Category Archives: Iran

Britain, Government, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, United States

Iran vows revenge on Israel

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: The temperature in the Middle East is rising by the day. Israeli air strikes in Lebanon and in Tehran claimed the lives of a senior military commander from Hezbollah and that of the political leader of Hamas. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader has vowed to inflict “severe punishment” on Israel. An all-out regional war looks ever likely, but the power vacuum in Washington DC is hardly helping matters

THE escalation has started. Today, the world stands on the brink of major war. Israel has retaliated following rocket attacks launched from Lebanon that killed twelve children in the Golan Heights. First, an Israeli rocket attack killed a senior military commander from Hezbollah, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut. Then, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of Hamas, in a precision air strike on a Tehran apartment building.

These two surgical killings mark a major upsurge of Israel’s twin conflicts with its neighbours – Lebanon to the north, and the Palestinians to the south. They effectively end any chance of a negotiated ceasefire in Gaza.

Now Iran, which backs both armed groups, is seeking retribution and revenge. Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, will regard Israel’s elimination of Haniyeh – on Iranian soil – as a deep humiliation that can be salved only with a confrontation that is bound to claim yet more Israeli lives.

Khamenei, who had met the Hamas leader only a few hours earlier, described Haniyeh as “a dear guest in our home” before adding: “We consider his revenge as our duty.”

The political leader of Hamas had flown to Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. In a region of the Middle East where “face” and reputation are valued so highly, the Iranian state knows it has little choice but to respond in kind.

The grim likelihood of war spreading across the Middle East and beyond has also increased thanks to the United States’ apparent lack of interest.

The White House seems disinclined to enforce the “pax Americana” that has protected the West and its interests for decades. As President Joe Biden prepares to leave office, it is widely viewed that Mr Biden has become a lame duck who will doze through the final months of his presidency.

The second air strike – presumably masterminded by Israel’s intelligence service Mossad from Jerusalem – took place at 2am in Tehran.

But it was still the middle of the evening in Washington DC and there should have been plenty of time for the White House to react.

The fact that neither President Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris deigned to speak suggests that Washington is either asleep, on summer holiday, on autopilot, or unwilling to act in an election year, all of which are equally dangerous.  

What next? After the nine-month siege of Gaza, some will say that Hamas can no longer be capable of inflicting much more pain on Israel.

But, based in Lebanon to Israel’s north, Hezbollah was able to fight Israel to a stalemate as recently as 2006.

The group still has a large arsenal of Iranian supplied rockets and drones.

It appears likely that Iran, too, could launch cruise and ballistic missiles as well as kamikaze drones at Israel in a repeat of April’s Operation True Promise (a coordinated attack of more than 300 missiles: itself a retaliation for Israel’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus).

It is Iran’s proxy forces throughout the rest of the Middle East that make international conflict so terrifyingly plausible.

The Houthi rebels in Yemen are stretching the West’s military resources in the Red Sea by launching drone attacks on commercial shipping and directly attacking vessels from the U.S. and Royal Navies.

The Houthis have also sworn to launch air strikes against Israel itself, a response to Jerusalem’s attacks on Houthi-held territory in Yemen.

Then there are Iran’s Shi’ite allies in Iraq and Syria, who have recent history of attacking the few remaining American air bases in the region.

For Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, perhaps he has concluded that Israel can cope with any escalation of the conflicts now threatening to engulf his nation.

In attempting to decapitate Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel is repeating the tactic that saw America successfully neutralise al-Qaeda as a global threat – by hunting down and destroying its leaders.

But Israel, of all countries, should know that wars of attrition are not won by assassinations alone.

Israel killed Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Yassin, as long ago as 2004, yet the Hamas threat grew ever stronger.

The danger for Netanyahu and Israel is that the country could be dragged into a bigger, wider conflagration on many fronts. And if that happens, the ramifications become very hard to predict.

In terms of military resources, Israel – with American backing – seems well placed to survive that conflict.

While U.S. Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, has previously said America wants to cool the temperature in the Middle East, Washington has been resolute in its insistence that the U.S. military would come to Israel’s aid if it was attacked by Iran – as it did when Tehran launched its huge drone and missile strike in April.

However, it remains to be seen how many civilian deaths, and how much economic damage, the Israel public is prepared to endure before ousting Netanyahu and suing for peace.

A widening conflict would leave Britain in an invidious position.

Former prime minister Rishi Sunak ordered British jets based in Cyprus to shoot down Iranian drones heading for Israel in a show of support for America and Israel. Sir Keir Starmer is likely to do the same.

