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The friction points between Iran and its allies on one side, and the US and Israel on the other, are glowing white-hot as acts of spectacular violence multiply across the Middle East.
The war in Gaza is entering a highly dangerous international phase, with a US-led coalition threatening the Houthi regime in Yemen for its drone, missile and seaborne attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea in retaliation for Israeli actions.
Western governments had been pleased, until a few weeks ago, that the destruction of Gaza and the horrific Palestinian casualties were not provoking as much hostile reaction in the region as they had feared. But in the past few weeks this optimism has evaporated as every day brings news of another assassination or bombing in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Those who warned Joe Biden last year that his culpable failure to bring about a ceasefire in Gaza was turning a crisis into a catastrophe are being proved correct.
A blank cheque
The US accuses Iran of being behind the Houthi bid to close the Bab el-Mandab strait to shipping, while Iran suspects the US and Israel as being secretly connected with whatever group carried out the bombing in Kerman that killed 84 Iranians attending the memorial for General Qassim Soleimani – who was assassinated by a US drone in Iraq four years ago. With so much violence outsourced and subcontracted, the Iranians may well be right.
None of this was inevitable. After the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October, the US was widely supposed to be giving full backing to the Israeli offensive so as to credibly impose restraint later on. This had been the pattern in Israel’s past wars in Lebanon and Gaza. As Israel’s main arms supplier and diplomatic protector, Washington certainly had the leverage to bring the war to an earlier end.
But either through feebleness or miscalculation, the US President failed to do this, giving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank cheque without getting anything substantive in return.
The three great confrontations in the Middle East over the past half-century have been between Israel and the Arabs, the US and Iran, and the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam. Thanks to Gaza, all three of these struggles are likely to intensify.
Disastrous precedents
Why has the US once again plugged itself into these toxic forever conflicts, from which it had supposedly been trying to escape in order to confront Russia and China? One explanation is what Barack Obama had derided during his time in office as the “Washington playbook” of the US foreign-policy establishment, which falsely imagines that chronic problems can be resolved by superior American force, despite disastrous precedents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
In reality, Iran has real strength in countries where there are large Shia communities – and almost none where it does not. But where there are such communities – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen – Iranian influence is powerful. As a Sunni movement, Hamas was an exception, but this was because the Palestinians would look to anybody who gave them strong support.
The US and 11 allies, including the UK, have now warned the Houthis to stop targeting ships in the Bab el-Mandab or face retribution. “The Houthis,” says a joint statement from the White House, “will bear the responsibility for the consequences should they continue to threaten lives, the global economy, and free flow of commerce in the region’s critical waterways.”
Flattered by the attention
It is an indication of the increased instability in the Middle East that Yemen, whose troubles have been ignored for decades by the international community, should suddenly be seen as a threat to the world economy.
The Houthis must be flattered by the attention they are suddenly receiving. They are unlikely to be much intimidated. Since they first emerged in the mountains of north Yemen in the 90s, few movements have been bombed for so long and with so little effect.
A Saudi-led coalition started an operation called “Decisive Storm” in 2015 to eliminate them, but it is still going on. Some 150,000 Yemenis have been killed, but the Houthi movement is still in business – an outcome worth considering as Israel seeks to bomb Hamas out of existence. Saudi Arabia is eager to disengage from the conflict, but the current unofficial truce is being endangered by the prospect of Western military intervention.
Another failing of the “Washington playbook” is to see “Iranian-backed” or “Iranian-armed” groups as the source of all evil. There is something in this, but all the movements backed by Iran have strong local – and usually religious – roots. Nobody can pick up the phone in Tehran and get their orders automatically obeyed in Yemen’s capital Sanaa – held by the Houthis since 2014. Iranian expertise and advice is on offer, but in Yemen, where there is said to be three weapons for every one of the 33 million population, not much military equipment or training is needed.
Fully backed by the US
Iran has made some gains from the Gaza war. The reputational damage to the US in the region is huge since Washington is seen as complicit in Israel killing 22,000 Palestinians. As a leading advocate of the Palestinian cause, Iran benefits from its return to the top of the international agenda. Normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab monarchies, not so covertly directed against Iran, has been capsized, perhaps permanently. In Saudi Arabia, an opinion poll showed 96 per cent of people are today opposed to normal relations with Israel. The Kingdom is not a democracy, but its rulers cannot wholly ignore public opinion on such an issue.
