Middle East War
Updated 2024-02-26
2024-02-07 PATRICK LAWRENCE: Lost & Fearful in The Middle East Of all the amateurish moments to arise as the Biden regime conducts its foreign policy, the White House’s official statement as B1–B bombers let loose over Iraq and Syria last Friday may be the taker of the cake. As the ordnance fell on 85 targets in seven locations, many of them outposts of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, our addled president felt compelled to insist, “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.” How many times have we heard this since these latest operations in Iraq, Syria and Yemen began? Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, has said the same thing in the same words. Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, has, too. So has Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser. So has John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman.
Once we are finished counting, we can consider the astounding stupidity that has led the Biden regime into this impossible contradiction. Reflecting the president’s compulsive support for Israel over the whole of his political life, the U.S. has incautiously stayed with the Zionist state as it seeks to widen the war all the way to Iran by way of Lebanon and Syria. Now, as the war runs straight up to the Islamic Republic’s borders, Biden and his people take to insisting they do not want that wider war the Israelis are bent on provoking. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/07/patrick-lawrence-lost-fearful-in-the-middle-east/
2024-01-31 America Has Stumbled Into an Avoidable Middle East War Despite plenty of warnings, the United States has stumbled into a worst-case scenario: an incredibly dangerous, expanding regional Middle East war with the United States fighting on multiple fronts. And it was all entirely avoidable.
On Sunday, Iraqi factions from the Iran-allied Axis of Resistance killed three Americans at a base in Jordan. Miraculously, until the attack on the military installation on the Jordan-Syria border known as Tower 22, no Americans had died in more than 150 strikes on American bases in the region since October 7. Axis of Resistance forces have vowed to continue attacking American targets, and global shipping through the Red Sea, until the war in Gaza comes to an end.
Without a swift course correction, the president who ended the war in Afghanistan might go down in history as the same president who started a new, unwinnable regional war that mires the United States in asymmetric conflict from Iran to the Suez Canal, from the Red Sea to the Turkish border. https://prospect.org/world/2024-01-31-avoidable-middle-east-war/
2023-12-11 Israel’s Strategic Calamity Its brutal war on Gaza is turning it into a pariah state and risking regional war. A more nebulous yet still serious risk is that Israel’s unending civilian massacre will alienate its allies, above all the U.S. Now, the power of the Israel lobby can be seen in the yawning gap between, on the one hand, Congress and the Biden administration, which have backed Israel almost in lockstep, and on the other the American people, who favor a permanent cease-fire by a 2-to-1 margin.
The biggest immediate risk is that the war will spiral into a regional conflict. Tensions have been escalating along the border with Lebanon for weeks now, and American officials tell Akbar Shahid Ahmed at HuffPost that Israel is considering using U.S. aid for attacks in Lebanon. “There is a will on the Israeli side to take advantage of the current rise in tensions to change the realities on the ground … to push Hezbollah far from the Israeli border,” a European diplomat said. Fighting against Iran-backed militias has long since spread to Syria, and massive protests have put major pressure on the Jordanian government to cut its relatively close ties to Israel. (Some Israeli extremists call for a “Greater Israel” including most of Jordan, by the way.) Egypt has forcefully criticized the Gaza war, and categorically refused to accept large numbers of refugees.
So Israel could see itself bogged down in street-to-street fighting against Hamas in Gaza, a shooting war with Hezbollah (which is far more formidable) in Lebanon and Syria, while greatly damaging its relationships with its other neighbors, all at the same time. https://prospect.org/world/2023-12-11-israels-strategic-calamity/
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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