Middle East at war: Those who have brought us to the brink
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“There’s always a cousin”
- Old Arabic Proverb
“This feels different” is a common refrain from those of us privileged enough to watch a brutal war unfold across the Middle East from the comfort and safety of our homes.
The snippets of news we voluntarily digest, whether on television or through our phones, have expanded now beyond the horrors in Gaza to include images of Beirut being lit up by midnight airstrikes in densely populated residential areas, deliberate in their timing to ensure maximum carnage, as emergency medical teams are hampered by darkness and chaos.
Videos, too, of thousands of Lebanese fleeing “the south,” itself a mythical manifestation in Western minds of an extremist, Islamic resistance, to a capital city in the North that is both unable and unwilling to cope with them.
Footage of Israeli soldiers preparing for and executing an invasion of South Lebanon is extra-jarring for Irish audiences, given there are 380 or so peacekeepers sheltering just miles from that imaginary border, rockets flying over their heads.
In Israel, too, this war has broken new ground, even if the consequences bear no comparison to those they routinely bomb.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said on Tuesday that it fired hundreds of missiles at Israel in response to deadly Israeli attacks against people in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as the assassinations of top IRGC, Hamas, and Hezbollah leaders.
It also stated the strikes, which sent thousands of Israelis into air shelters, were designed to inflict damage on military infrastructure, and not cause civilian casualties.
Israel reported that two people died following the barrage.
Meanwhile, the slaughter continues largely unreported in Gaza.
All of this feels different to us watching from afar, because it is.
Beirut has been struck before, but never with such brutal intensity, or so deep into the city.
Israel's Iron Dome air defence has been breached before, but never with such regularity.
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has invaded Lebanon before, but has never been as distracted and inexperienced as their infantry now are.
Gaza has been decimated daily for a year, but never has it been so far down the news cycle, relegated by a broader regional war that has potentially catastrophic global consequences.
Israel and Iran have squared up to each other before, but never have their noses touched.
Until now.
As we try and make sense of it all, we need to look at who are the players, the actors, the interlocutors, those who have both brought us to the brink and hold the keys to unlocking this deadly deadlock.
While many world leaders vow to “stand with Israel,” evoking some mythical moral code emanating from a guilty conscience following the Second World War, it is Israel's strategic importance as a so-called Western democracy in the Middle East that has long been most important.
A proxy state, bordering, as it does, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, while occupying East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and — up until October 2023 — suffocating the Gaza Strip.
Perched on the Mediterranean Sea, it is only one country away from Iran and Iraq to the east, Turkey to the North, Sudan to the South, and Libya to the West.
While the distance from Tel Aviv to Khartoum may be vast (about 3,000km), you don’t need to be a mid-east scholar to understand that Israel’s creation in 1948 had as much to do with how it could serve Western interests, as any connection to Abraham and the Holy Land.
So, when assessing Israel’s military capabilities, it’s important to understand that preserving — indeed, increasing — Israel’s regional military dominance is a fundamental tenet of the United States foreign policy.
Hence an annual injection of $3.8bn of military aid each year from Washington, a number that has multiplied exponentially in the last 12 months.
How strong is the IDF? Last October, the International Institute for Strategic Studies assessed Israel as having 169,500 active military personnel in the army, navy and paramilitary.
A further 465,000 constitute its reserve forces, while 8,000 form part of its paramilitary.
Much of this reserve has been activated since the IDF began its operations in Gaza last October.
Military service is mandatory for Israeli citizens over the age of 18 — once enlisted, men are expected to serve for 32 months and women for 24 months.
Many of these conscripts are Israeli citizens from “other” countries.
One consideration when assessing the potential outcomes of IDF’s invasion of South Lebanon is, compared to battle-hardened Hezbollah commandos who saw significant combat in Syria and Iraq in recent years, the standard IDF infantry soldier is college-age and middle-class.
So, while Israel boasts superior air support and military technology, the stomach for a guerilla war against a skilled enemy on foreign terrain may be crucially lacking.
Designed with the help of the US, the Iron Dome is a mobile anti-missile defence system built to intercept and destroy short-range rockets using radar technology.
It was developed after 2006, following the war with Hezbollah, where thousands of rockets were launched into Israel from Lebanon.
While Israel (and much Western media) lauded the Dome’s response to this week's barrage from Tehran, many experts have pointed to the system's failure in preventing long-range rockets from reaching their targets as exposing an embarrassing gap in Israel's air defence.
There wouldn’t be enough words available in a hundred supplements to adequately cover Lebanon’s origin story, but a good place to start would be to stop calling it "The Lebanon.”
The use of the prefix typically indicates ownership of that country by a colonising power.
The French, who occupied the country between 1920 and 1943, called Lebanon “Le Liban,” which may account for the use of the possessive.
“The Leb” is a commonly used term in Ireland because we have deployed thousands of peacekeepers to the south of the country for over 40 years, but, even then our knowledge of the country through that prism is largely confined to the area south of the Litani river, which is the equivalent of trying to understand Ireland by only looking at the six counties of Northern Ireland.
The crucial thing to understand about Lebanon today is this: Consecutive failures by its billionaire ruling class to form an effective government in the last 20 years have left the country in no state to withstand a war with anybody, let alone a neighbour backed by a global superpower.
Its military — the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) — is dreadfully ill-equipped to counter any Israeli offensive.
Its main sponsor is, of course, America, which has provided more than $5.5bn in foreign assistance to Lebanon since 2006, including $3bn in military aid.
Sounds like a lot of money until you clock the US gave Israel $8.7bn exactly one week ago.
Which leaves Hezbollah as Lebanon's only capable defence.
