Nature Abhors A Vacuum--But Iran Loves Obama

Michael Ledeen writes how Iran prefers others to do the heavy lifting--and killing--for them:

The mullahs have stepped up their tempo of killing, both at home and abroad. The main difference is that the Iranian citizens who are tortured and executed are slaughtered by fellow-Iranians. Our guys and our friends and allies are gunned down, or, more often, blown up, by proxies. As I have said before, the Iranians dread direct confrontation with other countries, both because they have no confidence in the loyalty of their armed forces (including the thoroughly corrupted Revolutionary Guards Corps), and because it’s not their way.
They prefer to kill stealthily, not openly. You may have noticed that when the Saudis sent troops to help their neighbors in Bahrain put down an Iranian-inspired insurrection, the Tehran regime first thumped its chest and promised to send the Guards to fight it out. Then… nothing happened. They just slinked away, back into their caves.

Call it the mullahs’ way of war. Let someone else die for you, avoid exposure, and never ever risk your own skin. And they pay heavily for it. As some Israeli analysts have written,

It can be assumed that the Sunni camp, headed by Saudi Arabia, is fully aware of the political and military significance of Iran’s weakness and its unwillingness to initiate face-to-face conflict. This will have ramifications on both the regional and the global levels.

Read the whole thing.

I'm not sure which is more striking, that despite its chest-thumping Iran avoids direct confrontation--or that the Obama administration appears to be either unaware of this or unwilling to exploit this.

Instead, we hear Ahmadinejad taunting the US almost as much as he taunts Israel.

And now it appears that Iran may be exploiting the US--specifically my adopting whatever success the US may have had, for itself:

There is a debate currently taking place at the highest levels, regarding the extent to which Iran will go to defend its ally Syria, and ensure that it avoids collapse, following the unprecedented popular uprising taking place in the country today. I posed this question to an official responsible for the Syrian file in the region, and his answer was surprising! The official said that there are indications suggesting that Iran has begun to prepare Iraq to be its closest ally in the region, in the event of the Syrian regime collapsing. Therefore today we can note the role being played by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, especially as some Sunni areas in Iraq are now witnessing deaths occurring every week at the hands of these militias, who are playing a greater and greater role with the approach of the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.[emphasis added]

If accurate, the concern should be more than just whether Iraq will be able to maintain itself without a US military presence. The larger question becomes whether Iraq will become an Iranian "ally", which in this case appears to be not much different than becoming a pawn of Iran in much the same way as Hezbollah is.

There is a cruel irony there: the US has offered nothing but words--and few of those--in response to the Syrian murder of its own civilians, yet the pressure on the Syrian regime has increased from inside the country. If that regime falls, it will not be due to the Obama administration. And yet, instead of losing its one real ally--Iran will take advantage of Obama's retreat from Iraq to secure a replacement for Syria.

According to this interpretation of events, the murder of Iraqis at the hands of Iranian-backed militias is merely Iran's method "to prepare Iraq to be its closest ally in the region".

Not a pretty picture.
Then again, neither is Obama's foreign policy.

Hat tip: Doc's Talk

Technorati Tag: Iran and Syria and Iraq and Obama.