Countdown to Middle East war? How the region can step back from the brink
With Israel poised to attack Iran, having already blindsided
friends and foes alike with its blitz against Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, all
the talk is of an inexorable slide towards a new, pan-Middle Eastern war.
Yet brakes remain to halt a regional fall into a wider
conflagration that would lock Israel and Tehran into escalating conflict and
suck in other nations, according to several people with experience in
intelligence and military decision-making.
Israel is unlikely to flinch from launching an aerial
barrage on Iran as soon as in the coming days in retaliation for Tehran's
decision to launch about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday, the
experts told Reuters.
"Whoever attacks us – we attack them," Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his security cabinet on Tuesday night,
summing up his doctrine of deterrence.
Israeli officials have nonetheless told U.S. counterparts
their response to Iran's attack will be "calibrated", though have yet
to provide a final list of potential targets, according to a person in
Washington familiar with the discussions who requested anonymity to discuss
security matters.
"I think that the targets that will be selected will
be meticulously, very carefully selected," said Avi Melamed, a former
Israeli intelligence official and a negotiator during the Palestinian
intifadas, or uprisings, of the 1980s and 2000s. Sites of Iranian military
importance such as missile infrastructure, communication centres and power
plants are likely candidates, he added.
Israel is less likely to hit the oil facilities that
underpin Iran's economy or its nuclear sites, according to many of the experts
interviewed, who include more than half a dozen former military, intelligence
and diplomatic officials from the United States and the Middle East.
These highly sensitive targets would be expected to draw an
escalated Iranian response including the potential targeting of the oil
production sites of U.S. allies in the region including Gulf Arab states, they
said.
U.S. President Joe Biden said
on Thursday he would not negotiate in public when asked if he had
urged Israel not to attack Iran's oil facilities, hours after he contributed to
a surge in global oil prices when he said Washington was discussing such
Israeli strikes.
Israel has surprised much of the world with the scale of its
offensive against the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah, from the detonation of
thousands of militants' pagers
and walkie-talkies to the assassination of leader Sayyed
Hassan Nasrallah in a Beirut airstrike and a ground incursion into
southern Lebanon.
"It would be unwise for outsiders to try to predict
Israel's attack plan," said Norman Roule, a former senior CIA officer who
served as the U.S. intelligence community's top manager for Iran from 2008 to
2017.
"But if Israel decides on a proportional yet
substantial strike, it may elect to limit its attacks to Iranian missile and
IRGC-Quds Force architecture that supported attacks by Tehran and its proxies
on Israel."
The Quds Force is a branch of Iran's elite Revolutionary
Guards military unit.
Roule, senior adviser to the United Against Nuclear Iran
advocacy group, said Israel could strike Iranian installations that refine
gasoline and diesel for domestic consumption while sparing those that load oil
exports, depriving Tehran of a justification to retaliate against the
facilities of Gulf states and limiting a spike in crude prices.
Any wider Middle Eastern conflict is unlikely to resemble
the grinding ground wars of past decades between opposing armies.
Only two sovereign states, Israel and Iran, have so far
militarily locked horns over the past year, and they are separated by two other
countries and vast tracts of desert. The distance has limited their exchanges
to strikes by air, covert operations or the use of proxy militias such as
Hezbollah.
Iran has long vowed to destroy the state of Israel, yet has
proven to be a cautious adversary in this crisis, carefully calibrating its two
aerial attacks on Israel, the first in April - after Israel bombed the Iranian
consulate in Syria, killing several commanders - and the second this week after
Nasrallah's killing.
The only reported death from Iran's two attacks was a
luckless Palestinian hit by a missile casing that fell from the sky into the
West Bank on Tuesday.
Egypt, which fought wars with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967 and
1973, and signed a peace treaty in 1979, is widely thought to have little
interest in getting pulled into the conflict. Syria, an Iranian ally which has
also battled Israel in the past, has sunk into economic collapse after a decade of
civil war.
The wealthy Gulf states, close U.S. security partners, want
to steer clear too. Two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters that
Gulf ministers held talks with Iran on the sidelines of a conference in Qatar
on Thursday, seeking to reassure Tehran of their neutrality in any escalation
that could engulf their oil production sites.
The United States says it will defend Israel to the hilt
against their common foe, Iran and its proxies, but no one thinks it will put
boots on the ground like it did in the two Gulf wars in 1990 and 2003 when it
went to war against Iraq.
War is already a grim reality for many in the region.
The Oct. 7 attack on Israel by fighters from Palestinian
group Hamas killed 1,200 people, while the ensuing Israeli battering of Gaza
has killed nearly 42,000 people and displaced almost all the enclave's 2.3
million population, according to local officials and U.N. figures. Clashes
between Israel and Hezbollah have also forced thousands of families in northern
Israel and southern Lebanon from their homes.
The United States is not pressing Israel to refrain from
military retaliation against Iran's latest attack - as it did in April - but
encouraging a careful consideration of potential consequences to any response, according
to the person in Washington familiar with the discussions.
Washington has proved to have limited influence over Israel
though, and Netanyahu has remained implacable about the targeting of his
country's enemies since the Hamas attack.
"The Israelis have already blown through any number of
red lines that we laid down for them," said Richard Hooker, a retired U.S.
Army officer who served in the National Security Council under Republican and
Democratic presidents.
The U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5 also means Biden's
powers of persuasion are limited during his final months in the White House.
Biden told reporters on Wednesday that Israel has a right to
respond "proportionally". He has made it clear he does not support an
Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, where Israel and Western states
say Iranians have a programme aimed at building nuclear weapons, a charge
Tehran denies.
Hooker said targeting such sites was possible but not
probable "because when you do something like that you put the Iranian
leadership in a position to do something pretty dramatic in response".
Israel, which is widely believed to be the Middle East's
only nuclear-armed state though neither confirms nor denies that it possesses
such weapons, has long considered Tehran's nuclear programme an existential
threat. Iran's nuclear sites are spread over many locations, some of them deep
underground.
In Washington, whose sanctions on Tehran have failed to shut
down Iran's oil industry, there are calls for strikes on refineries and other
energy facilities.
"These oil refineries need to be hit and hit hard
because that is the source of cash for the regime," U.S. Republican
Senator Lindsey Graham said in a statement.
For Arab states on the other side of the Gulf, action
targeting Iranian oil facilities would set off alarm bells, fearing a vengeful Tehran.
Saudi Arabia, which until the Gaza war was in talks on a
U.S. defence pact and a possible normalisation deal with Israel, saw its oil
sites come under attack in 2019 from the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, where
the kingdom was embroiled in conflict for years.
Oil prices have traded in a narrow range of $70-$90 per
barrel in recent years despite the war between Russia and Ukraine and conflict
in the Middle East.
Analysts say OPEC has enough spare capacity to cope even if
all of Iran's production is knocked out. But it would struggle to compensate if
an escalation damaged oil capacity in the producer group's linchpin Saudi
Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.
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