The Daily Signal - Why Iran Is at Center of Middle East Conflict

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Hamas and Israel have been at war for three months. The Houthis are firing rockets at ships in the Red Sea. Lebanon is firing rockets into Israel. And internal violence is growing in Iran between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. As tension builds in the Middle East, the most common thread in the conflict is Iran, according to Victoria Coates, former deputy national security advisor to President Donald Trump. There are three Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups beginning with “H” in the region, Coates explains—to include Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah.  Consider the attack on Israel alone.  “Hamas doesn't have the capability to do this on their own. They needed the help from Hezbollah. They needed the help ultimately from Iran in terms of equipment and intelligence and so on,” says Coates, who currently serves as vice president of the Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)  The Biden administration has failed to take strategic action against Iran, Coates says. Meanwhile, “there have been closer to 150 attacks on the part of these various Iranian proxy groups on U.S. installations and people” since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7. Coates joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain why the Biden administration has not taken consistent strategic action against Iran and to address the threat of all-out war in the Middle East. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, January 9th. I'm Virginia Allen. Tensions are growing and they're growing rapidly in the Middle East. The conflict is reaching outside of Israel and the conflict between Israel and Hamas and is spilling over now into Lebanon, Iran, and the Red Sea. So what do we know about these growing tensions and who are the key players, Heritage Foundation Vice President of the Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy and former deputy national security. advisor to President Donald Trump, Victoria Coates is joining us on the show to explain. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. The Heritage Foundation is the most effective conservative policy organization in the country. Every semester, our interns are a vital part of that mission. We pay competitively. We develop talent. And we give our interns access to some of the sharpest minds in the country. We're going on offense. So join us. To learn more about our

the Young Leaders Program here at the Heritage Foundation, please go to heritage.org slash intern. Heritage Foundation, Vice President of the Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy and former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump, Victoria Coates, joins us now. Victoria, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Virginia. Well, Victoria, tensions appear to be growing, increasing in the Middle East.

And recently, we've been hearing a lot about the Houthis. They have been firing missiles and launching attacks at ships, specifically in the Red Sea, since the attack that Hamas carried out on Israel on October 7th. First, can you explain who the Houthis are and why they are launching these attacks in the Red Sea? It's an excellent question. And because I think most Americans think of Yemen as the place Chandler Bing visited, and I believe season four of friends to get away from Janus. And so they can be forgiven for thinking Yemen is pretty remote, and it is.

Sure. It's down on the sort of southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula right at the mouth of the Red Sea, which then goes up to the Suez Canal, which is the conduit to Europe. So you get a large percentage of the world's shipping goes through this, including very significant percentages of both food and energy. So this is a vital economic conduit. if our listeners think back about two and a half years to when that container ship went sideways in the Suez Canal, and everything got snarled for months. That's why this is such an important strategic location, even though it is distant from the United States. So the Houthi are a rebel military group in Yemen who have toppled the recognized government of Yemen in the capital of Sanaah,

and they are the de facto rulers now of most of the country, and they are a Shiite, Islamic extremist group, and as Shiites have been basically co-opted by the Iranian regime as proxies. So where as Saudi Arabia and UAE intervened on the side of the recognized government of Yemen, which may not have been perfect, but was a functioning government, you know, U.S. ships made port calls there and so on. But they were on that side and the Iranians came in on the Houthi side. And unfortunately, international condemnation did not come down on the Iranians for supporting the violent extremist Houthi, but rather on the Saudis and Emirates and to some extent the United States, which was assisting in counterterrorism programs with them. And so,

you know, that's kind of the situation right now. And one of the tools the Iranians have deployed in the years that they've been involved in this is they allow and enable the Pahuti to take pot shots with various kinds of projectiles and missiles at commercial ships going through that very narrow neck of the Red Sea. And, you know, this has been a nuisance in years past. It's always been a concern, but since the October 7th attacks on Israel, it's become an epidemic, and there have been dozens of attacks. They're also deploying for the first time ballistic missiles. They're deploying killer drones, and they're attacking directly, as they said, commercial vessels, but also U.S. warships. And the carrier group we have around the Eisenhower

right off of Yemen is what's being deployed to counter these things. Okay. Have they, They give in a reason as to why they're carrying out these attacks on many, many different ships? They just say it's in solidarity with their brothers and fellow Iranian terrorist proxies Hamas. And so they are simply trying to terrorize the globe by frightening these commercial vessels into taking the much longer route down around the Horn of Africa, which takes another 10 days to two weeks. and you tack that onto your voyage, both in terms of time, how long it's going to take you to get to your destination, energy costs, crew costs, all of that is going to add to the supply chain problems that this will cause. And when it comes to the connection with Iran, is that an open connection or are we just aware of the connection? Because, you know, when you look at the chatter and all the connections, you kind of recognize, okay, you know, they are working together, but they're not open about working together. They're pretty open about it.

