Commentator
Iran, Israel, Ukraine
Dear Friends,
This is the Commentator post that I try to do a couple times a month. It involves reading through a wide array of news sources from around the world and trying to approach the news in a slightly different way. I have my own views, which I share, but the idea is more to think out loud — usually through the lens of the best, most deeply-reported pieces that I’ve come across on a particular topic.
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, writes lyrically on Howard’s End and American capitalism.Best,
Sam
IRAN (AND A BIT OF YEMEN)
It’s hard to remember starting a year with exactly the same sense of foreboding (I guess 2017). But the general sense from looking around the world right now is: nothing good is going to happen.
The Israel/Gaza War is its own nightmare. The war, increasingly, is being understood as a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran for dominance of the Middle East — and escalation, at the moment, seems all but inevitable. Meanwhile, every decision that the US makes plays itself out — even more so than usual — in the context of electoral politics and favorability ratings. And for good reason: a Trump victory (which really does seem more likely than not) means a collapse in whatever détente with Iran that the Biden administration achieves between now and then.
The basic problem is that the reigning US policy in the Middle East (even allowing for the disturbances of the Trump years) wasn’t so unreasonable. There was an attempt to work out a modus vivendi with Iran, just as Israel made its attempt to normalize relations with Hamas in Gaza. But all of that is off the table after 10/7 and it’s as if all policy has to be worked out from scratch. As analyst Aaron David Miller says of Biden’s position in the wake of the drone strike on Jordan, “His options range from bad to worse.”
Foreign Policy has a helpful piece outlining Biden’s three options at the moment, which are 1) striking inside Iran; 2) striking Iranian-affiliated targets elsewhere in the Middle East; 3) pursuing a more diplomatic route. But even the advocates for diplomatic reengagement acknowledge that, as Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy puts it, “I’m not going to pretend this is simple.” And strikes inside Iran — fairly obviously — are an extreme overreaction. “An outright war with Iran would be extremely dangerous, very deadly, potentially very expensive, and highly disruptive economically,” writes Tyler Rogoway at The War Zone.
So that leaves option #2 — a continuation of what Obama called ’the Washington playbook’ — tit-for-tat killings, with, in this case, Iranian shipping and Iranian personnel in Iraq and Syria coming in for targeting. Iran has, in a sense, created a loophole for the US within the logic of escalation. Iran has been very careful in its engagement throughout the Middle East to act through proxies — raising the possibility that the US, in fighting Iran, need only fight the proxies. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq took credit for the drone strike on Jordan. Why not just retaliate against the Islamic Resistance in Iraq? The Houthis are the ones attacking shipping in the Red Sea. Why not limit retaliation to the Houthis? But that’s not exactly how The Playbook works. Biden had tried, essentially, to ignore weeks’ worth of strikes against US military bases in the Middle East, but the deaths of servicemen put an end to that policy. “There is a sense that our deterrence measures to date have not been received by Tehran as we hoped, so escalation is unavoidable,” says Jeremy Bash, a former Chief of Staff at the CIA and Pentagon.
Whether that works or not — a limited, ‘proportionate’ escalation — depends largely on how you understand the Iranian regime, and this is the debate that runs all the way back to 1979.
For the purposes of this discussion, the adversarial positions are conducted by Bruce Riedel in a talk he gave for Brookings; and Pierre James and Suha Hassen in an article for Quillette. Riedel, who served for decades in the CIA, is particularly critical of US policy in Yemen and is at a nexus of dissident-minded Democratic Senators who believe that, as Riedel puts it, the US has been “snookered” by Saudi Arabia.
Riedel’s contention is that the Obama administration allowed itself to be drawn into the Yemen war out of a desire to placate Saudi Arabia. “They very much didn't want to go the route they went, but they ended up doing it because of larger geopolitical concerns,” he says. “The idea [was] that as a means to make Saudi Arabia okay with our decision to enter into a nuclear agreement with Iran, we owed them the unconditional backing of their disastrous war in Yemen.”
But that backfired horrendously, with the failure of the Saudi offensive (“the Saudis have seen their air strikes against the Houthis fail to achieve results for nine years,” writes Chatham House’s Farea Al-Muslimi), with the ensuing humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen (“it’s really hard to get your mind around the scope of this disaster,” says Senator Chris Murphy), and with deepened hostility with Iran without even the consolation of the nuclear deal.
