For years one of my pet issues is the widespread assumption that any time a shia group does anything bad in the world they must be doing it as a proxy for Iran. In the past I've referred to it as the "Shiites have no agency unless they are Persian" theory. Since the current war in Gaza erupted it has become common again. Anything that Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen, or even sometimes Hamas (who are not shia but have received Iranian support) say or do is assumed to be something they say or do on behalf of Iranian leaders.
It's absurd because obviously local people are going to have their own local interests. Receiving military assistance from a country doesn't automatically push all those local concerns aside and make someone into a pawn of the funders. People just don't work that way. And we don't make that assumption about other groups that receive outside military funding. Ukraine and Israel are not pawns of the U.S. even though both have received a ton of military assistance from the U.S. We may call them "allies", which retains the sense that they might have the ability to act on their own, but we don't call them America's "proxies." Why are people always making that assumption about Shiites? (okay, I guess I have already kind of answered that question, I blame the Saudis)
So I was amused when I read this bit in an article (gift link) this morning:
Iran is using proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis to distance itself from their actions and maintain its credibility in the region, attempting to avoid a direct attack, which could put at risk the Islamic Revolution and its nuclear program.
But Iran is also being pulled along by those very proxies.
A "proxy" is someone who acts on behalf of someone else. When someone is a proxy they are not pursuing their own interest. If Iran' is being "pulled along" by its "proxies", that means they are not really Iran's proxies. The article tries to frame the Houthi's actions as if they present some kind of logical paradox. But there's no paradox, the proxy framing is just wrong. It's funny that it never occurs to the authors to question the proxy frame even after running into a circumstances that suggests it's incorrect.
The simply-minded assumption that the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Syrian government, Shia rebels in Saudi Arabia, certain military units in Iraq, etc. are all just arms of Tehran's policies, might not be the right way to look at the world. It's weird that so many authors and commentators in our press can't let it go.
