The US Stuck in Two-Front Middle East War
It is hitting Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Syria and Yemen by air. Should Iran be spared?
US President Joe Biden had hoped to avoid direct participation in the Israeli-Hamas war, even while wholeheartedly supporting Israel’s goal of defeating and destroying Hamas.
Instead, the US is now involved militarily along two fronts trying to deter Iran-supported militias from firing on American troops based in the region and on ships traversing the Red Sea.
The US will be hard-pressed to exit quickly either arena amid the raging Gaza war, which Israeli officials have estimated will last through 2024. With no near-term exit in sight, the US is left trying to deter Iran-backed adversaries by bombing them. And so far, it’s not working.
Over the weekend, a drone launched from Iraq by an anti-US militia sponsored by Iran flew into Jordan, struck a small US Army base there and killed three American soldiers while injuring over 30 others.
Meanwhile, Iran-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen have, for a month been trying to sink commercial and military ships in the Red Sea, the gateway to the Suez Canal that provides a key, short trade sea route between Europe and Asia. The US Navy, seconded by a ship from the United Kingdom and other allies, is trying to protect the region’s shipping.
It is not just random freelance militias that Biden has to take into consideration. The armed group in Syria and Iraq that harassed US forces, as well as the Houthis sending drones and rockets into the Red Sea, are all militarily partners of Iran, a US regional adversary since the 1970s.
“Iran sponsors these gropes, and some cases it trains these groups…Without facilitation, these kinds of things don’t happen, said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austen.
Nonetheless, Biden has decided for now to target Iranian “proxies” but not Iran itself and hope that military action deters rather than motivates more attacks. Since October 7, when Hamas invaded Israel, there have been more than 150 attempts by roaming Iranian-backed militias to hit US forces stationed in parts of Iraq and Syria and numerous projectiles fired at ships in and near the Red Sea.
Until the weekend none had resulted in the deaths of Americans. In response to the non-lethal attacks, Biden only ordered up low-intensity drone and missile strikes that took a limited toll on enemy forces in what could be characterized as a kind of phony war scenario.
Now, he arguably has to kill someone.
On January 30, Biden tried to talk tough about how the US might respond while remaining vague about the likely scope. Queried whether Iran was to blame for the drone assault that killed US troops in Jordan, he answered curtly, “Yes.”
Then he suggested the response would be limited. “I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I am looking for,“ he told reporters at the White House as he prepared to depart for two election campaign events in the state of Florida.
Later he said Iran may or may not have been responsible: “I do hold them responsible, in the sense that they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it.” Then, when asked if Iran’s link to the attack had been well-established, he answered, “We’ll have that discussion.”
John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House, followed up by suggesting that some sort of limited retaliation, rather than a big bomb response, was on the way.
“It’s fair for you to expect that we will respond in an appropriate fashion and it is very possible that what you’ll see is a tiered approach here, not just a single action, but essentially multiple actions,” he said.
Such a response is unlikely to lower the heated American political temperature; campaigns for the November 5 election have already reached a fever.
Biden’s political opponents quickly criticized his approach to retaliation even though it was still unclear what it would be. Former president Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in this fall’s election, harshly criticized him.
“This brazen attack on the United States is yet another horrific and tragic consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender,” said Trump.
“The entire world now watches for signs that the president is finally prepared to exercise American strength to compel Iran to change its behavior,” added Mitch McConnell, the top Republican member of the US Senate.
If the Gaza situation wasn’t headache enough, American naval combat in the Red Sea has so far failed to deter Red Sea attacks by the Houthis, which have been going on several weeks. On Wednesday, the US struck 10 launching sites for armed drones, according to the Pentagon.
The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping is the first time the route to the Suez Canal has been blocked since the 1967 Middle East War when Egypt closed the canal for eight years. A drone set a small fire on a commercial ship Saturday. The group said it struck another one Wednesday, but US officials said the claim was false.
Almost all commercial shipping that would normally traverse the Red Sea, to and from the Suez Canal, has now been diverted to a much longer and costlier route around the Cape of Good Hope in far southern Africa.
