As the Israeli security cabinet authorises air strikes on Iran, Israel’s war aims are broadening and include the risk of a regional war against Iran in order to radically reshape the political landscape of the Middle East in Israel’s favour.

This ambitious, even fantastical, goal is fraught with danger for the region and the world. Israel cannot achieve it without the full and undisguised backing of the US. Despite President Joe Biden’s claim that he has fruitlessly urged a ceasefire on Benjamin Netanyahu, he has subsequently always endorsed every Israeli escalation. It is reasonable for Israel to conclude that it can attack Iran with impunity, since, if anything goes wrong, it will have the backing of the US armed forces.

Historians may one day reach a conclusion about how far the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog, taking advantage of Biden’s feebleness to lure the US into another reckless military adventure in the Middle East.

It is too easy to blame America’s feckless and ineffectual diplomacy on Biden’s cognitive decline over the past three years. But, if it is not Biden, it is unclear who are the real decision-makers in the White House and the upper reaches of the administration.

Judging the White House by its actions rather than its words, it sees a geopolitical advantage in defeating Iran – an ally of Russia and China, albeit a distant one – and its allies.

Wishful thinking probably plays a role. Israel has been far more successful in killing Hezbollah leaders and mid-level commanders than had been expected, so might not an aggressive attack on Iran and its “Axis of Resistance” produce similar victories?

It is an alluring prospect, although US military interventions – from Somalia in 1992/93 to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 – failed in large measure because of hubris and underestimating the enemy.

Uniquely dangerous

Israel’s track record is somewhat similar when it comes to arrogantly overplaying its hand in the West Bank after defeating Egypt and Syria in 1967, and invading Lebanon in 1982. Yet decades later the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are still fighting in both places.

These historic analogies are often cited by Western commentators as ominous warnings about what can go dreadfully wrong for the US and Israel when they rely solely on force. Yet, the comparisons are a little misleading as the political landscape, both in Israeli domestic politics and the region as a whole, has been transformed in the past 20 years. It is these changes that make the present crisis far more dangerous than its predecessors.

The Israeli government formed by Netanyahu after winning the general election in November 2021 was immediately recognised as being the most fanatically right-wing and ultra-nationalist in Israel’s history.

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To give but one example, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the Jewish Power party, became the national security minister – a newly created post placing him in charge of the national police force. A religious settler from Kiryat Arba, close to the West Bank city of Hebron, he had been convicted in the past on charges of inciting racism and supporting terror. He threatened Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on live television, and had hanging in his home a photograph of Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians as they prayed in the mosque in Hebron in 1994.

Given the ideological make-up of the Israeli cabinet, it is scarcely surprising that Israel’s objectives in Gaza and the West Bank seem now to have expanded to include ending all normal life for the five million Palestinians who live there. An air strike on a school in central Gaza on Thursday killed 28 people, many of whom Unicef says were women and children lining up for malnutrition treatment.

The IDF justified the strike by claiming that the school housed a Hamas command post. Even supposing this to be true, in its bid to justify itself, the IDF is making a confession that Hamas is present everywhere in Gaza a year after the Israeli invasion.

Israel contends that the figure of 42,000 dead in Gaza is exaggerated by the Palestinian health ministry, but precisely the same pattern of air strikes conducted regardless of civilian casualties is taking place in Lebanon. A strike on Beirut, on the same day as the one in Gaza, killed 22 people including three children from a family of eight, who had fled from south Lebanon.

The new elite

What makes the present crisis doubly dangerous is that it is not just that Israel has an ethno-nationalist political leadership. A parallel development has taken place among the elite leadership of the Israeli state – civil service, police, judiciary and, increasingly, the IDF – who are drawn from the fundamentalist and messianic wing of Israeli society.

This new elite is less sophisticated than its predecessors (though these, too, were often hardline), more prone to seeing Israel’s enemies as both demonic and threatening, yet vulnerable when confronted with the unrelenting use of force.

The course of the war so far in Lebanon would tend to confirm this and there are other powerful arguments on their side. The US is giving Israel carte blanche in an unprecedented way and is unlikely to resist an aggressive Israeli strategy towards Iran.

Looming threats

Arab nation states once hostile to Israel, including Syria, Iraq, Libya and Sudan, have all gravely weakened by civil wars in the past 20 years. Arab leaders are mute or ineffective about Gaza and Lebanon. Iran is more isolated than it has been since the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988.

Yet the vulnerability of Iran and its allies may be a little deceptive. A band of Shia Muslim-dominated states stretching across the north of the Middle East – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – are not going to disappear.

