When Israel assassinated seven Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Damascus last March, Iran immediately announced its intention to seriously respond. But U.S. diplomats intervened and brokered a very strange deal in which Iran informed all parties about when and where its missiles would be fired and allowed Israel’s Iron Dome protection system, with U.S. assistance, to render them almost entirely harmless. That permitted Iranian leaders much bellicose posturing while avoiding any serious retaliation by Israel or a larger war.
Perhaps encouraged by that, Benjamin Netanyahu has continued the assassinations, most recently of Fuad Shukr in Lebanon and Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. The latter paints a vastly different, and far more disturbing, picture of the likely course of the Israel-Hamas/Israel-Hezbollah/Israel-Iran/Israel-Yemen conflict.
Haniyeh was the point person for Hamas in the ceasefire and hostage-release negotiations with Israel. Of all people, why would Netanyahu target him? It’s a trenchant question whose answer is unsettling. Making it more so, his death was caused either by a Mossad-planted bomb in his Tehran residence that had been there for months or a short-range missile. The two possibilities strongly suggest that Israel could have killed Haniyeh at any time. So to the question ‘why’ is added another, ‘why now.’
Many observers on all sides of the conflict justifiably view the Haniyeh assassination and its timing as Netanyahu’s middle-finger salute to any notion of peace or even a ceasefire. The Biden Administration seems to agree. After all, when you assassinate the chief negotiator in ceasefire and hostage-release talks, it begins to look like you’re not interested in a ceasefire or the release of hostages.
So there appears to be one answer to both the questions ‘why’ and ‘why now’ – Benjamin Netanyahu wants the war to go on and expand to include Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and perhaps Iran. All that would strongly encourage far greater U.S. involvement than ever before. Unsurprisingly, after the Haniyeh killing, the Biden Administration announced its beefing up of air and sea power to help defend Israel. ‘Why now’ is therefore additionally answered by the increasing U.S. involvement in the area.
But there’s still another answer to ‘why now’ – internal U.S. politics.
From now until the presidential inauguration next January, the leadership of the U.S. will be uncertain. First, there’s the matter of the campaign season in which one person is nominally president and another will be her party’s nominee. If their policies differ, whose will guide U.S. actions until Inauguration Day?
Second, with Biden’s competency deteriorating, no one seems to know who is actually making our Mideast policy? Is Kamala Harris the de facto president? Will she become so at some point between now and Inauguration Day? What is/will be her posture toward Israel? Certainly she’s shown no indication that she diverges even slightly from Biden’s policies that have accomplished nothing so far except to further encourage Netanyahu in what looks like his mad pursuit of ever-widening war.
Then there’s the fact that, on July 24, the Israeli Prime Minister gave a hot speech to Congress in which he ensured that Israeli belligerence would continue undiminished. That was followed by no suggestion by the Administration that its policy of total support for Israel was in any way altered. Did Netanyahu consider that carte blanche? In less than a week, Shukr and Haniyeh were dead and Iran was seething.
With no U.S. political will to check him, Netanyahu looks free to pursue his own notions of Israeli self-interest. That’s even more true given that, in June, he disbanded his three-person war cabinet that was the only hope for a more limited Israeli military policy toward Hamas, Hezbollah and, by extension, Iran.
In addition, Netanyahu seems to have strong personal reasons for the war’s continuing. Here, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh cites an Israeli authority claiming that much of Netanyahu’s policy is dictated by his fear of being indicted on corruption charges that long preceded October 7. Plus of course his administration was excoriated and threatened with investigation for ignoring warnings of a Hamas invasion.
In short, some observers believe that the entire Gaza operation, the continued twitting of Hezbollah and the recent spate of assassinations is more about Netanyahu’s paranoia and desire to remain in power than about a sensible or constructive approach to the current crisis.
An Israeli leader afraid to lose power, a seriously impaired U.S. president, a neophyte vice-president who’s utterly untried in foreign affairs, isn’t the shed’s sharpest tool and seems to have no firm set of beliefs about anything, and a six-month period in which no one in the U.S. will do anything to jeopardize the electoral chances of the party in power all point to a situation in the Middle East that could produce a war that’s far larger, more deadly, more destructive, more destabilizing than anything that’s existed since – when? – 1967? 1948?
And the U.S. may find itself up to its armpits in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Götterdämmerung policies.
No one can predict Iran’s response, but, depending on what it does, there’s now no other brake on this escalating crisis. A weak response will encourage Netanyahu to further belligerence; a strong one will enlarge the war and make it harder for a mostly-leaderless U.S. to resist sliding deeper into it.
Meanwhile, Russia is arming Iran.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Liberty Unyielding. They were originally posted at The Word of Damocles.
