How Iran Would See A Cutoff of US Military Aid to Israel

Vivek Ramaswamy has proposed that American military aid to Israel be cut off within five years. “Republican Jewish Group Pushes Back on Ramaswamy’s Stance Against Israel Aid,” by Alana Goodman, Washington Free Beacon, August 22, 2023:

Brooks, in his letter to the candidate, argued that Israel is “our most valuable ally against Iran, which is the chief threat to U.S. interests in that part of the globe,” and said pulling military funding from Israel would be “universally perceived by Israel’s enemies as a weakening of the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran is an enemy not only of Israel, but of the United States, as well as of such Arab allies of America as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. If Iran ever acquires nuclear weapons, and the ballistic missiles to deliver them, there is no reason to think Israel will be its only target. After all, in the view of the Iranian regime, while Israel remains the “Little Satan,” it is America that is the “Great Satan.” In the rallies stage-managed in Tehran, chanting mobs routinely stomp on American flags, and then set fire to them. When it comes to Iranian targets, America should assume the worst.

Israel has been the key ally of the United States in the long effort to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. It has used cyber-warfare: the computer worm Stuxnet caused more than a thousand Iranian centrifuges to speed up so fast that they destroyed themselves. It has used assassination: Mossad agents inside Iran managed to assassinate five of Iran’s most important nuclear scientists. It has used sabotage: Mossad managed to set off explosives within the Natanz centrifuge plant, twice. Another feat of Israeli derring-do took place in 2018, when Mossad was able to to locate, in a nondescript warehouse in Tehran, Iran’s complete nuclear archive and then, racing against the clock, within a few hours at night, the agents had selected tens of thousands of documents that were then spirited out of Iran and back to Israel. That archive proved to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) that the Iranians had been lying for years about their nuclear program. This has led to a completely different approach taken by the IAEA investigators, who have been disabused of any trust they might once have placed in Tehran. No other country has done as much to prevent Iran from manufacturing nuclear weapons as Israel. And the Americans are keenly appreciative of that indispensable Israeli effort. As the Bidenites appear about to end the sanctions regime on Iran, allowing it to recover $131 billion in frozen assets, Iran will be able to spend that enormous sum both on its proxies and allies, from the Houthis in Yemen to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and on its nuclear program, not just on bombs, but also on ballistic missiles to deliver nuclear bombs to targets in Israel and elsewhere. This is hardly the time to consider ending military aid to our one indispensable ally in the region.

Were Washington to end military aid to Israel by 2028, as Vivek Ramaswamy proposes, this would be interpreted by Tehran and its allies in the region as a sign that Israel had lost not just American military support, but that it was being abandoned diplomatically and economically as well. To us such an interpretation is unwarranted, but that’s not how the Arabs and Iranian, reading their tea leaves, will think. Halting that military aid in 2028 would only embolden Iran and its allies throughout the region — Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq, Assad’s Alawite army in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza — to launch attacks, wherever feasible, on the Jewish state.

“Iran already controls Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Gaza Strip,” wrote Brooks. “The appearance of abandoning Israel would seriously harm Israel in military, diplomatic, and economic terms. In this dangerous time, such a move would very decidedly not be in America’s best interest.”

Brooks exaggerates Iran’s dominance of those lands, but not by much. Iran does indeed control several Shi’a militias in Iraq, especially the Kata’ib Hezbollah, providing them with money and weapons. But the Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq are not under Iran’s control, and the powerful Shi’a leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, rejects Iranian advances and remains an Iraqi nationalist. He was visited recently by the IRGC commander, General Ghaani, who hoped to persuade him to adopt a less hostile attitude toward Iran, but Sadr repeated that he wanted Iran to stay out of Iraqi affairs.

In Syria, the Assad regime has retaken most of the country, and Bashar Assad no longer needs Iran’s help as he did during the height of the civil war. He has been reaching out to Sunni Arab states, that have in response reestablished diplomatic relations with Damascus and welcomed Syria back as a member of the Arab League. The rapprochement with the Sunni Arabs should mean a lessening of Syrian ties to Iran; Syria is no longer in thrall to the Islamic Republic. Assad knows that if he is to obtain money to rebuild his country, those hundreds of billions of dollars can only come from one source: the rich Arab states of the Gulf.

In Yemen, despite the diplomatic thaw between Saudi Arabia and Iran, their proxies continue to battle it out, and Brooks’ claim that Yemen is now completely under Iranian control is simply wrong.