The Biden-Harris administration and the media speak of fears of a ‘regional war.’ That war is already on. The question is how much worse it might get.
The Biden-Harris administration and the media speak of fears of a ‘regional war.’ That war is already on. The question is how much worse it might get.
A s we brace for wider war in the Middle East, Congress is on vacation, the president is non compos mentis, and Hezbollah is firing rockets at northern Israel — 30 of them early on Monday according to several reports.
The projectiles caused no casualties. As we’ll discuss, however, a major objective of Iran-sponsored Hezbollah’s cross-border attacks is, in effect, to contract the territory within national boundaries over which Israel is sovereign. A significant portion of the population in the north has been evacuated since October 7, when Hamas began the latest round of intense war. (Note: The exterminationist jihad against Israel started before the modern Jewish state’s 1948 establishment and never actually stops; the jihadists just take occasional strategic pauses — which progressive Western governments, whether out of cynicism or cluelessness, applaud as “triumphs of diplomacy.”) At the moment, Hamas is under a grinding siege by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. The IDF may eradicate Hamas as an effective fighting force in a few more weeks if the Biden-Harris administration stops impeding it. (Of course, eradicating Hamas would not end the sharia-supremacist threat to Israel.) Yet, marshaled on Lebanon’s southern border, Hezbollah has no difficulty launching attacks that serve jihadist objectives even if they don’t drive a surge in the casualty count (and are thus less likely to “escalate” the conflict, to borrow the Biden-Harris obsession).
Iran needs to save face after several humiliations inflicted by Israel but realizes, despite its bravado, that it would be badly damaged — very much including on its own territory — if fighting further intensifies. Tehran’s better strategy is a lower-thrum battle of attrition, with mainly proxy attacks against Israel that occasionally test but don’t surpass the level at which Israel would have to respond more decisively. Iran knows that to mount such a response, Israel would need to shake off the straitjacket imposed by a U.S. government controlled by the Democratic Party, whose base is increasingly hostile to Israel.
Both the Biden-Harris administration rhetoric and media reporting convey fear of a “regional war.” In reality, there is already a war and the fighting is already regional, stretching from Lebanon to Yemen. The pressing question is whether the war is about to get much worse and draw in other players, including American armed forces — beyond the few already in the region and under sporadic attack by Iranian proxies. (The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday afternoon that, hoping to deter Iran, the Defense Department has dispatched a second U.S. naval strike group to the Middle East, along with a guided-missile submarine.)
This is a good time, then, for a brief refresher on the jihadist proxies through which Iran is orchestrating the ongoing war against Israel.
Hamas, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, is Shiite Iran’s proxy. (In fundamentalist Islam, jihad against Israel and the West is a higher priority than the bloodletting that is otherwise ceaseless intra-ummah — that is, between the two principal branches of Islam.) The Houthis in Yemen, also known as Ansar Allah (“supporters of God”), are the more usual Shiite proxies of Iran (from Yemen’s Houthi tribe). They have (1) long waged a brutal civil war against Yemen’s Sunni regime, which is backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; (2) terrorized commercial shipping in the Red Sea; and now (3) jumped into Iran’s war against Israel.
More an arm than a proxy of Tehran, Hezbollah is the forward militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It is based in Lebanon — i.e., Hezbollah is poised on Israel’s northern border, with an estimated 50,000 fighters (about half of what Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has publicly boasted) and up to 150,000 Iranian-supplied missiles (many of them precision-guided, far superior to Hamas’s gimcrack arsenal).
The proxies are valuable assets to Iran. The media–Democratic complex speaks incessantly of evacuations in Gaza, even though Hamas, which instigated the fighting that Israel had no choice but to engage, has insinuated itself into a civilian population that must necessarily be moved to shield it from the fighting. Very little attention, though, is paid to evacuations in Israel. A tiny country, roughly the size of New Jersey, Israel is being shrunk by Iran, forced by the warring proxies to evacuate territory near Lebanon and Gaza.
Iran is content to fight this way — sporadic third-party jihadist operations that make parts of Israel uninhabitable and stoke popular unrest — while relying on the United States under a Democratic administration to warn Israel against robust responsive attacks that could break its enemies’ will. For Tehran, this is preferable to an all-out war with Israel, in which it would be severely damaged, something its reeling regime, deeply unpopular at home, can ill afford.
Israel is nevertheless finding ways to remind the mullahs that it can and will act with lethal decisiveness. In just the last two weeks, it has carried out and otherwise announced three stunning assassinations.
