Tag: Israel
Mushroom clouds over the Middle East
Former IAEA inspector Pantelis Ikonomou writes:
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear deterrence became the strongest parameter in projecting geopolitical power. Nuclear weapons could eventually be decisive in the Middle East.
Israel and Iran are now in direct confrontation
Safeguarding state security and regional dominance are the fundamental aims of the main protagonists, Israel and Iran. Since spring, they have been confronting each other directly. Two exchanges of missiles have resulted. Further escalation seems irreversible.
Serious questions need serious answers. Where is this dynamic leading? What is next? Is there hope for an end to the escalation after next week’s presidential elections in the US? Is the global superpower willing or even capable of rerouting the war dynamics towards a peaceful direction?
The next American President
Candidate Donald Trump in 2018 withdrew the US unilaterally from the Iran nuclear deal. A few days ago Trump urged Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Doing that would force Iran to end its doctrine of strategic patience. Iran would exit the NPT, develop the military dimension of its nuclear program, and construct nuclear warheads. Iranian parliamentarians are already proposing this course of action.
The other candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, was an important voice in Washington as the current Middle East crisis developed. President Biden has struggled to prevent the escalatory spiral. His effort slowed but not stopped it.
The consequences are dire
Continuation of this situation could force Israel to abandon its doctrine of nuclear opacity. It neither confirms nor denies its nuclear weapons. Prime Minister Meir considered using nuclear weapons during the 1973 Yom Kippur war to respond to Egyptian army advances. Prime Minister Netanyahu could also be forced to consider or threaten their use.
An Iranian decision to pursue nuclear weapons or Israeli confirmation of its nuclear capability would change the situation dramatically. Either or both would challenge the credibility of the Non Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA, and the UN Security Council. Adding Iran to the non-NPT states (India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel) could undermine the global security architecture. Mushroom clouds would loom over the Middle East.
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The war Netanyahu wanted is at hand
Prime Minister Netanyahu has spent the 31 years since the Oslo accords seeking two principal foreign policy goals: preventing establishment of a Palestinian state and destroying the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is on the verge of getting a chance to achieve both. In the process, he is ending Israeli democracy, earning the enmity of much of the Arab street, and drawing the US into another Middle East war. I don’t like the result, but he is definitely stalwart.
Obliterating the idea of a Palestinian state
I recall in the mid-1990s a discussion at a mutual friend’s house with the then National Security Advisor to Vice President Gore. Leon Fuerth believed that Netanyahu would eventually come around to accepting a Palestinian state. I had my doubts. I still think I was right.
Netanyahu spent many years thereafter pumping up the idea that Israel was under siege, both by the Palestinians and the Iranians. The Second Intifada and the wall Israel built to isolate itself, successfully, from the West Bank boosted his credibility. Once Hamas took over Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2006/7, he worked hard to keep the two governing bodies separate. Dividing the Palestinians was one way to make sure they couldn’t get what they wanted.
Defeating Iran
Hezbollah is Iran’s most important ally/proxy in the region. Israel has now destroyed perhaps 50% of its rocket and missile supplies and killed an even greater proportion of Hezbollah’s leaders. The pager/walkie-talkie attack two weeks ago maimed thousands of its cadres. Israeli troops are now on the ground in southern Lebanon seeking to push Hezbollah forces north of the Litani River.
Netanyahu is imagining that regime in Iran is imminent:
He will be content with the results of yesterday’s 180-missile Iranian attack. Israel appears to have suffered little damage and no known strategic losses. Many of the missiles were destroyed before hitting their targets by US, Israeli, and other unnamed defenses.
Retaliation is nevertheless all but certain. Netanyahu has been looking for an opportunity to hit Iran for decades. The Israelis will likely aim for nuclear and oil production facilities. The nuclear facilities will be difficult to destroy, as vital ones are ensconced well under ground. The best the IDF can hope for is to block some of the access routes. The oil facilities are more vulnerable. Oil and natural gas are Iran’s major exports. If they don’t flow, the economy will deflate.
Restraint is not in the cards
The Americans and Europeans will be urging restraint on Israel. They don’t want a regional war. Netanyahu isn’t listening. His own political future depends on continuing the fighting and achieving a spectacular military success. Hamas has denied him that in Gaza. So far, Hezbollah has proven an easier target. Netanyahu knows President Biden will do nothing to Israel’s block arms supplies. And he wants to boost Trump’s chances of winning the presidency. So he has no reason to restrain an attack he has wanted to launch for decades.
