The key issue now is whether Iran and Israel will drag the rest of the world into a Middle East war. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
In both Ukraine and Gaza, the Biden administration has adopted the dangerous doctrine of war management in which, while not stopping a war diplomatically, it attempts to contain it and prevent it from becoming a wider war into which the U.S. might get drawn.
The difficult to calibrate policy is being threatened in both theatres.
In the Middle East, two Israeli actions appeared to escalate the calibrated strikes between Israel and Iran to the threshold that Iran could absorb without seemingly feeling the necessity to respond.
One was an airstrike in southern Lebanon that killed Ali Ahmad Hassin, an important Hezbollah commander. The more significant and volatile one was the April 1 attack on an Iranian embassy compound in Damascus that killed seven Iranian officers, including General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the top Iranian Quds Force commander in Lebanon and Syria.
Zahedi is the most senior Iranian commander to be killed since war broke out on October 7. But what made this strike escalatory and dangerous is that it targeted an embassy compound under Iranian sovereignty. “When they attack our consulate,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech on April 10, “it is as if they have attacked our soil.” Khamenei called the decision to escalate to such an attack a “mistake” that “must be punished.”
A direct response by Iran against Israel could risk the nightmare scenario the United States has sought to avoid through its policy of managing wars. In that scenario, Iran retaliates in kind against Israel and Israel responds, drawing Iran and Hezbollah into the war in a manner that pulls in the Houthi as well as militias in Iraq and Syria. A Houthi source told Responsible Statecraft that “In case a full-scale war was to erupt between Hezbollah and Israel, Yemen and its leadership will stand with the party [Hezbollah] militarily, politically and economically” in a way that could even include “sending foot soldiers.” Such a force aligned against Israel could risk drawing the U.S. into the war.