The Houthi threat represents a challenge to the long-standing, self-declared American role as caretaker of major maritime routes worldwide. The US first took up the chore, if rather prematurely, even before it achieved independence from Great Britain.
“Since 1775, America’s Navy has maintained freedom of the seas. Not only for our nation, but for our allies and strategic partners,” reads an explanation on the official US Navy website.
“We recruit, train, equip and organize to deliver combat-ready Naval forces while maintaining security and deterrence through sustained forward presence. It means we’re here to keep our shipping lanes open, so your packages can cross the ocean without interruption from bad actors.”
The Houthis seem unimpressed, so far. And the economic repercussions of disrupted trade flows are already being felt far and wide. Allied Europe fears the added distance from Asia will make imports costlier, feeding inflation.
Exports to Asia are also blocked, making its goods more expensive abroad and possibly reducing already low continental economic growth. Notably, neither China nor India, both of which trade abundantly with Europe, are joining the US-led anti-Houthi flotilla, known as “Operation Prosperity Guardian.”
Unlike the US, China based a solution not on the need to defend traditional freedom of the seas but on resolving the Gaza war. “A speedy end to the conflict in Gaza will help ease the situation in the Red Sea,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin on January 30.
China has naval ships moored at Djibouti, situated at the narrow mouth of the Red Sea, at a base inaugurated in 2017. A pier was constructed four years later to accommodate aircraft carriers. China describes the functions of the base as supporting humanitarian and anti-piracy missions.
India said its focus was not on the Red Sea but rather on the Gulf of Aden, where pirates from Somalia are currently menacing commercial shipping. “Houthis and piracy are disconnected, but pirates are trying to use this opportunity while the West’s efforts are focused on the Red Sea,” an Indian naval official told reporters this week.
Yet, in December, an Indian naval vessel rescued a pair of merchant ships hit by strikes from land near India’s Exclusive Economic Zone. Indian officials described the weapons used as Shahed 136 drones made in Iran but declined to blame Iran.
On January 17, India responded to a drone attack on a Marshall Island-flagged cargo vessel in the Gulf of Aden that had nine Indian crew members aboard.
While publicly refraining from criticizing Iran, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar made a quick visit to Tehran on January 29 to raise the sea security issue with the government, according to Indian press reports.
“An analysis of India's naval activity shows that the Indian navy dominates the western part of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden, while the British and American fleets are focusing on the Red Sea,” wrote Oshrit Birvadker. a researcher at the Jerusalem Instititute for Strategy and Security.
The US solution to the Houthi problem mirrors the one Washington applies to Iran’s proxies to the north of Israel: bombardment. The only debate within the Biden administration is whether Iran, as the sponsor of the Houthis and militias in Syria and Iraq, should be bombed instead of its proxies.
European and Arab governments, on the other hand, prefer a ceasefire in Gaza that would rob the Iran-backed groups of their declared rationale for attacking the US or blocking the Red Sea.
“The US and the EU, together with the UK, must urgently press for a ceasefire to prevent a broader regional conflagration,” wrote the European Council on Foreign Affairs, a pan-European think tank.
Hamas is also calling for a ceasefire. The militant group is clearly looking for a way to end the massive military as well as civilian casualties and destruction of Gaza infrastructure inflicted by Israel and save itself from being fully obliterated.
Israel has refused a ceasefire while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has predicted the war will go on until year’s end. Presumably, that calendar would possibly force the US to keep bombing Iran-backed militant organizations, if not Iran itself, for at least the next months or until someone gives in.
The situations are not exactly parallel, though that will not make much difference to anyone.
Putin uses some of your logic to justify his invasion of Ukraine and the Russian military presence in the Crimean, Donetsk and Luhansk, provinces that he established in 2014.
He argues that Crimea is rightfully Russian territory, so his takeover in 2014 was not an invasion but liberation. He also set up an ethnic Russian government in eastern Ukraine that then invite him in to occupy, so that too, was not an invasion.
Putin has justified the current war in Ukraine on the grounds that Ukraine is and was always Russian territory, so he's also not invading but simply liberating. Unfortunately for the theatrics useful to buttressing that narrative, the KGB was unable to organize a Fifth Column to support his logic of liberation.
