The regional war no one wanted is here. How wide will it get?
FROM the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war nearly 100 days ago, US President Joe Biden and his aides have struggled to keep the war contained, fearful that a regional escalation could quickly draw in US forces.
Now, with the US-led strikes on nearly 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday (Jan 11) and a smaller strike Friday, there is no longer a question of whether there will be a regional conflict. It has already begun. The biggest questions now are the conflict’s intensity and whether it can be contained.
This is exactly the outcome no one wanted, presumably including Iran.
“We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind,” John Kirby, a White House spokesperson, said Friday. “In fact everything the president has been doing has been trying to prevent any escalation of conflict, including the strikes last night.”
Biden’s decision to unleash airstrikes, after resisting calls to act against the Yemen-based Houthi militants whose repeated attacks on shipping in the Red Sea were beginning to take a toll on global commerce, is a clear shift in strategy. After issuing a series of warnings, officials said, Biden felt his hand was forced after a barrage of missile and drone attacks Tuesday were directed at an American cargo ship and the Navy vessels around it.
“This is already a regional war, no longer limited to Gaza, but already spread to Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen,” said Hugh Lovatt, a Mideast expert for the European Council on Foreign Relations. The US, he added, wanted to demonstrate that it was ready to deter Iranian provocations, so it conspicuously placed its aircraft carriers and fighters in position to respond quickly. But those same positions leave the United States more exposed.
BT in your inbox
Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.
Over the course of 12 weeks, attacks on Israeli, US and Western interests have come from Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, prompting modest, carefully targeted responses from US and Israeli forces. The United States also issued warnings to Iran, which the US says is acting as a loose coordinator.
What was notable about the retaliatory strikes in Yemen was their breadth: Employing fighter jets and sea-launched missiles, US and British forces, backed up by a small number of other allies, hit a wide number of Houthi missile and drone sites.
Biden is walking the fine line between deterrence and escalation, and his aides concede there is no science to the calculation. Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been careful in their support for Hamas, keeping their actions within limits, to prevent a larger US military response that could threaten Iran’s exercise of power in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria.
But how much control Iran has over its proxies is in question, and its leaders may also be misreading US and Israeli red lines.
The Houthis, a small Iranian-backed tribe in Yemen, have been among the most aggressive in pushing the envelope, trying to block international trading routes through the Red Sea and ignoring US and Western warnings to desist.
Houthi officials say the sole goal of their attacks is to force Israel to halt its military campaign and to allow the free flow of aid into Gaza.
Western diplomats said there had been reluctance to strike back at the Houthis, in part to avoid upending a truce in the Yemeni civil war, and in part because of the difficulty of eliminating their threat entirely. But the Houthis’ repeated attacks on ships, their direct fire on US helicopters and their attack Tuesday on an American cargo vessel left the United States with what officials said was no real choice.
US officials said the Pentagon carried out a second round of strikes Friday against the Houthis, bombing a radar facility in Yemen.
It is not known how long it will take the Houthis to recover and threaten ships in the Red Sea again, as they have vowed. So far, the response has been muted, with just a single anti-ship missile lobbed harmlessly into the Red Sea, far from any passing vessel, a Pentagon official told reporters earlier Friday.
But deeper US military involvement also adds to the perception in the larger world that the United States is acting even more directly on behalf of Israel, risking further damage to US and Western standing as the death toll rises in the Gaza Strip. Israel now is defending its conduct against the charge of genocide in an international court.
Iran is using proxies such as 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.
“Iran is really pushing it,” said François Heisbourg, a French military analyst. “It’s another reason they don’t want a war now: They want their centrifuges to run peacefully.” The Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon, but could enrich enough uranium to weapons grade in a few weeks, from the current 60 per cent enrichment to 90 per cent, he said. “They’ve done 95 per cent of the work.”
Israel also is ratcheting up its attacks on Iran’s proxies, especially in Lebanon and Syria. After the attack by Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon began a series of strikes from Lebanon, leading Israel to evacuate citizens near the conflict.
After that, Israel’s air campaign has killed 19 Hezbollah members in Syria in three months, more than twice the rest of 2023 combined, according to a count by Reuters news agency. More than 130 Hezbollah fighters have also been killed by Israel in Lebanon in the same period.
In public speeches this week, lranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah reiterated that they do not want an enlarged war. But Colin Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who is director of research at the Soufan Group, said Israel could not afford to be complacent given its grave miscalculation before Oct 7 that Hamas was also not interested in a war.
Recent assassinations that struck at the heart of Iran’s ties to Hezbollah and Hamas have unnerved Iranians who have described them in chat rooms and social media as being “slapped over and over.” NYT
Copyright SPH Media. All rights reserved.