Okay. The Iranian so-called ambassador to the Houthi is an IRGC and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member deployed as a diplomat, which is pretty rich. The Iranians have warships in the area, and we know these missiles are of Iranian manufacture. Okay. So then what has the U.S. response been not only against the Houthis, but against Iran, if Iran is really the one controlling the puppet? Yeah, there's been no response against the Iranians whatsoever. There have been dozens of attacks out of the Houthi overall across the Middle East. There have been closer to 150 attacks on the part of these various Iranian proxy groups on U.S. installations and people.

And so this is a dire situation. If we're going to leave our guys there, we're letting them be sitting targets. And the Department of Defense has said that they are not going to take. aggressive action against the Houthi or anybody else, they will only retaliate in self-defense if first fired upon, which is a very, very weak position to put us in. And in terms of the Houthi, the good news is that our Arleigh-Burk class destroyers have proven very adept in shooting these things down. The Lamboon, for example, the Mason, they're all there. And very, very capable. The bad news is that we have to keep using them. And the math is,

disastrous for us. It costs the Houthi 100,000 maybe to send up one of these drones, and it costs us millions of dollars to shoot it down. And we do that on their schedule, not on ours. So it's very bad math for us, and the supply chain issues are going to make it even more expensive. Okay. There's so much to unpack here. And when you look at the broader perspective of what's happening. There's been over 100 attacks on U.S. interest forces in the Middle East, not just in the Red Sea, but bases, so on and so forth. So talk a little bit broader about, you know, U.S. response to all of these multiple attacks. And are there additional players besides the Houthis and Iran that we know of who are behind these attacks? And what is the American response?

outside of what you said is really minimal for what's happening there at sea. Yeah, the big player, obviously, is Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group out of Gaza that perpetuated the October 7th attacks that brought on this most recent wave of violence. And they are like the Houthi Iranian proxies, largely, if not exclusively, funded and is supplied by the Iranians. And there's every reason to believe that through their Hezbollah brothers, which is the third H-standing Iranian-sponsored terrorist group in the region, Hezbollah up north in Lebanon, that the October 7th attacks were plotted in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, under the auspices of the Iranian regime. Apparently the Iranian foreign minister was there. Again, they're mixing up their diplomatic and military activities and under the auspices of Hezbollah.

So, again, Hamas doesn't have the capability to do this on their own. They needed the help from Hezbollah. They needed the help ultimately from Iran in terms of equipment and intelligence and so on. So you have all of those groups. And then adding to the mayhem, we have a series of Shiite militias in Iraq, which sprung up around the time that ISIS broke out of sort of central Iraq and Syria and created such havoc and chaos. 2015 time frame. And the Obama administration had withdrawn U.S. troops from Iraq prior to that. So we were caught really flat-footed. And the Shiite militia, because the ISIS folk or Sunni, developed as a sort of counter-force to ISIS. And as the U.S. went back into Iraq to also fight ISIS,

the Obama administration found common cause with a lot of these militias, which became loosely integrated into the Iraqi army, which we largely fund and continue to do so through security support. But once ISIS was largely defeated, the Shiite militias turned on the United States because ultimately they are the proxies of Iran. So the Iranians were fine when we were helping them kill ISIS, but the minute ISIS was in that incarnation dead, they turned on us and started attacking U.S. troops and installations. And that's what the Iranians are using now to attack the Americans in both Iraq and Syria. Okay.

So with Iran so much at the forefront of driving so much of the conflict, what is in your mind the logic behind not really going after Iran? And there, of course, I guess, can be an argument made that the American people have seen so much conflict in the Middle East, maybe don't have the stomach for another full out war in the Middle East. But what's your thoughts on why the Biden administration has not really hit Iran where it hurts? Yeah, no, it's in some ways counterintuitive. But with the Iranians, if you want to stop them from doing this kind of aggressive behavior, treat them like a bully.

