WarSclerotic

The Iranian threat to the Gulf and to Arabs has never stopped, not even for one day. In both the official and the popular memory, several sporadic unfortunate incidents the region has witnessed owing to Iranian intervention and Iran’s attempts to implant visible or invisible powers, a process commonly known as “exporting the Islamic Revolution,” still remain.

The very mention of Iran has never been for the good of the region, for its stability, development, or economic growth. Instead, it has always provided a reason for war and sedition, and this is demonstrated in its constant threats to wreak havoc to stop navigation in the Arabian Gulf and to activate its dormant cells in the area, all mentioned in Iranian official statements.

The last of those was made by Supreme Leader Khamenei, who threatened on October 1 to launch air strikes against Gulf countries.

A quick look at the map of the Arab world also confirms the path Iran has been taking to create non-stop chaos. There isn’t a country or a regime that, for example, used pilgrimage for political purposes through fabricating actions that varied between crime, terrorism, and subversion, as Iran has done for the past three decades.

Take the support given to the Houthis in Yemen and to certain opposition powers in Bahrain in order to destabilize this peaceful island, as well as intervention in Iraq and the destructive intelligence and economic presence currently visible in the new Iraqi state. Add to that the support of Hamas and the encouragement of internal Palestinian divisions, implanting Hezbollah and its weapons in Lebanon, embracing the remnants of al-Qaeda and forming a suspicious partnership with the Sudanese government.

This is all, of course, in addition to Iran’s most strategic ally and the main reason behind its influence in the Arab world: Syria and its tattered regime.

Then came the unraveling of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington while he was involved in a campaign that has been gaining momentum by the hour and which called upon Bashar al-Assad to end the systematic killing of his people and demanded that Iranian nuclear ambitions be curbed as soon as possible.

The ambassador met on a daily basis with members of Congress, the State Department, and State Security to convey the concerns of the Arab world about the crimes committed by the Syrian regime.

Another story reveals the collaboration between Iran and Syria in order to thwart Syrian opposition. The FBI recently charged a Syrian residing in the United States with collecting information about members of Syrians opposed to Assad’s regime.

In fact, it is hard to separate the assassination plot from its purpose: obstructing all attempts to condemn the Syrian regime and to issue a U.N. resolution against it so that at the end of the day Iran stays Syria’s first and foremost ally. Tehran is afraid of losing a regime that constitutes its power base in the entire Middle East.

That is why we might be up against a much bigger plan that aims at exporting terrorism to the whole world. This can be seen in the way the alert level has been raised internationally in the face of Iran’s terrorist scheme.

(The writer is head of media at Al Arabiya. This article was first published in al-Jazirah newspaper on Oct. 16, 2011 and translated from Arabic by Sonia Farid)