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By MARK LANGFAN<\/p>\n
When you boil Syria down to its principal players, there are only three: Russia, the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran.\u00a0 With Assad’s chemical attack, people have been misdirected from the reality by blaming the powerless Assad.\u00a0 But Assad doesn’t move\u00a0without direct Iranian permission.\u00a0 So, the real question is why did Iran launch a chemical weapons attack?<\/p>\n
The answer is simple: Iran desperately needs\u00a0Russia and the United States to get into a hot war in Syria so as to enable Iran to pick up the shattered pieces.\u00a0 In contrast, the United States and Russia desperately need each other to defeat Iran’s waxing neo-Safavidic Empire from stretching from Iran to the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.<\/p>\n
In order to see why Iran is attempting to foment a Russia\/US battle, one has to boil the Syrian theater into the child’s hand-against-hand game of ROCK\/PAPER\/SCISSORS-shoot.\u00a0 When one child flashes PAPER against the other child’s ROCK, the “paper” envelops and beats the rock.\u00a0When one child flashes PAPER against the other child’s SCISSORS, the scissors\u00a0cuts and beats the paper.\u00a0 When one child flashes SCISSORS against the other child’s ROCK the rock\u00a0smashes and beats the scissors.<\/p>\n
Russia is the “rock,” Iran is the “paper,” and the United States is the “scissors.”<\/p>\n
Iran’s strategy is to\u00a0envelope Syria like a piece of paper,\u00a0topologically combining Iran’s Iraqi “paper,” along with Iran’s Hezbollah\/Lebanon “paper” to form a patchwork-quilt Shiite Empire spanning from Iran\/Persia through Iraq, and Syria, and Lebanon into the Mediterranean Sea.\u00a0As an example of this, Iran\u00a0just announced it was to build a trans-Iran\/Iraq\/Syria\/Lebanon railroad.<\/p>\n
Russia is the “rock”\u00a0trying to bash the Sunni opposition to pieces in order to carve-out its eastern Mediterranean naval outpost and military enclave.<\/p>\n
The United States, through Secretary of Defense Mattis, under the strategic cover of defeating Daesh in Eastern Syria is the “scissors”\u00a0against Iran’s “paper” Shiite Empire.\u00a0 The United States with its indigenous allies is trying to efficiently occupy eastern Syria from the Kurds in the north to Jordan in the south.\u00a0 By topologically “cutting” off Iran’s patchwork piece of paper,\u00a0Iraq, from Iran’s patchwork piece of paper,\u00a0Syria,\u00a0the United States is attempting to defeat Iran’s waxing paper\u00a0Shiite Imamate.<\/p>\n
Before Iran’s chemical attack in the name of Assad, the western Syrian rock\u00a0strategy of Russia, and the eastern scissors strategy of the United States were avoiding each other, complementing each other, and together\u00a0quietly\u00a0weakening the whole Syrian paper\u00a0envelopment strategy of Iran.\u00a0 This was great for Russia and the US, but bad for Iran.\u00a0 Iran saw the United States’ cutting its patchwork-quilt in two in eastern Syria as an existential threat to the grand strategic arc of its contiguous Mesopotamian\/Levantian\/Mediterranean swatch of Empire.\u00a0 Therefore, Iran had to do something to instigate a hot war between the United States and Russia.\u00a0 And presto, Iran bombs civilians with Sarin using\u00a0Assad’s planes, Assad takes the fall, and Russia and the United States are escalating against\u00a0each other.<\/p>\n
Russia and the United States urgently need each other to thwart Iran’s scheme to control the Middle East.\u00a0 It is in\u00a0both Russia’s and United States’ worst strategic interests to allow Iran to become the colossus of the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Syria is big enough for Russia and the United States to find a modus vivendi and live with each other, allowing each to achieve\u00a0strategic goals.\u00a0 Russia\u00a0and the United States have a mutually exact goal if both aim to defeat\u00a0the ISIS Sunni Caliphate and the Iranian Shiite Imamate. To defeat both Islamic radical terror threats requires Russia and the United States to work together, and not fight each other.\u00a0 In the current war against both Sunni and Shiite radical Islamic terror, the United States and Russia are critically necessary for one another as allies, not inimical enemies.<\/p>\n
\u00a0(Mark Langfan is the chairman of Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI) and specializes in security issues. He has created an original educational<\/em>\u00a03-D topographical map of Israel<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n