WHAT IS IRAN UP TO IN THE MIDDLE EAST? – MATTHEW LEVITT

Matthew Levitt is the Fromer-Wexler Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute and director of its Jeanette and Eli Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. From 2005 to early 2007, he served as deputy assistant secretary for intelligence and analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In that capacity, he served both as a senior official within the department’s terrorism and financial intelligence branch and as deputy chief of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, one of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies coordinated under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He is the author of several books and monographs and is the host of the podcast series, Breaking Hezbollah’s Golden Rule. He created and maintains interactive maps of Hezbollah’s international activities and of Iran’s external operations. On 21 November 2024, Matthew Levitt addressed The Sydney Institute on one of the most significant issues in global politics. Matthew Levitt’s visit to Australia was sponsored by the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.

WHAT IS IRAN UP TO IN THE MIDDLE EAST?

MATTHEW LEVITT

Thank you so much. It’s been quite a few years since I stood at this podium and the view is the same. It’s a real pleasure to be back here. No good deed goes unpunished, so here I am again. Thank you very much and thank you all for coming and to those of you who are watching either live on zoom now or on the recording later.

The answer to what Iran is up to in the Middle East, is a lot. But before we get to what they’re doing now, it’s critically important to take a big step back. One needs to understand two critical things about the Islamic republic of Iran. The first is that there are two parallel sets of security services. There’s the army, the Artesh, whose job it is to defend the borders of Iran and there is the Revolutionary Guard and its Quds force. The Revolutionary Guard’s purpose is not to defend the borders of Iran; it is to defend the revolution against opponents within and without of the borders of Iran and, through the IRGC the revolutionary guard’s Quds force, to export the revolution.

Now, on the exporting the revolution, its critical to remember that before Iran was interrupted by a very terrible war with Iraq it actually, after the revolution, created entire agencies and departments for the sole purpose of exporting the revolution. That’s where the history of Iran’s effort to cultivate, and build, and develop, and fund, and arm proxies throughout the region begins. It doesn’t begin with anything Israel did. It begins with what Iran wanted to do in terms of exporting its own revolution.

It looked around the region to countries where there were other Shia communities, mostly minority communities, and the first and most attractive, most important, place for Iran was Lebanon. Not only because of the size of the Shia community, but because their historical, family, and educational links between the Shia community in Lebanon and those in Iran. In Iraq, there were so many Lebanese who had gone to study in the religious seminaries in Najaf and in Qom and had married into families in Iran and Iraq. So there were strong historical ties.

This gave them a tremendous opportunity. Within a couple of years of the revolution, Iran sent some 1500 Revolutionary guardsman to Lebanon, to the Beqa valley. The purpose was helping to coalesce into one organised element, at least under one organised umbrella, a variety of different motley crew Shia organisations that, at the time, were fighting each other and various sectarian elements of Lebanese society as much as they were fighting the Israelis. Thus began what we now know to be Hezbollah. Literally, the party of God. It’s important for me to highlight Hezbollah because that’s the topic of my book which has just come out in its fourth edition and will be available here in Australia in a week and a half.

Over the years Iran has doubled and tripled down on the strategy of building proxies, and it has done so itself. It has done so through Hezbollah which is its first among equals. During the U.S.-Iraq war, Hezbollah was leaned on by the Iranians to serve as the trainers for what has become the very capable Shia militias in Iraq – Kata’ib Hezbollah, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and a whole host of others. We now know from interrogations of people who were detained at the time, some of which have become public, that the Iraqis – who are while Shia are Arab not Persian – did not much appreciate the Iranian attitude because the Iranians did not just come and say well here’s how you fire this particular piece of weaponry, they also assumed Iraqis don’t know how to pray appropriately. Thus, they really talked down to them.

The Iranians didn’t have enough people who spoke fluent Arabic, and so it was attractive for them to have the Lebanese, Arab Lebanese Hezbollah, come and be trainers. Over the years had been very effective because as fellow Arabs the Lebanese didn’t talk down to the Iraqis. So Hezbollah built an entire unit, called unit 3800, whose sole purpose was to train the Iraqi militias and, in several really important cases, actually helped them carry out operations, in particular targeting US and British forces.

