SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
masoud pezeshkian
Israel Wants Its War With Iran—But If Netanyahu Not Stopped, They Might Spark World War III
The Israeli prime minister continues to wage war because war keeps him in power. He may burn the Middle East to the ground in the process.
Oct 03, 2024
Israel has assassinated the leader of Hezbollah and killed many of its members by way of booby-trapped pagers and walky-talkies. After a blitzkrieg bombing campaign, Israel once again invaded Lebanon this week to escalate its campaign against the paramilitary-cum-political party. Meanwhile, it continues to wage war against Hamas in Gaza. It has bombed various locations in Syria. And it has even attacked the Houthis in distant Yemen.
The Israeli government has never tried to hide its larger objective: weaken the sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Israel is really fighting against Iran.
At the United Nations last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map of the region labelled “The Curse.” It showed a swath of the Middle East in black that encompassed Iran, Syria, and Iraq, with outposts in Lebanon and Yemen.
“It’s a map of an arc of terror that Iran has created and imposed from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean,” Netanyahu declared. “Iran’s aggression, if it’s not checked, will endanger every single country in the Middle East, and many, many countries in the rest of the world, because Iran seeks to impose its radicalism well beyond the Middle East.”
Israel has not been content to launch attacks against Iranian proxies. Back in April, Israel struck Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing three senior Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) officials. Over the summer, in a brazen violation of Iranian sovereignty, it detonated a bomb inside a guest house in Tehran to assassinate a top Hamas leader. And in the most recent aerial attack on Beirut that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israel also killed a top Iranian military official, Gen. Abbas Nilforushan of the IRGC.
These last two attacks have come after elections in July elevated a reformer to the presidency in Iran. They have come after Iran has given a number of indications that it is reevaluating its unremittingly hostile policy toward Israel. They have come after the Iranian government has showed signs of willingness to restart nuclear negotiations with the United States.
If Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election in November, Israel will once again have an ally that is equally committed to confronting Iran, militarily if necessary.
But if Kamala Harris wins, the stage will be set for a potential return to a détente in U.S.-Iranian relations.
Certainly, the Israeli government is interested in weakening both Hamas and Hezbollah. Certainly, it wants to push back against Iran on various fronts.
But perhaps the real motivation for Netanyahu right now in attacking Hezbollah and refusing a ceasefire in the conflict in Gaza is to goad Iran into retaliating and burying all hopes of a reconciliation between Washington and Tehran. This week, with Iran lobbing missiles at Israel, everything is so far going according to plan. What’s not yet clear is whether Netanyahu will reap a side benefit of making the Biden administration look foolish, thus elevating Trump’s electoral chances in November.
Iran’s Restraint
Imagine if Russia had somehow smuggled a bomb into Volodymyr Zelensky’s hotel room in Washington, DC and managed to assassinate him on his recent visit. The United States might very well use such an attack as a casus belli to declare war on Russia. The only thing that could stay Washington’s hand would be Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the potential for planetary annihilation.
Israel’s assassination of a Hamas official inside Iran at the end of July might have triggered an all-out war—if not for Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Of course, Tehran threatened revenge. Its retaliation for the attack on the Iranian compound in Syria, which took place two weeks later in mid-April, might have looked impressive: 300 missiles and drones aimed at Israel. But only a few evaded Israeli defenses, and there were no Israeli casualties.
Israel has an advantage over Iran in terms of intelligence and technology. How on earth did it smuggle a bomb into one of the most secure buildings in Iran and then trigger it at just the right moment to kill its target? And how did it manage to turn hundreds of pagers and walky-talkies into hand-held bombs that killed and injured Hezbollah operatives along with many Lebanese civilians? These were intelligence failures on the part of Iran and its proxies, to be sure, but they also reveal the patience, planning, and technological sophistication of the Israelis.
In other words, it’s not just Israel’s nukes that serve as deterrent.
In effect, Iran is practicing a policy of “strategic patience.” It knows that it’s outmatched in any conventional (or nuclear) conflict. In response to successful Israeli operations, its feckless missile attacks on Israel have been more theater than actual military campaign. In some cases, it has been even more restrained, for instance, after the death of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan in January when it instructed its allies not to escalate their attacks against U.S. targets.
