LONDON — Since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out nearly 100 days ago, U.S. President Joe Biden and his aides have struggled to contain the war out of fear that a regional escalation could quickly draw in U.S. forces.
With U.S.-led attacks on nearly 30 locations in Yemen on Thursday and a smaller attack on Friday, there is now no question whether a regional conflict will break out. It has already begun. The biggest questions now are the intensity of the conflict and whether it can be contained.
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This is exactly the result that no one wanted, probably including Iran.
“We are not interested in a war with Yemen. “We have no interest in a conflict of any kind,” John Kirby, a White House spokesman, said Friday. “In fact, the president has done everything he can to prevent the conflict from escalating, including the strikes last night.”
Biden's decision to launch airstrikes after resisting calls to take action against Yemen-based Houthi fighters, whose repeated attacks on shipping in the Red Sea have begun to hit global trade, is a clear shift in strategy. After issuing a series of warnings, officials said Biden felt his hand had been forced after a barrage of missile and drone attacks on an American cargo ship and surrounding Navy ships on Tuesday.
“This is already a regional war that is no longer limited to Gaza but has already spread to Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen,” said Hugh Lovatt, a Middle East expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He added that the US wanted to show that it was ready to deter Iranian provocations and had prominently positioned its aircraft carriers and fighter jets to respond quickly. But those same positions make the United States even more exposed.
Over the course of 12 weeks, attacks on Israeli, U.S. and Western interests emerged from Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, prompting modest, carefully targeted responses from U.S. and Israeli forces. The United States also sent warnings to Iran, which the United States says is acting as a loose coordinator.
What was remarkable about the retaliatory strikes in Yemen was their scale: Using fighter jets and sea-launched missiles, US and British forces, supported by a small number of other allies, attacked a large number of Houthi missile and drone sites.
Biden is walking a fine line between deterrence and escalation, and his advisers acknowledge that the calculation is not based on science. Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been cautious in supporting Hamas and limited their actions to prevent a major U.S. military response that could threaten Iran's exercise of power in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria .
But how much control Iran has over its proxies is questionable, and its leaders could also misinterpret U.S. and Israeli red lines.
The Houthis, a small Iran-backed tribe in Yemen, have been among the most aggressive to push to the border, trying to block international trade routes through the Red Sea and ignoring warnings from the U.S. and the West to stop.
Houthi officials say the sole aim of their attacks is to force Israel to end its military operation and allow aid to flow freely into Gaza.
Western diplomats said there had been a reluctance to strike back against the Houthis, partly to avoid lifting the ceasefire in Yemen's civil war and partly because of the difficulty of completely eliminating their threat. But the Houthis' repeated attacks on ships, their direct fire on U.S. helicopters and their attack on an American cargo ship on Tuesday left the United States with no real choice, officials said.
U.S. officials said the Pentagon launched a second round of attacks against the Houthis on Friday, bombing a radar facility in Yemen.
It is not known how long it will take the Houthis to recover and threaten ships in the Red Sea as they have promised. So far the response has been muted, with only a single anti-ship missile hurled harmlessly into the Red Sea, away from passing ships, a Pentagon official told reporters on Friday.
But greater U.S. military involvement also contributes to the perception around the world that the United States is acting even more directly on Israel's behalf, risking further damage to U.S. and Western reputations as the death toll increases rising in the Gaza Strip. Israel is now defending its behavior before an international court against accusations of genocide.
Iran uses proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis to distance itself from their actions and maintain its credibility in the region, seeking to avoid a direct attack that could endanger the Islamic Revolution and its nuclear program.
But Iran is also being dragged along by these same proxies.
“Iran is really pushing it,” said François Heisbourg, a French military analyst. “That's another reason why they don't want war now: They want their centrifuges to run peacefully.” The Iranians don't have a nuclear weapon, but could enrich enough uranium to weapons quality in a few weeks, from the current 60% to 90%, he said he. “You did 95% of the work.”
Israel is also increasing its attacks on Iran's proxies, particularly in Lebanon and Syria. Following the Hamas attack, Lebanon's Hezbollah launched a series of attacks from Lebanon, prompting Israel to evacuate citizens near the conflict.
After that, Israel's airstrikes killed 19 Hezbollah members in Syria in three months, more than double the number killed in the rest of 2023 combined, according to a count by the Portal news agency. More than 130 Hezbollah fighters were also killed by Israel in Lebanon during the same period.
Amine Hoteit, a retired Lebanese army general and analyst, listed several goals of Israel's strikes in Syria: to maintain attention there and to pressure the Syrian government to “cut off the Iranian supply route.”
US troops stationed in Iraq and Syria to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State group have been attacked by Iran-backed militias 130 times since October 17, according to a Pentagon tally on Thursday, totaling 53 attacks Iraq and 77 in Syria. The United States has retaliated less than 10 times, usually following U.S. casualties.
Each time, the United States has said its response is aimed at deterring further attacks and aimed at sending a message to Iran and its proxies, who operate freely in Iraq and Syria. However, no US troops were killed. The concern, U.S. officials say, is that sooner or later one of the attacks will kill troops and the response would then be much deadlier and could spiral out of control.
On Jan. 4, the U.S. military launched a rare retaliatory strike in Baghdad, killing a militia leader it blames for recent attacks on U.S. personnel. The Iraqi government condemned this move.
While the Iraqi government is now dominated by Iran-aligned parties, the U.S. presence has been largely tolerated out of fear that the Islamic State group could quickly regain ground without U.S. help.
But on Friday, Iraq's Foreign Ministry condemned the attacks on the Houthis in Yemen in a statement. “We believe that expanding the targets is not a solution to the problem, but rather will lead to an expansion of the scope of the war,” the statement said.
Although the focus is on Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah, the Houthi threat to trade has the potential for the greatest global impact, with about 30% of the world's container ships passing through the Red Sea. Volvo, Tesla and other automakers in Europe have already halted production for a few days or longer due to disruptions in the delivery of parts as ships sail around the Red Sea and Suez Canal.
The United States and more than a dozen other countries have formed a coalition to protect shipping: Operation Prosperity Guardian. But the Houthis have continued to try to attack ships, whether with Israeli ties or not, and Maersk decided to suspend all shipping in the Red Sea after an attack on one of its ships on December 31. The company has warned customers to expect significant disruption and analysts expect higher prices to increase global inflation.
In public speeches this week, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah reiterated that they do not want an expanded war. But Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism expert and research director at the Soufan Group, said Israel could not afford to be complacent because it had a serious misjudgment before Oct. 7 that Hamas was also not interested in war have.
The recent attacks, which hit at the heart of Iran's ties to Hezbollah and Hamas, have unsettled Iranians, who have described in chat rooms and social media that they were “slapped over and over again.”
Brig. According to Iranian media reports, General Seyed Razi Mousavi, who was killed in Damascus on Christmas, was responsible for two decades for procuring missiles, missiles and drones for Hezbollah in Lebanon and allied militia groups in Syria and Iraq. Khamenei performed the funeral prayer ritual over his body at his funeral, an honor reserved for the most revered subordinates.
Saleh Arouri, Hamas's deputy political chief, who was killed in a drone strike in the heart of Hezbollah's power base in Beirut's Dahieh district, was Hamas' closest member to Iran and Hezbollah and the person they trusted most, When it came to sensitive communications and arranging financing, technical know-how from Iran was at stake.
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