Iran’s strategy for destablizing the region, and exploiting existing instability, is targeted on globally significant maritime chokepoints. America needs to get a clue.
Anyone who is not convinced of Iran’s aspirations to regional hegemony – or just expansion of power, if you prefer – should read Amir Taheri’s Wall Street Journal piece from Monday on that topic. Taheri has done American readers the service of collecting in a single piece a summary of Iranian activities to destabilize the US-friendly regimes in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain – the latter two of which host major Persian Gulf bases for American forces.
Revolutionary Iran has engaged in such activities at varying levels over the years in some of these nations (Lebanon, obviously, but Iran has sought to revolutionize Muslims in Morocco for some time as well, and undermine the Western-friendly monarchy there; and Tehran has long supported internal insurgents in Egypt also). But the last year has seen an unmistakable concatenation of Iranian efforts across all these Arab Muslim nations – efforts that appeared to surge in March 2009, with a sensational Iranian reference in a political speech to the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain as “part of Iran.” Tehran has been working through militants in Bahrain, as it has in Egypt, where 68 were arrested in December 2008 (four identified as members of Iran’s paramilitary/terrorist Qods force), in what Egyptian leaders described, in their April announcement of the operation, as an Iran-backed plot. Continue reading “Charging the Chokepoints”