For Riedel, the attacks on Red Sea shipping are comeuppance for a decade of failed, and criminal, policy towards Yemen and Saudi Arabia. “It is been, I think, a tragic mistake for the United States to so singularly support this cruel war,” he says. “We have literally been participants in the mass starvation of young children.”
Riedel’s contention is that the issue fundamentally is a misassessment by the US of its geopolitical priorities. The Saudis are not the enduring allies we have thought they were. And there is an unfortunate tendency to vilify the Iranians, which has now brought us to the brink of Middle East-wide war. “I have felt for a long time that Americans are almost out of their minds about Iran. We have built Iran up into a demon,” Riedel says.
It is difficult to argue with Riesel’s moral outrage, but the counter-argument is that the Yemen war was, as he notes, based on mollifying Saudi Arabia over détente with Iran and that policy simply didn’t pan out — both because of Trump and because of the unremitting intransigence of Iran. In that view, there simply are ingrained faultlines in the Middle East — and Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ will always be the enemy, with Saudi Arabia a problematic but ultimately necessary friend.
In Quillette, James and Hassen ask themselves why, if so many Middle East nations have been willing to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel, “Iran remains a holdout?” — and answer their own question by claiming that the anti-Zionism at the heart of the Islamic Revolution has intensified with time into a “lethal combination of….antisemitism, Shi’a theology, and eschatological visions of an Islamic Jerusalem.” In other words, James and Hassen are saying, Iran cannot be viewed as just another state. Iran has to be understood as a regime of eschatologically-minded religious fanatics and treated accordingly. That means no nuclear deal and — as the hawks lay it out in the Foreign Policy piece — a policy of always meeting Iranian aggression with a preponderance of strength.
It’s very difficult for me to swallow that line of thought — as redolent as it is of the neocon position that resulted in the Iraq War. And, as Matt Duss notes in the same article, “Let’s be honest, there have been people in [Washington] who have been hot for a war with Iran for 20 years.” Duss’ point is that, even if in the short-term diplomacy isn’t much of an option and the Washington Playbook is what’s called for, that a sustainable foreign policy can only involve rapprochement with Iran. “Ultimately, you need to get to some kind of modus vivendi of which Iran is a part,” Duss says. Which does seem very hard to argue with.
What that means, though, is Biden winning in November and then getting Iran back to the table for a fresh nuclear deal. Assuming that the entire Middle East isn’t engulfed in war at that point.
ISRAEL/GAZA
Let’s try to have a bit more positivity here. There really does seem to be a ceasefire on the table between Israel and Hamas, with the conflict ending as everyone assumed it would eventually end — Hamas gradually turning over its hostages and Israel gradually dialing back its offensive. The conflict is now in its “low intensity” phase. There’s a path to a better political future for Israel with elections expected sometime in 2024 and with Benny Gantz all but set — at least if you believe The New York Times — to replace Netanyahu.
The Playbook may do its bit to stall Iranian attacks in the Middle East at large. Biden is eager for Israel to bring the Gaza offensive to a close. And many in the Israeli military complex are obviously concerned about armaments shortages and about the far greater risk of escalated conflict with Hezbollah.
But, obviously, immense problems remain. It’s not really clear to what extent Hamas’ military wing is responsive to the political leadership. And, far more than that, the outstanding question is whether Israel can consider itself satisfied with what it has achieved. Hamas’ military infrastructure continues to exist. Hamas’ top leaders are at large. And Israel has forfeited a tremendous amount of its standing in the international community for what The Financial Times calls “more tactical than strategic” gains.
Netanyahu clearly believes that his political future is tied to indefinite continuation of the war — or to what he ominously calls ‘total victory.’ A military advisor tells the FT: “We can continue for another year or more and we’ll see who breaks first.”
The US and the Israeli moderates have far more modest ambitions. Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military analyst, says, in the same article: “We’ve reached a T-junction: either you reach a full deal and withdraw, or you go for the full toppling of the Hamas regime and the conquest of all of Gaza….You need to choose.”
Milshtein, who has been very critical of the administration’s handling of the war, opts for the first course. “What does ‘victory’ actually mean?” he says — and argues that there is no viable path for Israel in managing the reconstruction of Gaza through either occupation or reimposing the Palestinian Authority.
