The Ring of Firefights

“The immediate trigger and goal of the war was a Hamas-Iranian interest to scuttle the Biden team’s diplomatic initiative to forge Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia into a ring of peace. The Iranian-Hamas counterstrategy was to ignite a ring of fire around Israel, using Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq and West Bank militants armed by Iran with weapons smuggled through Jordan. The Iranian strategy is exquisite from Tehran’s point of view: Destroy Israel by sacrificing as many Palestinians and Lebanese as necessary but never risk a single Iranian life. The Iranians are ready to die to the last Lebanese, the last Palestinian, the last Syrian and the last Yemeni to eliminate Israel (and distract the world from the Iranian regime’s abuses of its own people and imperialist control over Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria).” The question is not really whether Iran (and its backers) are responsible for the chaos in the Middle East. The question is how Israel should respond. “The problem for Israelis and the Jewish people is that while the Netanyahu government was right in its diagnosis that this was a war of annihilation, it refused to conduct it in the only way that could hope to bring success.” Tom Friedman in the NYT (Gift Article): Why Everything Is Suddenly Spiraling for Israel. One could argue that things are spiraling for Hamas and Hezbollah (and even Iran) as well. They’re certainly spiraling for Hezbollah’s leadership. But they’re also spiraling for innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. Here’s the latest from BBC.

+ The wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine are part of a much bigger proxy fight that, along with our upcoming election, could determine much about how the world looks in coming decades. Russia has secret war drones project in China, intel sources say.