In general, the successes that Iran and its allies have had against Israel have been in guerrilla warfare. “Hezbollah and Iran are conserving military resources and waiting for Israeli ground forces to enter a trap inside Lebanon territory,” former Iranian journalist Mohammad Mazhari concludes.
In its eagerness to “teach Hezbollah a lesson” and draw Iran into a wider war, Israeli forces may just be walking into that trap once again.
Change in Iran?
While Netanyahu beat the drum of the Iran threat at the UN, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian took a different tack in his speech to the General Assembly:
I embarked on my electoral campaign with a platform focused on “reform,” “national empathy,” “constructive engagement with the world,” and “economic development,” and was honored to gain the trust of my fellow citizens at the ballot box. I aim to lay a strong foundation for my country’s entry into a new era, positioning it to play a effective and constructive role in the evolving global order.
Pezeshkian also announced his willingness to work on reviving a nuclear agreement. What he said in private meetings was perhaps even more important. For instance, he promised to accept whatever agreement that Palestinians favored to end the conflict with Israel, which presumably includes the two-state solution that Iran has traditionally opposed because it would mean acknowledging Israel as a state.
Indeed, after replacing Ebrahim Raisi, who died suddenly in a helicopter crash last May, Pezeshkian has quietly charted a different trajectory for Iranian foreign policy. One important indication is the team that he has assembled. Head of the foreign policy team is Abbas Araghchi, who played a key role in orchestrating the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States and other countries. Javad Zarif, the face of Iran’s negotiating team that year, is now vice president for strategic affairs. The cabinet contains plenty of conservatives, but the foreign policy team is both ready and experienced in the politics of détente.
Outside observers ascribe Iran’s “tepid” response to attacks on Iranian territory and against allies like Hezbollah and Hamas to Iran’s relative weakness. “The biggest explanation appears to be simply that Iran is weaker than it wants the world to believe,” writes David Leonhardt in The New York Times. “And its leaders may recognize that they would fare badly in a wider war.”
Another explanation, however, is that the consensus inside Iran is shifting, not simply within the political establishment (which has swung from reformism to conservatism and back again) but within the governing religious bodies as well. This is not a doctrinal transformation so much as a coming to terms with different geopolitical realities, particularly within the Middle East.
Contrary to Netanyahu’s ominous presentation at the UN, Iran is not experiencing a massive expansion of its influence. To be sure, it can count on support from Syria, a significant share of Iraq’s population, and the three Hs: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. But Syria’s still a mess, Iraq is divided, and the three Hs are reeling.
Meanwhile, Sunni powers in the region like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey are ascendant. The Abrahamic Accords, pushed by Trump and embraced by Biden, rallied Sunni powers like the United Arab Emirates and Morocco to recognize Israel. Saudi Arabia was next in line when Hamas disrupted the looming rapprochement by attacking Israel on October 7. So concerned was Iran about the prospect of the Abrahamic Accords cutting it out of regional geopolitics that it concluded its own détente with Saudi Arabia in 2023 after seven years of severed relations.
World War III?
The risk of regional escalation is large. This week, Iran fired missiles at Israel, though they have done limited damage. Israel wants an excuse to strike back against Iran, particularly against its nuclear complex. The United States has expanded its military footprint in the region as a visible sign of preparedness. Although Israel has declared that its invasion into Lebanon will be limited, the government has generally pursued maximalist goals—the destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah—even in the face of doubts from the Israeli Defense Forces.
The Israeli government aside, nobody wants a regional conflict. The Israeli government aside, everyone after October 7 has practiced a degree of restraint. Iran, in particular, has absorbed the kind of punishment that rarely goes without serious retaliation in today’s world of geopolitics. To a certain degree, it has satisfied demands both internally and externally for retaliation against Israel without inflicting any serious damage—like a short fired into the air in a duel. At some point, however, Iran might feel compelled to abandon its strategic patience and take more lethal aim at Israel.
To prevent a wider war, the Biden administration had best be conducting non-stop quiet discussions with Pezeshkian’s foreign policy team. Even while expressing support for Israel, the United States has to go over Israel’s head to negotiate with Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu is a problem that must be isolated somehow within Israel and somehow within the region.
