If Israel is no longer at war, Netanyahu will lose power and his trials for fraud and corruption will continue. I’m not a political analyst but hmmmm….
Yes.
Great article, these two paragraphs sum up the strategy nicely:
Rather, the attack was part of an effort to escalate Israel’s way out of a situation in which its declared objective of “destroying Hamas” is out of reach, the worldwide isolation of Israel because of its actions in Gaza is becoming undeniable, and even its habitually automatic U.S. backing has patently softened. For Netanyahu personally, escalating and expanding the war, insofar as this also means continuing it indefinitely, is also his only apparent hope for staving off his political and legal difficulties.
Escalation as an intended way for Israel to work its way out of the Gaza dead end has two elements. The main one is to provoke Iran to hit back, which can enable Israel to present itself as defending rather than offending and to push debate away from the destruction it is wreaking on Gaza and toward the need to protect itself against foreign enemies. The other element is to increase the chance of the United States getting directly involved in conflict with Iran. If it does, war in the Middle East would be seen as not just a matter of Israel bashing Palestinians but instead would involve equities of Israel’s superpower patron.
I think it’s a really bad miscalculation on the part of Israel to want US direct involvement in the area. That means eyes, western reporters that can’t be fragged so easily.
You’re right there would be even greater scrutiny, but I think it would mostly mean “embedded” journalists spouting propaganda.
excellent article - thank you.
As the article states, a war with Iran would not be good for anyone but it would be worse for Iran than for the USA. If the USA and Iran were purely rational agents, the USA would push back against Iranian influence and Iran would back down - its options would be to lose without a fight or to lose even more if it fought a war.
Of course in the real world rulers are often irrational, or more concerned about domestic affairs than foreign ones. (Maybe it’s better to rule an Iran battered by war than to be overthrown in an Iran that passively accepts containment.) Even rational rulers can miscalculate or underestimate their enemies.
Still, I think much of Iran’s recent success in growing its influence is due to a lack of political will in the USA for any sort of foreign intervention after Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than to a deliberate decision that allowing Iran to expand its influence is in America’s best interests.
In a completely rational world, the USA wouldn’t care about Israel nearly as much either, and would be willing to have the same sort of relationship with Iran as all the other Middle Eastern theocracies. Of course, they have their own domestic concerns that drive them, namely local Christian theocratic factions, and a desire to not change course on any given autocracy even when the original reason for a policy is long gone.
In a rational world we would stop war entirely and use our heads not our fists.
Sounds more painful. Helmets allowed?
Pretty much. There’s no particular reason to have competing sovereign countries in the first place, going by any reasonable system of ethics I can think of.
Edit: To be clear, in OP I was assuming the “realist” picture where states have free will like actual human people and work tirelessly towards national self-interest. Obviously, that’s not the world we live in.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, although I think Iran has a lot more ambition to expand its sphere of influence than the other Middle Eastern theocracies do and this would naturally bring it into conflict with the USA even if there wasn’t a historic enmity between the two countries. (Consider Russia as an example of a country that the USA had no particular hostility towards, despite the Cold War, but now actively opposes due to its ambitions.)