That's essentially what they are when they see an opportunity and they think their aggression is going to go with no response. They're going to keep trying. But when you do something strong but not escalatory, it's like the takeout of Qasem Soleimani four years ago, you know, that is a kind of action that says to them, we can reach out and touch you, whoever you are any time, and you are not above touching. And, you know, we're going to do something targeted. Yes, it's, you know, a couple of people in that he was the principal, obviously. but it's really going to degrade your capability to continue on the kind of behavior we would like you to stop.

And so if you don't do that, as I said, it's sort of counterintuitive, you are actually inviting them to do more and more. And eventually they're going to either mischute, miscalculate or have a successful, what they would consider to be a successful strike against an American target. And that has a much greater possibility of dragging us into a conflict that every reasonable person would want to avoid. Then there's another side to that coin, which is that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration before them, considers Iran a rational actor and a potential partner for various types of international negotiations. And so you have both the Obama-era nuclear deal, which they have been desperate to get back into for almost three years now. They've been eagerly trying to coax the Iranians to recomply with that. We've had the option take place. The Iranians are now enriching uranium to 60%. They're on the border of weapons grade. All of this took place under the Biden administration.

So they're hopeful, though, that they think that they can get back into that deal. And then the president campaigned on ending the war in Yemen between the Houthi and the legitimate government. And they thought that as part of the Israel-Saudi deal they were working on over the summer, they might be pretty close to a Saudi Houthi deal, which they considered to be a great diplomatic triumph. And unfortunately, you know, that's pretty much on ice now, but they still think it's possible. And so that's why, for example, they took the Houthi off the foreign terrorist organization list some three years ago, and it's why they're not hitting them now because they want to get to that deal. Okay. This is fascinating. Thank you, Victoria. I want to switch here a little bit

and just talk about Lebanon. So we've been hearing a lot just in the past really three days all of a sudden about Lebanon. We've begun to see really this kind of conflict spill over outside of Israel and Gaza over the weekend. Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah group fired rockets into Israel. Israel fired back. They say they struck a tarotill. On Monday, we learned that an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon killed a top Hezbollah commander. Why is Lebanon getting involved in this conflict between Israel and Hamas? Well, important to realize Lebanon, as we think about it as a nation state, really does not exist at this point. The government is completely dysfunctional. They haven't had a president in some years. The economy is in just a free fall. And Hezbollah is the most powerful political force and military force in the country.

So essentially Lebanon is functioning now as a satellite of Iran. So that's why they are now getting involved. They were involved in planning October 7th attacks, as I said. And a lot of the Hamas senior people, they're also being picked off by the Israelis in Lebanon. But the biggest problem with Hezbollah is over the last really five years, the Iranians have packed Lebanon with about 150,000 missiles, about 100,000 of which I believe are fitted to be precision-guided missiles. One of the reasons it seems that so many in the Middle East are bad shots, and you know you get these barrages of rockets

and that nothing seems to be really struck is because they don't have that precision guidance. But 100,000 of the Pesbollah rockets do have that. And so that is a potential huge problem for Israel, because if you set up a swarm of those things, you could potentially overwhelm their missile defenses. And so that's what they're really concerned about. That's what has not happened yet out of Hezbollah. But that's always been an option for the Iranians if they really wanted to distract and

degrade Israel's ability to get after Hamas and Gaza. They could open that second front. And is that something that the U.S. can and should help to prevent? Are there resources that we can give to Israel? Israel or do you think maybe that's not the place of America? No, no. I think there are a number of things we could be doing. You know, for starters, the House passed, you know, rapidly that $13 billion standalone

resupply for Israel. At the end of last year, that was an absolutely appropriate act. They simply pulled it out of the president's larger emergency supplemental. The difference being that they were actually going to pay for it through normal budgeting process rather than, you know, add to the debt, which is what the emergency. moniker does, it means you don't have to pay for it, you can just print more money. So that passed the House, every single Senate Democrat, including, for example, Senator Fetterman, Senator Schumer, who were vocally very pro-Israel. But when it came down to it, they stopped that bill from

