On Saturday, the U.S. and U.K. conducted another round of dozens of airstrikes on the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen, who continue to launch attacks on military and commercial vessels in the Red Sea. On Friday, the U.S. conducted dozens of airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for a militia drone strike against an obscure U.S. outpost in Jordan that killed three U.S. service-members. And while the U.S. and Iran are both indicating they have no interest in a direct confrontation, since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October, the ancillary conflict between the U.S. and Iran-backed (though not necessarily Iran-directed) fighters is clearly getting worse. Below is a running look at how various commentators and experts are viewing the escalating violence, including whether it could provoke a larger war, and how that could be avoided.
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Are both the U.S. and Iran overexposed to the risk of war?
Though the U.S. military’s footprint in the Middle East has been significantly reduced since the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some 40,000 U.S. troops remain stationed at various bases large and small across the Middle East. At Politico Magazine, Michael Hirsch examines the logic of the U.S. maintaining its presence in the region:
For America, the Jan. 28 drone strike at an obscure outpost in Jordan — a base few Americans knew existed — is yet another tragic illustration of the risks of leaving forces forward-deployed around the world, sometimes with no obvious mission. Currently the U.S. has about 2,500 troops in Iraq training the Iraqi military, another 900 in Syria, and a few hundred in Jordan ostensibly to ward off the return of ISIS. Every one of these military personnel is a potential victim who could trigger a future conflict.
For Iran, the U.S. retaliation underway is an illustration of the dangers of running proxy militias on multiple fronts that Tehran may no longer be able to fully direct, if it ever did. While Iran seems to have averted an attack inside its borders for the moment, Biden says he’ll continue striking back, and Tehran may find that its ultimate fate could be determined by an Iraqi or Syrian militia leader if more Americans die.
For both countries, in other words, events are on a permanent hair trigger that is constantly threatening to explode at the slightest pressure.
At Foreign Policy, analysts Adam Weinstein and Steven Simon argue that while U.S. troops still play an important role bolstering Iraqi forces, it’s no longer worth the risk:
There’s no feasible way for 2,500 U.S. troops to both assist Iraq against the Islamic State and contain Iran-aligned militias without the explicit approval and cooperation of the government in Baghdad. Ditto for the approximately 900 U.S. troops in Syria which rely on support from the U.S. military presence in Iraq and neighboring countries. The era of troop surges and active U.S. combat is over. With the global Islamic State threat decreasing significantly, attacks are down by over half compared to 2022. The operational benefit U.S. troops provide to Iraqi partners simply isn’t worth the risk of escalation if U.S. troops are killed. Some may argue that withdrawing from Iraq militarily would benefit Iran and its proxies, and they would be right. But by providing them with troops to target, the U.S. inadvertently validates their raison d’être, while perpetuating the risk of an undesirable war with Iran.
And the Atlantic contributor Arash Azizi writes that Iran has a lot less control over the militant groups it backs than it may seem. In fact, he explains, the whole relationship is a hot mess of Iran’s making:
The Iraqi militias form perhaps the rowdiest part of Iran’s Axis of Resistance and are among the most firmly rooted in Iran’s Shiite Islamist ideology. But unlike in Lebanon, where all supporters of Iran’s Islamist government are united in the ranks of Hezbollah, the militias have never coalesced into a single outfit in Iraq. Instead, each militia has a strong identity, usually organized around a single charismatic leader, and they cooperate through ad hoc umbrella groups, such as the military Iraqi Resistance Coordination Committee and the parliamentary Shiite Coordination Framework. …
The ideas of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s revolutionary leader, and Khamenei, its current leader, run deep in the Iraqi militias. But this ideological fervor makes them, ironically, hard for Tehran to control, because they are not always prone to be convinced by the strategic calculations of the Iranian establishment’s more pragmatic sections. Tehran and the IRGC leadership have thus struggled to keep the militias in check—and to restrain them from attacking U.S. forces, in particular. Wrangling them has become especially difficult since Soleimani’s killing, because the current head of the IRGC’s external operations wing, Esmail Qaani, doesn’t have Soleimani’s charisma, personal ties with the militias, or even a good command of Arabic.