Netanyahu’s governing coalition has only a thin majority in the Knesset. But his allies and his own Likud political party have given him a blank check in pursuing a regional war. The Arab states are protesting the war in Gaza but doing little to prevent Israel from attacking Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran. All of them are anathema to the Gulf monarchies. The Arab street is still sympathetic to the Palestinians, but it has little say. Restraint is not in the cards.
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Not only wider, but higher
Israel yesterday bombed Hezbollah headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut’s center, and killed its leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Israelis are celebrating:
So are anti-Assad Syrians in Idlib:
Decapitation ups the ante
This Israeli move signals that Prime Minister Netanyahu wants not only to widen the war from Gaza to Lebanon but also wants to up the ante. The assassination of an enemy leader forecloses negotiations and makes it harder to manage the conflict. Israel’s successful cell phone/walkie-talkie attack less than two weeks ago had already infuriated and discombobulated Hezbollah’s militants. The loss of its leader of more than three decades will cause further confusion and distrust in their ranks.
The impact of decapitation on insurgencies is a subject of debate. There is evidence that decapitation can shorten anti-terrorist campaigns, increase the odds of insurgent defeat, and decrease conflict intensity. Others think decapitation has greater chances of success in countering insurgency “when conducted by local forces against a centralized opponent in conjunction with larger counterinsurgency operations.” Those conditions were not fulfilled in yesterday’s raid. Local forces did not conduct it, Hezbollah is a networked opponent, and there was no “larger” counterinsurgency operation.
That said, Hezbollah will need time to regroup. The Israelis likely also killed some of Nasrallah’s lieutenants. A leadership strike of this sort requires inside intelligence. Somehow Israel knew where the Hezbollah leaders were at a specific time. Hezbollah depends a great deal on personal trust among its adherents. The choice of a new leader and the search for a culprit will disrupt that network for some time to come. That may not prevent retaliation in the form of rocket attacks, but those have been militarily ineffective.
Mixed reaction in Lebanon and the Arab world
Lebanese will have a mixed reaction: horror at the civilian lives lost in buildings in the capital, but also some Schadenfreude. Hezbollah has lost its heroic mettle for many Lebanese, both because it went to war against the Syrian opposition and because it is now part of a corrupt, self-perpetuating elite in Lebanon that has delivered little in recent years to its citizens. Even before the Beirut port explosion in 2020, the Lebanese economy’s wheels were coming off. The Lebanese pound has lost well over 90% of its value. Most of the population is impoverished, frustrated, and desperate.
The
The Arab world will likewise have a mixed reaction. Most Arab elites are allergic to Islamist movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. Before today’s event, they were protesting mistreatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank but doing little about it and nothing to defend Hamas and Hezbollah, which are Iranian allies. However, most Arab streets are sympathetic to the Palestinians and want the Gaza war to end (as do most Israelis). That was Hezbollah’s declared aim. It was rocketing Israel since October 8 of last year, it said, to get Israel to end the Gaza war.
It will be interesting to see now whether the Arab street gets agitated enough to change the Arab world’s relative quiescence (relative, that is, to its past military attacks on Israel). The Syrian exception (see video above) is due to Hezbollah’s fighting the opposition on behalf of President Assad.
The West won’t cry crocodile tears but needs to worry
The West won’t mourn Nasrallah, but many in Europe and the US will worry that his death will incentivize a major Hezbollah retaliation. While its rockets have so far caused little strategic damage in Israel, the Israelis would likely respond with further escalation. That will heighten the hostilities. Neither the US nor Europe wants a the wider war heightened.
The West will also need to worry about Hezbollah operations beyond Israel. Hezbollah has terrorist cells in many countries, including the US, which presumably supplied the large bombs that leveled Hezbollah headquarters. US embassies and government offices in Washington could become targets.
Iran is in a bind
Tehran has been trying to avoid war with Israel, which has demonstrated it could bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. Now two of its key allies have suffered a great deal of damage. Israel has not destroyed Hamas, but Iran needs to be concerned how long it will take for Hamas to regain its former military strength. Now Israel has decapitated Lebanese Hezbollah, killed other leaders, and injured thousands of its militants in addition to destroying a significant percentage of the rockets and missiles Iran has supplied.
Asking Tehran to continue to show restraint may be asking too much. Advocates of Iran’s nuclear program in Tehran will be emboldened. They will argue that Israel is looking for war with Iran and that only acquiring nuclear weapons will prevent an Israeli attack. That in turn could create incentives for Turkey and Saudi Arabia to get nukes. Their leaders have both said they will match Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The Middle East with four nuclear weapons states will not be a safe place.