In Tehran itself, on August 1, Israeli intelligence eliminated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, reportedly by exploding a bomb secreted in an IRGC guest house. Haniyeh had been staying there while attending ceremonies celebrating the inauguration of Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s new president — which is to say, the puppet the mullahs and the IRGC allowed to be “democratically” elected. Iran needed a new president because the last one, Ebrahim Raisi — the despised “Butcher of Tehran,” who was touted as a potential replacement for the regime’s ailing, 85-year-old “supreme ruler,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in May in a helicopter crash. Raisi’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, also died in the crash, which is believed to have been the result of regime incompetence, not sabotage.
In Beirut, just hours before taking out Haniyeh, Israel had assassinated Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah commander and Nasrallah protégé handpicked to manage the jihadist organization’s advanced weapons. The operation against Shukr followed Hezbollah’s killing of a dozen Israeli children on a soccer field in the Golan Heights, in the Druze community of Majdal Shams. Hezbollah clearly intended a deadly attack but almost certainly at a different target — specifically, a nearby IDF base.
On the day after Haniyeh’s killing, Israel announced that, back on July 13, it had killed Mohammed Deif, a top Hamas commander, in Gaza. Amid the deaths of Haniyeh and Deif, Hamas announced last week that its new leader is Yahya Sinwar (also known as “Abu Ibrahim”), the barbaric jihadist who orchestrated the October 7 atrocities. Sinwar has been running Hamas’s operations in Gaza and is believed to be holed up in the extensive underground tunnel network — with dozens of hostages for leverage (likely including some of the at least five Americans still believed to be alive after being abducted by Hamas on October 7).
There is more to Israel’s response to Iran and its jihadist confederates than the neutralization with extreme prejudice of Shukr, Haniyeh, and Deif.
On July 19, the Houthis succeeded in striking Tel Aviv, killing one Israeli and wounding eight others. (See Noah Rothman’s post on what was believed to be a “car-sized Iranian turboprop drone” strike.) Israeli fighter jets responded just a day later — 1,100 miles from home and clearly based on good intelligence — with a series of strikes against military launch and storage targets in Hodeidah, a port stronghold from which Iran supplies the Houthis with weapons. (As Noah detailed, quoting U.S. Navy vice admiral Brad Cooper, after “ten years of being supplied by the Iranians,” the Houthis “are the first entity in the history of the world to use anti-ship ballistic missiles.” Having hit the supply, it would not be a big leap for Israel to hit the supplier.)
On April 1, Israel struck a compound in Syria that Tehran had insisted was a diplomatic complex. The operation killed three senior IRGC commanders and four other officers who were directing Iran’s covert operations throughout the Middle East. The mullahs beat their chests promising a devastating revenge attack. In the event, they lobbed 300 missiles at Israel, a bare fraction of their arsenal — an attack notable both for being launched from Iranian territory (rather than by the usual proxies) and for being ineffectual, with CIA director William Burns labeling it “a spectacular failure,” in which nearly all projectiles failed to hit Israel. Still, mainly to show that it could, Israel responded with what appears to have been a sophisticated air strike on a key military installation in Isfahan — hitting not only a province in the heart of Iran but one the regime believed it had fortified with Russian-made air-defense batteries (Putin’s vaunted S-300 system).
Successful Israeli operations in Iran, which communicate to Khamenei and his cohort that they and their territory are vulnerable, are nothing new. In early 2018, for example, just 20 miles from Tehran, Israeli intelligence operatives managed to break into secured storage facilities and loot Iran’s nuclear archives. The mission was kept quiet for a few months, until the Israeli government revealed it.
For global consumption, these revelations illustrated that Iran, despite credulous insistence to the contrary by the Obama-Biden administration and American intelligence assessments, had for years assiduously pursued nuclear-weapons development and was close to achieving success. But the message to the mullahs was also stark: Israel has penetrated the regime, including the IRGC, and is fully capable of carrying out daring operations in and around Tehran itself. That same message has been conveyed by Israel’s assassination of a number of Iranian nuclear scientists over the years, including the 2020 killing of top IRGC scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, regarded as “the father of Iran’s nuclear program.”
Iran does not know how thoroughly Israel has mapped the regime’s capabilities and pre-targeted its principal leaders, operatives, and assets. The mullahs would be edified the hard way if they triggered an all-out war. That’s why they refrain from doing so. With the advantage of an accommodating American government, they can afford to play the long game.
With its territory being effectively contracted, Israel can’t afford to abide that game much longer.