Artículo World Politics Review, 04.10.2024 Paul Poast, profesor de ciencia política (U. de Chicago) e investigador (Chicago Council on Global Affairs)
This week, Iran launched a barrage of almost 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, in response to a series of assassinations carried out by Israel against Iranian military leaders and senior members of the Iran-backed groups Hamas and Hezbollah. The attack came days after a massive Israeli airstrike killed Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah in Beirut and the same week that Israel began a limited ground invasion of southern Lebanon.
Following the missile attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that “Iran made a big mistake tonight,” while promising that the Islamic Republic “will pay.” An array of U.S. elected officials and policymakers expressed their support for Israel. Sen. Lindsey Graham called on the administration of President Joe Biden to coordinate “an overwhelming response with Israel.” For his part, Biden asserted that the U.S. is “fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel.” While Israel has not yet taken action, its response is imminent, and many anticipate that it will show less restraint than it did back in April, when the two sides also traded tit-for-tat missile and air strikes.
I wrote back in mid-August that there was a declining risk of the war in Gaza expanding into a regional conflict. I stood by that assessment following subsequent rocket exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah back in late August. But in light of this week’s events, my argument needs to be reconsidered.
While I was wrong in thinking that the war in Gaza would not widen, the logic underlying my original claim is still relevant. After all, I argued that wars do not widen by accident, but rather because one or more of the belligerent parties actually wants a wider war and is therefore willing to take the risks that come with broadening it. That does indeed seem to be the case, as it appears that Netanyahu’s government was keen to enter a war, not just with Hamas, Hezbollah or any of the array of nonstate actors supported by Iran, but with Iran itself. In other words, the fact that the war is broadening to include Iran isn’t an accident. It was always about Iran.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. For years, Netanyahu has repeatedly singled out Iran as an existential threat to Israel and characterized an Iranian nuclear program as unacceptable. Even if there are reasons to question the view that an “Iranian Bomb” truly poses such an existential threat to Israel, it is clear that Netanyahu and his backers hold that view. Moreover, so long as Iran is able to support them, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah will continue to pose a threat to Israel. The only way for Israel to be secure is to stop not only Iran’s proxies, but Iran itself.
So, it appears that a confrontation with Iran is what Netanyahu always wanted, and he seems to be intent on getting it now. The operation in Gaza was only part of a broader conflict that ultimately aimed at Iran. In this respect, it is notable that in his speech before a joint session of Congress in July, Netanyahu opened not by talking about the war in Gaza, but about the threat posed by Iran: “We meet today at a crossroads of history. Our world is in upheaval. In the Middle East, Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends.” And in his speech before the United Nations late last month, delivered even as Israeli bombers were carrying out the mission that killed Nasrallah, Netanyahu went further, warning Iran, “If you strike us, we will strike you.” He then added,
“There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach, and that’s true of the entire Middle East.”
One can see the Iran-centric focus of Israel’s military operations by tracing how we arrived at his point. In not preventing the attacks by Hamas against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Netanyahu failed at what he has long portrayed as his key priority and even his political raison d’être: keeping Israelis safe in a hostile region. The shock of Oct. 7 induced Netanyahu’s government to launch a punishing air and ground campaign against the whole of Gaza, Hamas’ territorial base. That campaign has now killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and rendered Gaza unlivable, but it was never likely to actually eliminate Hamas.
For Netanyahu, the destruction of Gaza was a demonstration to Tehran of Israel’s willingness to utilize massive military force to punish the Palestinians, as a way of warning Iran’s leaders what lay in store for them.
Netanyahu’s government could have instead pursued an operation focused solely on the task of gaining the release of the hostages Hamas took during the Oct. 7 attack. That could have involved a mixture of limited but targeted strikes, covert operations, economic coercion and back-channel diplomacy. But the problem with that approach, from the perspective of Netanyahu’s government, is that it would not have addressed what it sees as the larger issue: Iran’s support for Hamas. The destruction of Gaza was a demonstration to Tehran of Israel’s willingness to utilize massive military force to punish the Palestinians, as a way of warning Iran’s leaders what lay in store for them.
Interestingly, Israel has used focused, limited operations in its post-Oct. 7 war effort, just not in Gaza and not against Hamas. In April, Israeli forces struck the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, killing several Iranian military officials. It was apparently an attempt to induce Iran to restrain rocket attacks by Hezbollah, but it led Iran to retaliate. Iran’s subsequent drone and missile barrage was largely intercepted by Israel’s countermeasures, including its advanced missile defense system.
After the success of that operation, Netanyahu’s government could have decided it was in a position of having restored deterrence against Iran. But it seems to have taken the opposite lesson, that it now had the opportunity and ability to go further in resolving its security dilemma, this time by targeting the personnel of Hezbollah. The subsequent operation was at first targeted against individual Hezbollah leaders, then more widely against Hamas fighters using a sophisticated simultaneous—and legally questionable—detonation of the pagers used by members of the group. It then chose to follow up that successful operation by assassinating Nasrallah and launching an invasion into southern Lebanon.
Opening up a second front against yet another Iran-backed group seems to have been the last straw for Iran itself, as evidenced by the Iranian missile attack this week. If the goal was to goad Iran into a war, it seems the mission was accomplished.
That Israel would attack other targets besides Iran to address what it sees as the “Iran problem” is not unprecedented. That is in many ways why the administration of then-U.S. President George W. Bush authorized the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. While Saddam Hussein was a problem for U.S. allies in the region, a key reason to escalate U.S. policy from containment to an invasion was to single Iraq out as a demonstration of what the U.S. would do to other states, like Iran, that sought WMDs. The war in Afghanistan, which was still ongoing at the time, was inadequate as a demonstration of U.S. military power. The Taliban were a “rogue regime,” but had not sought WMD. An Iraq already weakened by years of sanctions imposed because it had sought WMD was deemed a more appropriate target. It was a war of demonstration and a war of choice.
Israel sought a similar war of demonstration and choice in Gaza. It sought to both neutralize Hamas and send a larger message intended to deter Iran and its proxies, or, if deterrence failed, set up the war that Netanyahu had long sought. It seems that Netanyahu has finally been able to achieve that goal.