Yet would Britain put boots on the ground if America and Israel called for military help? Surely that would make Britain, and British interests overseas, a target for Iran’s allies?

Where would our involvement leave British relations with our European neighbours – some of whom have been vociferous in their support for Palestinian civilians caught up in the Gaza conflict?

And how would it affect our relationship with NATO ally Turkey, which has been increasingly strident in its support for Hamas, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even threatening to send troops to Palestine to support Hamas.

Russia’s involvement in the conflict should be considered, too.

Moscow is a long-term ally of Iran, which has provided drones and missiles for its war in Ukraine and it has a major military presence in Syria, providing Russia’s only military base on the Mediterranean.

The Kremlin also remains a master of destabilising tactics, using social media outlets to spread rumours and deploying “useful idiots” in rival states to foment social unrest and division.

The temperature in the Middle East is rising by the day. The usual mechanisms for de-escalation and negotiation seem dangerously absent.

How, or where, will it end?

The power vacuum in Washington isn’t helping matters.

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Britain, Government, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Politics, United States

Israel is on the brink of total cataclysm

MIDDLE EAST

AFTER more than nine months of desperate fighting against Hamas in Gaza, events in the Middle East with Lebanon now being drawn in suggest that Israel may be on the brink of total cataclysm.

Military action against Hezbollah, Iran’s largest and best-trained proxy group, in neighbouring Lebanon, could bring war on a totally different scale, a war which Israel is far from certain to win.

Worryingly, it is a war that might easily involve Britain – not only in supplying arms and air cover for Israel, but potentially hurling the UK into armed conflict with Hezbollah. Such a war would have a seismic effect on our domestic politics, already riven by pro-Palestinian protests.

The unprecedented chaos in America’s presidential election as it currently stands will be upended if Iran openly declares its military support for Hezbollah. That’s one step short away from a war that would engulf the whole of the Middle East.

And in the ultimate nightmare scenario, if Israel determines that its very existence is threatened and deploys its nuclear arsenal, then a global war would almost certainly ensue, with Russia and Pakistan likely to be among the first to react.

This may seem alarmist to those who have followed the Israel Defence Forces’ unrelenting campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, since the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis. The battering of Rafah and other populous areas, which has reduced entire cities to rubble and forced more than 1.5million displaced people into refugee camps, has given the world an illusion of Israel’s invincibility.

But this is far from the reality. Israel is exhausted by the conflict. Previous wars in the nation’s 76-year history have been brief and decisive affairs, and this one is neither.

After nearly 300 days of conflict, not only does prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline Government continue to resist international calls for a ceasefire, but the army of Hamas fighters has proved to be robust and resilient. Their failure to wipe out Hamas will be concerning for Israelis. And Hezbollah is no Hamas. It is far larger, with the support and backing of 2.5million Lebanese, almost half the population.

In fact, the group rules the country south of Beirut and its leaders have been preparing for war against Israel for many years. Hezbollah is backed by vast funding and training from Iran.

Their fighters are not a volunteer militia hiding among the civilian population and scurrying through underground tunnels, but a highly organised, well-equipped, disciplined army, dug into heavily fortified positions.

Whether the slaughter of 12 children in a rocket attack in the last few days was intended as the starting gun for a war is not wholly clear. It was, however, an outrageous provocation by Hezbollah.

Israel has already retaliated with air strikes against targets in Lebanon. And there is a danger that if its response to the killings is not sufficiently forceful, then Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters will feel emboldened.

Yet if Israel pursues further escalation, as seems probable, it couldn’t come at a better time for Hezbollah. This could start a much wider war most Israelis don’t want, undermining Netanyahu. Already, 120,000 people have fled their homes in the north because of Lebanese rocket attacks.

For western politicians, decision-makers are facing a policy crisis. In the United States, Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate to replace President Joe Biden in the White House, will face a dilemma. If she advocates backing Israel, she will alienate Muslim voters, while attracting no Republicans to her side. Donald Trump is 100 per cent pro-Israel.

For Sir Keir Starmer, the crisis could prove even worse. Many Labour MPs, particularly on the left of the party, are furious at his past support for Israel. Protests on Britain’s streets could quickly escalate to rioting, especially in urban areas with large Muslim populations, such as Birmingham and Leeds.

And if the RAF is deployed to protect Israel against missile attacks once again, Hezbollah could strike at British air bases in Cyprus, which is only 60 miles from the Lebanese coast.

The risks now are higher than ever.