The Party of God was formed in response to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982.
Often simplistically described as an “Iranian backed militia,” the Shiite Muslim group contains multitudes, including a political party, a nationwide health and education service, and an army that has recently deployed to Syria and Iraq, to — amongst other things — fight Islamic State.
Israel's assassination of its leader Hasan Nasrallah has been hailed by many as a death blow to the party, but this simplistic analysis misses the point.
As the old proverb goes, there’s always a cousin, and, with martyrdom intrinsic to the party’s identity, the IDF will likely feel the wrath of a wounded animal should they reach towns like Bint Jbeil and Marjeyoun.
Meanwhile, Beirut under siege is a city again divided. It’s almost 20 years since the end of a brutal 15-year civil war.
As dysfunctional as the political dynamic has been, the social fabric of the city had mended to such a degree that the sectarian lines of east Beirut (French, orthodox, Christian) and west (Muslim, Palestinian) had blurred sufficiently for Beirut to reclaim some of its former majesties as a vibrantly inclusive if highly unpredictable metropolis.
With refugees pouring north now from the embattled south, and thousands of the city's citizens displaced by devastating Israeli airstrikes, old schisms have suddenly reappeared. The east is eerily clean and calm, the state security services ensuring it so.
The west, including Hamra and the Corniche, suddenly strewn with distressed, displaced families sleeping rough in cars and on park benches.
For them, they know no government will help them, as, if they are not gone already, they will soon be exiled to their townhouses in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district of Paris.
Most Lebanese accept the Party of God represents their only coherent defenders. Nobody else is coming to save them.
“Iran has not attacked another country in 300 years, Israel has attacked five countries in the past two months” — Ashok Kumar, associate professor, Birkbeck University
On January 3, 2020, Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian major general, was killed by an American drone strike in Baghdad while travelling to meet the Iraqi prime minister.
Regarded as the most powerful figure in Iran after its supreme leader, Soleimani’s death was hailed as a triumph by Washington.
Five months after his killing, a report by the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callamard, concluded that the US targeting of Soleimani was “unlawful.”
As state-on-state, extra-judicial killings go, it might well have provoked an unprecedented response from Iran towards America.
It didn’t, leading some to believe the Islamic Republic showed restraint, others — Americans — to guess they didn't have the ability.
Either way, the most significant foreign policy intervention of the Donald Trump administration went unavenged.
On April 1, this year, Israel conducted an airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, killing 16 people, including eight officers of IRGC and two Syrian civilians.
Iran retaliated soon after with missile and drone strikes in Israel, but there were no casualties.
In July, the political leader of Hamas Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, one can only assume, by Israel.
Still, almost 11 months into the siege of Gaza, Iran remained aloof.
Much of the analysis that followed Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah pointed to a party disjointed, and — with little direction or support coming from Tehran — potential Iranian indifference.
Nasrallah's death, followed by Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon has finally prompted a response, with Tehran promising “more to come” should Netanyahu follow through on his one inevitable promise to retaliate.
Whether Iran was biding its time or was simply reluctant to be drawn into this conflict no longer matters. They are firmly in it now.
A key reason Iran is viewed with such fear and contempt by Israel and the US is because of its curation of a network of militias in the Middle East known as the “axis of resistance.”
While Hezbollah is the most well-organised and autonomous, another Shia group, the Houthis in Yemen, have evolved from a relative rabble into a rebel alliance that has been the most consistent in hitting Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, striking both military targets on land and at sea.
That Saudi Arabia — a predominantly Sunni state, US ally and key player in Lebanese politics — has been at war with the Houthis for the last nine years, further complicates the pastiche of power players wrestling with each other across the region.
Over the past 30 years, the tiny Emirate has managed to become a major US ally, while keeping contact with — and even giving shelter to —
enemies of the West like the Taliban, Hamas, and Iran, as well as funding the Al-Jazeera Arabic TV network.
Its role in both being one of the Palestinian cause's biggest supporters and financial backers, while simultaneously contorting itself to align with American interests is one of the great displays of diplomatic dexterity in current geopolitics.
Qatar has become an indispensable mediator and peacemaker maintaining ties with all of the key players in the region, while crucially remaining one of the largest exporters of oil and gas worldwide.
The Al Udeid Air Base, located in the desert southwest of Doha, is the biggest US military installation in the Middle East and can house more than 10,000 American troops.
Meanwhile, in Qatar's capital, Hamas’s leadership, continues to operate with the Emir’s approval.
From 1991 until 2005, Syria enjoyed near total control over Lebanon’s domestic and foreign politics, taking advantage of a post-civil war power vacuum which allowed it to become the dominant actor within Lebanon and the main external party overseeing the transition from war to peace.
Its presence and influence in the country ended in violent humiliation after the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri in Beirut in 2005, an assassination Syria and Hezbollah would later be implicated in.
In recent times, Syria’s own civil war and subsequent battles with Islamic State have seen the power dynamic shift, president Bashar al-Assad indebted to the deceased Nasrallah and Hezbollah for the role they played in defeating Islamic State and anti-government rebels.
Al-Assad has been rather anonymous of late, his own disastrous war crippling the country with conservative death tolls put at 400,000 people, with more than half of the country’s population displaced at various points in the conflict.
So, yes, this feels different, because, from our privileged perch, it’s been a very long time since we’ve been so overwhelmed by possibilities, almost all of them bad.
Every passing day brings fresh despair, every chance of peace obliterated by a broken promise dropped in a 2,000lb bomb.
There are no more red lines, only blood-stained streets.
Which leaves us with one certainty: Whoever thinks they've won, they haven't. Because there’s always a cousin.