Mitchell Plitnick
Mondoweiss / November 2, 2024
Even though Israel’s much-anticipated strike on Iran was smaller than expected, the threat of a potential global war may actually be growing.
The much-anticipated Israeli strike on Iran on October 26 was not what everyone was expecting and fearing. Though it was a significant attack, it was calibrated to leave Iran with a range of options to respond in kind, to escalate, or to allow this round of retaliatory strikes, which began in April when Israel bombed Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus, to end.
Joe Biden’s administration panicked at the prospect of a major escalation and took action to prevent it. Even here, it wasn’t the sort of decisive action that was required—which can only mean halting the weapons supply that enables the genocide in Gaza and devastation of Lebanon. As I discussed in my previous column at Mondoweiss, the White House assembled another in a long line of gift bags for Israel to incentivize it from attacking Iran’s energy sector. These inducements included helping to supply heavy engineering equipment, additional missile defense, and fast-tracking the weapons flow. The U.S. also expanded sanctions on Iran’s so-called “Ghost fleet,” ships that help to export Iranian oil evading U.S. sanctions on Iran oil exports.
Israel was also cognizant of the concerns of Gulf Arab states over the targeting of oil fields. These states, who either have already normalized relations with Israel or whom Israel hopes will in the future, are concerned that their own oil fields will be targeted in retaliation. As much as Israel may hope to enflame the region, the effect that duelling attacks on oil fields would have on the global economy is not something it wants to be held responsible for.
Instead, Israel targeted Iranian missile production and surface-to-air defensive sites. The sum total of these attacks was that, though it was not immediately damaging to Iran, it did weaken the Islamic Republic’s defenses. Iran is now more vulnerable to an all-out Israeli attack, and, while it is certainly still quite capable of defending itself, a larger Israeli attack is likely to be even more destructive and less costly for Israel.
But since the damage was not immediately devastating, Israel essentially allowed Iran an off-ramp, not dissimilar to the one Iran offered to Israel with its previous retaliatory attack. In both cases, the attack could have been worse, but the specific targeting showed their opponent that they were capable of hurting them.
In the immediate aftermath of the Israeli attack, Iran seemed willing to take that off-ramp. The Supreme Leader’s statement that the attack should neither be exaggerated nor minimized implied that Iran considered the attack a violation of its sovereignty, and an act of war, but preferred to be the “adult in the room” and veer away from the regional war that Israel seems interested in provoking.
Is this really the end of this round ?
Speculative reports, however, raise real questions about where things are headed.
On Wednesday, CNN reported that an anonymous source told them that “The response of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the aggression of the Zionist regime will be definitive and painful.” The report was picked up by numerous Israeli and American outlets.
CNN did not give any details about the source, which they described as “high-ranking,” and as being “familiar with Iran’s deliberations.”
The source reportedly told CNN that an Iranian attack would come before the U.S. election on Tuesday. This only makes it more dubious, as it is unlikely an attack of that magnitude is imminent without a peep from Israeli or American intelligence.
Beyond those points, it makes little sense for Iran to launch an escalatory attack against Israel before the election. Joe Biden is already a lame duck, but it is unlikely that, whatever the outcome of the election, he wants to embed the United States in a new war, which a major attack on Israel would inevitably lead to. It makes more sense to see who wins the election and how they start to position themselves on Middle East policy.
On the other side, Reuters quoted a former deputy U.S. national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Jonathan Panikoff, saying that the Biden administration threatened not to cooperate with Israel on a future attack to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
Panikoff told Reuters, “The implication was that if in the long term they want U.S. help to destroy [nuclear] targets – if a decision is made to do so – they’d have to be more measured this time.”
This, too, is far from credible. Even if the Biden administration made such a threat—which is itself highly unlikely—Israel would never take it seriously. Successive American presidents have vowed that Iran would never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon. While the United States is well aware that Iran is not, despite the hysteria from the pro-regime change in Tehran crowd, actively pursuing an actual weapon, in the scenario where it did, Washington would see that as almost as grave a threat as Israel would.
