WTH is Iran Up To in Israel and Gaza? Ken Pollack Explains

It is unclear whether Iran chose the exact date and time of the
Hamas attacks, but the detail is irrelevant. The Islamic Republic
of Iran has funded, coordinated, trained, and armed Hamas and
other proxies for years. Should Israel not definitively succeed
in eliminating Hamas, Iran will learn a critical lesson: its
strategy works. What does Iran want from this war? Eventually,
hegemonic control of the Middle East; in the meantime, derailing
normalization between Israel and the Arab states, eliminating any
moderate Palestinian political players, and total control of the
revitalized Palestinian question in the region. Iran’s influence
isn’t limited to its proxies in the Middle East either – it has
an unprecedented strategic alliance with Russia and a growing
partnership with the People’s Republic of China. So, why the
international equivocation on Iran? Sanctions are needed,
tightening the loopholes for Iranian financing of terrorist
proxies is needed… Iran must pay a price for fomenting this war.


Kenneth M. Pollack is a senior fellow at AEI, where he works on
Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular
on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries. Before
joining AEI, Dr. Pollack was affiliated with the Brookings
Institution, where he was a senior fellow at the Saban Center for
Middle East Policy. Before that, he was the center’s director and
director of research. Dr. Pollack served twice at the National
Security Council, first as director for Near East and South Asian
affairs and then as director for Persian Gulf affairs. He began
his career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA, where
he was the principal author of the CIA’s classified postmortem on
Iraqi strategy and military operations during the Persian Gulf
War.


Download the transcript here.