The PLO pulled out of Beirut in the early 1980s after being given guarantees from the international community that the remaining Palestinian population, unarmed civilians, would be protected both from Lebanese Christians and Israeli forces.
Then Israeli forces colluded with Christian militias to massacre Palestinians in their camps.
Hamas was never going to disarm and hand back the hostages based on "Trust me, bro".
What if they hit US bases using 'plausibly deniable' cutouts?
The Glorious Revolutionary Militia of country X, using Iranian built and supplied drones or missiles, blows up young American soldiers in a country half the electorate didn't even know there was a presence in. Iran disclaims all involvement, but says they sympathise with the legitimate frustration of the locals. Do you think the United States gets involved in a hot war against Iran based on that?
Remember the Beirut truck bombings. The biggest single day US Marine loss of life since Iwo Jima. Reagan (and Mitterand) immediately says there will be no withdrawal. They shoot a lot of artillery in the general direction of Hezbollah from a boat, then immediately withdraw all troops.
I think austin-cheney's point is largely right. Iran has fought a series of proxy wars against Saudi, ever since the Islamic Revolution.
The Iran-Iraq war was the first one, with Iraq funded and supported by the Gulf states.
Supporting Hamas and Hezbollah is strategic in this context. The Saudi regime wants rapprochement with Israel and to remain aligned with US interests. But neither of these are remotely popular in the Saudi population. By funding guerrilla warfare against Israel, Iran and to a lesser extent Qatar, keeps the Sauds discredited and unpopular among at home and in other Arab countries. The same applies to Egypt, another regional rival of Iran, whose government have never been off the defensive with the Egyptian people and wider Arab opinion since normalisation with Israel.
Obviously Hamas and Hezbollah themselves are only interested in fighting Israel and not the wider regional conflicts. But Iran itself uses that conflict, quite cynically, for wider geopolitical goals. Its stance is the reason that, from Afghanistan to Turkey to Tunisia, it can always find allies who want to challenge the Gulf states vision for the Middle East. Iran supplies the weapons and the know how, but there's never a shortage of locals to drive the car bombs.
There is an interpretation of Iran's behaviour which sees it as a source of Muslim pride for standing up to imperialism, and suggests in contrast that the Saudi leaders are too decadent, too corrupt, and bring shame by ignoring injustice and exploitation done to Arabs. I would certainly question this, but it's not an unpopular discourse in Saudi and other Arab countries.
If you have never come across the idea of the conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Palestine etc being part of a long game of proxy war and influence between Iran and Saudi, I would question how broad your sources of analysis are.
I live in a major world city with considerable immigrant populations from many parts of the world, and saw some of the pro-Palestine demonstrations yesterday.
There were numerous groups of Iranians protesting against Israel's actions and in support of the Palestinians. These are Iranians living abroad so can be expected statistically to be less supportive of the current government than the average Iranian resident.
The counter-protest, mainly of pro-Israel demonstrators, this time also had Iranians, demonstrating against the current regime (and broadly in support of Israel). All the Iranian flags in this very small group were the Shah-era design with the lion.
The visibly Iranian groups in the pro-Palestinian demo vastly outnumbered the counter protest. They seemed quite ideologically diverse. There were some people holding pictures of the ayatollah with the words 'No Surrender'. But there were also groups with the sign "don't bomb us and claim it's for women's rights" (can't remember exact wording). Groups including women with headscarves, other groups with only bare headed women. As well as the current official flag with the swords, I saw people holding the lion flag, and others with the neutral tricolour without emblem. So at least some of the people present were anti the current regime, but supported the Palestinians in the current conflict.
Obviously a very selective sampling for many reasons, but far from what you might expect if almost all Iranians were united against their current government.
They did spend a lot of the oil revenue on both education and developing their economy.
Compare them perhaps to Saudi Arabia, a similar sized country with much more oil and much fewer people. Saudi does not have any industry, does not export anything except hydrocarbons. All the extraction is done by foreign engineers.
Iran educates engineers, including many foreign students, has industry outside of oil, and largely works its own drilling and refinery. The Iranian economy is not dependent on migrant labor.
Saudi pays billions to Europe and America for high tech weaponry, yet can't defeat the Houthis. A considerable proportion of the money goes to baksheesh both for the Saudis themselves and their western suppliers. If Saudi decided tomorrow to challenge its Western backers in any real way, the umbrella would be withdrawn and the guys in the solid gold cars would last about a week.
Iran has wreaked havoc throughout the region for 40 years by putting $30 rifles, $200 RPGs, $100 IEDs and now, $2000 drones in the right (wrong) hands at the right time. They haven't lost a regular soldier in battle since the 1980s.
Even if you're calling the end of Iranian influence in the region right now, it's still an incredible run of hitting above one's weight. The only country in the Middle East this can be compared with is Israel, who are themselves legendary for hyper-insightful tactical leverage.
One way of looking at last week's ballistic missile attacks is that they were a way of demonstrating Iran's ability to retaliate in the wider region.
If Ramat Gan is not safe, then the UAE's resorts and airports, Saudi's oil processing facilities, the US installations in Iraq and in the Gulf, etc are not even remotely safe.
> Where do you think they've got the weapons from?
Ultimately, from the United States taxpayer. Who supply the Egyptian military government, who turn a small proportion over to the Islamists to keep them from too much rabble-rousing. Who smuggle them to Hamas.
Both Qatar and Iran supply money and other forms of support to Hamas. But no RPG makes it into Gaza (across a shorter than 10 mile border) without the Egyptian military sort of knowing about it.
1. You have to define 'Israel' quite carefully to make it work. Palestinians in East Jerusalem cannot vote in Israeli elections. Is East Jerusalem part of Israel or not?
2. There are several other democracies in the Middle East, for example Iraq and Lebanon.
3. Some of the countries which aren't democratic, would be democratic, except that representative governments were overthrown by the United States, in part to enforce cooperation with Israel, against the wishes of most of the people in the country. For example, Egypt.
"Yes, we did lie. But in hindsight, our lie did not affect anyone's decision making. The truthful part by itself was enough to convince everyone who was convinced."
91 also happened in a brief period where Russia was holding back from supplying end-of-line military hardware to anyone who wanted to take a shot at the United States and its clients.
Compare military spending by Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and the United States (only Middle East related) with Iranian military spending, over the four decades of Iran's shadow wars with these countries and isolation by much of the rest of the world.
And yet Iranian proxies have repeatedly challenged these powers across the Middle East, in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Sinai, etc. And a lot of Iran's actions have broad support in many other Middle Eastern countries, including strong US allies, those where there are no natural ethnic, religious or linguistic ties to Iran, and where there is prosperity based on peace and the American world order.
Whatever else the Iranian govt are, they are not foreign policy under-hitters or flawed tacticians blinded by dogmatism.
I think what you are missing is how vulnerable the United States and its allies are in the region.
There are much much softer targets than Tel Aviv, many of which Iran has successfully attacked in the past.
The argument that the Iranian people hate their autocratic government might be correct. But a symmetric argument can be made about many of the regimes which work with the United States. No one in those countries is going to war with Iran to defend the US right to have military bases in the Middle East.
The thing is, the United States is self sufficient in petroleum. But domestic prices will go up to reflect the effect on world supply.
Arguably the same could happen given widespread use of non petroleum sources of energy. Prices will go up to reflect the marginal cost of hydrocarbon based energy, even if that use is minimal, until the point where the energy network is completely decoupled from those markets.
This happened in the United Kingdom after the invasion of Ukraine. More wind was used as gas became more expensive. But the price of electricity from wind also went up.
> This is probably what happens when your government isn't very competent and you don't have mathematicians doing game theoretic simulations for you?
Religious government or not, Iran has plenty of engineers, statisticians, scientists and intelligence analysts working for their foreign policy and war effort. Your underestimating this betrays prejudice.
Then Israeli forces colluded with Christian militias to massacre Palestinians in their camps.
Hamas was never going to disarm and hand back the hostages based on "Trust me, bro".