Israel’s airstrikes against Iran on Saturday intensify the state of war in the Middle East. The Israeli military said it hit around 20 targets, including missile manufacturing facilities, surface-to-air missiles and other military sites.
Now, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his top advisors have to decide whether avoid or risk an even worse escalation.
They must choose the least bad option from a series of difficult options. At one end of the spectrum is the option of counterattacking with another wave of ballistic missiles. Israel has already threatened to retaliate again if that happens.
In the other, Iran is deciding whether to end destructive exchanges of direct attacks against their respective territories.
The risk for Iran, if it does not fire, is that it will appear weak, intimidated and deterred by the military power and political determination of an Israel always supported by the United States.
In the end, the supreme leader and his advisors are likely to make the decision that they believe is least detrimental to the survival of Iran’s Islamic regime.
In his first statements, Khamenei said that Israeli airstrikes “should not be minimized or exaggerated.”
And he claimed that Israel made a “miscalculation” over Iran, which Tehran must “correct,” the official IRNA news agency reported.
“They do not know Iran” and “they have not yet properly understood the power, the capacity, initiative and will of the Iranian nation. We must make them understand it,” he added.
Empty threats?
In the hours before and after the Israeli attacks, Iran’s official media published defiant statements that, at first glance, suggest that the decision to respond had already been made.
Its language resembles that of Israel, which cites its right to defend itself from attack, but The stakes are so high that Iran could decide to back down on its threats.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer joined, along with other voices, the United States’ insistence that Israel acted in self-defense.
“I am clear that Israel has the right to defend itself from Iranian aggression,” he said. “I am equally clear that we must avoid further regional escalation and urge all parties to show restraint. “Iran should not respond.”
Iran’s own statements have been consistent since it launched a ballistic missile at Israel on October 1. A week ago, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Turkish broadcaster NTV that “any attack on Iran will be seen as crossing a red line for us. Such an attack will not go unanswered.”
Hours before the Israeli attacks, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baqai had declared: “Any aggression by the Israeli regime against Iran will be responded to with full force.”
According to him, it was “very misleading and baseless” to suggest that Iran would not respond to an Israeli attack.
As the Israeli plane returned to its base, Iran’s Foreign Ministry invoked its right to self-defense “as enshrined in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.”
In a statement, Iran said it believed it had the right and obligation to respond. to foreign acts of aggression.
Deadly exchanges
Israel has set the pace of escalation since the spring. It considers Iran the main supporter of the Hamas attacks that killed about 1,200 people (Israelis and more than 70 foreigners) on October 7 last year.
Fearing that Israel was looking for an opportunity to attack, Iran repeatedly signaled that it did not want an open war with Israel. That does not mean he is willing to stop his constant, often deadly, but lower-level pressure on Israel and its allies.
The authorities in Tehran thought there was something Better than an all-out war: use your allies and representatives of their so-called “axis of resistance” to attack Israel. The Houthis in Yemen blocked and destroyed ships in the Red Sea. Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon forced at least 60,000 Israelis to flee their homes.
Six months after the war began, Israel’s retaliation forced perhaps twice as many Lebanese from their homes in the southbut Israel was willing to do much more. He warned that if Hezbollah did not cease fire against Israel and withdraw from the border, he would take action.
When this did not occur, Israel decided to exit a battlefield that had been shaped by the limited but exhausting war in Iran. He dealt a series of powerful blows that unbalanced the Islamic regime in Tehran and they left their strategy in tatters. Therefore, after the latest Israeli attacks, the Iranian leaders have only difficult options.
Israel interpreted Iran’s reluctance to wage total war as weakness and increased pressure on Iran and its axis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli commanders could afford to take risks.
They had the unequivocal support of the president Joe Biden, a security network that not only materialized in massive deliveries of ammunition, but also in his decision to send significant American reinforcements by sea and air to the Middle East to support the United States’ commitment to defend Israel.
