Tag Archives: #MiddleEast

Together Iran and Israel are destroying Biden’s Middle East policy

This op-ed was published by The National on October 3, 2024

U.S. policy regarding the crises in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, is hanging by a thread. Reckless actions by America’s closest partner, Israel, and primary adversary, Iran, are demolishing Washington’s goal of containing the conflict to Gaza. Tehran and Israel are both driving the region towards a multi-front conflict and war of missiles that could draw in the US. This is precisely what US President Joe Biden has been striving to avoid.

Last year, soon after October 7, the Biden administration concluded that US interests could probably withstand anything arising, strictly from the Gaza war. But they feared getting dragged into a conflict that would pose untold risks.

Therefore, Mr. Biden developed a policy of conflict containment. The virtual carte blanche Washington gave Israel regarding Gaza was intended to help him restrain Israel, particularly in Lebanon.

For many months, it appeared to be working. Despite the emergence of flashpoints in Syria and Iraq, and Red Sea piracy by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Israel was focused on Gaza rather than Lebanon and fighting wasn’t spreading disastrously.

Ironically, the principal threat to this US imperative has come from Israel rather than Iran. In the week following the October 7 attacks, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began pressing for a major offensive against Hezbollah. Mr. Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reject these demands and focus on Hamas. A similar scenario was repeated at least twice.

But Israel sought two imperatives that were unavailable in Gaza. Both Israel and Iran assessed that Tehran had pocketed strategic benefits at the expense of Israel, Hamas and, above all, the Palestinians. That equation couldn’t be altered in Gaza, which has no meaningful importance to Tehran, and especially since Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organization and an unreliable ally that broke with the “axis” completely over the Syrian war.

The Israeli state badly needed a “win” to recuperate national security institutions whose reputations were damaged by the breathtaking failures on October 7. Mr. Netanyahu needed an unequivocal “victory” to restore his own reputation in advance of any future investigation into those failures.

Neither goal was going to be absolutely achieved by fighting Hamas. Instead, taking the fight decisively to Hezbollah, the prototypical and most potent of Iran’s Arab militias, offered the potential for both. But until recent weeks, Israel was largely content with gradual escalation against Hezbollah that made Washington distinctly nervous but never threatened to force the regional war the US was seeking, at virtually all costs, to avoid, although there were obviously making such a disaster ever more plausible.

When Israel’s operation in Rafah marked the end of the primary war against Hamas and transformed the continued conflict in Gaza into an amorphous counter-insurgency rather than a conceptually-coherent campaign against clearly-identified targets, Israel’s attention began to shift back north.

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah expressed genuine interest in a US-proposed compromise in which the Lebanese militia would agree to withdraw its fighters and heavy equipment seven or eight km north of the border. Israel was demanding at least 20km while Hezbollah was insisting on an elusive and implausible ceasefire in Gaza.

Instead, Israel steadily increased pressure against Hezbollah and Iranian assets in Syria, while Mr Netanyahu rebuffed the intensified US efforts to achieve a four-week ceasefire in Lebanon. Israel’s extraordinary penetration of Hezbollah’s interworkings was the key to a series of devastating assassinations of much of that organisation’s key leadership while thousands of its operatives and associates were killed or debilitated by booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing air campaign severely damaged Hezbollah’s infrastructure and equipment, including its all-important rocket launchers. These assets are crucial to Iran, serving as the primary deterrent against any attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

The remarkably successful campaign culminated in the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and several of his key deputies. But it was followed by precisely what Washington had, for a year, focused on preventing: an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon.

While it is being marketed as “limited” and “targeted,” – and therefore implicitly not supposed to be the beginning of a new, open-ended Israeli occupation of parts of southern Lebanon as a “security buffer zone” – Washington understands from its own bitter experiences that such adventures are easy to launch but difficult to end or even contain.

After months of perceived passivity, Tehran finally intervened with a large-scale rocket and missile attack against civilian targets deep into Israel and the headquarters of its intelligence services. While the attack has been deemed unsuccessful by Washington, it’s unlikely that Israel will accept Mr. Biden‘s renewed calls for restraint any more than it has so many other such calls over the past few months.

The Israelis knows that the weeks before a presidential election are a time of maximum impunity from US pressure, and they are taking full and cynical advantage of this. Washington’s reticence was on full display when Mr. Biden bizarrely stated he “would not object” if Israel ended its invasion and eased its bombardment.

Israel seems unlikely to react with restraint. And the Biden administration is divided, with some senior figures privately encouraging Israel’s battering of Hezbollah and humiliation of Iran, while others increasingly fear that Mr. Netanyahu is trying to drag the US into a military confrontation with Tehran and at last secure his long-sought goal of maneuvering Washington into intervening on Israel’s behalf and bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. The US has the firepower to potentially set Iran’s nuclear weapons program back a decade or more, while Israel probably doesn’t.

But Mr. Biden has little to work with. He’s clearly unwilling to exercise the kind of US leverage that could keep Israel in check. He must now hope that Iran and Hezbollah will seek an understanding with Israel to remove militia forces from the border area, even though Israel may no longer be in any mood to compromise.

If the Israelis persist, and Iran and Hezbollah won’t employ “strategic patience” and back down, the nightmare of a multi-front regional war that could force Washington’s hand in defence of Israel – particularly in the month before a crucial election – may become a reality. This is a profound threat to US interests and goals, and would constitute the complete meltdown of Mr. Biden’s entire approach to the crises started by Hamas a year ago.

