How does Iran keep getting away with it?

The UN secretary general, British foreign secretary, president of France, former US secretary of state John Kerry – everyone seems to be going to bat for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran deal. Iran’s chief explainer, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, doesn’t even need to do his job anymore. He has a whole line of people in the West who speak on behalf of Iran, who put forward Tehran’s talking points. “If there is no deal there could be war,” they say. The French defense minister claimed Tuesday that weakening the deal might “aggravate the region.” The deal is a “source of peace.”

Meanwhile Iran’s regime is celebrating what it calls the “victory” of Hezbollah in Lebanon’s elections. The only armed party to participate in the elections and the only major party not to include any women on its list enjoyed unprecedented privileges at the ballot box. So while Western leaders were praising the “peace” and “stability” of the Iran deal, Iran was supporting the equivalent of a KKK-style armed organization running in the Lebanese election.

After the results came in, Hezbollah’s fanatics paraded in the streets, burned the posters of rivals and even danced next to the monument for murdered Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri. Hariri was allegedly assassinated by Hezbollah in 2005. That’s “stability” and “peace” in the Orwellian worldview of those who excuse the Iranian regime’s action: the more guns and far-right religious chauvinist fanatics win elections, the more stability and peace there are.

How does Iran do it? How does it always win?

It’s not just in Lebanon. In Iraq, Iran has quietly built up a network of political proxies and armed groups. Iran successfully exploited the war against Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq to place its allies in the Badr Organization at the head of the Iraqi Interior Ministry. They, in turn, got their Shi’ite militias, called the Popular Mobilization Units, enshrined as an official paramilitary force. Between 2016 when the Iraqi Parliament passed a law and 2018, the PMU have become an official arm of the government. What was supposed to be a militia organized to defend Baghdad in its darkest hour against the ISIS blitzkrieg became even more mainstreamed in Iraq than Hezbollah is in Lebanon. Leaders of the PMU are running in Iraq’s elections.