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Geopolitical Diary: Hoping to Ride Hezbollah's Wave
August 17, 2006 02 37  GMT

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday called the 34-day conflict between Hezbollah and Israel a "victory" for Islam. Earlier in the day, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki -- en route to Saudi Arabia -- called on Western states to reconsider their relations with Muslim countries in light of the new reality in the Middle East.

Clearly, Israel's unprecedented failure to render an Arab army incapable of continued resistance has had a dramatic psychological impact in the Arab/Muslim world. Many radical Muslim actors would like to take advantage of the post-war geopolitical situation -- including Iran, Syria, Hamas, the Taliban, Sunni insurgents in Iraq, al Qaeda and all other such anti-Western and anti-U.S. radical Islamist movements.

However, Hezbollah's achievement is not likely to produce a domino effect in the Muslim world. It will serve as a model that these forces will seek to emulate, but intention and ambition are not the same thing as ability and opportunity. There are likely only a few among this group who will be able to reap the benefits.

Apart from Hezbollah and its main patrons Iran and Syria, other groups will at best be able to boost their own morale, which will not do much to change their strategic and tactical limitations. Even Hamas, which is perhaps closest of all to the radical regional alliance led by Iran, cannot hope to gain an edge against Israel from the dynamic generated by the Lebanese crisis because its circumstances are so different from Hezbollah's.

This leaves Iran and Syria. These two can exploit the outcome of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict only in a geopolitical sense, by seeking to reshape the balance of power in the region to their advantage. Iran, although it is the de facto leader of the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah alliance, does not stand to get as much mileage out of this as the Syrians do, because of Syria's proximity to Lebanon and the fact that Syria is an Arab state.

Tehran knows its non-Arab identity is a roadblock to ambitions toward regional hegemony; instead, it tries to use the pan-Islamic card to its advantage, which explains Khamenei's statement about a victory for Islam. This does eliminate much of the challenge from major Arab states such as Egypt, Jordan and even Iraq (where the post-Hussein regime also works to Iran's advantage).

But Tehran faces a robust challenge from Saudi Arabia, which because of its religious and economic credentials is seen as a key leader in the Muslim world. For its part, the Saudi royal family and its allies in the kingdom's Wahhabi religious establishment do not want to share the leadership of the Muslim world with the Persian Shia. Nonetheless, neither side is ready to engage in a military conflict with the other; the result is a kind of Cold War between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Iranians are aware of the uphill struggle they face against the Saudis for the leadership of the Islamic world, and so they try to assert their revolutionary credentials and portray Riyadh as a force of the status quo. There is, however, a limit to how far the Iranians can actually push the Saudis. The Iranians know this and are seeking to reach an accommodation of sorts with the kingdom -- hence Mottaki's visit to Riyadh. However, given the competing interests, mutually exclusive goals and depth of mistrust on both sides, we expect this cold war to be a long one.