But with Netanyahu on Thursday again raising the Iranian nuclear boogeyman, it is quite possible that the U.S. did warn Israel that if they went after Iranian nuclear sites now, they would do so without American support, militarily or politically. That would have been enough to get Netanyahu to back off, and serves as a reminder of how little it would take for Joe Biden to defuse this entire situation by ending the genocide in Gaza.
But there are reasons that there is more than the usual amount of distracting smoke to confuse the media.
Russia in the background
The spiralling regional conflict remains rooted in the genocide in Gaza, but it is important to be aware that Netanyahu is increasingly working to separate the two. The horrors of northern Gaza, and especially Beit Lahia in recent weeks are growing worse, even as the world’s attention wanders away from them.
But while Israel works to empty Gaza through death and destruction that makes the area uninhabitable for years to come, its activities in Lebanon and elsewhere have been increasingly designed to sustain themselves in the event that the atrocities in Gaza end.
Targeted air strikes in Tulkarm and other West Bank sites are a feature of Israel’s raising the stakes there as well. Its operations in Lebanon are clearly not designed to simply move Hezbollah north of the Litani River, as Israel once claimed, but are intended instead to foment renewed conflict in that country, neutralizing it as a threat both from Hezbollah but also from the Palestinian factions that are located there and any other groups that might rise in the wake of Hezbollah.
Israel’s behaviour reflects thinking in both Tel Aviv and Washington that sees the Middle East through an anti-Iran prism.
Netanyahu and his crowd, as well as American Mideast hawks, have presented the regional struggles as emanating from revolutionary Iran for decades. Now, Netanyahu is pursuing the long term war against the Islamic Republic that would alter that regional layout.
Russia, which has long been an Iranian ally, could play a much more central role. According to reports, Moscow and Tehran are putting the final touches on a strategic partnership treaty that would enhance the cooperation between the two countries.
Iran has been accused of supplying some missile and drone technology to Russia in its war on Ukraine and Moscow has long been a strategic partner with Iran in Syria and across the region. This treaty would deepen that partnership and, perhaps of even greater importance, draw the strategies of the two countries’ main conflicts—with Ukraine and Israel—into closer alignment.
There can be little doubt that the United States would react very negatively to major growth in the already significant Iranian-Russia relationship, fueling Washington’s and Israel’s already hyper-aggressive tendencies. This is only reinforced by the growing influence and power of the BRICS alliance, which just held its summit in Russia. BRICS is a very loose alignment right now and its agenda is as yet undeveloped, but it has the potential to be a global game changer which can shift the balance of global power.
Closer ties between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s efforts to rearrange the Middle East bode ill for both conflicts. Netanyahu knows that his political position is secure only as long as Israel continues to be embroiled in very active conflict. Russian President Vladimir Putin knows that, especially as his own alliances are deepening and expanding, the longer the war with Ukraine goes on, the better Russia’s chances of winning are.
Bringing these two conflicts closer together may be advantageous for the aggressors in each war, but the people on the ground are going to suffer exponentially greater difficulties, even while the two combine to increase the risks for the entire world.
Ultimately each conflict will need to be resolved on its own terms. For right now, in terms of the Middle East, this is yet another reason—as if any were needed beyond ending the genocide in Gaza and the devastation of Lebanon—that the United States must be pressed into halting its mindless and reckless support of Israel’s regional ambitions.
For the moment, Gaza is still the lynchpin for ending all of this. Netanyahu knows this, and despite his undeniable success in maintaining the support he gets from the West and the silent acquiescence from the Arab monarchies, he wants the effort to fight Iran to move beyond its dependence on the slaughter in Gaza. Perhaps he is concerned it will get so bad that outrage will grow to a significant degree to deter Israel, or perhaps he is just worried that he will run out of innocent people to kill in Gaza.
Either way, if the Mideast conflict continues to spiral away from being rooted in the Gaza genocide, it will also continue to grow, and the devastation we are seeing now will spread even further and become much more difficult to stop.
It’s worth keeping this in mind even as we must renew our efforts due to the outrage we are seeing in Northern Gaza. The threat of this becoming a global peril is growing. Maybe all those so-called liberals who don’t seem very worried about the genocide of Palestinians might be motivated to do something to prevent this from growing into a global war.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy; he is the co-author, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
