The war on Iran is a watershed moment, and may well prove to be the harbinger of a version of the Middle East unwanted by the United States and Israel.
On September 27, 2024, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah. The strike that killed him came on the heels of several other coups, the most diabolical of which were the pager attacks that maimed thousands of the party’s civilian and military cadres, and scores of bystanders.
I was stuck in Dubai at the time, awaiting a seat on a flight back to Beirut. Three days after the assassination, I was having lunch with two close friends, both very keen political observers like me. The three of us were flummoxed that Tehran, even after the assassination of Nasrallah, a man whose stature in Iran was equal to his in Lebanon, had reacted with inexplicable torpor. Hezbollah, for all to see, most importantly its hounded and beleaguered community, was being left to fend for itself against a ferocious assault.
The abandonment was baffling in its implications. My two friends went so far as to speculate that Iran might have sold out Hezbollah in some kind of secret deal with the Americans. I disagreed, telling them the Islamic Republic doesn’t forfeit invaluable strategic assets like the Lebanese resistance movement, in an arrangement with a mortal enemy known to blithely walk away from its commitments. Ali Khamenei’s timidity demanded another explanation. The most reasonable one to me was the Supreme Leader’s extreme reluctance to enter a war that would draw in the US.
Over the past three months, as I witnessed the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) withstand and turn a withering Israeli-American offensive into audacious, immensely costly, region-wide economic and military counterblows, I remembered that lunch in Dubai. In the jarring contrast between the republic’s reserve then and its boldness today, the initial contours of a new Middle East were beginning to reveal themselves. They do so in the fourteen clauses of the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US, the sum of which is American recognition of Iran as a bona fide regional power. They do so via the active role played by the major Gulf states in crafting the MOU. They do so in the palpable tensions between the Netanyahu government and the Trump Administration, in many ways the inevitable fallout from a catastrophic, Israeli-engineered war. They do so in the sea change in American attitudes towards Israel among the public and policymakers alike — a profound pivot making itself increasingly felt in the superpower’s policy toward its once very special friend.
For the first time in decades, Israel confronts an unexpectedly treacherous geopolitical landscape. It does so unusually diminished and isolated, hemmed in by its genocide in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon. Perhaps its biggest folly was the misbegotten conviction that, through sheer firepower, it could collapse an entire regional order and remold it into a servile or fragmented expanse. Perhaps Washington’s deeper folly was in indulging its ally’s maddest scheme yet, of hammering, out of utter ruin, a supine Middle East. In 2024, Bibi Netanyahu announced to the world:
A year ago I said something simple: We would change the face of the Middle East, and we are indeed doing so. Syria is not the same Syria. Lebanon is not the same Lebanon. Gaza is not the same Gaza. And the head of the axis, Iran, is not the same Iran.
The prime minister was too modest and woefully wrong in his predictions. In fact, not a single country in the region is the same. None! But the Middle East he envisioned is immeasurably more farfetched now than it was when he embarked on his deadliest and riskiest gamble yet.
It is understandable that the terminally hubristic Netanyahu expected the 2026 blitzkrieg against Iran to yield the same results that its onslaught on Hezbollah had delivered in Lebanon. Instead, the very efficient decapitation of the Islamic revolution’s first generation of leaders has accelerated, with dizzying speed, the ascendance of a rising class of helmsmen: sophisticated, hard-bitten, bold, and brutal, but less concerned with revolutionary zeal than with the business of temporal governance. Khamenei’s doddering, obdurate theocracy, forever contained and on the defensive, finally relinquishes the future. “The new generation has separated revolution from statecraft,” Vali Nasr and Narges Bajoghli write in their seminal essay in Foreign Affairs, “Iran’s New Grand Strategy”:
At home and abroad, it neither espouses revolutionary grandiosity nor advocates revolutionary activism. The new leaders are establishment actors: pragmatic, hardened nationalists operating with a clear-eyed assessment of Iran’s capabilities and vulnerabilities.
Soon, we will know what this elite’s priorities portend for the stubbornly vibrant and forbearing Iranian people. The Islamic Republic was already long on this arduous, thorny path. By all appearances, it has finally arrived, ironically, with much gratitude to the Jewish state and the US, the midwives of our recurring upheavals.
In Lebanon, the open theatre on which geostrategic trends never cease to make their mark, Iran is already showing its strong hand. It made the two countries one front in the war. Today, it is making the two one front in the negotiations. The Lebanese government is right to feel belittled by the irony of being represented by Hezbollah’s patron in talks that could determine its fate. The fault here is not only the smallness of the country, but more poignantly, the smallness of its ruling caste, which of course explains the smallness of the state. The one consolation that comes to mind is that Israel, remarkably, has joined Lebanon on the sidelines.
Tehran’s insistence on including the Lebanese dossier in the settlement, however, speaks to its own vulnerabilities. The attention it is giving the file is no less an indication of its constraints than it is a translation of its strengths. The Lebanese Shiite sect has been forced to sacrifice everything under the sun in the last three years. Towns, villages, homes, livelihoods, and families have been wiped out in huge swathes of the south and the Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs. Discontent within the community is palpable; heartbreak is ubiquitous. This body of people will not be made to suffer in the service of others anymore. Hezbollah and Iran are keenly aware that this war was a watershed. A constituency long made to suffer enormously because of its proximity to a vicious enemy is spent — and done.
Wholesale destruction, ethnic cleansing, and occupation of gas- and water-rich terrains drive Israel’s strategy. Iran’s challenge is to deny the Jewish state its spoils of war and total latitude against Lebanon. At its least ambitious, Israel’s agenda is to retain its dominance in the Levant. The next few months, therefore, will be the most perilous in a decade of grinding turbulence.
It has been almost twenty years to the day that we were last promised a new Middle East. In July 2006, as the war between Israel and Hezbollah was burning through its second week, Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, asserted that “what we were seeing here… are the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” In her reading, a battle royale between the US’s axis of virtue and Iran’s “axis of evil” was ablaze in the lands between the East Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. The main battlegrounds were Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. The victor’s reward would be the very soul of the region.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s adversaries, perhaps intoxicated by Rice’s confidence, were almost swooning at the prospect of the party’s demise. The mood in those circles was a mixture of glee, euphoric anticipation, and vindictiveness. Finally, salvation, courtesy of Israel. The quest for deliverance by foreign “saviors,” far or near, was an old Lebanese reflex. No force — sectarian or otherwise — in our modern history was ever innocent of it. None!
By mid-August, sandcastles lay in a heap, much like the rubble of Dahiyeh. The biggest among them was the one that Rice had built. Hezbollah had endured a massive aerial assault and repelled the Israeli army. Today, Rice and Netanyahu have their birth pangs at last. The new Middle East dimly visible through the debris of a calamitous war is not the one they dearly wanted, though.
And the Lebanese sandcastles that were constructed on the expectation of the Islamic Republic’s defeat and salvation, courtesy of the Jewish state, lie in a heap as well. There are many lessons in these habitual delusions that crash into letdowns. Alas, history has never been our leaders’ strongest subject.
On Another Note
I fell madly in love with Albert Camus at university. It all started with The Stranger. Last week, I saw François Ozon’s adaptation. Wonderful! And then I remembered Robert Harrison’s Entitled Opinions conversation with Jean-Marie Apostolidès, a distinguished scholar and playwright, on the man himself.
Very much worth a listen!
Amal Ghandour’s biweekly column, “This Arab Life,” appears in The Markaz Review every other Friday, as well as in her Substack, and is syndicated in Arabic in Al Quds Al Arabi.
Opinions published in The Markaz Review reflect the perspective of their authors and do not necessarily represent TMR.