He also reports that there is hardly a consensus appetite for war with either Israel or the U.S. inside Iran’s regime:
Whatever their feelings about Israel, serious Iranian analysts know that it doesn’t make strategic sense for Iran to get into a military confrontation with the Jewish state and its American and Western allies. I have spoken with Iranian military and security figures in recent days, and some among them have asked: If Arabs themselves refuse such a confrontation, why should Iran accept this dangerous burden? Those I spoke with suggested the existence of sharp internal disagreements about the future direction of Iran.
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Or did the U.S. over-withdraw from the Middle East?
Last week, Politico’s Erin Banco reported that in the aftermath of Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and the escalating conflict with Iran-backed militant groups, some in the American foreign policy establishment believe the U.S. now needs to reestablish a larger presence in the region:
[Following the October 7 attack,] Analysts whose work had been focused on other regions were forced to quickly switch to Hamas and the Middle East. As they did, they strained to sift through and make sense of hundreds of reports of potential threats posed by a wide variety of groups, including those backed by Iran. That effort, and the uncertainty that followed, has forced a reckoning in the highest ranks of the Biden administration’s national security establishment about its Middle East strategy.
Now, amid intense bombardment from Iran-backed groups, more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, lawmakers and congressional aides say Washington’s deprioritization of the Middle East, and specifically its approach on Iran, has left the U.S. vulnerable. Many were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters.
“Biden has spent much of the last three years … ignoring the Middle East completely,” said one former senior official who worked on Middle East matters during the Trump administration. “I’ve spent a long time in the Middle East, and part of me wants to forget it, too. That’s not the way it is. They ignored it. And now they are paying the price.”
Washington Post foreign policy columnist Josh Rogin argues that it’s vital that the U.S. sticks around in Syria and Iraq:
Keeping small amounts of U.S. troops in strategically important outposts in the Middle East is not the same as fighting a “forever war.” It’s an insurance policy against much worse outcomes. Americans are willing to pay the price of this insurance policy, as long as it does not include the deaths of U.S. troops.
The United States has a tendency of trying to abandon its security responsibilities in the Middle East, only to later reverse itself and overcompensate when the situation deteriorates. The last time the U.S. military cut and ran from the Middle East, Islamic State fighters filled the security vacuum and the United States (and dozens of other countries) had to send thousands of troops back to dislodge them. That endless cycle is a recipe for a real forever war.
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Biden retaliated very carefully
At CNN, Nick Paton Walsh explains how the delay of the U.S. retaliation for the Jordan drone strike was clearly deliberate:
The Biden administration faced a near-impossible task: Hit hard enough to show you mean it, but also ensure your opponent can absorb the blow without lashing out in return. The US had telegraphed its response for over five days, with senior US officials briefing about its nature, its severity, and even hinting at its targets. This warning was likely designed to reduce the risk of misunderstanding, and perhaps enable the militias targeted to shift locations, and lessen the loss of life. It may have also been intended to ensure US strikes were not mistaken for the work of Israel, which could have sparked retaliation against the Israelis and risked another cycle of escalation.
A larger war would benefit neither side, particularly this year, he adds:
Wars normally happen in the rare event that both sides want them, or in the more common occasion when parties determine open conflict is unavoidable, or sometimes when they have run out of diplomatic space. Or they stumble into them through a wild spiral of escalation. Neither Iran nor the United States want a war. The Biden administration has elections looming, in which it does not need another costly foreign adventure, trouble over its Israel policy, or rising oil prices. Iran’s economy is still shaky, internal unrest is a not-yet distant memory, and it has wider goals of outsized regional influence, milking its technical relationship with Moscow, and the apparent pacy pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
The New York Times’ David Sanger and Farnaz Fassihi translate Friday’s show of force:
The strikes, Mr. Biden’s advisers quickly concluded, had to aim at facilities used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. But the president made the decision to strike largely at facilities and command centers, without aiming to decapitate the force’s leadership or threatening Iran directly. There was no serious consideration of striking inside Iran, one senior administration official said after the first round of strikes was complete. And the telegraphing of the hit gave Iranians and their proxies time to evacuate senior commanders and other personnel from their bases, and disperse them in safe houses. …
Mr. Biden’s decision to mount the strike with B-1B bombers that took off from the continental United States carried its own message, of course: While Pentagon officials said the B-1B’s were the best bomber available for the complexity of these strikes, they were also the same warplanes that would be used in any attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, should Tehran decide to make a final sprint for a nuclear weapon. Nothing reminds Tehran of the reach of American power more than a strike next door, one official said on Saturday morning.
