Keep an eye on the emerging effort among neoconservatives to argue that Israel's assault on Gaza is in fact a crucial front in the broader battle in the war against Iran. In The LA Times this weekend, Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren argued that "Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is a proxy for the real enemy Israel is confronting: Iran. And Israel's current operation against Hamas represents a unique chance to deal a strategic blow to Iranian expansionism." Today, in The New York Times, Bill Kristol asserts that "The huge challenge for the Obama administration is going to be Iran. If Israel had yielded to Hamas and refrained from using force to stop terror attacks, it would have been a victory for Iran." Put slightly differently: Israel is not engaged in a limited assault that's part of a decades-long conflict with Palestinian liberation movements. Rather, their war is our war. They are launching the assault on Iran, and radical Islam, as a sort of Western proxy, and thus they deserve Western support. Indeed, it goes further than that. According to the neoconservatives, Israel is fighting on behalf of the Arab world, as well. Halevi and Oran say that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas "understand what many in the West have yet to grasp: The Middle East conflict is no longer just about creating a Palestinian state but about preventing the region's takeover by radical Islam." Kristol argues that Israel's attack on Hamas benefits "everyone in the Middle East — very much including Muslims — who aren’t interested in living under the sway of extremist regimes." One imagines that Abbas and Mubarak and the region's Muslims might not greet the IDF with the chocolates and flowers that the neoconservatives suggest, but as it happens, the neocons have easy access to our newspapers, and those folks really don't.