Now some context. Fast forward to today or really the past year plus. There is zero question that Iran and Hezbollah were not fully knowledgeable of the October 7 attacks, not of the date, but certainly of the plot that was going to happen. Two years earlier, right after the last Hamas rocket war with Isreal, Hamas stood back and said that under Yahya Sinwar, this is not working. The now deceased Yahya Sinwar was the real deal, and for him governance in Gaza was getting in the way of the real work that need to be done – that of destroying Israel. He could jump up and punch Israel in the nose every year or so and start a rocket war, fine, they were doing it. They were doing it – they could check that box. But he was getting nowhere towards his goal, a goal he thought was real and achievable. At least it was starting a process in his mind. He was absolutely wrong, but in his mind an irreversible process had started that someday he could achieve the destruction of Israel. So, after that rocket war with Israel in 2021, he said Hamas should change tactics. We now know that Hamas and Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary guardsman started meeting in what they called, a “joint war room” in Beirut, two years before October 7.

Now Hamas understood and appreciated the capabilities of Israeli intelligence and frankly they had a pretty good idea, if only a logical assumption, that the Israelis were very, very focused on trying to penetrate Hezbollah. Fast forward to the past few weeks and they were not wrong. They wanted to make sure that the Israelis didn’t find out about or defeat Hezbollah’s effort to pull off an incredible intelligence coup which I’m not thrilled to concede, they did. They led the Israelis to think that Hamas prioritised their governance project in Gaza over fighting Israel. So, there is no question Hezbollah and Iran they did not know on the morning of October 7 that something was going to happen. They knew and provided strategic guidance based on documents that have recently been discovered in Gaza, some of which have been made public which revealed that Iran increased its funding for Hamas in advance leading up to this.

So, the first point to accept is that Iran is trying to operationalise this network of proxies so that they are integrated, so that if one proxy is in a fight, all the other proxies get involved. This was the brainchild of General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds force who was killed during the previous Trump administration in a targeted killing in Iraq, along with a very important Iraqi Shia militia leader who was serving as one of Qasem Soleimani deputies. Some people may have thought this brain child died with him but they’ve been proven wrong. What we see now is Iran successively operationalising and trying to institute as the new normal a reality in which, chose your terminology, Israel is permanently surrounded by a ring of fire. Iran’s proxies are uniting the fronts in an effort to put significant pressure on Israel and through Israel on the West, including things like more regular rocket fire on U.S. forces in Iraq, and so on.

But that’s only one piece of what they’re doing. Iran is strategic in its thinking and how it operationalises those ideas while we in the West work on short election cycles. We just had one at home and I hear you’re likely to have one by not later than, what is it May 2025? Right. It becomes difficult to plan out, especially when you’re switching out parties, but even when you’re not, to plan out strategy over a period of time. But the Iranians do, and not only because they’re not democracies and they’re able –  in a society where you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission and the supreme leader says this is what it is and this is how it is.

Now for some of the other things they are doing. The nuclear program. While we’ve all been paying attention to October 7 and the wars that have been going on since, – Iran has been ratcheting up its nuclear program. Just now when the IEAA was about to issue a report calling them out, Iran said very clearly, if you do that we will respond in an appropriate manner. Iran won’t even allow you to call them out for their bad behaviour or there will be a consequence for calling them out for that behaviour. In the end, there was a negotiation where it appears they won’t be called out, but they’ll just pause their enrichment for a moment. It seems to me very likely that the issue of Iran’s nuclear program comes to a head, fairly soon. Certainly, I would imagine within the first two years of President-elect Trump’s administration and maybe sooner. One of the reasons it may be sooner is because all these things are integrated and when Iran has a policy of trying to institute a circling of Israel in a ring of fire; Israel, for its part, is trying to push its new normal, which is they’re no longer going to sit back and, to quote, “maintain the calm”, which is what Israeli officials have told me over the years.

When I’ve asked, “You keep briefing me on all the new weaponry Hezbollah has and all the new tunnels they have and Hamas also digging hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, are you not kicking the can down the road?” They would answer me that the policy is “maintain the calm”. No longer. They’re not going to allow adversaries that literally have pledged their destruction to accumulate weapons, so long as someone thinks they can be deterred. Among Israelis, strategic thinkers, defence, intelligence security officials, the word deterrence no longer holds a lot of credibility, for most it’s a dirty word.

