As of: February 5, 2024, 10:31 a.m
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The USA reacts cautiously to the killing of three US soldiers.
Biden wants to avoid escalation with Iran.
How should he react in the Middle East?
Washington DC – “It’s time to end the forever war,” President Biden said in 2021, ahead of his administration’s fateful decision to move forward with plans to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan.
Biden, a key player within the Washington establishment that launched a generation of open-ended military interventions in the Middle East and South Asia, cited the language of critics who desperately tried to write the book about the United States' post-9/11 misadventures close.
The ensuing debacle left the Taliban taking over a weak state that had been propped up with U.S. funding for nearly two decades.
Biden and his allies are still defending what happened, believing that the American public wanted to end the longest war in the country's history and that the chaotic collapse in Kabul was an outcome already set in motion by the mistakes of Biden's predecessor .
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Whatever the merits of that claim, Biden once again plunged into the sprawling battlefields of the post-9/11 era this weekend.
The United States and a number of Western allies launched attacks on dozens of targets of militant groups linked to Iran in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
The wave of attacks was announced in response to a drone strike by an Iran-linked militant group in Iraq that killed three U.S. soldiers at a base in Jordan the weekend before.
USA wants to protect trade routes in the Red Sea from Houthi rebels
On Friday, Biden described the punitive action as a necessary measure.
“If you hurt an American, we will respond,” he said.
The attacks on Yemen's Houthi rebels, which also involved the British, were described as a deterrent to the group's attacks on maritime activity in the Red Sea, a key artery for global trade.
“We will not hesitate to defend lives and the free flow of commerce in one of the world’s most important waterways,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement, adding that there will be “further consequences” for the Houthis who pursue this campaign as a form of protest against Israel's attack on Gaza if the attacks did not stop.
US President Joe Biden.
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Analysts are skeptical that the US attacks can achieve any significant strategic goals.
The Biden administration has telegraphed its response over the past week, consciously avoiding crossing the Iranian regime's implicit red lines - no Iranian personnel were apparently hit, although Iraqi authorities pointed to more than a dozen deaths, including one specified number of civilians.
Is the Biden administration's deterrence of militias failing?
“It looks like a very significant action by the Biden administration, but on the other hand I don't think it will be anywhere near enough to deter these groups,” Charles Lister, director of the Middle East Institute's Syria program, told my colleagues.
“These militias have been involved in this campaign for more than 20 years, they are in a long-term fight.
Ultimately, they are waging a campaign of attrition against the United States.”
The attacks predictably triggered a new wave of regional anger.
The Houthis said they would “answer escalation with escalation.”
An Iranian Foreign Ministry official accused the United States and Britain of “fomenting chaos, disorder, insecurity and instability.”
An Iraqi government spokesman said Biden's action was "bringing security in Iraq and the region to the brink" and complained that his country was a "battleground for reckoning."
Yemen's Houthi rebels announced retaliation for the American and British airstrikes.
© picture alliance/dpa/AP |
Uncredited
The background to the tensions is the war between Israel and the militant Hamas, which still holds more than 100 hostages.
Israel's devastating campaign in Gaza has killed more than 27,000 people, leveled the area and sparked a humanitarian crisis.
It has also sparked a wave of attacks by Iran-aligned “Axis of Resistance” groups on U.S. bases in the region.
USA does not want to provoke another war in the Middle East
The main inhibiting factor at the moment is that neither the United States nor Iran wants a full-scale war.
“The Biden administration faces an election in which it doesn't need another costly foreign adventure, anger over its Israel policy or rising oil prices,” CNN's Nick Paton Walsh wrote.
“Iran's economy is still shaky, internal unrest is a not-so-distant memory, and the country has broader goals such as outsized regional influence, exploiting its technical ties with Moscow and the apparent ... pursuit of a nuclear weapon.”
In Washington, Republican lawmakers and politicians have urged Biden to take far more aggressive action against Iran and even suggested the need for U.S. attacks on Iranian territory.
The White House has made it clear that it does not want to engage in open war with Tehran.
“Biden is characteristically less rabid than his critics,” wrote Spencer Ackerman, a veteran chronicler of post-9/11 Middle East wars.
“But he has put his policies in a position where every provocation results in another step on the escalation ladder.”
Biden could still enter into negotiations with Iran
Ackerman invoked Karl Marx's pithy axiom that history unfolds first as tragedy and then as farce.
After two decades of Middle East quagmire, he argued, Biden is engaged in a “farcical, rote recapitulation of the historical catastrophes that led to this point, with the ultimate failure as preordained as the horrors it will produce.
Biden still has time to restrain Israel - and find a way to negotiate with Iran before we cross the threshold.
But not much."
Other commentators are less worried.
Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin pushed back against the suggestion that the Biden administration should now withdraw the United States' relatively small troop presence in countries like Iraq and Syria, which have been used in the fight against the Islamic State militant group for nearly a decade become.
"Maintaining small numbers of U.S. troops in strategically important outposts in the Middle East is not the same as 'forever war,'" Rogin wrote.
“It’s an insurance policy against much worse consequences.
Americans are willing to pay the price of this insurance policy as long as it does not include the deaths of U.S. troops.”
“Deter Iran?” – How should Biden act in the Middle East?
Jon Hoffman, a policy analyst at the liberal think tank Cato Institute, disagreed.
“America’s presence and policies in the Middle East neither deter violence nor stabilize the region,” he wrote.
“Instead, they provoke and risk a major escalation.
“Washington should end its aimless military exchanges with Iranian-backed groups in the Middle East and bring U.S. troops home.”
That won't happen now as Biden prepares for a combative election year.
“One of the great things about having a president with 50 years of experience in foreign policy is that he is acutely aware of the difficulties, the tensions and the competition in the region,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) , a close Biden ally, the
New Republic
.
“But I am confident that he is carefully considering how to deter Iran and how to strike back in a way that shows resolve and determination to protect American troops while taking care to avoid expanding the conflict.
To the author
Ishaan Tharoor
is a foreign policy columnist at The Washington Post, where he writes the Today's WorldView newsletter and column.
In 2021, he was awarded the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary by the American Academy of Diplomacy.
Previously, he was a senior editor and correspondent at Time Magazine, first in Hong Kong and later in New York.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 5, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.