Since Friday, the US military has launched dozens of airstrikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Joe Biden’s administration portrayed the wave of attacks as a response to a drone strike that killed three US troops at a military base in Jordan on 28 January, and to ongoing attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthi militia. “If you harm an American, we will respond,” the US president said on Friday, adding that there will more retaliation to come.
Biden, the president who withdrew the last US troops and ended America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, could now become the same leader who started a new regional war in the Middle East that entangles the US in a conflict with Iran and its allied militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
For now, the fallout from US reprisals seems to be contained, especially since Biden did not order the Pentagon to strike targets inside Iran. But Biden has promised more US attacks on Iranian-backed Shia militias operating in Iraq and Syria, including on bases where members of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards train and advise the militias.
And that’s where the US military and Iran’s allies are caught in a loop of tit-for-tat escalation: attacks on US bases in the region, or shipping vessels in the Red Sea, lead the Pentagon to hit back, risking new reprisals that could spiral out of control. The US keeps hoping that its overwhelming military power will create a “deterrent” and stop the militias from carrying out new attacks.
Despite Biden’s insistence as a presidential candidate and in his first year in office that he wanted to end the “forever wars” that the US unleashed after 9/11, the president is once again hoping to bomb his way out of a problem in the Middle East.
The cognitive dissonance of unleashing more bombing to achieve stability is even more stark because Biden and his top aides have insisted that their highest priority since the brutal 7 October attacks by Hamas militants inside Israel has been to prevent Israel’s devastating invasion of Gaza from spreading into a regional conflict.
Yet Biden has dodged the most straightforward path to avoid the escalation he rightly fears: for the US to withhold military assistance to Israel so that it accepts an immediate ceasefire and ends its war on Gaza. That would be the most effective way to de-escalate the conflict on all fronts.
For its part, Iran has used the so-called “axis of resistance”, a network of regional militias funded and supported by the Revolutionary Guards, to strike at Israeli and US targets across the region in an attempt to increase pressure on Israel and Washington to stop the Gaza war. The alliance includes Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, the powerful Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and several Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.
Since October, these militias launched more than 150 attacks against US troops stationed in Iraq and Syria; remarkably, there were no US casualties until the 28 January drone strike on the US base in Jordan, which led to the most recent escalation. The Houthis, meanwhile, started firing missiles and drones at shipping vessels sailing through the Red Sea, prompting the US and Britain to launch a series of air and missile strikes against dozens of targets in Yemen last month.
All of Iran’s allies have said they would stop their attacks once Israel ends its bombardment of Gaza. In late November, when Israel and Hamas agreed to a week-long truce to exchange some of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoner, the militia attacks on US forces and on shipping in the Red Sea largely stopped.
Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 unleashed regional chaos and allowed Iran to increase its influence in Baghdad and elsewhere, Tehran has worked to enhance its power by funding, training and arming militias across the Middle East. But the Iranian regime, led by its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, does not want to confront the US directly, fearing devastating reprisals.
While Tehran is supporting some of the recent attacks by its allies, even US intelligence officials acknowledge that Iran does not have full control over the various militias in its alliance. The Houthis and other militias have their own agendas, and they have basked in the attention they’re receiving for standing up against Israel and the US to defend the Palestinian cause.
Iran has made clear that it does not want to escalate the conflict and will avoid responding to US strikes on its allies unless Washington directly attacks Iranian territory. But the spiral of attacks and counterattacks still carries a risk of miscalculation, especially since Biden has a clear way out of this vicious cycle: forcing Israel to end the Gaza war.
Biden has significant leverage over the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is trying to prolong and expand the conflict to avoid an investigation into whether his government could have prevented the Hamas attacks and a series of personal corruption charges that have dragged through the Israeli courts for years.
Without a huge airlift of US weapons since October, Israel would run out of bombs to drop on Gaza. But Biden has refused to use that leverage to force Netanyahu’s government to accept a ceasefire. In fact, the Biden administration has gone out of its way to hide the extent of US arms shipments and other recent military aid to Israel – unlike the detailed breakdowns that Washington has provided of its billions of dollars in weapons shipments to Ukraine.
Successive Democratic and Republican administrations have provided Israel with more than $130bn in military assistance since the Israeli state was founded in 1948. After the October attacks, Biden rushed to request that Congress approve $14.3bn in new weapons for Israel. While that package still hasn’t been approved by US legislators, the Biden administration has bypassed congressional review to quickly replenish Israeli stockpiles. In December, the US twice invoked emergency provisions to ship tens of thousands of artillery shells and other munitions to Israel.
Recent reports in the Israeli press make clear that because of a global shortage of ammunition that started with the Ukraine war, Israel would not be able to sustain its bombardment of Gaza without the US resupplying the Israeli military. In fact, Israeli officials in December said they had to reduce the frequency of air attacks on Gaza to “manage the economy of armaments” to sustain a protracted war. According to Israeli sources, the US has delivered more than 25,000 tons of weapons through 40 ships and 280 aircraft landings since October.
The ammunition shortage has so deeply alarmed Netanyahu that he is pushing Israel’s homegrown defense industry to dramatically ramp up its production of weapons, especially bombs and other ordnance. “Israel is preparing the defense industries to disconnect from dependency on the rest of the world,” the prime minister said last month, in comments that were barely noticed outside Israel.
In the meantime, Biden has the power to restrain Israel – he has simply refused to use it. Biden is also aware of the responsibility that comes with providing an ally like Israel with a virtually unlimited pipeline of weapons to continue its war. On 30 January, reporters at the White House asked Biden whether he holds Iran responsible for the killing of three US soldiers in Jordan. “I do hold them responsible in the sense that they’re supplying the weapons to the people who did it,” Biden said.
It was a remarkable admission by the US president, and it poses a basic follow-up question: does Biden think the same about the more than 27,000 deaths in Gaza enabled by a steady supply of US weapons he has provided to Israel?
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University
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