In any event, Ukraine is a sovereign country under international law and therefore permitted to invite and accept aid from the West or any else.
Israel, like Russia, is occupying foreign territories, though through a quirk of history, Palestine is not a sovereign state. Indeed, like Putin, Netanyahu has declared that the West Bank is Jewish sovereign territory dating from Biblical times. Hence, he and religious Zionists refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria.
The Iranian proxies nor Iran are not themselves laying claim to territory in Palestine. Rather, it is Israel that is in breech of international law by denying self-determination, a status that became especially prominent across the globe after Word War I.
Unfortunately, the eventual concession of sovereignty in the Middle East did not happen in Palestine--the British, whose pre-World War II sins are numerous, managed to muddle the march to decolonization in Palestine. He declared the area a future home for Jews. The Holocaust created conditions for that promise to become a n opportunity for persecuted Jews to escape European antii-Semeisim.
The Arab anti-colonialists used a liberation tactic that at least obscured, even if only emotionally, their legal case, at least in the eyes of the US: terrorism. It was a tactic used by the Algerians to expel France in the early 1960s. Israeli freedom fighters also employed the tactic to get the British out of Palestine.
Oct. 7 pitted the use of terror tactics vs. the legal demands of anti-colonialism. Israel contends that history started on Oct. 7 and showed that Palestinian are not due nor can be trusted to rule themselves. Most other countries contend that history dd not begin on Oct. 7, and though the perpetrators must be punished the Palestinian statehood issue must also be resolved.
The US government has been entrapped in its overweening dedication to anti-terrorism. I think Blinken is of the history-did-not-begin on Oct. 7 camp.
As far as I am concerned, history did not begin on Oct. 7. But nor is terrorism, as defined by attacks on civilians, the only rout to liberation. I acknowledge I live in the past: Lucia and I covered the first intifada, which was largely a civic, mostly non-violence revolt. It eventually failed for reasons that are too many to add to this long missive, b ut it represented a moving confluence of liberation and peaceful resistance. Neither Putin nor the mullahs and perish not Netanyahu believe in that civil political tactit either
Many navies from many parts of the world have been fighting those attacking civilian shipping in the region for a couple of decades now, this is nothing new. It's an escalation due to the Houthi action which indeed could go on, damaging not just Egypt's economy but those of all the navies (and more) whose trade depends on cheaper transport via the Suez Canal, so it won't go on indefinitely. Furthermore, the Houthis will try the patience of China, on whom Iran depends.
On the different issue of the Gaza war, Israel will soon be severely censured for its ongoing action because the ICJ ruling. If legal cases are brought in the USA, as surely they will be in the UK and EU, then Israel will find itself even more isolated. If Israel plays this wrong - and it so easily could in many ways - the ramifications and fallout could become an existential threat to the Jewish state in a way that 1400 deaths on 7 October never were.
But the war is a different issue to Houthi attacks on civilian shipping. While Iran in the short term benefits from the actions of these maritime terrorists, there is no evidence that the Mullahs are orchestrating them. Sooner rather than later, though, the Houthis will need re-arming and will be asking Iran to give them further support, and also sooner rather than later, Ebrahim Raisi's phone is going to ring and on the other line will be Xi Jinping.
On a second disconnected issue, and just a little point of history concerning your comment to Peter Wellington. Britain was not in Palestine as an imperialist, but because the League of Nations handed it the Mandate after the imperial Ottoman Power had collapsed spectacularly at the hands of British manoeuvre warfare in WW1. See a presaging of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Churchill's White Paper of 1922 in the letters of the Palestinian Arab Delegation and Zionists Organisation > https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-202945/
And on a counterfactual from that history: had the war against the Ottoman Empire turned into a defensive war of attrition as it was in Europe, Britain would either: have had to withdraw its forces needed for the Flanders trenches, in which case the Ottoman, though the Sick Man of Europe, might have prevented the flood of Jews arriving in Palestine; or it would have decimated the Turkish army, and successfully prosecuted it for the genocide of Armenians.