Defusing a spiraling Middle East crisis
AS the war between Israel and Hamas approached its fifth month, the prospects of the conflict engulfing the entire Middle East have loomed bigger. Last week, the United States found itself being pulled deeper into the Mideast maelstrom after a drone strike on a US military base in Jordan killed three American soldiers and wounded scores more.
The Islamic Resistance, or IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), a militia group in Iraq aligned with Iran, has claimed it carried out the attack, but US President Joe Biden insists Iran must bear full responsibility for the loss of American lives, since it was “supplying the weapons to the people who did it.”
Tehran has denied having a hand in the drone strike, explaining that “resistance groups” like the IRGC “do not take commands [from Iran] in their decisions and actions about how to support Palestine.”
Biden, however, is now under pressure to order a retaliatory strike against the IGRC, and there were even calls for a direct attack on Iran. Last Tuesday, he announced he had decided on a response, but did not give details.
Whatever the response might be, Biden said he doesn’t think “we need a wider war in the Middle East. That’s not what I’m looking for.”
Tiered, multilevel approach
The US National Security Council said the US might adopt “a tiered approach…, not just a single action but potentially multiple actions.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken also sees a response that “could be multileveled, come in stages and be sustained over time.”
It’s left to Biden to calibrate a response that will deliver a stern warning that any hostile act against the US will not go unpunished, and at the same time reinforce its assurance that it will not be provoked into igniting a full-blown war in the region.
The Middle East has long been a tinderbox, with simmering political and religious animosities often boiling over into armed conflict. The deadly incursions by Hamas fighters into Israel’s border communities last October 7 has triggered a massive Israeli offensive that has left most of the Gaza Strip in ruins and more than 20,000 of its residents dead.
Gaza today is in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe, and its political future is unclear, as Israel vowed to end once and for all Hamas’ domination in the Palestinian enclave.
The intensity of Israel’s invasion of Gaza has sparked worldwide outrage, but even more importantly, it provided pro-Hamas groups in the region the rallying point to further their own agendas.
It was to affirm its “solidarity” with Hamas that the IGRC launched the drone strike on the US base in Jordan.
The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen also showed they are one with Hamas by attacking ships in the Red Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.
The Houthis consider American and British ships as prime targets, but they have attacked vessels from other countries as well.
On January 9 alone, the rebels launched drones and missiles at civilian merchant vessels in the Red Sea. The projectiles were shot down by a combined US and United Kingdom naval force before they could inflict any damage.
The attacks, however, have forced ships to take a long detour to avoid sailing to the Red Sea. At about this time last year, more than 400 vessels passed through the Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. It was down to 150 ships during the first two weeks of this year.
Because of the detour, the cost of shipping a container from Asia to Europe has tripled. Tankers which still venture into the Red Sea must pay higher insurance premiums for their crews. That’s significant, considering that 12 percent of world oil shipments pass through the Red Sea.
As Biden contemplates the appropriate response to the drone attack in Jordan, he must not lose sight of the bigger objective, which is working out a ceasefire in Gaza.
More than ever, he must persuade Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to order Israeli troops to stand down and allow humanitarian aid to pour into Gaza and the reconstruction efforts to begin.