There were four “lost warships,” two American and two Iranian, between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. The first two were crossing the Suez Canal and heading for the Mediterranean, and the other two were leaving this body of water. Washington described its dispatching of the two ships to the waters off Libya as a signal that it might act militarily to strike at Moammar Qaddafi's military capabilities, which he is using against people revolting against his unjust rule. However, the hesitation – in fact America's failure – to act when it comes to the issue of military intervention, as expressed by President Barack Obama and senior US officials, robs the naval exercise of its justifications. Meanwhile, Iran's insistence on testing the political waters, through a trip through the Suez Canal on the pretext of heading for Syrian shores as part of joint training exercises with the Syrian navy, amid conditions of changes and revolutions taking place in the region, robs this maneuver of its justifications as well. This is irrespective of the message that Tehran wanted to send by the presence of the two warships in the Mediterranean. Most likely, the Iranian and American policies are both lost, and confused about the changes on the Arab scene. Both Washington and Tehran are seeking to keep up with these changes and trying to put them in the service of their own strategies. Up to now, these appear to be failed attempts, despite the presence of the four ships in the Mediterranean. It is true that Washington is benefiting from what is taking place in the short term, because it allows the US to ride the wave of democratic change that it has advocated for decades in the Arab world. It is gaining time with regard to the peace process, which has stumbled because the White House has stepped back from its commitments, in favor of the Zionist lobby. It is true that resuming peace negotiations has dropped on Washington's list of priorities, saving the US from more disputes with Israel. The Jewish state has exploited the opportunity to move ahead with more settlements and ignore the international position on its policies toward the Palestinians, as the world focuses on what is going on the region. However, it is also true, in the medium and long term, that Washington was taken by surprise as a result of popular insurrections that are completely independent from its double standard of calling for regime reform and supporting the guarantee of Israeli security and stability. The US supported regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya without equivocation. The fall of these regimes is a loss for the US and puts before it the challenge of re-evaluating its foreign policy in radical fashion. Meanwhile, Israel fears that the White House will be diverted from its policy of blind support for Tel Aviv, and that America's quick abandonment of its “allies” might apply to the Jewish state after a period of time. There are alternative regimes that are taking shape, with revolutionary points of departure that are domestic in nature, and are related to freedom, political pluralism, ending corruption and seeing citizens regain their national dignity at home and abroad. However, they are new regimes whose leading figures can no longer accept American policy that is biased toward Israel; the case of Egypt is the leading indicator on this front. Cairo wields many means of pressure on Israel, and beyond it Washington. There is the Egyptian natural gas that is sold to Tel Aviv at reduced prices, depriving the Egyptian people of its revenues, before we arrive at the option of canceling the Camp David peace agreement. This puts before Washington the challenge of halting its hypocrisy and double standards. For Iran, if it is true that the fall of pro-western regimes and forces with which it was at loggerheads is in the interest of the Islamic Republic, at least in terms of form, the attempt by the Iranian leadership to exploit the changes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and the demonstration in other states, as being in Iran's interest, has provoked reactions that disappointed the Iranian regime. The Supreme Leader made an exception and addressed his public and the Arabs in Arabic instead of Farsi, attributing the revolts by various peoples to Tehran's slogan of seeing an Islamic Middle East. The reactions came from Egypt, from al-Azhar, and the young people in Tahrir Square, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, rejecting the Iranian model decisively. The attempt by Tehran (and its allies in Lebanon) to benefit from the changes sweeping the Arab world, including Bahrain, contradicted the images of how the Iranian regime suppressed opposition groups at home. The regime went as far as to threaten to execute opposition leaders, while the Revolutionary Guards engaged in a bloody confrontation with opposition demonstrators, in a manner resembling that of Arab regimes, which the Iranian regime hopes will fall, classifying such a development as being in its interest. This contradiction invited ridicule, and in fact the rulers in Tehran should fear a domino effect of intifadas, as Egypt reclaims its regional role over the medium-term, when its new regime stabilizes, in order to re-fill the vacuum from which Tehran's rulers benefited during the days of the former Egyptian regime.
