Eric Mandel, writing in the Jerusalem Post on March 16, calls Iran’s war “a war of attrition”.  The loss of its current leadership through targeted assassination is unlikely to affect this survival strategy. The March issue of Foreign Affairs carries an article by Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, entitled: “Why Escalation Favors Iran”.

In it Pape explains why Iran, despite its weaker conventional military power, paradoxically benefits from broadening and extending the current conflict.

The core of his argument is that Iran is pursuing a strategy he calls “horizontal escalation” — namely, expanding the scope, geography, and duration of the conflict, in order to shift it from direct military contest toward political endurance and strategic costs.

Pape contends that Iran knows it cannot defeat a US-Israel alliance in a direct military confrontation. Instead, it is changing the nature of the conflict. By using regional proxies, attacking economic targets and disrupting international commerce, Iran can vastly increase the political and economic costs borne by its stronger adversaries and their allies.

The strategy draws on historic precedents like the Vietnam war. The North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces out-maneuvered the US by escalating the war “horizontally” into towns and cities in the south. The US won every battle over 11 bloody years, but lost the war.

Pre Passover for Jews, and post Ramadan for Muslims, adds despair about the terrible state of the modern world. “Allah reveals this in a verse about the Torah: “We sent down the Torah containing guidance and light, and the Prophets who had submitted themselves gave judgment by it for the Jews–as did their scholars and their rabbis–by what they had been allowed to preserve of Allah’s Book to which they were witnesses. (Qur’an 5:44)

“In examining the portents of the End Times, we will also evaluate the related statements in the Torah and the Gospels in the light of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and present the sections that are compatible with the divine verses of the Qur’an and the hadiths of our Prophet. For that reason, Muslims can find in this book, the passages relating the End Times from the Torah and the Gospels as well as the Qur’an.”

“The subject of the Mahdi” is one that has always occupied an important place in the Islamic world. Hoping that Hazrat Mahdi (as) will be instrumental in making the afflictions Muslims suffered, the intellectual........

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