Fanatics, an obsessive, and a belligerent fool

We don’t have to look very far to find a useful historical analogy for the current crisis in the Middle East. In 1967 Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli ships, and Israel replied with a surprise air attack that destroyed almost the entire Egyptian air force on the ground.

Israel followed up with a ground offensive that reached the Suez Canal – which then remained closed for the next eight years. Could something like this happen at the Strait of Hormuz now? Of course it could. In fact, at this point in the confrontation in the Gulf it will require a great deal of forbearance on both sides to avoid it.

Unfortunately, forbearance is a virtue conspicuously absent on either side. US President Donald Trump let himself be talked into a surprise ‘decapitation’ attack on Iran by his Israeli partner, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanhyahu, but it did not deliver the promised results. Dozens of Iranian leaders were killed, but the regime did not collapse.

So now Trump is desperately looking for a way to get out of the war he started without losing face, but his only available method for putting pressure on Iran is endless escalation. Israel, meanwhile, is determined to press on until the entire Iranian regime – or if necessary Iran’s whole economy – is destroyed.

And while the United States and Israel must bear the main responsibility for this increasingly bloody mess, Iran is also behaving badly.

Many of the surviving Iranian leaders have lost close family members in what can reasonably be called a treacherous American attack (the US was in the midst of negotiations with Iran). Now they believe that their control of the Strait of Hormuz gives them the upper hand in the struggle, and they are in a vengeful mood.

Despite Trump’s ludicrous claims to the contrary, there is no deal on the table, no meaningful negotiations of any kind underway. The Iranian leaders who are in power now are only there because the Americans and Israelis killed everybody more senior than them. They want to watch their enemies twist in the wind for a while before they deign to talk to them.

This is almost as childish and brutal as Trump’s threat to “unleash Hell” on Iran if its leaders do not bend to his will, and that is not an empty threat. He has promised to destroy Iran’s electrical power industry, its oil and gas resources, even its desalination facilities. That will mean no electricity, no income, and precious little water for a country of 92 million people.

Iran has made counter threats of the same sort, except that the United States is beyond its reach and so instead it promises to inflict the same misery on America’s regional allies: Saudi Arabia, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and of course Israel.

These actions are all crazily disproportionate to the issues at stake, but there is a difference between the United States and Israel, which are fully capable of carrying out this programme of mass destruction, and the Iranians, who lack the means to do the whole job. However, the longer-term consequence of that scale of destruction is probably a ‘forever war’

Are the Iranians willing to accept the wholesale destruction of their country’s economy in exchange for doing only major damage in return – especially when that damage is mostly being done to Israel’s and America’s local allies, not to the perpetrators themselves? The wisest course would be to stop now, but nobody in this game is showing much wisdom.

The people making decisions in Iran are grief-stricken true believers who think it is their religious duty to oppose evil at any cost. Yielding to the demands of the Great Satan is unthinkable, however grave the consequences of resistance may be.

Netanyahu is not fanatical, but he is obsessive. He first warned Israelis that Iran was  “three to five years” away from getting nuclear weapons in 1992. He issued the same warning in 1995 (“3 to 5 years”), in 1996 (“extremely close”), 2012 (“a few months”), 2015, 2018, 2023 and 2025. This year he finally got somebody to listen, although Iran still has no nuclear weapons.

And Trump is beside himself with rage and fear: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump.”

Trump knows he has been suckered into Netanyahu’s war, and he sees defeat looming in the mid-term election this November. The only exit he can see is a military victory that grows less likely by the day. Escalation is his only hope, and we all know where that can end.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’. The previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.