Shortly after an airstrike blamed on Israel destroyed an Iranian consulate in Syria, the U. S. sent an urgent message to Iran: We have nothing to do with this.
But that might not be enough for the U. S. to retaliate against its forces in the region. A top U. S. commander warned Wednesday of the danger to U. S. troops.
And while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent expansion of targeted measures against adversaries in the region, along with Iranian security officials and leaders, is deepening regional hostilities, analysts say, it’s unclear whether the U. S. can also sink deeper into a deeper regional conflict.
Biden’s leadership insists it had no prior knowledge of Monday’s airstrike. But the U. S. is still strongly tied to the Israeli military. The United States remains Israel’s indispensable best friend and staunch arms supplier, responsible for about 70% of Israel’s arms imports and about 15% of Israel’s arms imports. This comes to provide the kind of complex aircraft and munitions that appear to have been used in the attack.
Israel has not stated its role in the airstrike, but Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Tuesday that the United States believed Israel was responsible.
Several branches of the Iranian government have said they will find the U. S. guilty of the violent attack. The attack, in the Syrian capital of Damascus, killed senior commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for Syria and Lebanon, an officer in Iran’s tough army-allied defense force in Lebanon, and others.
U. S. forces in Syria and Iraq are already common targets as Iran and its regional allies seek to retaliate for Israeli attacks, says Charles Lister, director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria Program.
“What the Iranians have done for years when they felt attacked with maximum aggression through Israel is not retaliation against the Israelis, but against the Americans,” considering them as mere targets in the region, Lister said.
On Wednesday in Washington, U. S. Air Force Middle East commander in chief Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich said Iran’s assertion that the U. S. has a duty to Israel’s moves could end the pause in defense forces’ attacks on U. S. forces that has been going on since the beginning. February.
He said he doesn’t see any express threat to U. S. troops at this time, but “I’m concerned about Iranian rhetoric related to the United States, because there may simply be a threat to our forces. “
U. S. officials have recorded more than 150 strikes by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria against U. S. forces in those countries since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel on Oct. 7.
One of them, in late January, killed three U. S. service members and wounded dozens more at a base in Jordan.
In retaliation, the U. S. introduced a major airstrike, hitting more than 85 targets at seven locations in Iraq and Syria, adding command and headquarters, ammunition and drone storage sites, and other facilities connected to militias or the IRGC’s Quds Force, the Guards’ force. an expeditionary unit that manages Tehran’s relations with regional militias and their armaments. Since that response, there have been no public reports of attacks on U. S. troops in the region.
Grynkewich told reporters that the U. S. is conscientiously watching and listening to what Iran is saying and doing to assess how Tehran might respond.
Analysts and diplomats point to tactics in which Iran could simply retaliate.
Since October 7, Iran and its allied regional militias in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen have pursued a strategy of calibrated attacks that does not involve provoking a full-blown confrontation that could put Iran’s internal forces or Hezbollah in everyone’s hands. war with Israel or the United States.
Beyond measures opposed to U. S. troops, the odds of Iranian retaliation could arise simply with a limited missile attack directly from Iranian soil into Israel, Lister said. This would be a counterpart to the Israeli attack on what, according to foreign law, is Iranian sovereign soil, as opposed to Iranian diplomatic construction in Damascus.
A concentrated attack on a U. S. position abroad, on the scale of the 1983 attack on the U. S. Embassy in Beirut, is possible, but unlikely given the scale of U. S. retaliation that could follow, analysts say. Iran could also step up its intervention. his efforts to kill Trump-era officials, the drone killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
The extent of retaliation and possible escalation would possibly depend on two things beyond the will of the United States: Iran’s willingness to maintain or escalate regional hostilities to the current level, and the willingness of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s far-right government to do so.
Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, said Iranian analysts are among those seeking to read Netanyahu’s brain since the attack, suffering between two competing narratives related to Israel’s goal.
“Israel’s moves are perceived as a planned provocation of war to which Iran responds with restraint,” Toossi wrote in the U. S. -based think tank’s newspaper. “The other suggests that Israel is capitalizing on Iran’s sometimes contained responses,” and that it is not reacting appropriately. in the same way it will only embolden Israel.
Ultimately, Iran’s sense that it has already taken its strategic steps as the war between Hamas and Israel continues (advancing the Palestinian cause and costing Israel’s friends around the world) could translate more into persuading Iran’s leaders to threaten open war with Israel or the United States. . regardless of your answer. They are surrendering to Monday’s airstrike, some analysts and diplomats say.
Shira Efron, director of policy studies at the U. S. -based Israel Policy Forum, dismissed rumors that Netanyahu was actively trying, with attacks like the one in Damascus, to drag the United States into a potentially decisive confrontation on Israel’s side against its usual rivals. For now.
“First of all, the level of escalation has increased. Definitely,” Efron said.
“I don’t think, however, that Netanyahu is interested in a full-scale war,” he said. “And while in the afterlife there is the idea that Israel sought to drag the United States into a larger conflict, even if that preference still exists in some circles, this is only wishful thinking for now. ” U. S. . President Joe Biden is under pressure from the other side.
So far, he has resisted calls from a growing number of lawmakers and the Democratic electorate to restrict the shipment of U. S. weapons to Israel in order to pressure Netanyahu to facilitate the Israeli military’s massacres of civilians in Gaza and heed other U. S. appeals.
As the U. S. military’s complaints about Israel’s war in Gaza mount, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller is increasingly emphasizing Israel’s need for long-term weapons, to protect itself from Iran and Iran’s best friend, Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The U. S. “is always involved in anything that could lead to escalation,” Miller said after the attack on Damascus. “Since October 7, one of the objectives of this administration has been to prevent the confrontation from spreading, seeing that Israel has the right to protect itself against adversaries who have promised to destroy it. “
For years, Israel has been targeting Iranian proxies and their sites in the region, curtailing their skills and causing disorder for Israelis.
Since the Oct. 7 attack through Hamas, one of the Iranian-aligned defense force networks in the region, which shattered Israel’s sense of security, the Netanyahu government has added Iranian security agents and leaders to its lists of targets in the region, Lister notes.
The U. S. military has already stepped up its engagement from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel, deploying aircraft carriers to the region to deter rearguard attacks on Israel and opening airstrikes to quell attacks on Iran-allied Houthis. It is shipped in 2017. Yemen.
It also plans to build a jetty off the coast of Gaza in a bid to deliver more aid to Palestinian civilians despite obstacles, adding Israeli restrictions and attacks to aid deliveries.
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