How Israel responds to Iranian missile strikes could reshape politics of the region
The almost 200 long range and ballistic rockets fired at Israel by Iran’s regime Tuesday night took just 12 minutes or so to cross the desert separating the two arch-enemies, but the implications of the strike will likely be felt for years.
Faced with humiliating losses that Israel inflicted on their closest proxy, Hezbollah, and with hope of a ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza exhausted, it appears Iran’s Islamic rulers decided confronting Israel directly was their least-worst option.
“This is a dangerous gamble here,” Sanam Vakil, a Middle East analyst with Chatham House in London, told BBC Radio’s Today program in the aftermath of the strikes.
“Iran recognized that without trying to inflict damage and restore some deterrence, it would continue to get hit by Israel, and that’s what it is trying to achieve here.”
The decimation or debilitation of its key proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen — means Iran’s capability to project its influence in the Middle East, and of confronting the West and Israel, has been dealt a crushing blow.
Iran launched a series of ballistic missiles at Israel less than a week after the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and a day after ground operations started in Lebanon. The attack has added to fears of a wider conflict in the region.
Designed to inflict major damage
This was the second time in the past six months that Iran launched salvos of rockets at Israel, but unlike the previous strikes in April, these attacks appeared designed to cause maximum damage.
Rather than preceding the main strikes with slow-moving, easily intercepted drones, on Tuesday night, Iran used some of the most advanced ballistic missiles in its inventory, aiming at three Israeli military installations: military bases at Nevatim, Hatzerim and Tel Nof as well as the headquarters of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, in Tel Aviv.
Civilian buildings and neighbourhoods were not targeted, said Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqch.
“Our action is concluded unless the Israeli regime decides to invite further retaliation. In that scenario, our response will be stronger and more powerful,” Araqchi said in a post on X early on Wednesday,
He said Iran only took the action, “[after] exercising tremendous restraint for almost two months, to give space for a ceasefire in Gaza.”
While it appears civilian casualties on the ground were few, a 37-year-old Palestinian labour was killed near Jericho by falling shrapnel from Iranian missiles or Israeli interceptors.
Israeli response could target refineries
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterised Iran’s move as “a big mistake” with an Israeli response in the hours or days ahead a virtual certainty.
The implications of that response will be felt around the world, says Ahron Bregman, an Israeli military analyst and senior teaching fellow at King’s College London.
“The Israelis are hinting it will be something that will surprise the Iranians and surprise the world, and when I think of potential targets, what comes to mind is their oil refineries, which will have an impact on the Middle East but [also] on the world economy, and which would see oil prices rocketing,” said Bregman in an interview on France24.
But within Israel, hawkish voices are pushing for something even bolder: a strike on the country’s nuclear sites that they believe would weaken the Iranian regime for years.
Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, urged the Netanyahu government not to hold back.
“Israel now has the greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle East,” he wrote on X.
“We must act now to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime.”
Israel has attacked the sites, or the area around them, before, most recently back in April in response to Iran’s earlier round of missiles launched against Israel.
Then the target was a sophisticated air defence system in Isfahan, close to where Iran’s nuclear program is headquartered. Some observers saw the choice of location as an explicit message to Iran that its nuclear facilities were easily within Israel’s military capabilities to destroy.
But such a move by Israel would carry enormous risks.
Destroying or damaging facilities Iran uses to enrich uranium would not undo the knowledge and experience Iran has gained, and some experts fear it could push Iran to develop nuclear weapons even more rapidly.
“Iran has built in some contingencies and taken much more of its facilities underground,” said Vakil, the Chatham House expert in London.
“The gains are there, the knowledge is there.”
CBC’s Ellen Mauro breaks down why Iran fired roughly 200 ballistic missiles into Israel and the potential consequences for the Middle East.
Polls suggest Israelis back recent actions in Lebanon
Then, there are the motivations and political calculations of the man who will make the ultimate decision on a response: Netanyahu.
Blamed and vilified by much of the Israeli public over the past year for first not stopping the Oct. 7 massacres by Hamas that killed around 1,200 people and for letting many of the 250 hostages taken that day languish in Gaza rather than agreeing to a deal that would bring them home, polls now suggest Netanyahu’s popularity has surged.
Israeli society appears roundly united behind its military’s assassination campaign of senior Hezbollah members in Lebanon, including the elimination of longtime enemy Hassan Nasrallah five days ago in an attack on his command headquarters in Beirut.
The cumulative attacks have gutted the Iran-backed militia, which was funded and equipped by Iran over the decades to be its first line of defence against Israel.
Over the past year, Netanyahu’s critics have accused him of drawing out the war against Hamas in Gaza to appease his far right coalition partners that keep him in power.
Iran’s missile attack into Israel on Tuesday prompted some cheers in the streets of Beirut. The attack marks the latest escalation in the war between Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah.
Israeli observers say the prime minister now has a chance to redefine his legacy and take the focus off his Oct. 7 failures — by doing something even dramatic involving Iran.
“Clearly, the prime minister wants to survive politically,” said Eyal Zisser, a Middle East expert at Tel Aviv University, told CBC News in an interview.
“His popularity clearly increased dramatically after the severe blow to Hezbollah. So, he tells himself, ‘Maybe this is the right way.'”
Other analysts caution that Netanyahu’s personal and political hubris could end up undoing some of Israel’s tactical gains in Lebanon and beyond in recent weeks.
“Ultimately, Israel, if it hasn’t already, will overreach,” said Daniel Sobelman, assistant professor of international relations at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“Israel cannot single-handedly restructure the Middle East.”
