hamas was key to that strategy over the decades. For instance, Tehran supplies Hamas with financial support and also helped it develop longer-range rockets and a larger arsenal. Whereas Hamas rockets could once only travel a few kilometers, now they can reach most parts of Israel.
The Islamic Republic also supported Islamic Jihad, which is even more of an Iranian proxy than Hamas. The group not only has an arsenal thought to include thousands of rockets, but it has gunmen in the West Bank and its leadership often resides in Damascus….
Other elements of Iran’s threats to Israel include militias in Syria and Iraq. These include the Iraqi-based Popular Mobilization Units and their factions such as Kataib Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. Iran flew a drone into Israeli airspace from Iraq in May 2021. It also launched a drone at Israel last week from Syria.
Iran’s idea for a multi-front war is not new. It has been boasting in recent months about how Israel is internally collapsing, and it signaled that it wants to increase its threats. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Sunday that this year its power will grow compared to Israel’s. Jerusalem also carried out drills in May 2022 in preparation for the threat of a multi-front war. At the time, estimates said Israel’s adversaries could fire 1,500 rockets a day at the Jewish state….
[T]he Iranian threat has not gone away and its proxies and allies appear to have begun a multi-front conflict with Israel over the past week….
When one looks at the larger picture, the Iranian octopus of partners and groups is seeking to threaten Israel from multiple areas.
Our second story – again, seemingly unrelated – is also from Sunday but from Axios:
President Biden’s not-yet-official bid for re-election will lean on hundreds of social media “influencers” who will tout Biden’s record — and soon may have their own briefing room at the White House, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The move aims to boost Biden’s standing among young voters who are crucial to Democrats’ success in elections — and to potentially counter former President Trump’s massive social media following, if he’s the GOP nominee in 2024.
Biden’s digital strategy team will connect with influencers across the nation to target those who may not follow the White House or Democratic Party on social media — or who have tuned out mainstream media altogether.
Hundreds of unpaid, independent content creators have been given access to Biden’s White House.…
A dedicated White House briefing space for influencers to meet in person or by remote would be unprecedented — and a sign that the traditional Press Briefing Room no longer would be the administration’s only messaging center….
Besides White House invitations, the administration has given influencers opportunities for access to Biden when he goes on the road….
Biden’s strategy is aimed more at platforms favored by younger voters, such as Instagram and TikTok.
Now, before you go thinking that you might need to remind us that the saying is “touch grass,” not “smoke” it, let us explain how these two stories are connected.
Iran is, apparently, waging a new multi-front war on Israel. A big part of the reason that Iran is able to do so is that it is no longer going to have to focus so much of its attention on Yemen, where it has, for more than a decade, supported and financed the Shiite Houthi rebellion. Eight years ago, Saudi Arabia launched a war against the Houthis, calling them Iranian proxies intent on upsetting the Sunni status quo on the Arabian Peninsula – which is precisely what they are. Over the weekend, however, Saudi emissaries met – for the first time ever – with Houthi representatives and proposed a cease-fire as a prelude to a more permanent peace. The Houthis are reportedly inclined to accept the offer, meaning that Iran suddenly has a great deal of time and resources on its hands that it didn’t have last week.
And just why would Saudi Arabia come to the peace table with the Houthis now? They have been at war for almost a decade because they rightly believed that stopping the Houthis was imperative for their survival in a Middle East where Iran is seeking both nuclear weapons and regional hegemony. So what changed?
Well, as we noted last month, everything’s changed:
Finally, there is a peace deal of sorts in the Middle East. Not between Israel and the Arabs, but between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have been at each other’s throats for decades. And brokered not by the United States but by China.
This is among the topsiest and turviest of developments anyone could have imagined, a shift that left heads spinning in capitals around the globe. Alliances and rivalries that have governed diplomacy for generations have, for the moment at least, been upended.
The Americans, who have been the central actors in the Middle East for the past three-quarters of a century, almost always the ones in the room where it happened, now find themselves on the sidelines during a moment of significant change. The Chinese, who for years played only a secondary role in the region, have suddenly transformed themselves into the new power player. And the Israelis, who have been courting the Saudis against their mutual adversaries in Tehran, now wonder where it leaves them.
“There is no way around it — this is a big deal,” said Amy Hawthorne, deputy director for research at the Project on Middle East Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington. “Yes, the United States could not have brokered such a deal right now with Iran specifically, since we have no relations. But in a larger sense, China’s prestigious accomplishment vaults it into a new league diplomatically and outshines anything the U.S. has been able to achieve in the region since Biden came to office.”
Again, as we noted last month, the Saudis were willing to take this step with Iran – and with China as the intermediary – in large part because they have had their fill of Joe Biden and his tough-guy posturing. This is the same reason that the Saudis were willing to engineer the OPEC+ production cuts just over a week ago, by the way. They dislike Biden so thoroughly that they will do whatever they can to undermine his positions and his presumed authority.
The Saudis’ antipathy to Biden has many sources, not the least of which is his constant haranguing on the evils of fossil fuels and fossil fuel producers, even as he quietly demands that Saudi Arabia increase its oil output to keep prices stable. In the end, though, the biggest factor in the Saudi-U.S. break is Biden’s blithe, patronizing, and repeated attacks on Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. MbS is no choirboy, and his reform efforts are, to date, more talk than action. Nevertheless, he is the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, and he has pushed the idea of reform considerably further than anyone had reason to expect.
Since he reentered public life to run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Biden has gone out of his way, time and again, to insult and humiliate MbS. One of his first foreign policy acts as president was to release to the public the 2018 intelligence report on Jamaal Khashoggi’s murder, which was both superfluous and malicious.
And here’s the best part: Biden has been spurred on in this vein, not by the foreign-policy establishment and not by his party’s elder statesmen (whoever they might be), but by the very same social media and internet “influencers” whom he now wants to turn into his personal alternative press corps. From the very start, Biden and his advisers have counted on people who think that Twitter and Tik-Tok are “real life” both to hone and to spread their message. These influencers were particularly enraged that MbS was friendly with President Trump. That spilled over into heightened rage at the murder of Khashoggi and at the Trump administration’s refusal to sanction MbS for it. In turn, these internet people were adamant that Candidate Biden take the opposite tack and punish MbS for his Trump connection by labeling MbS and Saudi Arabia “pariahs.” And Biden complied.
In short, then, the state of Israel is right now in greater peril than it has been in a long time, largely because Joe Biden lets social media personalities pull his strings. The entire Middle East is in shambles, and the security that Israel spent years building and reinforcing with outreach to the Arab world is in serious jeopardy. All because Joe Biden lets the internet guide his presidency.
Not only are they the same picture, but it’s a stupid picture as well.
