i think this guy got it right indeed.
when your enemies are stupid you have a good fate ahead of you.
Iran has been lucky in its enemies
Forty years after the Islamic Revolution, Tehran’s Shia axis is all but complete
By:
David Gardner on Financial Times
The Islamic Republic’s initial plans to export its revolution were shelved. It was not just that the target Arab audience was mainly Sunni. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, with backing from the west and the Gulf, to strangle the revolution at birth. This led to an eight-year war that killed an estimated 1m people, but left the leaderships on both sides in place.
The Islamic Republic’s initial plans to export its revolution were shelved. It was not just that the target Arab audience was mainly Sunni. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran, with backing from the west and the Gulf, to strangle the revolution at birth. This led to an eight-year war that killed an estimated 1m people, but left the leaderships on both sides in place.
Iran only just survived, as Saddam rained chemical weapons on its troops and missiles on its cities, while the world stood by. That is why Iran sought a nuclear capability. That is also its justification for establishing forward lines of defence in neighbouring countries, and its winning formula of militias and missiles. Under regional and international siege, it has indeed withstood all enemies. But it needed their help.
The Israeli invasion of civil war-racked Lebanon in 1982, greenlit by Washington, helped create conditions for Iran to develop Hizbollah, which would become its paramilitary spearhead in the Levant.
The reckless US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 took out a tyrant but also demolished a bulwark against revolutionary Iran. Amid chaos and carnage it installed Shia governance in an Arab heartland country for the first time in centuries, rekindling the embers of Sunni-Shia enmity. The explosion of Sunni jihadi extremism in Iraq after the invasion, and then Syria as the west subcontracted support for the majority Sunni rebellion there to the Gulf states, also garnered kudos for Iran and its paramilitaries for their role in defeating Isis. The Trump administration’s attempt to marshal a Saudi-led Arab bloc behind a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians allows Tehran to posture as the only power that stands by the Palestinian cause.