by ANDREW BACEVICH
Here We Go Again?
One way of understanding the ongoing bloodbath pitting Israel against Hamas is to see it as just the latest chapter in an existential struggle dating back to the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. While the appalling scope, destructiveness, and duration of the fighting in Gaza may outstrip previous episodes, this latest go-around serves chiefly to reaffirm the remarkable intractability of the underlying Arab-Israeli conflict.
Although the shape of that war has changed over time, certain constants remain. Neither side, for instance, seems capable of achieving its ultimate political goals through violence. And each side adamantly refuses to concede to the core demands of its adversary. In truth, while the actual fighting may ebb and flow, pause and resume, the Holy Land has become the site of what is effectively permanent conflict.
For several decades, the United States sought to keep its distance from that war by casting itself in the role of regional arbiter. While providing Israel with arms and diplomatic cover, successive administrations have simultaneously sought to position the U.S. as an “honest broker,” committed to advancing the larger cause of Middle Eastern peace and stability. Of course, a generous dose of cynicism has always informed this “peace process.”
On that score, however, the present moment has let the cat fully out of the bag. The Biden administration responded to the gruesome terrorist attack on October 7th by unequivocally endorsing and underwriting Israeli efforts to annihilate Hamas, with Gazans thereby subjected to a World War II-style obliteration bombing campaign. Meanwhile, ignoring tepid Biden administration protests, Israeli settlers continue to expel Palestinians from parts of the West Bank where they have lived for generations. If Hamas’s October assault was a tragedy, proponents of a Greater Israel also saw it as a unique opportunity that they’ve seized with alacrity. As for the peace process, already on life support, it now seems altogether defunct. Prospects of reviving it anytime soon appear remote.
More or less offstage, the fighting is having this ancillary effect: as Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) employ U.S.-provided weapons and munitions to turn Gaza into rubble, the “rules-based international order” touted by the Biden administration as the latest organizing principle of American statecraft has forfeited whatever slight credibility it might have possessed. Russia’s assault on Ukraine appears almost measured and humane by comparison.
As if to emphasize Washington’s own limited fealty to that rules-based order, President Biden’s immediate response to the events of October 7th focused on unilateral military action, bolstering U.S. naval and air forces in the Middle East while shoveling even more weapons to Israel. Ostensibly tasked with checking any further spread of violence, American forces in the region have instead been steadily edging toward becoming full-fledged combatants.
In recent weeks, U.S. forces have sustained dozens of casualty-producing attacks, primarily from rockets and armed drones. Attributing those attacks to “Iran-affiliated groups,” the U.S. has responded with air strikes targeting warehouses, training facilities, and command posts in Syria and Iraq.
According to a Pentagon spokesman, the overall purpose of American military action in the region is “to message very strongly to Iran and their affiliated groups to stop.” Thus far, the impact of such messaging has been ambiguous at best. Certainly, U.S. retaliatory efforts haven’t dissuaded Iran from pursuing its proxy war against American military outposts in the region. On the other hand, the scale of those Iran-supported attacks remains modest. Notably, no U.S. troops have been killed — yet.
For the moment at least, that fact may well be the administration’s operative definition of success. As long as no flag-draped coffins show up at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Joe Biden may find it perfectly tolerable for the U.S.-Iran subset of the Israel-Hamas war to simmer indefinitely on the back burner.
This pattern of tit-for-tat violence has received, at best, sporadic public attention. Where (if anywhere) it will lead remains uncertain. Even so, the U.S. is at risk of effectively opening up a new front in what used to be called the Global War on Terror. That war is now nearly dormant, or at least hidden from public view. The very real possibility of either side misinterpreting or willfully ignoring the other’s “messaging” could reignite it, with an expanded war that directly pits the U.S. against Iran making the Israel-Gaza war look like a petty squabble.
Then there are the potential domestic implications. No doubt President Biden’s political advisers are alive to the possibility of a major war affecting the outcome of the 2024 elections (and not necessarily to the incumbent’s benefit either). One can easily imagine Donald Trump seizing on even a handful of U.S. military fatalities in Middle East skirmishing as definitive proof of presidential ineptitude, akin to the bungled withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan, during Biden’s first year in office.
Two Wars Converge
Understanding the larger implications of these developments requires putting them in a broader context. In Gaza in the last two months, two protracted meta-conflicts that had unfolded on parallel tracks for decades have finally converged. That is likely to have profound implications for basic U.S. national security policy, even if few in Washington appear aware of the potential implications.
On the one track, dating from 1948 (although its preliminaries occurred decades earlier) is the Arab-Israeli conflict. Enshrined among Israelis as the War for Independence, for Arabs the events of 1948 are seen as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” Subsequent eruptions of violence have ensued from time to time, as Arab nations vented their anger at the Jewish state and Israel pursued opportunities to create a strategically more coherent and more economically viable, not to mention biblically endorsed, “Greater Israel.”
Initially intent on steering clear of the Arab-Israeli conflict — occasionally even denouncing Israeli misbehavior — American officials allowed themselves over time to be incrementally drawn into becoming Israel’s closest ally. Yet under the terms of the relationship as it evolved, the Israeli leaders insisted on retaining a large measure of strategic autonomy. Over Washington’s vociferous objections, for example, it acquired a robust nuclear arsenal. To guarantee their security, Israelis placed paramount emphasis on their own military capabilities, not those of the United States.
Meanwhile, on the other track, dating from the promulgation of President Jimmy Carter’s Carter Doctrine in 1980, U.S. forces have had their hands full in the region. With Israel exacerbating or fending off threats to its own security, successive American administrations undertook a series of new military commitments, interventions, and occupations across the Greater Middle East that had little or nothing to do with protecting Israel.
In the Persian Gulf, the Levant, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, the Pentagon dealt with problems of its own as those regions became venues for hosting American forces engaged in operations intended to protect, punish, or even “liberate.” Such military exertions and the presence of U.S. forces became commonplace throughout the Middle East — except in Israel. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Washington’s military actions reached their apotheosis when President George W. Bush embarked on a global campaign with the aim of eliminating evil.
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