The post-war Trump Administration in the Middle East going forward seems to be based on monitoring Iran and restraining Israel.
A lot of this assumption derives from the gossip coming out of Gulf allies of Trump fretting about preferring to foster ties with their Islamic enemy Iran than with the Jewish state.
The notion of “let’s get rich together” will trump “Let’s get safe together by removing the radical death cults."
It derives from the feeling of impotence displayed by the wealthy Arab oil states in restraining Iran and its multiple proxies.
Notice how silent they all were in the last month while Israel along was doing their dirty work for them.
This false Saudi-Trump assumption is that making those who control Iran rich will dissuade them from being so radical.
Wrong! They were rich, very rich, thanks to the largesse of Obama and Biden, plus their oil and their covert drug smuggling industry based in central America, but they didn’t spend their money on golf courses and 5-star hotels.
They spent it on a nuclear program and anti-Israel armed proxies.
I am sorry to tell Mr. Witkoff and the Saudi Crown Prince that nothing has changed in the mentality and the motivation of the Ayatollahs and the rest of this Iranian death cult.
Steve Witkoff and his boss need to get their heads out of their real estate mode.
It’s not about casinos. It’s about jihad.
America always believed that dollar bills would cure the Islamists' Messianic pathology. It didn’t then. It won’t work now.
In 1986 during the Iran-Iraq war, America got involved with a hostage deal and believed that Iran was under so much pressure that they would be pragmatic. They thought that Iran’s revolutionary fervor would play itself out under the pressure of the Iran-Iraq war, so the US send them military spare parts hoping the moderates would head the decision-making process. That failed.
America was also myopic in once reaching out to non-existent moderate factions in the Kremlin.
They applied this delusional thought process to the Palestinian Arabs in which all Israel had to do was offer territory and other goodies to the moderate wing of the Palestinian Arab movement, and rainbows and peace would spread around the Middle East. We did, It didn’t, and we got blamed for it, led by US President Obama who brought down a damning, untruthful United Nations Security Council resolution against us leaving the deceptive Palestinian Arb death cult in place, cashing in the dollars and using them to kill us.
Decades later, Israel woke up to the fact that there are no Palestine Arab peacemakers, not in Ramallah, and certainly not in Gaza.
It has always been a deliberately misleading notion that Israelis are the enemies of peace. This falsehood holds even more sway today. It is what is infecting political thought in the West and it invades their media.
We became hamsters running frantically on a wheel trapped in a cage of everlasting concessions with no way out, until we become too exhausted and either die from our efforts or are killed by those who never promised us peace in the first place.
But I digress.
Ahead of the Trump-Netanyahu meeting and whatever lies ahead, if Trump wants to impose an unnecessary ceasefire between Israel and Iran, it has to be a Lebanon type ceasefire which entitles Israel to act every time our intelligence uncovers any military or nuclear movement by the Iranians, this without giving advance warning.
The only problem with this is there is no counter government in Iran as there is in Lebanon, and the distance is far greater to Iran than next door Lebanon, and it is not certain we would have the cooperation of countries along the flightpath of our planes as we had in early July.
In my humble opinion, Trump was wrong in stopping Israel from targeting remaining regime facilities. Given an additional week, we could have decimated the points that stand in the way of an Iranian uprising against their oppressors.
In Iran you have Azeris (Azerbaijanis) and Turkmen. Azeris are a third of all Iranians and they have two neigboring homelands. To complicate matters, the Iranian Azeris call themselves Turks and speak Turkish. There is irridentism in Iran, which is a multi-ethnic society. Add to that the elitist Persians who see themselves as authentic in the land. Add to that mix the Baluchis and the Kurds within Iran.
Iran is ready for regime change and that does not mean American or Israeli boots on the ground. Another week of Israeli targeting would have opened the way for an uprising supported by neighboring countries to get of this evil regime.
As for the Prime Minister agreeing with Trump to leave Hamas in place at the end of the Gaza ceasefire, Netanyahu cannot allow this to happen. He has been haunted since 7/10 by the left wing political and media rivals accusing him of leading Israel into wars in order to escape his court cases and falling popularity. Add to that the accusing finger that he presided over the 7/10 disaster.
But after the astounding success of our 12-day war against Iran, the leftist media and politicians have been fairly silent. Some, including Lapid and Ganz, actually shook his hand and complimented him over his Iranian victory
However, now that Iran is behind us, they are now desperate for a moment of weakness to pounce on him again, and that moment may be if the proposed ceasefire leaves Hamas in alive and in control of Gaza.
The other issue that is worrying is Trump’s love affair with the wealthy Arabs. Notice when Trump talks about potential new Abraham Accord partner, he will not include Saudi Arabia. This is because the Crown Prince cannot accept a public partnership with Israel without Israel conceding on accepting a Palestinian Arab state, even though Saudi Arabia does nothing to persuade any Palestinian Arab leader they must accept the reality of Israel with Jerusalem as its capital.
MBS cannot do that for one reason. He doesn’t want to be the next Sadat who courageously made peace with Israel and was killed by his own people.
If Bibi is forced to accept Hamas in any form in Gaza after a 60-day ceasefire, this could be Netanyahu’s House of Cards. All his successes will collapse and be credited not to him, but to the Mossad and our pilots.
Netanyahu has to be at his wily best when he visits the White House.
Barry Shaw is a fellow at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.