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Iran and the US moved significantly closer to war when Israel assassinated a Hezbollah military leader in Beirut and the political leader of Hamas in Tehran. The escalation of the Middle East crisis born out of the continuing Israeli bombardment of Gaza is even more menacing than it might appear, for two connected reasons: Iran and Hezbollah believed that US-led efforts to stop the war spreading would prevent Israel from attacking the Lebanese and Iranian capitals. Secondly, Iran and Hezbollah are convinced that the attacks could only have occurred with the knowledge of the US government.
Hezbollah did not evacuate its top officials in Beirut before the attack that killed Fouad Shukur, a senior commander, this week because it believed that US-led diplomacy would keep Israel from striking the area, according to security sources close to the group.
Believing that Israel would not hit its strongholds in the southern suburbs, the Shia Muslim Hezbollah had not evacuated its senior personnel from there, as it had from southern and eastern Lebanon, according to Lebanese security sources quoted by the Reuters news agency. “We were not expecting them to hit Beirut and they hit Beirut,” said Lebanon’s foreign minister, Abdallah Bou Habib.
Unprepared
Shukur was still at his home in the Dahiyeh district when it was hit by drones, and not in a military headquarters. Foreign diplomats in Beirut say that they had understood Dahiyeh would be spared. There was a “clear message” sent that Israel would spare big cities, including Beirut, according to one diplomat.
In Tehran, Iranian the security service was equally unprepared for an Israeli attack since it housed the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who was attending the inauguration of the new Iranian President, in the same VIP guest house as it did during his previous visits. This enabled Israeli agents to pre-position a bomb in the house two months earlier, which could be detonated by remote control.
Iranian security and Hamas evidently believed that the US, supposedly eager for a ceasefire in Gaza, would not allow Israel to kill Haniyeh because he was in charge of the ceasefire negotiations.
The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, denies that Washington knew anything in advance about the Israeli attack in Tehran, while President Joe Biden said the assassination “doesn’t help” ceasefire talks.
‘Plausible deniability’
Biden and Blinken’s blank denials that they knew anything about the assassinations will not convince many in the Middle East. It will be assumed that if they did not know about the proposed killings, it was only because they had deliberately not been told in order to preserve “plausible deniability”. Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations wrote to the Security Council claiming that “the attack could not have occurred without the authorisation and intelligence support of the United States”.
Given that Iran and its allies are usually paranoid about the capabilities, effectiveness and ruthlessness of Israeli foreign intelligence, they seem to have been curiously naïve about the likelihood of Israeli assassination attempts on their leaders.
They may have had a misplaced faith that the Biden administration would act to restrain Israel, though it had failed to do so in Gaza since 7 October last year. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, knows by now that Biden’s support for the Israeli war effort remains “rock solid” even when it undermines US national interests.
The assassinations are unlikely to do much to degrade the political and military capacity of Hezbollah and Hamas. Both organisations have survived repeated killings of their leaders, and there is no reason to suppose that the outcome should be any different this time around.
Explanations for the assassinations
Indeed, the record of Israeli and American campaigns to eliminate enemy leaders shows that these often counter-productively promote younger, more able leaders through a Darwinian survival of the fittest.
Nevertheless, the targeting of Shukur and Haniyeh looks geared to inflict maximum public humiliation on Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas in order to provoke them into a maximum retaliatory response.
Earlier in the Gaza war, conventional wisdom held that Netanyahu did not want to fight a war on multiple fronts, but the air strike that killed three Iranian generals in the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April, and this week’s killings, suggest that Netanyahu does want a regional war against Iran in which he will try to draw in the US. This has certainly been his strategic objective in the past.
Given the likelihood that the latest assassinations will bring Israel close to an all-out war with Iran and its regional allies, Alon Pinkas notes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that there are two possible explanations for the assassinations.
He writes: “That Israel did not perform a serious risk-assessment analysis and was motivated instead by instant gratification, with disregard to the ramifications.
“Or, conversely, that Israel is deliberately provoking escalation in the hope that a conflagration with Iran will drag the United States into the conflict, further distancing [Netanyahu] from the debacle of 7 October.”
Lame-duck Biden
The Israeli premier has repeatedly made clear that he does not want the ceasefire talks in Cairo to succeed and killing the chief negotiator on the other side is one way of ensuring their failure. He knows that he has a window of opportunity over the next three months before the US presidential election on 5 November, during which time America will be wholly absorbed in domestic politics.
A lame-duck Biden with cognitive impairment will be even less capable of holding back Israel than ever. The UK and other European powers have no influence whatsoever. “Israelis do not listen to a word that we tell them,” says a European diplomat in Beirut. “They are following their plan and don’t listen to us.”
But does Israel have a realistic plan for the future? The killings in Tehran and Beirut and its over-running of Gaza demonstrate Israel’s war-making superiority in the region, but this military strength stubbornly refuses to turn into permanent political gains.