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What are the stakes of a direct conflict between the U.S. and Iran?
Last week, the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall argued that “direct American military retaliation against Iran itself would be a disaster”:
It would prolong the Gaza conflict. It would almost certainly trigger an all-out Hezbollah attack on Israel. It could turn local firefights into raging infernos in Iraq and Syria, and destabilise friendly regimes in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf. An open-ended US-Iran confrontation would divide, perhaps permanently, the western democracies between those, such as the UK, that would back Washington, and those, such as France, Germany and Italy, that might sensibly prioritise renewed diplomatic outreach to Tehran. It would assist China in furthering its anti-democratic geopolitical ambitions and Russia in justifying its aggression in Ukraine. More than that, it would be a gift to Netanyahu, who has long urged punitive military action against Iran and whose post-October policy is one of perpetual war.
If that’s not enough, here’s another, even more basic reason why Biden must exercise all possible restraint. Attacking Iran would not achieve the fundamental twin objectives of protecting western security and changing the mullahs’ behaviour. It just wouldn’t work. In truth, it would backfire by accelerating the escalatory spiral.
Spencer Ackerman also warns against the U.S. underestimating an enemy in the Middle East again:
Iran effectively won the 2003-11 U.S. war in Iraq through a low-cost dual strategy of sponsoring militias—low cost to them; the shaped-charged bombs they gave their Iraqi clients helped kill hundreds of U.S. troops—and politicians. After the rise of the so-called Islamic State in 2014, Iran provided a ground force that played a large role in defeating ISIS on the ground in Iraq, whether or not the U.S. acknowledges that. As for the rest of the Iranian coalition: The last time Israel fought Hezbollah, in 2006, Hezbollah overperformed to the point of prompting a crisis within the IDF. In the intervening 15 years, Hezbollah has only gotten stronger, both as a battle-tested force in the Syrian Civil War and through possession of a massive arsenal of missiles and rockets. The Houthi movement withstood seven punishing years of U.S.-backed Saudi airstrikes and Emirati ground invasion. Hamas, whose multi-domain breakout of Gaza to initiate the Oct. 7 massacre took Israel by surprise, is probably the weakest member of Iran’s military coalition.
A war will not look like the one Western analysts predict, nor will it be one where the U.S. will often possess the initiative, beyond tactical superiority at the point of engagement. Those are the battlefield lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and should be uncontroversial. The array of the Iranian coalition across the region ensures that there will be no containing the war to a single front, an operational reality we are getting a taste of already. Western support for such a conflict will be put to the test economically once the Houthis—or the Iranians themselves—reprise the 2019 drone-and-missile assault on Saudi oil infrastructure. Add to that the domestic difficulties that the U.S.-aligned Arab autocracies will have in aiding a war effort that most people in their countries will see as a conflagration to help Israel commit genocide.
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The deadly attack in Jordan shows how the U.S. is now vulnerable to drones, too
At Vox, Joshua Keating highlights how “American air superiority in recent conflicts has been so complete that no US ground troops have been killed by an enemy aircraft since the Korean War, which ended more than 70 years ago,” but notes that the January 28 attack on Tower 22 in Jordan appears to be first time a U.S. adversary has killed American troops with a drone:
[Pentagon press secretary Sabrina] Singh did not specify the exact weapon used but described it as a “one-way-attack unmanned aerial system,” meaning it was designed to crash into its target and explode. This indicates it may be similar to the so-called “kamikaze drones” that Iran has supplied in large numbers to the Russian military for use in Ukraine. The drone reportedly struck near the troops’ sleeping quarters, accounting for the high number of casualties. A report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that the militia drone may have evaded air defense systems because it was mistaken for a US drone that was due to return to base at the same time.
