The past two weeks have witnessed many Iranian allusions to the possibility of a military conflict erupting in the region, and this coincides with the start of serious discussion over imposing further sanctions on Tehran because of its obstinacy in the nuclear issue, as well as with Washington announcing that it will present a draft concerning this matter to the Security Council before the end of this month. Indications of war came in the words of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who announced that he had informed Syria in a telephone call to its president that “we have reliable information (...) that the Zionist regime is after finding a way to compensate for its ridiculous defeats from the people of Gaza and Lebanon's Hezbollah”, adding that “if the Zionist regime should repeat its mistakes and initiate a military operation, then it must be resisted with full force to put an end to it once and for all”. He then repeated his claims in a press conference two days ago, saying that “according to information we have they (Israel) are seeking to start a war next spring or summer, although their decision is not final yet”, without making clear against whom yet adding “but the resistance and regional states will finish them if this fake regime does anything again”. Some might find it “understandable” for Ahmadinejad to hint at the possibilities of war with Israel and to raise the level of tension in the region, in order to deter the Westerners from seeking to impose sanctions and drive them instead to rush to find a way to calm the situation down, and consider this to fall under “tactics” and “indirect negotiations”. Yet previous experience has shown that Iran's talk of war has been serious when the matter concerns the regime's interests. The summer 2006 Lebanon war erupted after economic sanctions were imposed on Tehran, and there is nothing preventing such a scenario from being repeated, a scenario which produced a “victory” Iran and its allies still boast of. Yet it is noteworthy that, when Ahmadinejad spoke of resisting any Israeli offensive, he did not indicate the willingness of his country to participate in such resistance, and in fact laid the responsibility for the task on just Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. And of course, Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyid Nasrallah rushed to seize the direct Iranian message and gave a speech the day before yesterday in which he raised the bar of the “challenge” which he said to “accept” and threatened to strike the infrastructure in Israel if it endeavored to attack Lebanon. Nasrallah said that he does want war, despite the fact that he “misses” it and is willing to wage it, but he seemed in effect to be luring the Israelis to confrontation under the guise of “deterrence” when he revealed a substantial development in his arsenal and his possession of accurate rocket launch systems that never miss their targets and have the ability to destroy. And when he spoke of Israel's “weakness” and its inability to wage a war unless it ensures its “certain, guaranteed and absolute” victory in it, and said that it needed time to regain its strength and build an anti-rocket “steel dome”, he in fact fell into contradiction with his ideology itself. Indeed, if he is certain of Israel's weakness, of the “predicament” it is in, and of the fact that it cannot bear another defeat because that would mean its end, then why does he choose to grant it enough time to prepare since his political convictions and his “religious obligation” drive him to obliterate the “Zionist entity”? The explanation for such contradiction has come in the words of Nasrallah himself when, in the process of attacking those who demand that he does not give Israel a pretext to launch an offensive against Lebanon, he said “since July 2006, nothing has happened on the South Lebanon front, and this has assured us of a strategy”. The strategy here means exclusively the decision and timing controlled by Tehran, which might currently want to prevent sanctions at any cost… which of course we would pay.
