The Middle East as a Chess Game & Tournament

Trying to follow the conflict(s) in the Middle East can be likened to a chess game – or to put it more accurately, a chess tourney with successive games, each player learning from the previous match. But there’s another chess aspect that parallels the conflict: it’s important not to focus too much on where the “action” seems to be taking place.
For anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of chess, the idea is clear. Whereas for most of the game the “action” takes place in the middle of the board with pawns, bishops and knights leading the attack and defense, the ultimate threat lies in the periphery: the rook and especially the queen. Moreover, the central goal of the game is to mate the king – almost always found at the edges of the board, behind protective players.
For most of the past year, the world’s attention has been on Gaza; more recently it has moved to Lebanon. Yet, although these battlefronts are certainly newsworthy, they misdirect us from the main source and goal of this civilizational clash: Iran. When we turn our attention to this Middle East “King,” other aspects of the war become more comprehensible.
Iran has two ultimate goals (however unattainable to Western eyes): destroy Israel and then turn the Sunni world into the Shiite version of Islam. Unfortunately for Iran, it is an economically weak country with an unpopular government promulgating and even more unpopular set of theocratic rules and regulations. What to do? Turn to proxies.
There are several advantages to having proxies doing the dirty work for you. First, others die, so that your own domestic constituency doesn’t feel the pain directly. Second, it is harder for your enemy to react directly against you when attacks arrive from elsewhere by others. Third, it’s a lot cheaper to provide proxies with ammunition and having them recruit and maintain their own armies, than doing all that by yourself. Fourth and finally (perhaps most germane to what’s occurring these days): it keeps the world’s eyes off your 8-ball – in this case, Iran’s nuclear development program. Without nukes, Iran’s above-mentioned ultimate goals cannot be achieved. From its standpoint, therefore, everything revolves around that.
Let’s see how this explains several things of recent vintage. Hamas attacked Israel, expecting Iran (and others) to join the fray. Why didn’t that happen? Because Iran doesn’t consider Hamas and Gaza worth expending undue energy on. From its perspective, bloodying Israel – perhaps even weakening Israel’s military might and certainly its economy – is quite enough. Gaza is expendable, especially when this proxy didn’t even get Iran’s permission to attack Israel! Proxies should know their place…
This also explains the quasi-actions of Hezbollah, a far mightier opponent of Israel. Why “quasi”? For eleven months, Hezbollah has been very careful to limit the use of its deadly arsenal, “only” attacking Israel’s north as “support” for Hamas. Here too, one can see the puppet master (Iran) at work behind the scenes. Although Iran wasn’t ready or willing to help Hamas directly, a measured proxy response (Hezbollah firing at Israel’s northern towns) was fine. To be sure, Hezbollah could have gone “all out” and unleashed tens of thousands of its missiles at the heart of Israel, but this would have been totally counterproductive to Iran’s ultimate goal: protecting its nuclear program.
It’s here that we return to the chess game analogy. While the world’s attention is on the center of the board (Gaza and Lebanon), for Iran in the geographic “periphery” it all comes down to protecting its nuclear King. The huge investment in Hezbollah’s missile arsenal serves that purpose – and only that purpose.
But chess games have two players, and one never knows when the other side will surprise you with a blindsiding attack. That’s exactly what Israel has now done in Lebanon with its massive attack not only against Hezbollah’s pawns but its bishops and even rooks as well. And yet Hezbollah has not crossed Israel’s “red lines” (missiles into the center of the country) in any significant fashion. Why not?
The reason is clear. Those longer-range missiles have one main purpose: a deterrent against Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear program sites and/or bringing Iran to its economic knees by destroying its oil field infrastructure. Iran is desperate not to lose its main, perhaps only real, protective card, for what it considers to be a peripheral “skirmish.” (This works both ways: despite Iran’s clear hand behind all the proxy attacks on Israel, the Jewish State hasn’t hit Iran where it really hurts: its oil manufacturing plants etc.; that would probably lead to all-out war between Israel and… Hezbollah!)
The paradox here is that Israel now has a dilemma (assuming any potential ceasefire doesn’t produce the desired results): whether to invade Southern Lebanon to push back Hezbollah over the Litani River (U.N. Resolution 1701 from a decade and a half ago). The problem for Israel is that this could force Hezbollah to finally send a full missile barrage to Israel’s heartland with very significant damage in property and life, notwithstanding its terrific Iron Dome defense system.
On the other hand, such a development would be highly useful for Israel in the longer term. If Hezbollah’s stock of armaments were to be mostly depleted through Israeli attacks and also a result of a future Hezbollah missile barrage on Tel Aviv et al, that would free Israel’s hand in any future decision to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. In chess terms, Israel’s sacrifice now could lead to a victorious endgame.
In short, as the title of this essay suggests, we are not witnessing a single chess game but rather an entire tourney. Winning or losing one game (or even a draw) can mightily affect future game outcomes of this very drawn out “tournament.”