Gaza and Tehran’s Game of Three-Pocket Billiards: Le Figaro, France

So what or who is really behind the escalation in Gaza? According to French Historian Alexandre Adler, the answer to that question couldn’t be more clear: Iran. And to be more specific – Iranian President Ahmahdinejad, who is fighting a rear-guard action against many people in his own government who desire an accommodation with the United States.

But what is his game, exactly? Ahmahdinejad is fashioning a foreign threat before elections in the spring to save his political neck.

For France’s Le Figaro, Alexandre Adler writes in part:

“By precipitating such a fight, the fundamentalists are taking a huge risk, but they also hope to win big.

The sacrifice by the Islamists of Gaza are meant, in the spirit their instigators, both to beat the Shiites in Tehran and Baghdad – who dream only of a dialogue with Obama and, once and for all, destabilize an increasingly fundamentalist Egypt.

Mubarak’s powerlessness could definitively weaken his state and make the entire region shift toward a sort of caliphate.”

The Chronicle of Alexandre Adler

Translated By Kate Davis

December 26, 2008

France – Le Figaro – Original Article (French)

The sounds of Israeli mobilization and the organization of retaliation in Gaza shouldn’t obscure the reality of the decisive confrontation playing out before our eyes, which is none other than the fate of Iran, the true key to the entire future of the Middle East.

Looking closely at what’s happening, one is struck by the fact that Tehran’s policy has just achieved, over recent weeks, the culmination of inconsistency.

Having arrived at this point, Iran needed to evolve in one way or another – toward cooperation with the United States in Iraq or armed conflict with Israel. This choice seems a necessary one before general elections are held in spring 2009. It seems that President Ahmahdinejad has decided before this domestic deadline to take deliberate steps toward organizing a vast external provocation.