(Dobbs) Warning Signs In Every Direction. None Is Good.
And what about a week from now? Without a crystal ball, nobody knows.
How much worse will the Middle East war get? We know it might widen— it already has— but who will set an even bigger fire? Israel? Hamas? Iran? Hezbollah? The Houthis? The United States of America? Between the spiraling pace on the battlefield and the unpredictable behavior of the combatants, no one knows. No one can know.
That was obvious one night last week when I moderated a discussion for an international organization called World Denver about the implications of the war and the prospect that it could spread beyond the borders of Gaza. Two professors from the Korbel School of International Studies were the expert guests. And here’s what’s intriguing: we had done a zoom call about the program only three weeks earlier but when we did that call, we couldn’t even begin to know what was coming.
We knew that the war might widen in those three weeks but we didn’t know— nobody could know— how.
Now, to a point, we do.
The most explosive thing we didn’t yet know was that an Iran-backed militia, Kataib Hezbollah, would attack a U.S. military desert outpost on the northern edge of Jordan, killing three American soldiers and wounding dozens more. We didn’t know that some political leaders in Washington would demand a direct retaliatory attack on Iran itself. Senator Lindsey Graham said in a written statement, “Hit Iran now. Hit them hard.” In a post on X, Senator John Cornyn was even more blunt: “Target Tehran.”
American retaliation started the day after our program. There was no direct attack by our B1 bombers on Iran, but they did hit 85 targets in Syria and Iraq that are used by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. President Biden said, "Our response began today. It will continue at times and places of our choosing.” We still don’t know though how it will continue, and we surely don’t know what kind of counterattack the United States will suffer.
The one thing we do know is, the Middle East gets hotter.
The uncertainty about counterattacks comes partly from the differences between Iran and its “Axis of Resistance”— fellow Shiites from Hamas, the different branches of Hezbollah, the Houthis, and terrorist cells in Syria and Iraq.
Iran is a sovereign state. It has an organized uniformed army. It funds and arms the members of its Axis of Resistance, so its influence is strong, but by all accounts it doesn’t fully control them. Their armies are unconventional and undisciplined, and they have different goals. The one thing they have in common with each other and with Iran is their hatred of Israel, and of the United States. Whether Iran’s leaders can be believed is a different issue but after the first waves of strikes by the American bombers, its foreign ministry said that “resistance groups in the region do not take orders from… Iran in their decisions and actions.”
Iran’s overall response to the American air strikes was mild, compared to much of its rhetoric in the past. Its president said at Friday prayers, “If an oppressive and bullying power wants to bully, the Islamic Republic will deliver a stern answer.” But the long-familiar drumbeat of “Death to America,” which I first heard during the revolution there more than 45 years ago, was missing from his tough talk.
That’s because Iran’s proxy armies are willing to take risks that Iran itself won’t take, at least not directly. With U.S. troops scattered around the Middle East, including nearly 3,500 of them fighting terrorists in Iraq and Syria, these groups have staged more than 160 attacks against those troops.
The Iranians can attack American interests too if they choose to but what they can’t do is defend themselves against the superior force of American attacks. The U.S. airstrikes, in B1 bombers flown from an airbase in Texas, was a reminder of America’s reach. What’s more, Iran’s economy is hurting desperately and the ayatollahs’ popular support has diminished.
But their proxies fight on, and that itself might widen the war. One group, Harakat al-Nujaba, declared after the American strikes, actually echoing President Biden’s threat, “Islamic Resistance will respond with what it is appropriate at the time and place we want, and that this is not the end.”
And with Iran’s help, the Houthis keep attacking Western cargo ships and American warships. We knew that when we had our zoom call for the Middle East discussion in Denver, but we didn’t yet know that the United States would attack Houthi military sites in Yemen. The U.S. fired more missiles in last weekend.
The Middle East gets even hotter.
Nor did we know that in that same period, Iran would lob some missiles and drones at non-state military training camps in its next door neighbor Pakistan, and that Pakistan would lob some of its own back into Iran.
