Israel Caught in a Giant Chess Game & Tournament
Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: Israel Caught in a Giant Chess Game & Tournament
If you’re having trouble trying to follow the Middle East conflict(s), think of it as a chess game – or to put it more accurately, a chess tourney with successive games, each player learning from the previous match. And there’s another chess aspect that parallels the conflict: it’s important not to lose sight of the core issue by overly focusing on where the “action” seems to be taking place.
If you have even a rudimentary knowledge of chess, the basic idea is clear. For most of the game the “action” takes place in the middle of the board with pawns, bishops, and knights leading the attack and defense. Nevertheless, the ultimate threat lies in the periphery: the rooks and especially the queen. Moreover, the central goal of the game is to mate the king – almost always found at the edges of the board, behind protective players.
For most of the past year, the world’s attention has been on Gaza; recently it has moved to Lebanon. Although these battlefronts are certainly newsworthy, they misdirect us from the main source – and goal – of this civilizational clash: Iran. When we turn our attention to this Middle East “King,” other aspects of the war(s) become more comprehensible.
Iran has two ultimate objectives (however unattainable to Western eyes): destroy Israel and then turn the Sunni world into the Shiite version of Islam. Unfortunately for Iran, it is an economically weak country with an unpopular government promulgating an even more unpopular set of theocratic rules and regulations. What to do? Turn to proxies.
There are several advantages to having proxies doing the dirty work. First, others die, so that your own nation doesn’t feel the pain directly. Second, it is harder for your enemy to react directly against you when attacks arrive from elsewhere by others. Third, it’s a lot cheaper to provide proxies with ammunition and having them recruit and maintain their own armies, than doing all that by yourself. Fourth and finally (perhaps most relevant to what’s happening these days): it keeps the world’s eyes off your 8-ball – in this case, Iran’s nuclear development program. Without nukes, Iran’s above-mentioned ultimate goals cannot be achieved. From its perspective, therefore, everything revolves around that.
This explains several things occurring recently. Hamas attacked Israel, expecting Iran (and others) to join the fray. Why didn’t that happen? Because Iran doesn’t consider Hamas and Gaza worth expending undue energy on. If others can bloody Israel – perhaps even weakening Israel’s military might and certainly its economy – that’s quite enough. Gaza is expendable, especially when this proxy didn’t even get Iran’s permission to attack Israel! Proxies should know their place in the vast scheme of things…
This also explains the quasi-actions of Hezbollah, a far mightier opponent of Israel. Why “quasi”? For eleven months, Hezbollah has been very careful to limit the use of its deadly arsenal, “only” attacking Israel’s north as a sign of “support” for Hamas. Here too, one sees the puppet master (Iran) at work behind the scenes. Although Iran wasn’t ready or willing to help Hamas directly, a measured proxy response (Hezbollah firing at Israel’s northern towns) was fine. To be sure, Hezbollah could have gone “all out” and unleashed tens of thousands of its missiles at the heart of Israel, but this would have been totally counterproductive to Iran’s ultimate goal: using those missiles as blackmail to protect its nuclear program from Israeli attack.
Here we return to the chess game analogy. While the world’s attention is on the center of the board (Gaza and Lebanon), for Iran in the geographic “periphery” it all comes down to protecting its nuclear King. The huge investment in Hezbollah’s missile arsenal serves that purpose – and only that purpose.
But chess games have two opposing players, and one never knows when the other side will surprise you with a blindside attack. That’s exactly what Israel has now done in Lebanon with its massive barrage, not only against Hezbollah’s pawns but its bishops, rooks, and most recently its “King” (Nasrallah) as well. And yet Hezbollah has still not crossed Israel’s “red lines” (missiles into the center of the country) in any significant fashion. Why not?
The reason is clear. Again (it bears repeating): those longer-range missiles have one main purpose – deterring Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear program sites and/or bringing Iran to its economic knees by destroying its oil field infrastructure. Iran is desperate not to lose its main, perhaps only real, protective card, for what it considers to be a peripheral “skirmish.” (This works both ways: despite Iran’s clear hand behind all the proxy attacks on Israel, the Jewish State hasn’t hit Iran where it really hurts: its oil manufacturing plants etc.; that would probably lead to all-out war between Israel and… Hezbollah!)
The paradox here is that Israel now faces a dilemma: whether to invade Southern Lebanon to push back Hezbollah over the Litani River (U.N. Resolution 1701 from a decade and a half ago). The problem for Israel is that this could force Hezbollah to finally send a full missile barrage to Israel’s heartland with very significant damage to property and life, notwithstanding the IDF’s terrific Iron Dome defense system.
On the other hand, such a development would be highly useful for Israel in the longer term. If Hezbollah’s stock of armaments were to be mostly depleted through Israeli attacks as well as a result of Hezbollah’s all-missile hell breaking loose, that would free Israel’s hand in any decision to attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the future. In chess terms, Israel’s sacrifice now could lead to a victorious endgame.
And Iran’s “sacrifice”? As in any chess game, one can never be sure that sacrificing any piece will ultimately bring victory – or defeat. Given the present Hezbollah debacle (from Iran’s standpoint), the question facing Khameini et al is whether the billions of dollars funneled to Hezbollah was (and continues to be) worth any gain. With Iran’s economy deep in the doldrums, its people will surely ask whether such overseas largesse hasn’t further eroded their own economic situation. With a pattern of massive protests every few years in Iran against the mullah regime, here too the Iranian government might lose the chess match most important to it: the survival of its Islamic State.
In short, as the title of this essay suggests, we are not witnessing a single chess game but rather an entire tourney. For all the myriad players, winning or losing one game (or even a draw) can mightily affect future game outcomes of this very drawn-out “tournament.” Stay tuned!
