Patrick Lawrence: This Is Not Another ‘Phoney War’
It Just Got Very Real.
Amid the tit-for-tats along Israel’s border with Lebanon over the past few weeks, the Houthis’ shelling of Red Sea traffic and repeated assertions that the U.S. does not want to widen the Gaza crisis into a regional war, I started thinking of that twilit interim in 1939–1940 known in history as “the phony war.” Has the world entered another such passage—another war we do not want to think is a war but is a war we do not want to see?
That question seems far away now, an intellectual flinch. America, mindlessly loyal to the frothing dog known as Israel, has wandered into another war the way our president wanders away from podiums and off television news programs while the cameras are still rolling. This is a 21st century war, replete with attacks, denials, proxies and indirection, and with no formal declaration. But we may as well declare it ourselves so we understand our moment properly. America is once more at war.
The U.S. had for weeks refrained from responding to the Houthis, who, in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, have since November staged dozens of drone and missile attacks on commercial ships sailing through the Red Sea. These now include U.S. and British vessels and a U.S. warship. The Biden regime’s stated concern was that it did not want to risk sparking a conflict that would spread through the region and, in particular, provoke the Islamic Republic. The Pentagon, in the role of lumbering giant, also acknowledged that there was little U.S. forces could do to stop the Houthis’ operations.
The weeks of restraint, so uncharacteristic of the Biden White House, ended last Thursday, when the U.S. and a handful of its clients hit more than two dozen Houthi targets—military bases, airports, weapons dumps—in Yemen. Air and naval units struck the Houthis again last Friday, and the world suddenly sat up straight. Here is part of a news analysis The New York Times published Friday evening:
With the American-led strike on nearly 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday and a smaller strike the next day, there is no longer a question of whether there will be a regional conflict. It has already begun. The biggest questions now are the conflict’s intensity and whether it can be contained.
This is exactly the outcome no one wanted, presumably including Iran.
Among the reporters bylined on this piece was David Sanger, a longtime Washington correspondent who is, to keep this polite, very close to the national- security state and faithfully reflects its perspectives. I certainly sat up straight on reading these paragraphs. They struck me as the Biden regime’s first admission, an early warning, that war was on the way. “I will not hesitate,” President Biden had said by the time Sanger et al. published, “to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.” Indeed, U.S. attacks on Houthi targets are now something close to routine. On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that Navy SEAL commandos had raided an Iranian vessel bound for Yemen and seized missile components from its cargo.
As of Monday evening (East Coast time, Tuesday morning in the Middle East), Biden and his policy people have exactly what they have insisted they do not want but which Israel probably does. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the IRGC, launched at least 11 ballistic missiles into northern Iraq and Syria, where all sorts of U.S. proxies, including the Islamic State, are active. I do not think there is any longer any stepping back from the reality that the U.S. is now in a regional war involving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.
There are varying accounts of the Iranians’ targets and motives. The Revolutionary Guards, quoted in official media, said the missiles “were used to destroy espionage centers and gatherings of anti–Iranian terrorist groups in the region.” This can be read with confidence to refer to U.S. proxies and (according to some reports) clandestine Israeli targets. In its statement the IRGC said it was responding to the U.S. presence in Iraq and its, Washington’s, support for Israel.
The missile barrage followed by four days Tehran’s assertion that it would avenge a U.S. airstrike in Syria that killed, among others, two members of the IRGC. Al Jazeera reported that the base of a U.S.-led coalition in Erbil was among the targets. RT reported, as did The Times subsequently, that one missile struck very close to the U.S. consulate in the Kurdish capital.
This week the Iranians sent missiles into Pakistan, targeting what it identifies as anti–Iranian militias, and the Pakistanis responded in kind on Thursday. It is true, as the major Western dailies report, that the Iranians are now eager to demonstrate their capability and willingness to defend themselves against adversaries of any kind. I read this as the consequence of many years of American and Israeli violations of Iran’s sovereignty by way of assassinations, covert sabotage operations, piracy at sea and the like. The Islamic Republic’s insecurity is unmistakable at this point. And insecure nations, it goes without saying, are bound to be aggressively defensive.
There is no ambiguity here, no room for alternative interpretations. I am with David Sanger (for once) and his colleagues: Whether the Biden regime has just led America into another war is no longer an interesting question. The interesting question is how big and dangerous the new war will get. Oh, for the days when the mess unfolding across West Asia seemed a phoney war.
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The Phoney War (customarily known by its British spelling) began after the Reich invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, but almost nothing happened for the next eight months. This was an extremely strange interlude, as contemporary accounts make clear. Sartre, to give an idea of the oddity of it all, served in a meteorological unit in Alsace and spent his time smoking his pipe, reading Heidegger, working on a novel (probably one of the Roads to Freedom trilogy) and writing War Diaries. Nobody seems to have thought this at all amiss.
The Phoney War ended abruptly when Germany invaded France and the Low Countries in May 1940. Thenceforth the war was all too horribly real until the Allied victory five springs later. I have long thought that the British and French shuffled their feet for those eight months of unwaged war in part out of a subliminal dread of what they knew was to come. The English, after all, are famous for their habit of muddling messily through difficult circumstances—though in this case, as in some others, clarity and determination followed the indecision.
It is upside down in the case of the Biden regime and its brand-new war: Clarity and determination of the most diabolic kind came first, and out of this the U.S. has muddled into its latest conflict. Biden famously declared years ago, “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” and he has held resolutely to apartheid Israel’s cause ever since. I am convinced that this unswerving loyalty reflects the Man from Scranton’s demonstrated stupidity in all matters to do with foreign relations: He has settled on support for Israel, a sure winner for decades, and simply cannot think through a change of course even in the face of a real-time genocide of historic proportions.
This administration can be a hard read. It seems safe to assume, as I have for some time, that those around Biden—notably Secretary of State Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William Burns—are running the foreign policy side and in essence tell our incompetent commander-in-chief what the plan is in any given case. On the other hand, I read here and there reports that Biden’s adjutants are increasingly nervous about what their boss will decide to do next as the Gaza crisis deepens. My surmise, and it is only that: Biden may leave a lot of policy decisions to those around him, but in the case of Israel the lockstep Zionist rules. He has, after all, taken more money from the Israel lobby over the years than any other political figure in Washington.
This makes Israel’s psychotic—as in detached from reality—obsession with the Palestinians the gravest feature of the post–Phoney War war into which the Biden regime has just led America. The Netanyahu regime professes almost daily its determination to exterminate as many Palestinians as it can and scatter the survivors to the winds. Where will this lead the perversely loyal U.S., we have to ask. The atrocities in Gaza have already kindled all sorts of extremist aggression among settlers in the West Bank. As reported and ably analyzed Monday in The Cradle, published in Beirut by the estimable Sharmine Narwani, “The West Bank is a ticking time bomb.” Indeed. What will Biden and his people do if it detonates?
There are Israel’s other obsessions to consider. It is spoiling for a provocation to justify an attack on Lebanon. It has hankered after an excuse to attack the Islamic Republic for decades. You start to think Israel took October 7 as the beginning of a once-for-all devastation of its periphery. Is Tel Aviv now hoping to recruit Zionist Biden into a campaign against Iran, or at least obtain the White House’s acquiescence as Israel goes it alone, tactical nukes and all?
These are among our questions, as what seemed a Phoney War in 21st century mode gets un–Phoney. Like the Brits and the French 85 years ago, I dread what will come next.