We also didn’t know that Saudi Arabia, which had been nurturing a relationship with Israel before the war broke out, would say that it’s still ready for the relationship if there’s an agreement for a Palestinian state, but that Israel’s prime minister would say, maybe even more unequivocally than he has said before, that at least on his watch, a sovereign Palestinian state is not in the cards.
What he predicted was that such a state would become a launching pad for attacks against Israel, which “collides with the idea of sovereignty.” Given the bitterness today of each side toward the other, his prediction is probably right.
Everything’s changing so fast that if we’d actually done our program a few weeks earlier, it would have been different, it would have been incomplete. And if we’d planned it for a week later— like, tonight— it was impossible without a crystal ball to know then how different things would look now.
And what about a week from now, let alone further down the road? Once again, nobody knows.
What we do know is, the implications of this war are bad, and potentially getting worse. We know that predictions that the war will widen are not alarmist, they are not irrational. As The Washington Post recently put it, “Events on the ground are accelerating in a worrying direction.”
They are worrisome for the direct combatants in the war, for the countries that could be drawn into it — including Syria and Iraq, where the U.S. struck last week— and for the nations that have taken sides in the war, which includes the United States.
And, because of its effects on shipping and arms sales and a few other things of value to the world community, this war has worrisome implications around the globe. And that begins where it started: in Israel and the Gaza Strip.
There are different scenarios under which the war might end, but between the determination of Israel to wipe out Hamas, and the terror group’s demonstrated ability to survive, and the fate of the hundred or more hostages still held in the subterranean caves Hamas has built, no one can say which scenario it will be.
No one can say how the shattered people and the shattered structure of Gaza will be rebuilt.
Nor can anyone say who will govern Gaza when the war does end. Western nations call for a revamped Palestinian Authority, shorn of the corruption that has cost it its influence, but both Hamas and Israel say that’s one scenario they won’t tolerate.
No one can say whether Israelis or Palestinians can ever, at least in the foreseeable future, live in peace. Trust between the two sides has never been strong, but since the war started, it is lower than ever. That’s a big barrier to the creation of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians don’t trust Israel to prevent attacks against them by ultra-right wing settlers, or to let them live without restrictions on movement and resources. The Israelis don’t trust the Palestinians to let them live without attacks against their citizens on the streets of their cities. It’s ironic that it has taken this war to put a two-state solution— with Israelis and Palestinians living in their own sovereign lands— back into play. But the war makes it seem that the possibility of separate states, side-by-side, is farther away than ever.
We also don’t know what’s going to happen to the relationships that had developed over the years between several Arab states and Israel. When the war started, they ground to a halt. Because those relationships would bring economic benefits, some Arab leaders had put aside their insistence on an independent Palestinian state. Now they are insisting again that they will not renew friendly ties until that happens.
These are all big question marks that nobody yet can answer. Does Iran have more influence in the Middle East than it had before? Can the United States straddle the line between provocation and escalation? Will the Israelis achieve their goals or will Hamas live on to threaten them again? Do the Iran-supported terror groups care whether the war escalates throughout the region or not?
One thing they’ve got going for them that we don’t: in keeping with their history in that part of the world, they play the long game. We are a quick-fix society. They are used to waiting.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Long fomenting but mostly neglected. This tit for tat terrorism started with the Zionist bombing of the King David Hotel in ‘46, ironically to destroy evidence of their previous terror activities, and was accelerated by the unilateral declaration of statehood in ‘48 followed by the subsequent Zionist murder of the Swedish UN diplomat sent to mediate the situation. In spite of the good faith efforts on the part of the Carter and Clinton administrations to find a two state solution, the only one possible, there is no trust left on either side as Greg so well points out.
Disturbing but important piece Greg. Yes a very fast changing environment—-my mind’s eye conjures a punball game with little silver balls going in a dozen directions. I think if this ceasefire goes into effect Netanyahu might be forced out and elections will be called. A less doctrinaire government will take steps toward a Palestinian State— whether that will end some of the proxy agent wars we’ll see but Saudi and the Gulf States want a future without these periodic wars and will work to achive that.