The attack is far from the first of its kind — since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, Iran-backed groups have targeted US troops more than 150 times with drones, rockets, and missiles, causing dozens of injuries, most of them traumatic brain injuries. But Sunday’s attack marked the first fatalities among US troops in the burgeoning regional conflict. And at least according to publicly available information, the three troops who died also appear to be the first US service members ever killed by an enemy drone. (Two US troops were killed by friendly fire in a Predator drone strike in Afghanistan in 2011; a US contractor in Syria was killed in a drone strike in March 2023.)
Yet Paul Lushenko, a US Army lieutenant colonel and expert on drone warfare who teaches at the US Army War College, told Vox that a fatal enemy drone strike on US troops “wasn’t a matter of if, it was a matter of when. All militaries, the United States included, are vulnerable to these capabilities.”
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Does the deescalation need to begin in Gaza?
At Slate, Fred Kaplan explains how a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas would make a big difference:
The hot spots of conflict in the Middle East have been brewing, simmering, or raging for some time now, most of them well before Oct. 7, some generated by forces and tensions that have little to do with Israel or the Palestinians. Yet the events since Oct. 7 have intensified all of those conflicts, imbued their combatants with fiercer passion and the allure of international support or tolerance. The separate conflicts are bleeding into one another. The prospect of a regionwide war is very real. The results of such a war—in bloodshed, physical destruction, and geopolitical instability—would be gargantuan and completely counter to U.S. interests.
This is why a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war is an urgent necessity—both for its own sake and to prevent the spread of war across the region and possibly beyond. Then, those who say their violent acts of late are strictly a response to Israel’s bombing of Palestinians—the Houthis, Hezbollah, and the various Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria—must be pressed to cease fire as well. Part of this involves opening up a back channel of communications with Iran’s leaders, assuring them that the U.S. has no intention of attacking Iran, per se, and pledging a halt to attacks on Iran’s proxies as long as the proxies stop shooting off missiles too.
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It’s Trump’s mess, too
The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor, noting the onslaught of attacks on the Biden administration by Donald Trump and GOP hawks following the deadly drone attack in Jordan, offers a reminder of how the U.S. got here:
Taking a wrecking ball to diplomacy with Tehran, Trump broke the nuclear deal forged between Iran and world powers, restored a slate of sanctions on the Islamic Republic and assassinated influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani in a 2020 drone strike. Trump’s policy on Israel, meanwhile, amounted to a tight bear hug of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the boosting of the agenda of the Israeli right. He was punitive to the Palestinians — markedly shifting U.S. policy against them by formally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, shuttering a U.S. consulate intended for Palestinians, and brokering “peace” deals between Israel and a clutch of Arab monarchies that further sidelined Palestinian political aspirations.
After coming to office, the Biden administration muddled along in the Middle East. Its initial halfhearted rhetoric about restoring human rights to the center of U.S. policy soon melted away as the White House pursued closer cooperation with Saudi Arabia and maintained the status quo with Israel, eager to build on Trump-era normalization agreements. It struggled to make any headway on Iran — Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign led to an even more hard-line, uncompromising government taking hold in Tehran and the Iranian regime unshackling its nuclear program and dispensing with the measures of transparency that had been mandated by the nuclear deal. Earlier this month, Rafael Grossi, the U.N.’s atomic agency chief, said Iran’s nuclear program was “galloping ahead” and urged for diplomacy to fill the breach “to prevent the situation deteriorating to a degree where it would be impossible to retrieve it.” Now, as the White House contemplates opening new fronts of conflict with Iran, diplomacy is not in the picture.
This post has been updated to include additional commentary.
