Iran's Secret Weapon Is Not A Nuclear Bomb

Why is it that, over the last 30 years, Iran has financed terrorist groups instead of a Palestinian and Lebanese Arabs middle class, as other Arab states are doing?

In an op-ed in the New York Times last week, Karim Sadjadpour--an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace--writes about a discussion he had with an Iranian diplomat about why Iran prefers to support terrorism:

He complained, justifiably, about Washington’s excessive focus on military power to solve political problems. I posed a simple hypothetical: What if, instead of having spent several billion dollars financing Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad over the past three decades, Iran had spent that money educating tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites to become doctors, professors and lawyers? Wouldn’t those communities now be much better off and in a much stronger position to assert their rights vis-à-vis Israel?


“What good would that have done for Iran?” he responded candidly. (He himself had a doctorate from a British university.) “Do you think if we sent them abroad to study they would return to southern Lebanon and Gaza to fight Israel? Of course not; they would have remained doctors, lawyers and professors.”

Iran, in essence, understands that it can inspire and champion the region’s downtrodden and dispossessed, but not the upwardly mobile. Its strategy to dominate the Middle East hinges less on building nuclear weapons than on the twin pillars of oil and alienation.

Iranian petrodollars are used to finance radicals — Khaled Meshaal in Syria, Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon and Moktada al-Sadr in Iraq, to name a few — who feed off popular humiliation. As an Arab Shiite friend once complained to me, “Iran wants to fight America and Israel down to the last Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi.” [emphasis added]

The Arab world is well aware of Iran's intentions in the Middle East and its successful efforts to expand its sphere of influence.

It's not as clear if the Arabs are aware they are being exploited by Iran.

Technorati Tag: Iran.