WTH is Iran Up To in Israel and Gaza? Ken Pollack Explains

What the Hell Is Going On

AEI Podcasts

News, Government, History, Politics

4.4 • 633 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2023

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It is unclear whether Iran chose the exact date and time of the Hamas attacks, but the detail is irrelevant. The Islamic Republic of Iran has funded, coordinated, trained, and armed Hamas and other proxies for years. Should Israel not definitively succeed in eliminating Hamas, Iran will learn a critical lesson: its strategy works. What does Iran want from this war? Eventually, hegemonic control of the Middle East; in the meantime, derailing normalization between Israel and the Arab states, eliminating any moderate Palestinian political players, and total control of the revitalized Palestinian question in the region. Iran’s influence isn’t limited to its proxies in the Middle East either – it has an unprecedented strategic alliance with Russia and a growing partnership with the People’s Republic of China. So, why the international equivocation on Iran? Sanctions are needed, tightening the loopholes for Iranian financing of terrorist proxies is needed… Iran must pay a price for fomenting this war.

Kenneth M. Pollack is a senior fellow at AEI, where he works on Middle Eastern political-military affairs, focusing in particular on Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf countries. Before joining AEI, Dr. Pollack was affiliated with the Brookings Institution, where he was a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Before that, he was the center’s director and director of research. Dr. Pollack served twice at the National Security Council, first as director for Near East and South Asian affairs and then as director for Persian Gulf affairs. He began his career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA, where he was the principal author of the CIA’s classified postmortem on Iraqi strategy and military operations during the Persian Gulf War.

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute.
0:03.1	If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on.
0:01.0	Who in God's name knows what it's all about.
0:23.6	Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
0:29.6	I'm Mark Tiesin.
0:31.6	Welcome to our podcast.
0:32.6	What the hell is going on?
0:34.6	Mark, what the hell is still going on in that world out there?
0:38.9	Every week, the question becomes deeper and more profound. Today, we are trying to figure out
0:45.6	what the hell is going on with Iran. So, you know, there's this whole debate going on about
0:50.7	Iran's role in the October 7th attacks, Iran's role in whether they planned and
0:57.4	coordinated the attacks or whether they simply knew about them or whether it was just
1:02.5	Iran's complicit simply by the fact that Hamas wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Iran and all
1:06.8	the money and weapons and training it gives them. In either case, all roads lead back to
1:11.5	Tehran in this fight. And so we've got Ken Pollock on to talk to us because he is an expert on Iran
1:17.1	and he is an expert in this region and he's written a lot about this and he's going to break it down
1:21.7	for us about what Iran's role in this is and how Iran can be defeated. Ken does a fantastic job, I can attest, and you and I
1:29.5	see him almost every day. So he really is able, I think, to put this in perspective. And one of the
1:35.1	most important things I like about Ken Pollock is he has worked for the CIA. He's worked on the National
1:42.3	Security Council in the Clinton administration twice.
1:45.9	He worked at the Brookings Institution.
1:50.0	So nobody can call him a clone of Mark Tieson and Danny Pletka.
	...

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