Fake Solutions for a Real Problem

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's 30-year-long policy of using costly proxies to keep war away from Iran has failed. Now he may be forced into doing his own fighting. Pictured: Khamenei stands with a rifle as he leads Friday prayer at the Imam Khomeini Musalla Mosque on October 4, 2024 in Tehran. (Photo by Iranian Supreme Leader's Press Office via Getty Images)

Although the war, or in fact wars, triggered against Israel by Hamas are far from over, global punditry is already regimented in a cacophonic chorus to tell the protagonists what to do and what not to do.

In fact, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's decision to try and save face by firing missiles at Israel could expand rather than shrink a battlefield that covers a large chunk of the Middle East down to Yemen.

It is too early to decide whether the ayatollah has walked into a trap set to force him into a direct clash with Israel, something he manifestly tried to avoid. But one thing is certain: his 30-year-long policy of using costly proxies to keep war away from Iran has failed. Now he may be forced into doing his own fighting.

Depending on how far this goes, Khamenei's latest move could put the very fate of his regime in the bargain.

Those who have turned real or imagined victimhood into the sole criterion for dispensing fake sympathy want Israel to call it a day and settle for a ceasefire even if the "other sides", that is to say the five H groups, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hashd al-Shaabi, the Houthis and "Imam" Ali Khamenei don't give up their declared goal of "wiping the Zionist entity" off the map.

Some allies of Israel, notably the United States, claim that having "degraded" Hamas and Hezbollah, it is time for Israeli leaders to settle for a half-time pose.

Others like Great Britain have gone further by announcing a moratorium on sale of arms to Israel as a stick to encourage ceasefire.

Other voices, including some inside Israel, call for a pause in the hope of persuading Hamas to release the hostages and Hezbollah to stop rocket attacks on Jewish villages.

The knife left in the wound in 1948 led to even bigger knives in deeper wounds in 1967. Israel's many wars with Hamas and Hezbollah, though theoretically on a smaller scale, produced more victims and opened larger wounds than 1948 and 1967 did.

In classical Greek tragedies, the chorus does not intervene to halt the action of protagonists. It comments and shows empathy or antipathy, but knows that events must take their tragic course to a catharsis.

Even an intervention by a deus ex-machina prop cannot lead the action into a fishtail of uncertainty. Just as a tragedy that does not complete its full course isn't a tragedy, and risks morphing into black comedy, a war that is not allowed to do what a war is designed to do, that is to say create clear winners and losers, would be a carnivalesque waste of blood and treasure.

Another part of the global chorus has already embarked on "peace-making" hallucinations by suggesting "solutions" to what is labeled the "Arab-Israeli problem." The American magazine Foreign Affairs tries to revive the bitter joke of a "two-state solution" with a new slant.

It suggests that a Palestinian and an Israeli state should be created alongside each other but with no borders, allowing each other's citizens to reside in either of the two states. It is not clear who the "creator" of the two imaginary states would be, in effect turning both the Palestinians and Israelis into objects in their own history.

Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian says peace could come only if Israel and Iran are disarmed, and an international force is deployed in the Middle East.

The wise men of the New York Times claim that the revival of the Obama "nuclear deal" with Tehran would do the trick, thus implicitly holding the Iranian mullahs responsible for the current wars. The subtext is: surrender to Tehran so that it orders its five "H" hounds to return to their niches.

Since World War II, we have witnessed dozens of wars, big and small; all of which ended when war did what it is supposed to do -- that is to say, decide who won and who lost, thus allowing the emergence of a new status quo capable of offering stability if not everlasting peace.

The current wars have provided the global chorus with ample opportunity for virtue-signaling of the most cynical type. Contract-deprived stand-up comedians, half-forgotten pop-stars and academics experts in victimology say they are allocating part of their income to Gazan and Lebanese orphans. Ayatollah Ahmad Alam al-Hoda of Mash'had has chosen a cheaper option: an extra evening prayer for Hamas and Hezbollah. An Iraqi poet, seldom praised for his literary prowess, committed an encomium for slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Wrecking the furniture in universities and burning the Israeli and American flags may produce feel-good moments, but are unlikely to pave the way to peace.

One typical illusion of leftist French intellectuals of the past century or so has been their belief that, thanks to Cartesian wisdom, whenever there is a problem a solution must also be at hand; all we need to do is to find and apply it.

In real life, however, there are problems that have no solution within a reasonable span of time and space. In such cases, one risks conjuring ersatz solutions of the kind Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and the new French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, who suggests priority for rebuilding Lebanon.

Khamenei's opening gambit may lead to a real clash of two visions for the Middle East. Khamenei wants to make the whole region look like his Islamic Republic of Iran. In a fiery speech last Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu declared his ambition to make the Islamic Republic look like the rest of the region, that is to say swallow the bitter pill of accepting Israel as a reality.

At the risk of appearing as part of the very same chorus I am denouncing, may I suggest that Netanyahu put his phone on silent for all those who hope to second-guess him on the course he has adopted, which is to let the current war to determine clear winners and losers?

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987. He is the Chairman of Gatestone Europe.

This article originally appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat and is reprinted with some changes by kind permission of the author.