Is America’s Tower 22 in Jordan ‘ground zero’ for a new battlefront in the Middle East?

 

This op-ed was published by The National on January 29, 2024

The stakes have once again risen for US President Joe Biden’s high-wire balancing act in the Middle East, as three US military personnel were killed and dozens wounded by a drone attack in Jordan that the White House has blamed on Iranian-backed radical groups.

The killings have transformed the third flashpoint in the region, repeated attacks on US troops and facilities in the Middle East, from the least to the most alarming minefield. It now outstrips – at least, for Americans – daily violence on the Israel-Lebanon border and Houthi piracy in the Red Sea. Responding to the attack with firmness, yet also without intensifying a drift towards regional conflict, will be the most challenging spill-over yet of the October 7 crisis for the Biden administration.

The devastating strike hit Tower 22, a US logistics support base, and some claim signals intelligence facility, in a remote part of north-eastern Jordan near the Syrian border. Several Iranian-backed groups operate in the area, both in Syria and Iraq. Their fighters have reportedly been evacuating their bases in expectation of a significant US retaliation. That is extremely likely, although Washington is going to have to carefully weigh how to balance going far enough to restore deterrence but not too far for its own purposes.

The Biden administration’s key goal since the Hamas-Israel war began has been to prevent the conflict from spreading dramatically beyond Gaza. After a tense first month, the policy had appeared to be succeeding, and Washington began turning more attention to restraining Israel inside Gaza itself and preparing for a “day-after” scenario there.

However, in recent weeks, tensions rose dangerously in the Red Sea and on the Lebanon-Israel border. The US has already been drawn into a limited but serious conflict with the Houthis, after the radical Yemeni group began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. And Israel persists in demanding submission to its ultimatum that Hezbollah withdraw its elite Radwan Force fighters from the south, as far north as the Litani River – a demand Hezbollah has dismissed as totally unreasonable.

Amid these growing threats of escalation, however, the Biden administration had reason to hope that its policy of conflict containment remained viable and even relatively successful. The battle against Houthi piracy could drag on at a low-level for months or even years without degenerating into all-out warfare, as the battle against Somali pirates did between 2000-2017. And both Israel on the one hand and, especially, Hezbollah and Iran on the other have every reason to want to avoid another major war with each other at this stage – which is probably why one has not broken out over the past four months.

Attention had been mainly focused on those two crises, almost to the exclusion of handwringing over an ongoing, and almost daily, set of attacks against US forces and facilities in Syria and Iraq by less potent members of Tehran’s “axis of resistance” network of militia groups. Saturday’s deadly strike against Tower 22 serves as a stark reminder that this third flashpoint always remained potentially the most dangerous for the US, because these attacks were aimed directly at the US presence in the region and at Americans.

Until now, US anti-rocket and missile defences, which were beefed up before Israel’s major offensive into the Gaza Strip, managed to successfully intercept and thwart these attacks. The Pentagon is unlikely to have underestimated the potential for a deadly outcome, but the civilian administration in Washington may have been lulled into a false sense of security and was certainly hit by extremely bad luck as well as a vicious attack on Saturday. It’s also entirely possible that the militia groups responsible are taken aback by their own “good luck”, and the extent of death and destruction they were able to visit upon US forces.

It may have gone too far, as well, for their Iranian backers, who will be in a key position now to help to determine whether any or all of these three smoldering fuses detonate a regional explosion that could engulf all major parties. That certainly won’t suit Tehran’s interests, especially under current circumstances, as Iran is quietly inching towards irreversible nuclear status while the world’s attention is focused on many other Middle Eastern priorities.

Iran has clearly been doing nothing to prompt Hezbollah into a larger conflict with Israel that could cascade eventually into a confrontation between Tehran and Washington, conceivably even producing the US military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities that Israel has long sought but never achieved. This might help to explain the enthusiasm of some Israeli leaders for a “pre-emptive” attack against Hezbollah, and their appetite for a growing list of totally unconvincing pretexts for new levels of bellicosity.

By contrast, Iran has almost certainly relished Houthi piracy in the Red Sea, as it repeats long-standing Iranian messages about the right of Tehran and its regional allies to be included in any de-facto maritime security arrangements and that if Iran cannot freely export its oil due to sanctions, no one else can be assured of buying and selling anything unmolested either. But, with a series of US and UK military strikes inside Yemen, Tehran may begin acting as a restraining force on the Houthis as well, because, having made their point, the last thing Iran needs is for Yemeni militants to drag the region into uncontrolled conflict.

Iran will also have to be cognisant that Republicans in Congress and the party’s likely presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, will loudly blame the Biden administration for the growing crisis and attacks on Americans, pressuring Mr Biden into tougher responses. The attack in Jordan also brings Iran and its network into direct conflict with yet another US partner in the Middle East.

So, restraint is not going to only be up to the US. Iran must move quickly to get a grip on its regional network of armed gangs, or, eventually, face the wrath of the most potent possible enemy with powerful regional partners. If it’s still the case that none of the main actors want a broader regional war that would be devastating to them all, then careful deliberation and relative forbearance becomes a shared responsibility. Otherwise, one, two, or even all three of these smoldering fuses will sooner or later explode with devastating consequences.