Deterrence alone is not going to be how things are run, deterrence as a piece of the puzzle, sure. On top of that, the Israeli position now is taking the fight to their enemies. So, the Houthis penetrate Israeli airspace with a drone that crashes into Tel Aviv, the Israelis take out Houthi oil containers and other storage facilities. Not that this was supposed to destroy the Houthis or severely undermine the Houthis, but they’re no longer going to let actions like that go unanswered. That presents problems for Iran, because now the Israelis have taken the fight to Hezbollah, in a way that has never been done before – no terrorist group, no militant group has been so decimated.

What the Israelis have achieved if submitted to Hollywood as a script would be laughed away, it is a cheap paperback novel, too fanciful, no one would have believed it. Somewhere around, perhaps upwards of 70 per cent of Hezbollah’s medium, long-range and precision-guided rockets and ammunitions are reported to have been destroyed. Hezbollah’s entire front line, forward deployed weaponry, tunnels, bunkers, along the blue line, the UN-demarcated border between Lebonon and Israel, are now being swept away. Its not the case that Israel destroyed every rocket. Watch the news, Hezbollah is still able to do some nasty stuff especially with shorter range rockets. But they also have to be careful because they don’t have as many anymore. The threat that Hezbollah had over Israel for many years – that they could potentially rain 1000, 2000, 3000 rockets a day on Israel, overwhelming even Israel’s defence system, has gone. They certainly can’t do it for weeks and weeks on end.

So, there’s still Hezbollah; they’re still dangerous. But the two big strategic threats facing Israel – huge numbers of long-range rockets and precision guided missiles and on the other hand the forward deployed weapons, and bunkers, and tunnels for cross border raid – they are severely degraded. That makes a huge difference for Iran. Those long-range rockets were provided by Iran for two reasons. One to threaten Israel and some day to be able to use them against Israel; but not in the moment. On October 8, Hezbollah started firing short range rockets mostly third generation Kornet anti-tank guided missiles into Israel. But everybody was pretty surprised they didn’t do more. Hamas was certainly surprised and more than a little miffed that Hezbollah didn’t do more. But Hezbollah was deterred I think – or Hezbollah decided not to do more I think for two main reasons.

One reason is that Lebanon, for several years now, has been in a severe political and, far more importantly, economic crisis. Hezbollah has engaged in a bunch of behaviours over the years that have additionally undermined their position in Lebanon. Think, for example, about the tragedy of the Beirut explosion. If you read the Arab barometer report and the polling data there, support for Hezbollah in Lebanon has been dropping steadily, something which Hezbollah is aware of. Those people who say Hezbollah is only a terrorist organisation and not a political movement or social movement in Lebanon, are wrong. They’re absolutely a terrorist organisation, they’ve done things internationally, they’re a militia, a larger military than the Lebanese armed forces with more rockets than most sovereign nations on earth. But they are Lebanese, and they care about their position in Lebanon, and they understand that nobody in Lebanon wanted them to enter this war of choice and risk the Israelis responding in a way that would further undermine the Lebanese economy. I anticipate that this time around, unlike the last war in 2006 you’re not going to have a circling the wagons with many Lebanese saying, “Yay Hezbollah you stuck your finger in Israel’s eye.” This time around, the Lebanese are going to be really annoyed that Hezbollah dragged them into a war they didn’t want, that nobody but the hardest line people in Lebanon wanted.

The second reason is because Iran did not want Hezbollah doing too much. Not because they were interested in Israel’s protection, but because they did not want Hezbollah to be in a position of having Israel destroy too many of those rockets. That’s now happened and so Iran at the moment is in a very bad position. They have severely miscalculated. They no longer have the Hezbollah rockets to serve as a deterrent against Israel or anybody else targeting them or anybody targeting their nuclear program. They no longer have those as a second-strike capability should anybody do that, and not only that, they’ve crossed the Rubicon of now attacking Israel directly, not once, but twice.

