A US-Israel Deal on Iran and Gaza

The deal:

1. Israel satisfies Trump on Gaza.
2. Trump satisfies Israel on Iran.

#1 means: Israel either stops the war in Gaza, or — if President Trump decides it’s preferable — helps the U.S. deport a lot of radical Gazans to Libya.

#2 means: the U.S. joins Israel in destroying the Islamic Republic in Iran, and the nuclear program with it.

It’s a win-win proposition. The U.S. gets rid of the terrorist regime in Iran and its nuclear threat to us all. Israel gets to let up on its increasingly costly war in Gaza, and gets the job done more easily and effectively anyway – by cutting off the head of the snake in Iran.  We both win big.

The large gains – larger than we can expect any other way

There are still more benefits than that. With the Islamic Republic gone in Iran, all its proxies – Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas… – will be widowed. They’ll stop getting resupplies from Iran in weapons and intelligence. They’ll be doomed to shrivel. They will no longer be able to threaten Israel, or even go on hitting U.S. shipping. Their local opponents will finally be able to finish them off.

Beyond the local neighborhood, it will truly be a new Middle East. We will no longer be facing constant crisis there. We’ll be able to refocus elsewhere for real. We won’t keep getting dragged back to the Mideast by worse conflicts there, the way it’s happened every time in the past dozen years that we’ve announced a rebalance to Asia.

The smaller costs

What about the costs of toppling the Islamic Republic? They are actually less than the costs of trying to destroy Hamas in Gaza while leaving the Islamist regime in power in Iran.

It’ll be our first really good regime change since we did it in Germany and Japan in 1945. (Russia would add the Eastern European and Soviet area regime changes of 1989-1991, but there we played only a minor cheering-on role. Russia really gives us far too much credit.)

Why will it be easier to overthrow the Islamist regime in Iran and replace it with a pro-Western regime, than to do the same thing in Gaza alone? It is because the Islamic Republic has very little popular support in Iran. In fact it has a huge opposition at home. The Iranian people are positively pro-American and pro-Israel, unlike any of the Arab peoples. By contrast, Hamas still has significant popular support in Gaza.

Iran is the point of least resistance. The proxy lands, though smaller, are all points of greater resistance.

This makes changing Iran not just the safer and better thing to do, but the easier thing to do, compared to continuing along the current path of endlessly fighting the proxies.

We can fight on and on with the thrashing of the tail, or we can cut off the head.

The road to Gaza runs through Iran.

Time for Trump to do a deal with Israel on Iran and Gaza. A deal that ends the need to negotiate for another flawed deal with the Ayatollahs and with Hamas. And that instead conclusively solves both problems.