Iran has launched dozens of missiles into Israel, escalating the months-long fighting with Iran’s proxies in the region — Hezbollah and Hamas. Orders to shelter in place were sent to Israelis’ mobile phones and announced on national TV – as air raid sirens were reported in parts of Jerusalem and central Israel. Chris Brown provides an update from a hotel in Jerusalem, where he and others were taking shelter.
Published at Tue, 17 Sep 2024 18:38:40 +0000
Trumpism, post-Trump: VP debate offers flashes of potential U.S. future
American politics, beyond Donald Trump. For nearly 90 minutes, viewers were granted a potential glimpse of it in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate.
And it’s not just the gracious banter and arm-slapping post-debate bonhommie between Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz, whose genteel exchanges were like a throwback to a bygone era.
Nor in the calibre of the lies: the candidates certainly delivered nose-stretchers, albeit more modest in quantity and quality than in recent American politics.
Americans were given a taste of Trumpism, minus Trump. His younger running mate, Vance, espoused the same anti-trade, anti-migration, pro-reshoring policies ascendent in the party, even floating the type of family-support payments that might mortify past-generation Republicans.
But he did so without Trump’s pot-pourri of non-sequiturs and putdowns; Vance argued with the fluidity one might expect from a past editor of the Yale Law Review who quoted religious philosophers in his 6,700-word essay on converting to Catholicism.
In a recurring pattern Tuesday, one candidate would half-compliment something the other said, then take issue with the other half.
To pick one example toward the end, Walz said, “I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate and think there was a lot of commonality here.” To which Vance replied: “Me too, man.”
The early consensus of pundits commenting online was that Vance had the better night. Walz stumbled a bit early on, recovered, but still suffered more hiccups than his rival, including the wince-inducing: “I’ve become friends with school shooters.”
During the CBS News Vice-Presidential Debate on Tuesday, , when Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz asked his Republican counterpart J.D. Vance if Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Vance said he is ‘focused on the future’ — which drew a rebuke from Walz.
Vance evades basic question: Who won the 2020 election?
Yet the reality remains: American politics has not moved on from Donald Trump. He is still firmly entrenched at its epicentre.
A reminder of this came near the end of the debate, when the attempted theft of the 2020 election came up, and Vance got an unflattering reminder of why he was there.
Trump’s last vice president wouldn’t let him cancel the election, refusing Trump’s pressure, and defying the demands of an angry crowd that called for his hanging on Jan. 6, 2021.
“That’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage,” Walz said.
And then Kamala Harris’s running mate alluded to Vance’s statement that he would not have certified the 2020 election and asked a question Trump hates.
“Did he lose the 2020 election?” Walz asked. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied. To which Walz said: “That is a damning non-answer.”
Vance tried casting Trump’s election denials as just the process working itself out, pointing out that, in the end, on Jan. 20, 2021, Joe Biden became president anyway.
Vance hinted at a different reaction this time; he promised to shake hands, after the debate, and again after the election, and to root for his opponents’ success if they won.
It briefly sounded normal.
Walz’s biographical embellishment
The candidates danced around the politically problematic parts of their record. On health care, Vance tried crediting Trump with preserving the Obamacare system – a system Trump famously, and aggressively, tried abolishing, falling one Senate vote short.
On abortion, he repeated Trump’s latest stance: it’s up to the states, and any state bans should include exceptions for rape, incest, and health crises. Vance mentioned a friend in an abusive relationship who’d had an abortion and said of her, “I love you.”
Left unstated? Vance’s onetime position that abortion should be illegal nationwide. How would a Republican administration address detailed questions – like interstate shipment of abortion pills? It didn’t come up.
Vance accused Democrats of outsourcing U.S. jobs – yet investment in domestic manufacturing facilities is exploding; if there’s one point of commonality between the parties, lately, it’s that some trade protectionism is good.
The National asks U.S. political analysts Tia Mitchell, Chris Cillizza and CBC News correspondent Katie Simpson to break down key moments from the U.S. vice-presidential debate between Tim Walz and J.D. Vance and how it could impact the presidential race.
Migration produced another heated exchange. Walz accused his rival of endangering Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, by telling lies about them, stoking death threats.
The state’s Republican governor who lives in the area even criticized the rhetoric. Vance replied that the migration surge needs attention, as it’s straining American communities, from social services to housing; border-crossings have dropped significantly in recent months.
Walz’s own paper-trail of falsehoods was flung back at him.
In his case, it went beyond the usual sparring over policy; it involved revisions to bits of his own personal story.
Walz has inflated details of his experience in China: He has claimed, falsely, more than once, to have been in Hong Kong during China’s 1989 student uprising.
Walz has also inflated the military rank he retired with, and, amid a political furore about IVF access, he wrongly claimed his family had used that treatment.
When pressed by moderators about the 1989 inconsistency, Walz changed the subject to discuss his humble upbringing, and his horizon-expanding travels to Asia.
“I will talk a lot. I will get caught up in the rhetoric,” he said. The moderators pressed him again and he fessed up: “I got there that summer and misspoke.”
VP debates rarely change elections
In a different time, these sorts of biographical embellishments might have been the election story of the year. Not this year.
The good news for Democrats, on this night, is that a vice-presidential debate doesn’t tend to change an election.
The good news for Republicans – especially those who like Trump’s policies, but not him: they got to live briefly in a parallel universe.
While the candidates disagreed on gun control, Vance reacted to a story Walz told, about his son witnessing a shooting while playing volleyball.
“I didn’t know,” Vance said. “I’m sorry about that. Christ have mercy. That is awful.”
It’s unclear whether Trumpism will outlast Trump, or if it will pack the same electoral punch with voters; but we’ve seen what it might look like.
Published at Tue, 01 Oct 2024 21:53:56 +0000