J.E. Dyer
The Optimistic Conservation, Nov. 21, 2023
“It’s an in-your-face method of trying to widen the war. Increase the regional chaos; complicate the whole region’s stability situation, while presenting Israel with tough choices about deterrence, and – from the Iranian regime’s perspective – increasing regional resentment against the Gaza conflict as the source of the growing problem.”
Whatever the Biden administration is doing about deterrence and containment in the Middle East – if we assume what’s going on is meant to achieve deterrence and containment – is unfolding in a peculiar fashion. The shortest accurate statement about it is this one: “It’s not working.”
A key measure of that is the rapidly increasing number of attacks on small, remote, ill-defended bases used by American troops in Iraq and Syria.
Initial threats of retaliation, limited strikes in response to attacks on our troops, and releasing billions in previously frozen cash to Tehran have all failed to deter the Islamic Republic from using its proxies to attack our military personnel. pic.twitter.com/t9wqHppPSN
— Patrick Fox (@RealCynicalFox) November 20, 2023
Far from using any leverage we may have in Mesopotamia for deterrence of Iran-backed provocation, we’re the hapless, unredressed target of it, day after day. Occasional retaliatory air strikes on valueless targets accomplish nothing. The more the provocation happens without U.S. action actually stopping it, the weaker we are in terms of credibility, and the more peril our troops are in.