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Britain, History, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Saudi Arabia, Society, United States

Middle East history. It needs to be understood.

MIDDLE EAST

Ancient indifferences are reshaping the Middle East and forging unlikely new alliances

GEOPOLITICAL statements come no more obscure than one given earlier this week by an Israeli news site.

A member of the Saudi Arabian royal family had reportedly told the broadcaster Kan that, in his view, Iran had started the Gaza war by instructing its proxy group Hamas to attack Israel on October 7.

Tehran’s attention, according to this nameless royal, was to thwart the imminent normalisation of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Saudis.

This is so important because it symbolises the extraordinary transformation under way in the politics of the Middle East. For a Saudi royal to express such a view – that a Muslim country instigated the conflict for the purpose of spreading discord – would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But that’s not the only way in which the winds of change are resettling alliances in this volatile region.

Five days ago, the ayatollahs of Iran inflicted their first direct attack on Israel since they came to power in 1979.

For some 45 years, the Islamic Republic has plotted the destruction of what its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei calls “the evil Zionist regime”. But it has left the actual attacks to its proxies, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

This fresh assault did almost no damage, thanks to the defensive coalition that shot down almost all of the weapons directed at Israel.

The US and UK played a role in this. But they were joined by two other countries for whom defending the Jewish state would have been fanciful until recently: Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

For most of the time Israel has existed, Saudi, as one of the leading Muslim nations and home to the holy city of Mecca, has been its implacable foe. But now it is on the verge not just of tolerating Israel but becoming an ally.

Similarly, back in 1967, Jordan actually invaded Israel – a disastrous move which lost it the territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Yet now Jordan, too, has stood alongside Israel to protect it from Iranian bombs. This newfound cooperative spirit continues apace: it has emerged that both the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates had passed helpful intelligence to America to use in Israel’s defence, with Jordan further agreeing to let the US and “other countries’ warplanes” use its airspace, as well as sending up its own jets. The rise of Iran – and its chilling proximity to a nuclear weapon – has driven old foes closer.

Iran now dominates a vast region from its borders with Iraq, through Syria and Lebanon, to the Mediterranean. Through its Yemeni proxies, the Houthis, and its own navy, it is causing chaos and major disruption in the key Red Sea trade route.

And it has turned the Palestinian cause into a strategic vehicle for its own ambitions through two other proxies, Hamas (Gaza) and Hezbollah (Lebanon). This chaotic and meddlesome statecraft has appalled other Muslim countries.

The story of the Middle East used to be “Israel versus everyone else”. However, that is no longer true. To understand how all this has come about, you need to go back to the very roots of Islam – and the schism within it. In 610AD, Mohammed unveiled a new faith. By the time he died in 632AD, he and Islam were all-powerful in Arabia, and within a century it had subjugated an empire stretching from Central Asia to Spain.

But as history teaches us, Islam was split over who should succeed the Prophet. One faction argued the leadership should be passed through his bloodline. They became known as Shias, from shi’atu Ali, Arabic for “partisans of Ali”, who was Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law.

The others, the Sunnis (followers of the sunna, or “way” in Arabic) said leadership should be determined on merit.

Ali was elected as “caliph” (spiritual leader) in 656AD but within five years was assassinated, enshrining an enduring split.

Fast forward to 2024, and about 85 per cent of the world’s 1.6billion Muslims are Sunni, while 15 per cent are Shia.

Two countries now vie for the leadership of Islam, Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. Since the mullahs seized power in Tehran 45 years ago, the divisions and mutual hatreds have only grown.

As a minority within Islam, the Shiites have historically been treated as subordinate in Sunni-dominated countries. But there has been a significant growth of the Shiite population in Gulf nations. This has increased anxiety among Sunni rulers over the growing power of Shia Iran.

In Gulf states such as the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and especially Saudi Arabia, the Shia threat – in other words the threat from Iran – is seen as existential.

Egypt, too, which has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1979, is also an arch enemy of the mullahs. In Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war with Hezbollah, Sunni countries were, behind the scenes, willing Israel to triumph, just as it is said now that Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia want Israel to destroy Hamas in Gaza.

The rapprochement of some Sunni countries was embodied in the 2020 Abraham Accords which normalised relations between the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel, and later Morocco and Sudan.

There is logic, then, to the deepening alliances between Sunni states and Israel. The Arab nations understand that while Israel has no ambitions to dominate its neighbours, Iran seeks to control all of the Middle East.

What’s indisputable is that if you don’t understand this split and history, you can’t understand the Middle East at all.

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