Article by P. David Hornik in "PJMedia":
The regime in Tehran is in lots of trouble these days. As U.S. sanctions tighten, at least a quarter of Iran’s oil rigs are now out of action, “dealing a potentially long-term blow to its oil industry.” The coronavirus “has now spread
to every province in the country and people are fearful that the true
scale of the outbreak is even worse than is being disclosed.”
And
if those and other severe pressures aren’t enough, Shiites in countries
that Shiite Iran seeks to dominate are now telling Iran to go home and
get off their backs.
That’s the story told by Hanin Ghaddar, a Lebanese expat and an analyst for the Washington Institute for Near East policy:
In
Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and inside Iran itself—the countries that
fall along the Shia Crescent—the people have realized that the enemy is
within. It’s their own governments that have allowed the Iranian regime
to take over the state and its institutions…. The Shia Crescent…is
finally turning against the Iranian regime and its proxies.
Calling this development “Iran’s worst nightmare,” Ghaddar says:
[It]
started when the Iraqis—mostly in Shia towns and cities—started to
chant “Iran, out out, Iraq free, free,” and when the Lebanese took to
the streets with one unifying slogan: “All of you means all of you.”
This nightmare became a serious challenge when Iraqi protestors set
Iranian consulates on fire and when Lebanese protestors included
[Hezbollah chief] Hassan Nasrallah among the failed Lebanese political
figures, and blamed Hezbollah for Lebanon’s calamities.
Iran, of course, has “responded” in the only way it knows—with “brutal crackdowns.” And yet:
It
is going to be very difficult for Iran and its proxies to come back
from this. The Shia in these countries no longer believe that the
Iranian ideology is the solution or that its strategy to defeat Israel
and the US will elevate them from poverty and hunger.
As
the U.S. sanctions on Iran “started to squeeze its finances,” Iran told
the Lebanese and Iraqi Shia communities “that it is time for them to
pay the price for the years of free services, political empowerment and
quick military victories.” But “many Shia in Lebanon and Iraq…have
already paid the price for Iran’s hegemony, [and] the Shia Crescent no
longer appeals to the Shia.”
The picture of a tottering Iranian regime scaling back its aid to its proxies—or would-be proxies—is confirmed by Amir Taheri, an Iranian expat, regime opponent, and prolific author and columnist.
“Badly hit by cash-flow problems,” he notes,
the
regime has been forced to cut down payments to regional clients in
Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan and Gaza. This has led to a
reduction in Lebanese Hezbollah’s military presence in Syria while the
Houthis in Yemen have also gone into slow-motion mode. Almost all
offices in 30 Iranian towns and cities recruiting “volunteers” to fight
in Syria, ostensibly to protect Shiite shrines, have been closed or
downgraded into a symbolic presence.
The Islamic Republic has also stopped raising new fighting units of Afghan and Pakistan mercenaries….
Hillel Frisch, an analyst with Israel’s BESA think tank, underlines Iran’s role as regional epicenter of the coronavirus. Or as Frisch puts it:
Iran’s
Shiite crescent, which until recently reflected its imperial reach into
the Arab world, has now become a vector for the spread of COVID-19….
A
study released on Feb. 24 by the Center for Infectious Disease Research
and Policy at the University of Minnesota inadvertently revealed how
salient Iran’s religious ties to Shiite communities in Arab states have
been and continue to be in the spread of the epidemic.
The
five Middle Eastern countries that first reported COVID-19
cases—Afghanistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and Oman—all have substantial
Shiite populations, and all the cases cited are clearly linked to Iran.
The first confirmed case in Afghanistan was flagged in Herat province,
which is in the country’s west on the Iranian border. Another sufferer
had recently returned from the city of Qom, Iran’s Shiite religious
center…. The first Bahraini to be confirmed as having succumbed to
COVID-19 had also just been in Iran, as had all three cases first
reported in Kuwait, Iraq and Oman.
The ramifications of this situation, Frisch says, are “more than medical”:
The
Islamic Republic has seen wide-scale protests in Iraq and Lebanon
against regimes it warmly supports. In Iraq in particular, Iranian
consulates have become targets of protester anger.
Iran’s
failure to control its COVID-19 problem will hardly endear it to
protesters in Iraq and Lebanon, many of whom feel their states are being
damaged by Iran’s involvement in their domestic affairs….
That
imperialism comes at a price could have been predicted. Not so COVID-19
and its ramifications, and least of all its effect on the Iranian
Shiite crescent—a crescent that, true to form, is fast turning into a
boomerang headed back into the heart of the Islamic Republic.
The news about Iran’s weakening hold on its would-be empire should not obscure the fact that Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons
and remains a menace to the region and the world. But these tidings
reinforce the importance of continuing the Trump administration’s
pressure on a regime that for 40 years has been a source of hatred,
terror, and war—and, like other radical regimes before it, is not
invincible.