In April Iran fired three-tiered 3D chess drones that go about the speed of a car, low altitude cruise missiles that go about the speed of a civilian aircraft and ballistic missiles that go up and come down in about 18-22 minutes. Coming from different angles and different places and different times, it was a tremendous puzzle which the Israelis and U.S. central command, with help from a few others, successfully defeated. Iran fired some 300 projectiles at Israel and basically none of them hit anything. Israel responded with about a dozen projectiles, all of which reportedly hit, and hit among other things, Russian S300 air defence systems which happened to be located right outside a pretty important Iranian nuclear facility. The message is pretty clear.

The Iranians decided to attack again, this time only with ballistic missiles, which gives a much, much shorter window to respond to them. Again, they almost entirely failed although they did hit some bases, but they didn’t destroy any significant infrastructure. The Israelis, this time around, responded by taking out basically all of Iran’s radar systems. By taking out critical components of the supply chain for the ballistic missile production. Now Iran doesn’t have so many ballistic missiles. They’re unable to produce new ones because the Israelis knocked out a particular component of that. And they’re flying blind.

It seemed to me very likely that in the first few days after that second Israeli attack, when the supreme leader of Iran said were going to attack Israel were going to respond were going to do all these things, it seemed clear that maybe he hadn’t yet been briefed on what actually happened. A few days later suddenly he went silent. Every so often you’ll get someone much more junior than the supreme leader of Iran who says it is going to do something at a time and place of their choosing. It’s no longer coming from the mouth of the supreme leader, because eventually he got briefed, “Sir, I’m sorry but we’ve got no radar, so if we hit the Israelis we can’t stop anything that they do – oh – and, by the way, if we respond to them again with more ballistic missiles were about to run out”.

I don’t see the Russians providing the Iranians with new S300s both because the Russians need them, especially now that President Biden and a lame duck-session move has given approval to the Ukrainians to do things that they have not allowed them to do in the past; and second because the Russians aren’t stupid, are they going to put good money after bad? The Israelis just demonstrated they can take out all the s300 systems. But that’s not the only way Iran has miscalculated. Iran decided it would be a great idea to beg some favour with the Russians and provide them drones to attack Ukraine.

Now when I go to Europe, I talk to people privately. Many European governments are talking very differently about Iran, about Iran’s nuclear program, about the threat that Iran presents by virtue of its relationship with Russia in particular, about the threat that Iran presents to the region. This region that has been on fire for the past year has had ramifications for all of us. It has ramifications domestically; I hear that in some cities you wake up in the morning and you find out that Jewish cars get vandalised on your streets. It happens in other countries, not just here, there’s real trickle-down effects for what Iran has done. Even the Europeans are beginning to act differently.

There’s one more reason, because there’s yet another layer of what Iran is doing not only in the region. Since the revolution, Iran has used assassinations and abductions and intimidation of diaspora communities as a means of silencing their critics. One of the first assassinations was just a few miles from my front door outside Washington D.C. and they’ve been doing it ever since. But in the past few years, in the past decade in particular, the plots have been skyrocketing in numbers.

In 2018, authorities in Europe thwarted a bombing plot of an anti-regime rally just outside Paris, where there were lots of current and former officials, government officials, including several current and former American prominent officials. That plot was thwarted. An Iranian diplomat based out of the embassy in Vienna, Asadollah Asadi, was arrested, tried in Belgium, convicted, later released because of course the Iranians did what they do pretty frequently. They’ve done it to Australians too. They arrested someone from Belgium who was in Iran, on trumped up charges of being a spy and told the Belgians there was only one way you get this guy out. I don’t care how many years you sentenced our guy to, those are trumped up charges too and the Belgians made the deal that saw the release of Asadollah Asadi.

The Iranians have been carrying out plots like this around the world, including in the United States. The most recent plot was one targeting former Canadian attorney general Irwin Cotler in Canada. But I’ve created an interactive map and you can look at them at our website washingtoninstitute.org. It’s a free interactive map and when you put out the pie graph, when you map it out, the highest number of plots over the past decade is in Europe. Even at times when things were sensitive such as negotiating over the JCPOA or negotiating in the beginning of the Biden Administration over the potential for a renewed JCPOA 2.0. Even in times and even in places that are sensitive, the Iranians continue operating.

