How wide will this Mideast regional war get?
LONDON — From the outbreak of the IsraelHamas war nearly 100 days ago, President Biden and his aides have struggled to keep the war contained, fearful that a regional escalation could quickly draw in US forces.
Now, with the US-led strikes on nearly 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday, as well as smaller strikes Friday and early Saturday, there is no longer a question of whether there will be a regional conflict. It has already begun. The biggest questions now are the conflict’s intensity and whether it can be contained.
This is the outcome no one wanted, presumably including Iran.
“We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind,” John Kirby, a White House spokesperson, said Friday. “In fact everything the president has been doing has been trying to prevent any escalation of conflict, including the strikes last night.”
Biden’s decision to unleash air strikes, after resisting calls to act against the Yemen-based Houthi militants whose repeated attacks on shipping in the Red Sea were beginning to take a toll on global commerce, is a clear shift in strategy. After issuing a series of warnings, officials said, Biden felt his hand was forced after missile and drone attacks Tuesday were directed at an American cargo ship and the Navy vessels around it.
“This is already a regional war, no longer limited to Gaza, but already spread to Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen,” said Hugh Lovatt, a Mideast expert for the European Council on Foreign Relations. The United States, he added, wanted to demonstrate that it was ready to deter Iranian provocations, so it conspicuously placed its aircraft carriers and fighters in position to respond quickly. But those same positions leave the United States more exposed.
Over the course of 12 weeks, attacks on Israeli, US, and Western interests have come from Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, prompting modest, carefully targeted responses from US and Israeli forces. The United States also issued warnings to Iran, which it says is acting as a loose coordinator.
What was notable about the retaliatory strikes in Yemen was their breadth: Employing fighter jets and sea launched missiles, US and British forces, backed up by a small number of other allies, hit a wide number of Houthi missile and drone sites.
Biden is walking the fine line between deterrence and escalation, and his aides concede there is no science to the calculation. Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been careful in their support for Hamas, keeping their actions within limits, to prevent a larger US military response that could threaten Iran’s exercise of power in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria.
But how much control Iran has over its proxies is in question, and its leaders may also be misreading US and Israeli red lines.
The Houthis, a small Iranian-backed tribe in Yemen, have been among the most aggressive in pushing the envelope, trying to block international trading routes through the Red Sea and ignoring US and Western warnings to desist.
Houthi officials say the sole goal of their attacks is to force Israel to halt its military campaign and allow the free flow of aid into Gaza.
Western diplomats said there had been reluctance to strike back at the Houthis, in part to avoid upending a truce in the Yemeni civil war, and in part because of the difficulty of eliminating their threat entirely. But the Houthis’ repeated attacks on ships, their direct fire on US helicopters and their attack Tuesday on an American cargo vessel left the United States with what officials said was no real choice.
US officials said the Pentagon carried out a second round of strikes Friday against the Houthis, bombing a radar facility in Yemen.
It is not known how long it will take the Houthis to recover and threaten ships in the Red Sea again, as they have vowed. So far, the response has been muted, with just a single antiship missile lobbed harmlessly into the Red Sea, far from any passing vessel, a Pentagon official told reporters earlier Friday.
But deeper US military involvement also adds to the perception in the larger world that the United States is acting even more directly on behalf of Israel, risking further damage to US and Western standing as the death toll rises in the Gaza Strip. Israel now is defending its conduct against the charge of genocide in an international court.
Iran is using proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis while distancing itself from their actions and attempting to avoid a direct attack, which could imperil the Islamic Revolution and its nuclear program.
“Iran is really pushing it,” said François Heisbourg, a French military analyst. “It’s another reason they don’t want a war now: They want their centrifuges to run peacefully.” The Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon, but could enrich enough uranium to weapons grade in a few weeks, from the current 60 percent enrichment to 90 percent, he said. “They’ve done 95 percent of the work.”
Israel also is ratcheting up its attacks on Iran’s proxies, especially in Lebanon and Syria. After the attack by Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon began a series of strikes from Lebanon, leading Israel to evacuate citizens near the conflict.
US troops deployed to Iraq and Syria to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State group have come under attack from Iran-backed militias 130 times since Oct. 17, according to the Pentagon’s tally Thursday, totaling 53 attacks in Iraq and 77 in Syria. The United States has retaliated on fewer than 10 occasions, usually after US injuries.
Each time, the United States has said its response is meant to deter further attacks and is aimed at sending a message to Iran and its proxies, who operate freely in Iraq and Syria. But no US troops have been killed. The worry, according to US officials, is that sooner or later, one of the attacks will kill troops, and then the response would be much more deadly and could spiral out of control.
‘This is already a regional war, no longer limited to Gaza.’
HUGH LOVATT, Mideast expert for the European Council on Foreign Relations