Israel and the US might try to stir up religious and ethnic conflicts in countries such as Lebanon, which witnessed a murderous sectarian civil war between 1975 and 1990. Already there are reports of Shia Muslims in flight from Israeli bombing being regarded with hostility when they seek refuge in non-Shia areas.

As for Iran, it may conclude that it cannot deter Israel, which is prepared to risk a regional war, but that it might do better to broaden the conflict by attacks on the oil trade, US allies or US bases. Its aim would be to force the US to restrain Israel – the claim by Washington that it cannot do this is universally disbelieved in the Middle East.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to see how a regional war can be prevented – and even more difficult to see how it can be brought to an end.

Further thoughts

“If you choose to stay… you are going to die,” said Tampa mayor, Jane Castor ahead of Hurricane Milton.
At least 16 people have sadly died, and many have needed to be rescued. But the great Tampa Bay storm surge never happened, and Hurricane Milton was not the apocalypse predicted by US politicians and the media.

Potentially catastrophic weather brings out the worst in politicians and news outlets. It provides both with an irresistible temptation to grandstand before a mass audience. President Joe Biden spoke of the worst storm in a hundred years and denouncing Donald Trump for telling lies about it. Small town politicians will briefly command an audience from coast to coast for perhaps the only time in their lives. They likely believe what they are saying, caught up in the hysteria of the moment.

The news business loves big weather disaster stories because they provide melodrama and mass appeal. Storms provide dramatic pictures with rain-soaked correspondents telling of the terrible things racing towards them just over the horizon. And if the disaster fails to live up to their dire warnings, nobody ever lost their job for saying what might have happened – even if their tone of voice at the time suggested that fate was knocking at the door.

My cynicism about weather disasters stems from my experience of reporting them when based in the US as a correspondent. Once, when the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were in flood, I visited a small town that was supposedly in danger of being engulfed by the rising waters. When I got there, I found just a single wooden cabin tipping picturesquely into the flood, its destruction guaranteed by the number of heavily built television crews who had crowded onto its veranda, to get a better shot.

In 1992, I reported on Hurricane Andrew which had been expected to hit Miami fair-and-square and, as a result, had for a few days received national coverage. In the event, the hurricane had diverted about 20 miles south of Miami and destroyed a town called Homestead, consisting mostly of wooden houses lived in by cleaners, waiters and hotel staff working in the big luxury hotel and restaurants of Miami. I arrived there about 10 days after the disaster and got a big welcome from the townsfolk because they hoped at first that I might be an insurance adjustor or a government official bringing them help. But they had not seen many journalists either, so they were happy enough to describe what had happened to them. Another aspect of weather disaster reporting is that over-coverage is normally followed by no coverage at all.

Beneath the radar

In the run-up the US president election, it is fascinating to see how the anti-Trump media steers clear of any reference to Biden’s cognitive difficulties. They were happy to publicise this in July when pressing Biden to drop his candidacy for re-election, but after he finally did so on 21 July there are few references to the fact that the man supposedly in charge America’s slide into war in the Middle East cannot think straight.

On occasion, there is visible evidence of this when Biden breaks free from his handlers as he walks towards the presidential helicopter and talks to reporters. When his words are at all coherent, they may tend to cause fear and panic – as when he mumbled that the US was talking to Israel about attacking Iranian oil facilities.

In the 80s, President Ronald Reagan’s aides had a similar problem with their boss, who may already have been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease that was publicly admitted several years later. Knowing the risk of Reagan hearing and replying to reporters’ questions – and thereby revealing his deteriorating mental health – on his way to the presidential helicopter, they told the pilots to switch on the engines early so all words would be drowned out by the noise.

Cockburn’s picks

American politicians talk up weather calamities, while their British counterparts overstate the disaster facing the NHS. Both exaggerate to an absurd degree. Incoming Labour Party leaders are understandably eager to fix in the public mind the belief that Labour inherited a poisonous legacy. Fair enough: it is to their advantage to say that the NHS, and the ship of state in general, is in a bad way thanks to the Tories. But it is not a good idea to say the NHS is “broken” and that the ship of state has a large hole its bottom and is sinking, claims that are not only false but likely to cause anger and demoralisation.

Andrew Seaton has a lucid and convincing account of what is really going on in the NHS in his blog for the London Review of Books in which he cites a typical piece of ministerial exaggeration from the health secretary Wes Streeting, “who told the BBC that if healthcare spending kept increasing then Britain was in danger of becoming ‘an NHS with a country attached’. Given that the UK allocated only 10.9 per cent of GDP to healthcare in 2023 (a whole percentage point lower than France or Germany), there is a fair way to go before that happens.”