Yet there are also strong negative consequences for Iran in the Gaza war. It may lead the “Axis of Resistance”, but it is not doing much resisting so far. Hezbollah has reacted cautiously to the assassination of the Hamas deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri, saying it will retaliate at a time of its own choosing. Iran and Hezbollah evidently calculate that they must avoid being trapped into a direct military confrontation which they cannot win at a time when Israel is fully backed by the US.
The credibility of Iran and its allies will suffer in the short term by their failure to help the Palestinians. But the Iranian regime specialises in fighting, and usually coming out ahead, in long, complicated low-level wars, as in Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982, in Iraq after the US-led invasion of 2003, and in Syria after the Sunni uprising against the regime in 2011.
What could change Iranian calculations is a belief that an attack on its own territory is becoming likely and cannot be deterred by long-distance operations. The Gaza war has killed off positive diplomatic contacts between the US and Iran, making it more likely that Iran will seek to manufacture a useable nuclear device – a prospect it has used hitherto as a form of leverage to extract concessions on sanctions and other issues.
Already the Gaza war is reshaping the Middle East and the wider world.
Further Thoughts
I have always liked stories about the hidden history of big organisations – government, state institutions, armies, commercial companies – who commit giant but avoidable blunders and then persist with them for reasons of personal institutional self-interest.
Britain has a noxious tradition of denying or playing down self-inflicted calamities for which nobody is ever held accountable. First World War generals who ordered their men to advance into the machinegun fire, held their jobs long after the slaughter was over.
The Second World War had many similar examples of colossal blunders deliberately denied to preserve official credibility. One of the most striking was Special Operations Executive’s [SOE’s] refusal to recognise that their network of British agents in the Netherlands had been infiltrated and was controlled by the Nazis’ occupation authorities.
SOE kept parachuting in new agents who were promptly captured. Deliberate errors in coded messages had been pre-arranged for just such an eventuality, but these were ignored by the SOE leadership who did not want to admit to their gigantic failure. Those interested in this extraordinary story should read Leo Marks’s book Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemakers War 1941-45 about his struggle to get his SOE superiors to recognise the ongoing disaster.
The tradition marches on: there is the NHS contaminated blood scandal of the 70s and 80s. Blood plasma – factor VIII – infected with the HIV virus or Hepatitis C was given to patients, most of them haemophiliacs, who contracted terrible illnesses. The blood had often come from infected prison inmates and drug addicts in the US.
Much the same impunity has protected those responsible for Post Office scandal when 700 sub-postmasters were unjustly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting because of a malfunctioning computer system. Some were imprisoned, many had their lives destroyed but even today they struggle for compensation.
The stories are well known but they still tell us something deeply unpleasant about the nature of British life.
Beneath the Radar
It is always interesting to learn about the curious accidents and misunderstandings by which even well-qualified people get their jobs. Leo Marks, mentioned above, was a coding expert who should have been snapped up by SOE but, according to his account, was only employed by them because they mistakenly thought he was part of the family who part owned Marks and Spencer. SOE was eager to cultivate them because it wanted to use the M&S dining rooms next to the SOE head office and thought that employing Leo Marks would help them.
The same sort of bizarre recruitment choices occurs in journalism. Howard Spring, who worked on The Guardian between the wars and later became a successful novelist, once wrote an attack on Lord Beaverbrook, describing him as “a pedlar of nightmares”. The timid Guardian editor of the day, WP Crozier, changed this to “pedlar of dreams”.
Beaverbrook liked the phrase so much that he promptly offered Spring a job on the Evening Standard at a high salary which Spring instantly accepted.
Cockburn’s Picks
I once used to play a game which involves making up or discovering meaningless proverbs such as the old Norwegian saying: “The tree is taller than the highest wave.”
More mysterious is the ancient Chinese proverb: “Of nine bald men eight are deceitful and the ninth is dumb.” I particularly like Peter Cook’s enigmatic remark: “Cricket is nothing if it is not one man pitted against a fish.”
I wrote about this in more detail for The Independent in 2012.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