coming to the Senate floor and going to the president's desk, which was all right because the president said he would veto it. That's how they actually feel about aid to Israel. So that would be the first thing you could do is pass that supplemental. The other, you know, we have had a lot of options until recently we had the Ford Carrier Group and the Eastern Med, which is our most capable, largest, newest aircraft carrier, and you could do a lot off of that with the Hornets. You could do some targeted, again, not massive, not escalatory, but very targeted strikes on Hezbollah apparatus in Lebanon. Again, to demonstrate, we can reach out and touch you, we can degrade your abilities, how expensive do you want this to be, how painful

do you want this to be for you? And I think if that was handled properly, that would push them back. But the Ford has departed for it. It had to come back to Norfolk to get maintenance. So we no longer have that capability. Okay. Looking at the current situation, all these moving factors, of course, we have the recent situation in Iran between Sunni and Shiite Muslims where there was a really tragic attack that 100 people, over 100 people were killed. It was the most deadly attack in Iran since 1979 Islamic Revolution. All of these moving factors, all of these tensions growing. Victoria, are we headed for an all-out war in the Middle East? Or are we kind of already there? Well, you know, the situation in Iran, I mean, I would never call something like that encouraging,

but it is a reminder that Iran is not 100 feet high, nor is it impenetrably strong. There are severe divisions inside the country, both in terms of ethnic differences. You know, there are women's issues, they're environmental issues, there are money issues. So there's a lot of trouble. And in that particular case, the attack was on the grave site of Qasem Soleimani on the anniversary of his death when there were a bunch of so-called pilgrims there to pay homage to him. and that those were, of course, are all Shiite representatives of the Iranian regime, and they were attacked by ISIS, which is, of course, Sunni. So ISIS now back from the grave in Iraq is flexing its muscles in Iran. And, you know, the important thing there is not to fall into the trap we fell

into in Iraq when we partnered with the Shiite militias to fight ISIS, just because ISIS is bombing the Shiite in Iran does not make them our friends by any stretch of the imagination. ISIS is still very, very savage and bad and problematic. So I don't think the United States can be looking for any friends here in this particular alphabet. Where do you see this escalation ending? Well, you know, a lot of that is going to have to do with what the Americans decide to do. You know, in a way, it is easier for the region if the United States is unambiguous and

its stance and if we were unambiguously supportive of Israel and, you know, basically told our partners and allies in the region, look, look, this is the way it's going to be and we're going to get after this. I mean, the dirty little secret for a lot of the, say, Gulf monarchies, for example, is they don't like the Palestinians either. They have done none of the things that they might have done 50 years ago in terms of trying to supply and help and even participate in a war beside the Palestinians. They have been remarkably quiet.

There hasn't been any influx of supplies or material, and there has not been overtly anti-Israel action. I would have opposed the UN resolution that was adopted recently written by the UAE, but for the standards of that sort of thing, it was remarkably muted. So, you know, it's a moment when I think American clarity could be very helpful in reducing tensions, getting the conflict with Gaza actually resolved, not kind of dragging it out, hopefully getting some of the hostages home as much as much as as humanly possible and restoring some kind of order. But unfortunately, we're sending a lot of very mixed messages right now,

which has the perhaps unintended consequence of creating confusion and unfortunately opening the door to more strife. Quickly, Victoria, before we let you go, you mentioned the hostages, do we have any update on the about 100 hostages that are still in Gaza, where negotiations stand? No, unfortunately, they seem to be pretty much stalled and at a stalemate. You know, the Qataris have continued to play a mediating role there. I know that's highly controversial.

It is, you know, one avenue to try to resolve this situation. It appears that the remaining Hamas leadership who are dug in in various facilities in Gaza are basically surrounding themselves with the hostages using them as human shields in order to protect themselves from target. And, you know, that is a situation. They are unlikely to give up at this point. I don't know what could be worth it to them. They don't particularly care about humanitarian aid unless they can co-opt it and, you

, repurpose it. So, you know, the fact that the people of Gaza are suffering is for them acceptable damage, and they're going to probably hang on to the hostages as long as they can at this point. Victoria Coates of the Heritage Foundation, Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you, Virginia. Please keep them in your prayers. Absolutely. And want to encourage all of our listeners to check out the work of Victoria Coates at the

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