Iran’s “offensive defense” strategy was founded by Lt. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated on the orders of then-US President Donald Trump on January 3, 2020, in a drone attack.
According to the dictates of this strategic doctrine, Tehran is firmly and strategically oriented to instrumentalize the numerous Shiite populations of the Middle East so that it can indirectly pressure and strike countries with which it does not maintain land or sea borders.
So, for example, it could – and in the past – attack Israel through Lebanon’s Hezbollah (whose involvement in the current phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict is feared by everyone, while we should note that if something like this happens it will be one of the few times a Sunni – such as Hamas – and a Shiite organization, both extreme, will strike simultaneously on the battlefields of the common “enemy”) and Saudi Arabia through the Shiite Houthi rebels of northwestern Yemen.
In other words, we see Tehran applying Liddell Hart’s “strategy of indirect approach”, since, without wanting to get involved directly, it appears to be able to rekindle many foci of ignition in the region through its “proxies”, in a heterogeneous, one-sided “proxy war”, which – however – we see for the first time acquiring purely asymmetric characteristics, with an attack by an extremist group on the state of Israel itself, while in the last three decades, we have been watching a lasting, but different “proxy war” either between the Sunni Saudis and the Shia Iranians with a field of action in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, or – earlier – from the time of the 6-Day War and Yom Kippur, between the USA and the then USSR with the scope of the Arab-Israeli conflicts.
These particular Shia religious groups – the “war agents” of Tehran in its hostility against the state of Israel – and more specifically their armed arms, are considered by many, at this stage, as the “long arm” of Iran in the region.
For the Shiites of the Middle East, in the past, Qassem Soleimani was something like James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga combined, as former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack commented shortly after his assassination. in the Times.
But contrary to what the titles of the films of the legendary agent 007, ‘You live only twice’ and ‘Die another day’ testify, Qassem Soleimani lived only once time and did not die on another day, but on January 03, 2020.
We see, however, that an action aimed at a specific person, which took place about three and a half years ago, can now, belatedly, have its consequences in the region, on the citizens of Israel and on the Palestinian civilians of the Gaza Strip.
The Iranian Major General may have been compared to the tactical genius of Marshal Rommel, but the military conflicts in which Soleimani was involved, as Commander of the elite unit Al-Quds (which means Jerusalem and belongs to the ranks of the “Revolutionary Guards” whose current deputy commander directly threatens to “wipe Israel off the world map like a cancerous tumor”), as well as the current conflicts, to the extent that they can also be counted as an afterthought of his death, anything but a “War without Hate” (as one of Erwin Rommel’s books is titled), could qualify.
In Iran they like to liken Suleimani to Arash, the mythical archer and hero of the “Book of Kings”, an epic of pre-Islamic Persia, who, when it was agreed that the border between Iran and Turan would be drawn based on the longest possible shot of a Persian arrow, he was willing to climb Mount Alborz and pour all his vital energy into shooting his bow.
The arrow traveled for a full day and night before falling to the ground – like a mythological, sharp-pointed, early bionic drone, in a hyperflight in search of its maximum range – flattening the borders of Iran, but leaving the archer Aras dead on the mountaintop, as he had given all his strength to the effort to grow his homeland.
On the other hand, all parties to the conflict must be characterized by a high degree of empathy. Empathy is, simply put, the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. A quality that, along with his high physical and political IQ, we would expect him to display equally well in the face of Gaza’s hostages, be it the Israelis and foreign prisoners of Hamas, or the trapped Palestinian civilians and their children. of a bombed Hospital in the Gaza Strip, the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu.
A man who in the distant 1976 had lost his brother, Yonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu in a spectacular operation to release hostages from the Israeli army.
