Letting It All Burn

Between the Biden administration's belief that it can reshape the world and an Israeli government that won't stop killing, some thoughts on where things stand in the Middle East.

Hi everybody. I know I said I needed a week off from The News, but I think what I really needed was a break from fixating on day to day developments in the Middle East so that I could clear my head. I’ve tried to channel that clearing into written form here, if that makes sense, and I hope it’ s of value to you. As I usually do when I write something more reflective than our usual news roundups, I’ve unlocked a lengthy summary of events for everyone and tried to reserve most of my opining for subscribers. If you’d like to become a subscriber you can take advantage of the free trial offer below or just take the plunge now:

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Let’s start with something I hate doing, which is writing about myself. Normally when I take a few days away from the newsletter I do so hoping that nothing major will happen before we get back to our regular schedule. This time, when I announced on Friday that I was taking a little time off, it was with full awareness that the situation in the Middle East was about to get worse. So I knew it was not an opportune time to step away, but I also knew that my brain was running on ‘E’ and that there probably wouldn’t be a “good” time to recharge in the coming weeks. There hasn’t been a “good” time for a while now, which is how I wound up letting things get to the point where I could barely think straight before I finally tapped out.

Anyway, this brings us to today, and suffice to say this definitely was not an opportune time to take a break. Let’s try to recap what’s happened over the past several days. As most or all of you have no doubt heard, Friday’s Israeli airstrike in the Dahiyah suburb in southern Beirut did in fact kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, along with other Hezbollah officials including the group’s southern commander, Ali Karaki, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ senior officer in Lebanon, Abbas Nilforoushan.

We still don’t know how many other people the strike killed, at least partly because of the difficulty Lebanon’s almost non-existent government is having with overseeing a recovery operation in a crowded residential neighborhood that had possibly “dozens” of 2000 pound US-made “bunker buster” bombs dropped on it. The Israeli military estimated that the strike killed some 300 people, but Lebanese officials have so far only confirmed 33 deaths, with 195 wounded and many people apparently still missing. Those same Lebanese officials acknowledge that they’re struggling to assess the destruction. At this point we may never get a full accounting of the toll.

The aftermath of the IDF airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on September 27 (AFP via Getty Images)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Nasrallah’s death a “turning point” for his country. The Israeli military (IDF) then resumed pounding Lebanon relentlessly, killing over 100 people in one 24 hour period from Sunday into Monday and carrying out an airstrike in central Beirut for the first time since its 2006 ground invasion of southern Lebanon. Speaking of 2006, news broke Monday evening that the Israeli military (IDF) had invaded Lebanon again, and by Wednesday there were definitive reports of clashes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters (at least one of which didn’t go so well for the Israelis). So far that invasion has taken the form of raids across the border, but the likelihood of a full blown invasion is high. So if Nasrallah’s death was a turning point for Israel, it certainly did not mark much of a change for the Lebanese civilians who are now being killed, maimed, and displaced by Netanyahu’s year long (and counting) violence spree.

(For what it’s worth US officials, and we’ll come back to them below, reportedly believe the Israeli invasion will be “limited.” The reader would be forgiven for wondering if it will be “limited” in the same way the IDF’s assault on Rafah was “limited,” which is to say not limited at all except to willfully blind members of the Biden administration and US media establishment.)

Tuesday brought a whole new avenue for escalation in the form of an Iranian missile strike on Israel, its second such attack this year following a one-round exchange of fire with the IDF back in April. In comparison with April’s incident this Iranian attack was more forceful and apparently more effective. The IRGC eschewed the slow-moving drones it employed last time and instead fired somewhere in the neighborhood of 180-200 ballistic missiles at several military targets, including the IDF’s Nevatim and Tel Nof airbases and Mossad’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. Israeli air defenses (with US help) intercepted many of these missiles but not all of them, as videos circulating on social media showed. Casualties seem to have been light—one person killed in the West Bank, apparently by falling missile debris, with a few people injured by debris in Jordan and Israel. Damage is impossible to assess, particularly given Israeli media censorship, but clearly there were missiles that did score hits on or around the targets noted above.

(Mossad headquarters is, to be fair, located in Tel Aviv’s Glilot neighborhood. CNN pointed out that this is a “densely populated” area, which is correct and thus there was a risk to civilians. There’s no point dwelling on it, but if you were to change a few details of this story one could easily imagine CNN reporting on the devious use of “human shields” to try to protect a legitimate military target. I just figured that might be worth pointing out.)

In short, Tuesday’s attack was more intense than the attack the Iranians made in April, but it was not a drastic escalation. It seems the intent was once again to demonstrate Iranian capabilities while offering the Israeli government a chance to make its own limited response and then push back from the table. The low casualty figure among Israelis gives Netanyahu cover to respond cautiously, and the Biden administration’s efforts to talk down the effectiveness of the attack are presumably intended to gently steer the Israeli leader in that direction, talk of “severe consequences” notwithstanding.