There is another way out. Tehran could tell Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani River, as required by the UN Security Council, and end the rocket attacks. This would enable Israelis to return to their homes along the border with Lebanon. It would also give the US leverage in pressing Israel for a ceasefire and prisoner/hostage exchange in Gaza. The war there would be unlikely to end entirely, as Netanyahu needs the war to continue until he can declare unequivocal victory. But relative calm could allow far more humanitarian aid and early reconstruction assistance to flow.
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Israel has chosen the wider war
Israeli warplanes are today striking more than a thousand targets in Lebanon. This ratcheting up of the conflict comes after Lebanese Hizbollah had launched hundreds of rockets in recent days against Israeli targets, including near Haifa and settlements in the West Bank.
There is always something the enemy did yesterday to justify what you are doing today. Israel is driving the escalation to pre-empt what it expects would be a major Hizbollah missile attack in response to the cell phone and pager explosions that last week killed and maimed thousands of its militants. Lebanese view the warnings to civilians as an effort to get them to flee.
The prospects are grim
Hizbollah has ample reason to try to duck the escalation. It is losing a lot of rockets to Israeli attacks. The President of Iran, Hizbollah’s sponsor, has indicated a willingness to de-escalate. Many non-Hizbollah Lebanese–while resenting Hizbollah–are not pleased with suffering the brunt of the Israeli attacks.* The air attacks have killed about 500 today alone. Many thousands of civilians are fleeing. But there is no sign that Hizbollah is willing to comply with Israeli demands that it move away from the border to north of the Litani River or stop the rocket attacks.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have reportedly not yet deployed sufficient ground forces for an invasion. The 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon did not go well. Israel will try to avoid a repeat. Its stated objective is to enable Israelis who have had to evacuate from near the northern border to return to their homes. A ground invasion would not serve that objective well, but it is still a possibility.
The regional situation
Israel is now at war with Hamas in Gaza, with the Houthis in Yemen, with Hizbollah in Lebanon, and with Syria, which actively supports Hizbollah. Military experts would not have advised opening a multi-front war.
But this serves Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political interests. So long as the country is at war, he can avoid an election. He is hoping that military success will erase resentment of his many defects and enable him to stay in power. Israelis have not forgotten the October 7 intelligence failure, his corrupt practices, or his extremist coalition partners. But so far postponement has worked, even if it is hard to see how it can work forever.
That said, the Arab countries of the region and Turkey object strongly to what Israel has done in Gaza. They will also protest what they are doing in Lebanon. The sympathies of the Arab and Turkish streets remain with the Palestinians. But the governing elites are happy to see Hamas and Hizbollah get their comeuppance. Both are Islamist movements, albeit one Sunna and the other Shia, that serve Iranian interests and are not welcome in most states in the region.
Implications for the US
The wider war means no negotiated end to the war in Gaza before the US election. This is fine with Netanyahu, who supports Trump’s re-election despite President Biden’s full-throated support for Israel.
Trump hasn’t been outspoken on the Middle East. That is because he would lose Arab American votes in Michigan and Wisconsin if he said he wants Israel to win and win quickly and big. But that is precisely what his Netanyahu-aligned advisors and supporters want. He would avoid the handwringing about civilian casualties Biden has evinced or the appreciation for Palestinian rights that Vice President Kamala Harris has voiced.
American restraint on Israel isn’t happening before the November 5 election. Netanyahu knows that. Expect him to use the next six weeks to continue to do as much damage as he can to Hamas and Hizbollah, no matter the harm to Arab civilians.
*Apologies: this sentence did not say what I meant in the original posting.
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Harris is gaining while Trump steps in it
Donald Trump managed yesterday to turn an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists into a campaign debacle. He claimed that Kamala Harris, who went to historically Black Howard University and became a member of a Black sorority, had not always identified as Black but rather as Indian. She in fact is Black and Indian. Her father was a Black Jamaican and her mother was an Indian Tamil. She grew up identifying as both.
Why would a presidential candidate even mention a competitor’s racial origins? Why would he do so in a demonstrably false way? What did he hope to gain from this strange assertion?
What did he think he was doing?
Trump’s faux pas could be just a mistake. His cognitive capacity is in doubt. He often says “weird” (and offensive) things. This could just be another one.
