The U.S. is preparing for a Greater Middle East War
It's about more than Israel - and it's been a long time coming
America Explained is a newsletter about American politics, foreign policy and history - and how they all tie together. Subscribe to make sure you never miss a post and can access the full archive.
Many people are wondering why an Israeli ground operation into Gaza has not yet begun, and it’s pretty clear to me that there is one main answer: because both Israel and the United States are getting ready for a wider war. Here is a report from The Wall Street Journal:
Israel has agreed, for now, to a request from the U.S. to get its air defenses in place to protect U.S. troops in the region ahead of an expected ground invasion of Gaza, U.S. and Israeli officials said.
The Pentagon is scrambling to deploy nearly a dozen air-defense systems to the region, including for U.S. troops serving in Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to protect them from missiles and rockets. U.S. officials have so far persuaded the Israelis to hold off until those pieces can be placed, as early as later this week.
Israel is also taking into account in its planning the effort to supply humanitarian aid to civilians inside Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to free more of the hostages held by Hamas, officials said.
But the threats to the U.S. troops are of a paramount concern, U.S. officials said. U.S. military and other officials believe that American forces will be targeted by various militant groups once the incursion begins.
The fact that the U.S. has asked Israel to delay its Gaza operation until sufficient defenses can be put in place to protect U.S. assets in half a dozen or more countries tells you something about the number of variables which will be involved in this conflict once it enters its next phase. In the worst-case scenario, there’s a chance this might become more than an Israel-Hamas War - it might become a Greater Middle East War, one which reshapes the region.
What would a Greater Middle East War look like? First, you have to understand the potential belligerents.
The belligerents
You can best think about the unfolding conflict as a series of concentric circles. The small circle in the middle contains Israel and Hamas, the two actors who will be at the core of whatever unfolds. This war started when Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel has vowed that it will only end when Hamas no longer exists in its current form. Israel’s significant delay in launching a ground operation into Gaza has some people convinced that it might back away from this goal, but I view that as highly doubtful, at least for the foreseeable future. Preventing Hamas from being able to do again what it did three weeks ago is the core Israeli war aim.
In the next circle you have the other actors who are most likely to be sucked in, and here I would place Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, the United States, and Iran. Hezbollah is already engaged in tit-for-tat strikes with Israel and has heavily implied that an Israeli ground offensive into Gaza will trigger it to undertake some major action, which seems hard to back down from. The decision might not even be Hezbollah’s to take - some in the Israeli government, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, are arguing that Israel ought to pre-emptively attack Hezbollah and focus its main military effort in the north.
Next to consider are various other militant groups in the Middle East, many of them funded and armed by Iran, which might attack Israel, U.S. assets in the region, or even civilian shipping. There have already been at least a dozen attacks by Iran-backed groups against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, with many more sure to come. Yemen’s Houthi group has launched a number of ballistic missiles towards Israel, but is also exceptionally well-placed to attack U.S. forces in the region, America’s Sunni Arab allies, and oil tankers or commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, through which a huge quantity of the world’s shipping transits.
America and Iran also sit in this second circle. If this war was merely an Israel-Hamas clash, then the U.S. would probably not get directly involved in the fighting. But the other actors in the second circle have already attacked U.S. assets, or - in the case of the Houthis - forced the U.S. to step in to directly protect Israel, in this case by shooting down an incoming missile. Washington has redeployed an immense amount of combat power to the region and seems to be signalling to Hezbollah that it will directly strike it if it escalates its involvement. The same probably applies to other militant groups in the region, including the Houthis.
What about Iran itself? There has been a bit of a strange discourse around Iran’s precise role in the Hamas attack on Israel, with many media stories seemingly selectively quoting very specific intelligence assessments out of their full context. It’s important to understand that the subtext to this whole debate is actually whether or not the participants think it’s a good idea to attack Iran directly. Regardless of the state of that debate now, if this conflict does become a Greater Middle East War, it seems a bit naive to expect that military action against Iran will somehow be considered off-limits by Israel and the United States, especially given Iran’s status as a patron of Hamas and many other groups who might soon be killing U.S. soldiers and tanking the global economy by shooting at oil tankers.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to America Explained to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.