Article represents opinion of the author 

 by Elliott Abrams CFR– In May, 2017 Major General Qassem Soleimani, chief of the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations branch known as the Qods Force, visited the Iraq/Syria border in the company of an Iran-backed Shia militia. A spokesman for the militia, called the Popular Mobilization Forces, was quoted in Newsweek: “This will be the first step to the liberation of the entire border,” Ahmad al-Asadi, a spokesperson for the PMF said, according to the Associated Press. “This victory will also be an important incentive for the Syrian Arab Army to secure the entire border from the Syrian side,” he added. Iranian-backed forces, that is, would take both sides of the border, so for Iran there would be no border. In June Soleimani was reported to be on the Syrian side of the border. Now, it is reported that one of Iran’s hardest-line leaders, Ibrahim Raisi, has visited the Israeli-Lebanese border. Raisi, the defeated candidate for president in 2017, is a member of the Assembly of Experts that will choose a successor to “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei and is a candidate for that position himself.