Why Iran smiles on Jerusalem clashes

Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said on Tuesday that result indicated American weakness. Washington was not following through on promises of “respecting” the rights of Muslims, and that Israel had made an “insult against Islamic culture.”

“Despite the Americans coming and going to the area and discussing the matters with them, the Israelis and the Zionist regime apparently don’t pay any attention,” Mr. Larijani said at a press conference, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency. That result “can be analyzed as a serious threat against the Americans.”

Petraeus warns the US looks increasingly weak

The US-Israeli crisis has come to a head two months after US CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus sent a team to the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen about his rising concern over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to a report published over the weekend in Foreign Policy magazine, Gen. Petraeus’ team reported “that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the US was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, [and] that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing US standing in the region…”

Such a high-profile US-Israeli disagreement “would be looked at with a smile” in Tehran, where Ahmadinejad is trying to position himself as a leader of all Muslims, says Massoumeh Torfeh, an Iran specialist at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

The Iranians “won’t feel it is the end of the line … just a little moment of disagreement between these two nations because they are so inter-connected.” But the Iranian reaction, she adds, “should be seen in terms of politics. They can see that they have a serious problem inside [Iran], so they really need to have a [bigger] role in regional and international politics.

How Iran can use Israel crisis to boost its clout among Arabs

The US-Israel flap is providing some space for that.

“The Iranians will try to use it as a tool in their box, to define Israel as a pariah state,” says Javedanfar. “Now more people on the Arab street will have more time for what Iran is saying – not Tehran’s streets [where anti-regime clashes have been episodic], but on the Arab street.”

Iranian officials have rarely strayed from triumphant criticism of US policy, in a narrative that portrays the US as a lapsed superpower. The deputy ground forces commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Abdollah Eraghi, replied to Petraeus, who told CNN on March 7: “I think you've heard it said by pundits that Iran has gone from a theocracy to a thugocracy."

“Unintelligent and shameless statements by the destitute and vanquished US military chief in the Middle East show how far the foreign policy of the United States has been degraded,” said commander Eraghi said last week, according to Fars News Agency. “The United States supports the most thuggish regime in the world, which is the Zionist regime.”

Previous

1 | 2