Kamala’s Chance to Stop an Escalating Regional War
Biden’s team has slow-walked us to the brink of a large-scale war spanning the entire Middle East. Mass military mobilization is the next logical step. But it doesn’t have to happen.
Iran and Hamas are accusing Israel of assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas, in an air-launched missile strike in Tehran.
And that’s not all.
Israel had already been more or less at war with Hezbollah; this attack merely consecrates that reality because of Hezbollah’s ties to Iran, where the strike was conducted.
Haniyeh was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president, along with representatives from Hezbollah the Houthis, and Islamic Jihad—the so-called resistance axis.
Israel also literally just conducted a strike against Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, that targeted a Hezbollah commander that Israel believes was responsible for a rocket attack on the Golan Heights. The Associated Press confirmed that the Israeli attack “killed at least one woman and two children and wounded dozens of people.”
And in a predictable enough response, Iran has “authorized” paramilitary forces in Iraq to attack US bases if Israel launches another assault against Lebanon or Hezbollah.
Added to these latest events, of course is Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. And lest you need a reminder, the US military has launched strikes against Iraq, Syria, and Yemen THIS YEAR alone, and the US has been at war with Houthi rebels since at least January.
The Middle East, then, is not “on the brink of war”—it is quite obviously engrossed in a region-wide war. Combat operations spanning at least five countries plus a genocide. Presenting it otherwise sanitizes what’s happening and ignores the risks of escalation because of how we’re enmeshed in all this—yes, US policy owns a large share of blame for what’s happening.
And yet, nobody is characterizing these strikes or the events of the past nine months as a regional war. The media (and White House) presents each strike, each event, as if it were its own self-contained thing.
There are three points to make about this.