Now I can’t tell you if that’s because they just don’t care and they just go, go, go. I can’t tell you if it’s because there’s a left-hand, right-hand going on in their bureaucracy. I can’t tell you if the hardest line people in Iran acted during negotiations over an Iran deal because they wanted an Iran deal to fail. I can’t answer the why. All I can tell you is that the Iranians have been carrying out these assassinations, abductions, intimidation plots and surveillance to do them in the West and other places in a much more aggressive way than they had even before. You put all of these things together and you get a sense of how disruptive a player Iran has become.

The good news is that the Iranian strikes on Israel have amounted to the single greatest commercial that anybody could have ever done to convince the world, but in particular countries in the Middle East, in particular the Gulf States, of the fact that Iran is the primary, most immediate clear and present danger to the region. And of the fact that a shared air defence with other countries in the region, including Israel in partnership with the United States, is not only absolutely necessary but incredibly effective. I don’t know, to be perfectly honest, if officials before the April strike knew that their air defence, something that had never been tried before, would be successful. There was a tremendous amount of tension, but it was not once, but twice. So, for all that’s happened since October 7, for all of the trauma that Israelis have been through, for all of the trauma that Palestinians have been through and making light of neither to the contrary, conscious and pained by all of it, it’s important to recognise the Abraham Accords did not fall apart.

The Saudis are very sensitive to current events and are not about to revert to a table to discuss normalisation immediately. But you will not find Saudi officials saying, they don’t want normalisation with Israel, or rejecting regional integration. They want it, they just don’t want it this second. They want to see the war end, they want to see rebuilding of Gaza, they want to see something positive move forward and then they would like I believe to be able to normalise with Israel and to integrate the air defence systems of the region’s moderate states. They remember the Iranian strike on the Abqaiq oil fields, they remember the Iranian proxy strikes on the airport in Abu Dhabi, and they do not want to be that vulnerable again.

So, at the end of the day what we are dealing with is a revolutionary regime that is not confident in its longevity. Of all the targets that Iran has been trying to kidnap and/or kill over the past year, the person they are most targeting, Masih Alinejad, is a petite woman with frizzy hair and a big flower in it. Amazing, amazing woman. But is this their great threat? So great that they tried to kill her multiple times, in multiple countries, including two plots in New York City. When I put together my data set of Iranian external operations, I thought I would probably see an increase in plots, but most likely in third world countries. In places where there’s lax border security, relatively less capable law enforcement. Of course, we do see cases in places like that, but that’s not where the majority are. Iran goes where the target is. So, they’ll go to New York City, NYPD, FBI, like they know what they’re doing. I can prove it because none of the plots succeeded. And they get guys behind bars. The fact that Masih Alinejad is the woman they’re afraid of, says a lot, because she inspires women and men in Iran to stand up to the regime.

Let’s finish my opening remarks where we started. The reason they’re looking at people like Masih Alinejad, in particular, the reason the biggest spike in their external operations is not targeting Israelis, which they’re still doing, is not targeting Jews, which they’re still doing – recently a couple of plots in Germany and in France targeting not Israelis, just German Jews and French Jews – it’s not targeting Americans, which they’re still doing to avenge the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, it’s targeting dissidents. And the reason is because there’s an Artesh, there’s an army whose job it is to defend the borders of Iran. And there’s the IRGC whose job it is to defend the revolution; Masih Alinejad is a threat to the revolution. They understand that the supreme leader won’t be here forever. They understand how weak they have become, how isolated they have become, and they will therefore, I predict, become more aggressive, not less so.

Whether they are successful, as they were on October 7, or whether they fail as they have in the year since, because from their perspective they have to continue. They are there to protect the revolution, not to do what’s in the best interest of Iranians, not to make sure that Iranians can put a roof over their heads and afford eggs, and milk, and gas in a cold Iranian winter. But to make sure that they have money for their nuclear program, to make sure that they have money for their proxies, because for them this is about protecting and exporting the revolution. If you try and think about a revolutionary regime in terms that you’re used to, sitting in a democracy like Australia, you’re going to fundamentally misread them. With that, I want to thank you again for allowing me to return to The Sydney Institute and look forward to pretending to have answers to all your questions.