But how to pry Netanyahu out of his office and put someone in his place with at least an ounce of pragmatism? The prime minister continues to wage war because war keeps him in power. So, too, did Antaeus draw strength from the earth until an opponent lifted him into the air to defeat him. That is the essential question today: figuring out a way to separate Netanyahu from war and thus deprive him of his power.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden's Destructive Israel Policy Has Led Us to the Brink of War on Iran
Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians.
Oct 03, 2024
On October 1, Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel in response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders of its Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), Hezbollah and Hamas. There are conflicting reports about how many of the missiles struck their targets and if there were any deaths. But Israel is now considering a counterattack that could propel it into an all-out war with Iran, with the U.S. in tow.
For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union. Former U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite President Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.
Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.
Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.
Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.
President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”
On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors.
“Let’s create a situation where we can coexist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue… We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.
Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the U.N. General Assembly.
“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”
The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran.
That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is leading the opposition.
On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the U.N. Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.
Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons.
When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.
Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coattails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.
Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.
So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote inResponsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here—avoiding war.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Signaling Next Target, Netanyahu Tells Iran Change Coming 'Sooner Than People Think'
One observer noted that the Israeli prime minister "has a habit of pretending to reach out to the people of the countries he intends to bomb next."
Sep 30, 2024
Fears that Israel is planning yet another escalation of its multi-front Middle East war mounted Monday after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a recorded speech to the people of Iran vowing that they would soon be "free" from their current leadership.
Addressing the "noble Persian people" in English, Netanyahu accused Iran's theocratic rulers of plunging the region "deeper into darkness."
"When Iran is finally free—and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think—everything will be different," he said.
"He posted English 'addresses' to the people of Gaza and Lebanon right before bombing them."
"When that day comes, the terror network that the regime built in five continents will be bankrupt, dismantled," Netanyahu claimed, adding that Iran will then "thrive as never before."
However, critics noted that such proclamations by the right-wing Israeli leader have previously portended attacks on the people he claimed to be saving.
"He posted English 'addresses' to the people of Gaza and Lebanon right before bombing them," Zeteo News reporter Prem Thakker said on social media.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, a U.S.-based foreign policy think tank, made a similar comment.
In recent weeks, Israel has attacked Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, the West Bank, and Gaza—where its conduct is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide trial. More than 147,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Thousands more have been killed or injured in Lebanon, where the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Friday reportedly used U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bombs to kill Hezbollah leaders including Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah along with an Iranian general, and an unknown number of civilians in the densely populated southern suburbs of Beirut.
Israel has already attacked Iran, assassinating Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on July 31. Israel also bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria in April, killing seven people including diplomats and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps senior commander Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi.
"There is nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach," Netanyahu ominously claimed during his speech on Monday.
Netanyahu's speech came as IDF tanks amassed along Israel's border with Lebanon, sparking fears of a possible ground invasion.
Addressing some of these IDF troops near the Lebanese border, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that "in order to ensure the return of Israel's northern communities, we will employ all of our capabilities, and this includes you."
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese have evacuated their homes due to cross-border fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah, which began attacking Israel with rockets, drones, and other weapons in solidarity with Gaza after the October 7 Hamas-led attack and Israel's massive retaliation.
When asked during a Monday press conference if he was "comfortable" with Israel invading Lebanon, U.S. President Joe Biden—whose administration has provided Israel with diplomatic cover and billions of dollars in weapons—said: "I'm comfortable with them stopping. We should have a cease-fire now."
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, 1982, and 2006, killing and wounding tens of thousands of civilians. Israeli forces occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said during a Sunday government meeting that Tehran must give a "decisive" response to Israel's assassination of Nasrallah.
"This crime once again proved that this criminal regime does not adhere to any of the international principles and rules," Pezeshkian said of Netanyahu's far-right government, according to Iranian media reports.
On Monday, Pezeshkian visited Hezbollah's Tehran office and signed a memorial guestbook honoring Nasrallah.
"The U.S. and supporters of the Zionist regime showed the world how human rights, human dignity, and international regulations are violated," he wrote.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular