OPINION:
Back in 2010, when I was serving as deputy chief of the CIA’s Near East Division, the Arab Spring engulfed the Middle East, bringing with it levels of popular unrest not seen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
It all started with a Tunisian fruit vendor’s self-immolation, after which protests, fueled by social media, spread rapidly, often in the form of a “day of rage” after Friday prayers, just like the one the leaders of Hamas called for on Oct. 13.
Tunisia’s ruler at the time, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, fled to Saudi Arabia. In the ensuing regional turmoil, Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh were all deposed.
The Arab Spring reflected a mass dissatisfaction that continues today, particularly among unemployed youth tired of a dearth of economic opportunities, endemic corruption and unresponsive government.
The lessons of the period were not lost on Iran, which is exploiting Hamas’ war in Gaza to revive a social media-fueled information war to mobilize pro-Palestinian public opinion and weaken Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states.
Iran’s strategic goals are to freeze the Abraham Accords normalizing Arab world ties with Israel, drive a wedge between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and undermine U.S. influence in the region.
Hamas launched a devastating terrorist attack, then deliberately flooded social media with barbaric images of its murders of innocent Israeli men, women and children. Hamas knows Israel has no other choice but to mount a retaliatory ground offensive in Gaza’s densely populated urban 140-square-mile enclave.
Hamas will continue to base its fighters in residential neighborhoods and use innocent civilians as shields, deploy snipers above ground while moving stealthily in underground tunnels, and use both improvised explosive devices and explosively formed projectiles, which Shia militants in Iraq with links to Iran used to great effect against the U.S. military.
While carrying out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s directive to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth,” the Israel Defense Forces seek to spare the civilian population in Gaza and rescue hostages while avoiding fratricidal friendly fire. But scorning the international law of war principle about distinguishing between enemy combatants and civilians, Hamas will deliberately use the civilian Palestinian population as pawns to transform Gaza into a bloody kill zone.
As the deadly blast at the Al-Ahil Baptist hospital in Gaza demonstrated, facts are in an uphill battle against the public narrative promulgated by Iranian, Hamas and Hezbollah spokesmen that Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians.
The war in Gaza has upended, for the time being, any hope for a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. should consider a three-pronged strategy to counter Iran based on lessons learned from the ill-fated U.S. 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
First, the U.S. needs to bring the full force of its diplomatic engagement with Israel and the region to ensure there is a postwar reconstruction plan for Gaza, one that addresses ordinary Palestinians’ legitimate grievances about economic opportunity, statehood and governance. Failure to do so in Iraq resulted in a bloody Sunni insurgency and the birth of the Islamic State terror group there.
The governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt are enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot. A U.N.-supported plan to rebuild Gaza without an Israeli occupation force, which would free the IDF to focus on other missions, would help drive a wedge between the irreconcilable Hamas terrorists and the Palestinians who deserve better. Planning and public messaging for post-Hamas Gaza should proceed in tandem with the IDF’s ground offensive.
Second, following up on recent F-16 strikes against Iran-linked weapons and ammunition bases in eastern Syria, the U.S. must escalate its response to the recent spike in attacks from Iranian proxy militants on our forces in Syria and Iraq.
A nuclear threshold state allied with Russia and China, Iran will continue to play regional arsonist as long as we allow it. The U.S. needs to reestablish escalation dominance over Tehran by taking the fight more forcefully to its proxies.
Third, the Biden administration should recognize Iran’s despotic mullahs have to deal with reformists in their own public square. Iranians have a long history of protesting their country’s authoritarian rule, the latest example of which occurred after the September 2022 death of Masha Amini in the custody of the country’s morality police, after she rejected Iran’s hijab mandate for women.
With their economy sputtering, many Iranians are opposed to spilling their country’s treasure to support proxy terrorists such as Hamas and Hezbollah, not to mention the Shiite militias in Iraq and Yemen’s Houthis.
Iran is especially vulnerable to an information campaign directed against its miserable record on human rights at home and its barbaric warmongering overseas — if only the Biden administration would launch it.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018. Follow him on X @DanielHoffmanDC.
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