Violent genies
On the contrary, the Gaza war has proved to be a political disaster, since the fact that it has taken place at all underlines the falsity of Netanyahu’s belief during his entire political career that Israeli security does not require a compromise with the Palestinians.
A year ago, he seemed close to persuading the US and the Gulf monarchies that this was the case. Yet today, the very fact that Israel has found it necessary to put the world in an uproar by killing a Palestinian leader in Tehran starkly illustrates the extent to which Netanyahu’s bid to marginalise 7.2 million Palestinians has utterly failed.
Sadly, those who fail to achieve their goals by force commonly conclude that where they have gone wrong is in not using sufficient force. Instead of concluding that this old, discredited formula does not work, Israel is now becoming locked into wars that it will not lose but cannot win.
An Israeli-Hezbollah war is unlikely to end in a decisive defeat for Hezbollah but “could leave swathes of southern Lebanon and northern Israel in ruins”, according to a report by the International Crisis Group. Everywhere in Israel and among its neighbours, violent genies are popping out of bottles to which they may never return.
Further Thoughts
Shakespeare and Dickens both wrote perceptively about corruption, but the best – and funniest – comment on it is in a verse by Rudyard Kipling:
“Who shall doubt ‘the secret hid
Under Cheops’ pyramid’
Was that the contractor did
Cheops out of several millions?
Or that Joseph’s sudden rise
To Comptroller of Supplies
Was a fraud of monstrous size
On King Pharaoh’s swart Civilians?”
Kipling believed that corruption had not changed much down the ages, but here I think he may have got it a little wrong. During the last 20 years, the increase in high level corruption is one of the most striking developments in the UK. The incoming Labour government is eager to blame all the country’s ills on the toxic legacy of Conservative rule. It has appointed a Covid corruption commissioner but it needs to focus more on the contemporary use of public office for private gain, directly or indirectly, legally or illegally, as one of the most poisonous feature of its inheritance.
Much corruption in the UK is hidden or is not even illegal, yet recent years have racked up an impressive series of scandals which top the news agenda for a few days before disappearing from view. Outside the pages of Private Eye, essential reading for anybody who wants grown-up reportage on corruption at all levels of government, the media has largely failed to join up the dots when it comes to the ways in which access to political power is routinely turned into money for personal gain.
I write about corruption frequently because I am deeply conscious of how swiftly governments can turn into looting machines because of my long experience of reporting in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Russia, where corruption is the order of the day.
I vividly recall how $1.2bn for Iraqi arms procurement was stolen in 2004 and how, 10 years later, the Tigris River flooded the streets of Baghdad with a mixture of dirty water and sewage because a $7bn city-wide drainage system was paid for but never built.
Yet, at the same time, I am conscious of the risk that readers are not convinced that giant frauds can occur in London just as easily as in Baghdad and Kabul. In all three cases, the trick is to get close to political power and use that influence to make money. Bribes may take different forms such as juicy consultancy contracts rather than bundles of cash, but they remain bribes. In Iraq, billions of dollars was paid for non-existent or useless weapons, but since the Covid-19 pandemic the government has written off some £15bn in useless or unnecessary equipment. Much of this was supplied by people in or close to the Conservative Party using the VIP lane to win contracts they could not fulfil, but would act as middle man or woman and pass them on to others for a fee. This is exactly how it used to work in Kabul.
The book to read on corruption in the UK is the recently published Good Chaps: How Corrupt Politicians Broke Our Law and Institutions – And What We Can Do About It by Simon Kuper. This is the best detailed but lucid account I have read of how corruption surged in the UK.
Beneath the Radar
“Did you ever think, sir, what an opportunity a battlefield affords liars?” The question was asked by the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson of an aide accompanying him on a visit to a battlefield where the general had once fought. I have often used the quote to remind myself and others that all wars are propaganda wars and it is unreasonable to suppose that people doing their best to kill each other will not lie about each other.
Obvious though this point is, news reports on wars in the Middle East and Ukraine cite partisan think-tanks or recently retired generals with depressing frequency. Bias is not going to disappear, so the best way to counter it is simply for the public to know that partisanship is ever present. Scepticism not cynicism is the antidote to fake facts and selective reporting. When it comes, for instance, to the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, I try to look at the latest comments by experts from the International Crisis Group and The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Cockburn’s Picks
Over 39,400 Palestinians have been killed and 90,996 injured in the Israeli military offensive on Gaza between 7 October and 30 July according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Of this number, it says that 70 per cent are women and children.
But how reliable are these figures? Western governments and media outlets refer to the “Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in Gaza”, seeking by implication to discredit the high death toll in the eyes of the public. President Joe Biden early on said that he had “no confidence” in these casualty figures. Now Airwars, an organisation that seeks to identify with scientific accuracy how many people are really being killed in airstrikes, be they in Mosul or Gaza, has independently tabulated the names of 3,000 civilian killed in the first 17 days of the war, when the Gaza health infrastructure was still largely intact. Its study concludes that the Gaza Health Ministry figures are largely accurate.
Tragically, they are also probably a gross underestimate.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.