(I guess it might also be worth mentioning the tone of derision that I’ve seen among some in the broadly “pro-Israel” camp when referring to the low casualty count, which kind of gives the game away in suggesting that, as far as Israel and its supporters are concerned, high civilian casualties are a marker of success. I don’t want to make too much of this since it would require nutpicking random social media accounts, but you’ll see an example of what I mean in this piece from The Guardian.)

For those who still care about international law, Iranian officials have justified this strike as as response to the Israeli assassination of former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, and the assassinations of Nasrallah and Nilforoushan last week. They’ve also referred to their “legitimate right to self-defense under the UN Charter.” Unsurprisingly there’s been a fair amount of disagreement that any of these things justifies this strike under international law. But in a world in which even the US government acknowledges that Israel has probably been violating international law in Gaza but refuses to do anything about it, who really cares anymore? Certainly not the Israelis or Americans.

Right now it doesn’t look like Netanyahu is going to avail himself of the chance to limit further escalation. “Israeli officials” on Tuesday told everyone’s favorite leakee, Axios’s Barak Ravid, that they’re planning a “significant retaliation” to Tuesday’s attack. Ravid reports that Iranian oil facilities are “a likely target,” though “targeted assassinations” and “taking out Iran's air defense systems” are also on the table. That’s a wide range in terms of provocation and within each of those scenarios the options range from symbolic to genuinely destructive, so I don’t want to get into the prediction game here. Systematically striking Iranian oil infrastructure is different from carrying out a damaging but not destructive strike on a single refinery, which is different from attacking a few air defense batteries or taking out some IRGC officers (something the Israelis have done before). All I’m saying is that the rhetoric right now is not looking promising if you’re hoping to avoid a full fledged war with Iran.

There’s been less attention paid to the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities though that’s also in the wind. There’s no question that such a strike would risk a severe Iranian retaliation and paradoxically would probably convince Iranian leaders that the time has come to transition from “nuclear threshold state” to plain old “nuclear state.” But Ravid’s reporting suggests the Israelis are reserving a strike on nuclear facilities for a next round of escalation, should one manifest.

I think my pessimism about all of this is fairly well-founded at this point. If you’ve been paying attention to his actions since October 7, then you know that with the singular exception of that April exchange of fire with the Iranians Netanyahu has at every turn opted to escalate—in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Yemen, and in Lebanon. He’s turned his back on and/or actively undermined every attempt to deescalate the crisis and has forsworn simple retaliation in favor of intensifying the violence of the IDF’s campaigns.

And why not? Through it all—the shocking number of children the IDF has killed in Gaza, the intentional denial of humanitarian aid to civilians, the likely murder of an American citizen, and on and on—the Biden administration has continued to enable whatever the Israelis have done rather than dissuade them from pushing the envelope further (occasional and completely ineffectual expressions of “frustration” notwithstanding). The US secretary of state has gone so far as to lie in violation of US law in order to protect Israeli arms shipments. Every time Netanyahu has taken a precipitous action the Biden administration has not only kept the weapons flowing, it’s dispatched more US military forces to the Middle East to shield Israel from any repercussions. Given that level of pampering it’s no wonder Netanyahu has refused to take any steps that might deescalate regional tension but might prove politically risky at home. He, and Israel, have nothing to lose. The US government has made sure of it.

With all that in mind I still, until the last couple of weeks, would have counted the Biden administration among those who were hoping in the final analysis to avoid a regional war. Its spokespeople and senior officials keep saying so, after all. Even taking into account the extent to which this administration has indulged every Israeli impulse to date—hell, even taking into account Joe Biden’s career-long (and careerist) fixation on pandering to Israel—basic political considerations would argue against enabling a war in the Middle East on the eve of a US presidential election. Joe Biden ran for president on the idea of ending the “forever wars,” of restoring US prestige, of being a steady hand on the rudder in a perilous global age. He’s now manifestly failed on the second and third of those counts and if he shepherds a war with Iran into being he will have failed at all three. I assumed there was some reluctance left within the administration to burn everything down on Israel’s behalf.

I no longer believe the above to be true and I’m kind of chagrined that I ever did, though there are still reporters asserting that Biden tried to talk the Israelis out of invading Lebanon and was essentially told to get bent. Maybe he did, but a report from POLITICO’s Erin Banco and Nahal Toosi on Monday suggested that either Biden’s supposed opposition to a Lebanon invasion is performative or that something more disturbing is happening within his administration.

According to Banco and Toosi, senior figures within the administration—chiefly Amos Hochstein, the special envoy who’s supposed to be trying to prevent a war in Lebanon, and National Security Council Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk—have been quietly encouraging Israeli officials to ramp up their campaign against Hezbollah despite “opposition from people inside the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community who believed Israel’s move against the Iran-backed militia could drag American forces into yet another Middle East conflict.” Either they’re doing that with Biden’s blessing or they’re taking advantage of a lame duck (and maybe cognitively impaired) president to conduct their own foreign policy.