A year of confrontations
On April 1, an air raid Israeli destroyer part of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus, the Syrian capital, and killed a senior Iranian commander, Brigadier General Mohammed Reza Zahedi, along with other high-ranking officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
The Americans were furious that they had not been warned or given time to put their own forces on alert. But support for Joe Biden did not waver as Israel faced the consequences of its actions.
On April 13, Iran attacked with drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. Most were shot down by Israeli defenses, with considerable help from the armed forces of the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Jordan.
Biden apparently asked Israel to “assume victory” in the hope that it could stop what had become the most dangerous moment in the escalating war in the Middle East.
When Israel limited its response to an attack on an air defense site, Biden’s plan appeared to be working.
Since the summer, Israel has repeatedly escalated the war with Iran and its axis of allies and proxies. The hardest blows came in a major offensive against Iran’s most important ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Iran had spent years strengthening Hezbollah’s arsenal as a key part of its forward defense. The idea was to deter an Israeli attack on Iran knowing that Hezbollah would attack Israel from across the border, in Lebanon.
But Israel went ahead and implemented the plans it had drawn up since Hezbollah fought them to a standstill in the 2006 war. He blew up booby-trapped pagers and walkie talkies that Hezbollah had bought by deceiving the organization.
He also invaded southern Lebanon and killed Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah a man who had been a symbol of defiant resistance to Israel for decades.
Authorities in Beirut say the Israeli offensive in Lebanon has so far killed more than 2,500 people, displaced more than 1.2 million and caused enormous damage to a country already on its knees after its economy collapsed.
The war in Lebanon
Hezbollah continues to fight and kill Israeli soldiers in Lebanon and fire large amounts of rockets, but is reeling after losing its leader and much of its arsenal.
Faced with the imminent collapse of its strategy, Iran concluded that it must counterattack. Allowing his allies to fight and die without responding would destroy his position as leader of anti-Israel and anti-Western forces. in the region. Their response was a much longer-range ballistic missile attack on Israel on October 1.
The airstrikes that began on Friday, October 25, were Israel’s response. They took longer than many expected. Leaks of Israeli plans could have been a factor.
Israel is also carrying out a major offensive in northern Gaza. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, has described the situation as the darkest moment of the war in Gaza, in which the Israeli army subjects an entire population to bombings, sieges and famine.
It is impossible for anyone outside the situation to know if the moment chosen by Israel to attack Iran was intended to divert international attention from northern Gaza, but perhaps that was part of the calculation.
Stop an escalation
It is difficult to stop successive rounds of attacks and counterattacks when the countries concerned believe that they will be seen as weak and will become discouraged if they do not respond. This is how wars get out of control.
The question now is whether Iran is willing to give Israel the last word, at least at this stage of the war. President Biden backed Israel’s decision to retaliate after October 1, but once again sought to avoid an even deadlier escalation, publicly telling Israel not to bomb Iran’s most important assets, its nuclear, oil and gas facilities.
The United States also increased Israel’s defenses by deploying the THAAD anti-missile system in Israel, and Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to follow its advice.
The US elections on November 5 are part of Israel and Iran’s calculations about what happens next. If Donald Trump wins his second term, he might care less that Biden responds to Iranian retaliation, if it occurs, with attacks on nuclear, oil and gas facilities.
Once again, the Middle East is waiting.
Israel’s decision not to attack Iran’s most valuable assets could, perhaps, give Tehran the opportunity to postpone a responseat least long enough for diplomats to do their jobs.
At last month’s UN General Assembly, the Iranians suggested they were open to a new round of nuclear negotiations.
And this Sunday, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Syed Abbas Araghchi, said in a letter to the UN Secretary General that Iran reserves the right to respond to Israel’s “criminal aggression.”
All of this should be of great importance to the world beyond the region. Iran He has always denied that he wants a nuclear bomb, but its nuclear experience and uranium enrichment have put a weapon within its reach.
Its leaders must be looking for a new way to deter their enemies. The development of a nuclear warhead for its ballistic missiles could be on its agenda.
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