That is hard to believe. His campaign has surely briefed him extensively on Harris’ background and biography. He should know by now where she went to university. He has a particular interest in immigration and had for years challenged Barack Obama’s illegibility for the presidency based on the false claim that he was born in Kenya. Trump certainly knows the origins of Harris’ immigrant parents.
Trump was trying to cast aspersions. He was suggesting that she had been dishonest about her Black identity and is now only using it for political purposes. Trump may have hoped to suggest that she, like Obama, was not a legitimate candidate. He wanted to drive a wedge between Black voters and Harris, hoping to prevent her from reversing the modest flow of (mostly male) Black voters the polls show he has gained.
Failure is its own reward
He failed miserably. His audience knew that Harris identifies as Black as well as Indian. The country knows too. This faux pas makes him look worse in the eyes of Harris supporters and independents without gaining him much among his own fans. They already knew he is an insensitive racist and like him for it.
Harris has now drawn even with Trump in national polling and is improving in battleground states. Biden before withdrawing his candidacy had been running consistently behind Trump. Harris’ campaign has energized Democrats while the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, has been dragging down Trump. He told the Black journalists it doesn’t matter who the vice presidential candidate is.
The election is still a long way off
Anything can happen between now and November 5. But for now Harris is gaining and Trump is lagging. Harris will name her vice presidential candidate in the next few days. The Democratic Convention August 19-22 should give her a bump, provided demonstrations don’t ruin it. The economy is weakening and inflation is flattening, which could mean a Fed interest rate cut in September. Today’s release of US prisoners from Russia is an unexpected plus.
But war between Iran and Israel? A jump in unemployment or inflation? A third party candidate who gains more traction? Violence against one or the other candidate? Catastrophic harm to US troops abroad? All of these downers?
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Biden is toast, but don’t burn him
I expect President Biden will soon announce the withdrawal of his candidacy. That’s good. His decline since I saw him up close last winter is obvious. While I would still far prefer him to Trump, he is wise to throw in the towel. He has a fantastic record of restoring the country to sanity and steady economic growth, reknitting its alliances, appointing capable and diverse officials, getting a lot done on climate change, meeting the Russian challenge in Ukraine, shoring up defenses against China, and I could go on. Bowing out now ensures a positive legacy.
Challenges ahead
The rumor mill suggests the convention will be an “open” one with several candidates to replace Biden on top of the ticket. That seems to me a bad idea. It ensures a floor fight that will necessarily be divisive. It could also stimulate street demonstrations, which could get out of hand. I favor handing the baton to Kamala Harris. Biden has repeatedly avowed that she is ready to take over. He should let her do so.
The campaign against Trump will still be an uphill battle, no matter the candidate. The Democrats need not only to unify. They need to present a clear and compelling alternative to Trump’s lying, criminality, and immorality. He is a terrible candidate. That Biden in his weakened condition is still running neck and neck with him in the polls suggests the Democrats can recover from the last few weeks to win.
Biden can help
Biden can be a useful surrogate in the effort. He still has strong Democratic support and could help to get voters to the polls. He is a formidable fundraiser and a savvy political operative. His sterling record contrasts dramatically with the chaos and decline of Trump’s presidency. Biden may be toast, but it would be a mistake for any successor candidate not to use his record and his savvy.
Whoever the Democratic candidate, s/he should rely a good deal on Biden, whether or not he remains in the presidency. The mistake Al Gore made–not to rely on President Clinton’s record–should not be repeated. Biden has been a successful president. Running away from him would be a big mistake.
Trump is worse than too many think
I’m hearing wishful thinking about a second Trump term. To the contrary, it will be far worse than his first. Just listen to what he says. He wants to weaponize the Justice Department, claiming falsely that Biden has done it. He wants to cut taxes for the rich again and raise them on middle class people who (necessarily) spend most of their income. Trump will give Ukraine to Putin and won’t protect Taiwan. And he’ll support extremists in Israel who want to expel Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. If you think the world is problematic now, just wait until a new Trump presidency.
Trump will also use a return to the White House to deliver retribution to those who oppose him. Take it from the Australians:
Part II isn’t out yet.
And remember this: Trump deployed unidentifiable law enforcement personnel on the streets of Washington (and wanted them to fire on demonstrators), he has praised the January 6 rioters, he is a committed racist, and he has appointed Supreme Court Justices who think a woman shouldn’t be allowed to decide on her own health care. That’s in addition to being a rapist, a tax cheat, and a Russian asset. Trump is far worse than too many think.
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