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It’s more like a courtship ritual between exotic birds than a 21st-century war. First, the Israelis assassinate Revolutionary Guard generals in an Iranian embassy on foreign soil. Tag. You’re it.
After a long pause, the Iranians respond with a “massive” strike against Israel using hundreds of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles, but they tell the Israelis and the Americans exactly when the attack is coming and what the targets are, and use mostly obsolete missiles, and most of them are shot down and nobody dies. That was all in April.
Longer pause. Then in July the Israelis kill Fuad Shukr, the military commander of Iran’s ally Hezbollah, in Beirut, and the same night another Israeli strike kills Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, while he is asleep in a guest house in Tehran. But they don’t kill any Iranians, or at least no important ones, so Iran lets it pass.
It seems that the dance may be ending, but then in late September, Israeli bombs kill Hassan Nasrollah and most of Hezbollah’s senior leaders in Beirut. No pause this time. On Oct. 1, Iran launches 181 weapons at Israel. Most of them are ballistic missiles, and a lot of them strike their (exclusively military) targets. Two Israelis are killed.
Now it’s Israel’s turn for a long pause, mainly because the U.S. election is looming and the White House doesn’t want a big war in the Middle East, perhaps involving American troops, that distracts the voters on Election Day.
Some Israelis, or at least the people around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, think that Israel is on a roll militarily. They are tempted by the idea of seizing this opportunity to go all out against Iran and drag the U.S. in, too.
Israel does strike Iran again on Oct. 25, but it’s as restrained as the last Iranian strike. A short list of military targets only, no messing with Iran’s nuclear installations and only four Iranians killed. And as at every step in the dance, the last one to “retaliate” urges the other one not to “retaliate” back.
But it’s time to drop the avian courtship analogies and call this what it really is: the kind of posturing and signaling that is typical between bands of higher primates (including entire human nations) who find themselves in a confrontation but are not sure they would benefit from all-out war.
The whole anachronistic institution of war is like that. The very same kinds of conflicts that are settled by law or negotiation within a modern country are frequently settled by massive amounts of violence (or more commonly remain unsettled) when they happen between countries.
Everybody knows this is bad but true, and avoids mentioning it mostly because it sounds so trite. Once in a while, however, there is a chain of events so obviously futile and counter-productive that it becomes a duty to condemn it publicly. The current game of tit-for-tat in the Middle East certainly fits that description.
None of these attacks and counterattacks has had the slightest impact on the regional balance of power or even on the current political stances of the various players. It’s not a real war yet either (except in Gaza). The strikes and counterstrikes elsewhere are just so many “demonstrations of resolve,” rituals that would be familiar to our most distant ancestors.
The problem has always been and continues to be that these displays can easily topple into full-scale war: Chest-beating is not a precise science. There has not been such a war in the Middle East since 1973, and half a century later, a similar conflagration could bring regimes down all over the region.
The existing regimes are so uniformly dreadful that there is a temptation to say that it couldn’t get any worse, but that is not true. It could get a great deal worse, and very quickly, if the present crisis turns into a full-scale war.
What are the odds of that happening? Nobody knows, but even the fact that we can seriously ask such a question suggests that we are already in serious danger.