But ending the war on the more lenient terms Milshtein suggests seems very difficult to justify within Israeli political discourse. Hamas would remain in power in Gaza, and there would be no real alleviation of the trauma of 10/7.
A long article in Der Spiegel — the best piece I’ve read on the conflict since it’s started — gives the perspective that, more than anything, it’s really about one man: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza. Der Spiegel interviews several of the Israelis who interacted with Sinwar in his decades in prison — including his most relentless critic, his dentist — and paints a picture of a figure who is both charismatic and fanatical, who is dedicated to nothing but the destruction of Israel. Asked why he wasn’t married in his late 20s, Sinwar replied, “Hamas is my wife, my son, my daughter, my parents. Hamas is everything to me.”
Der Spiegel contends that the political leadership in Qatar may well not have not known about 10/7 and that, while Iran was likely supportive of the attack, the decision itself was taken by Sinwar and the military leadership. Netanyahu looms large in this account — with his decision to strengthen Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority creating the near-criminal negligence that laid out the conditions for the attack — but the attack itself seems to be possible only with the dogged determination of Sinwar and his close circle of military leaders.
What that means is that there is a way to wind down the conflict somewhere between ‘total victory’ and a withdrawal by the Israelis. And that would be to kill Sinwar, along with the rest of the trio of the Hamas’ military leadership — which would likely give Israel the accomplishment it ‘needs’ to feel that 10/7 was, in some way, avenged.
That’s easier said than done, of course: Sinwar and the rest of Hamas’ Gazan leadership know that, ultimately, they are the target, and, according to the FT article, Israeli intelligence believes that many of the hostages have been placed around Sinwar as a human shield.
As the conflict moves to its ‘low intensity’ or ‘attritional’ phase, the war — even more so than earlier — is fought in the domain of public relations. Israel, since the incursion into Gaza, has found itself very nearly a pariah state — supported, really, only by the US. What we’d expect is more of a public relations campaign. It’s been a surprise to me that there isn’t been more of an attempt in the media to break up the number of Gazan casualties between civilians and militants — the number of 26,000 deaths looks very different if, as the IDF claims, 10,000 of those are fighters — and I’d expect Israel to more vociferously insist on that distinction. Meanwhile, Israel has scored a real publicity coup with the discovery of the UNRWA workers who participated in the 10/7 attack — a revelation that deeply undercuts the legitimacy of the UN itself to sit in judgment over Israel’s actions. And the continued exposure of the hundreds of miles of tunnels, including underneath hospitals, goes a long way towards providing some justification for Israel’s actions.
But nothing in the public relations campaign detracts from the awful facts on the ground: the high number of civilian losses; the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza; the near-total absence of a plan for reconstruction at the end of hostilities; the absence of any vision for a political future.
Anyway….so much for positivity.
UKRAINE FATIGUE
And as for the other interminable, attritional war, a series of articles discuss ‘Ukraine Fatigue’ — the feeling that everybody on the Western side of the conflict so badly wants to be done with the war as to seriously risk jeopardizing the Ukrainian cause.
Masha Gessen, who has been throwing bombs in every possible direction, has a controversial piece for The New Yorker in which they claim that Ukraine’s regime is on the verge of becoming autocratic and that democracy — the ostensible reason for fighting — has been suspended, maybe permanently. “Russia is Russia because Russia is ‘fighting Nazis,’” says Mustafa Nayyem, the head of Ukraine’s federal agency for reconstruction, “and we risk becoming Russia because we are actually fighting Nazis.”
I don’t mind Gessen’s piece — it’s well-reported and a revealing glimpse of Ukraine approaching the two-year anniversary of the start of the war — but the actual evidence for the slide to ‘autocracy’ is fairly thin, and those in the piece arguing the contrary position are somewhat more persuasive.
What is absolutely clear is that ‘Ukraine Fatigue’ is pervasive within Ukraine itself. Much of the country is desperate for the conflict to end. Draft-dodging is commonplace — with draftees buying their way out of service. And what the Ukrainians whom Gessen talks to seem to crave more than anything else is the return of normal television, as opposed to the war-related ‘marathon’ news coverage. “The one thing all Ukrainians agree on is that we need an end to the Marathon,” says Oleksandra Romantsova of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.
But Gessen is less compelling in the argument that Ukraine’s wartime challenges indicate a demise of civic values in Ukraine. Gessen quotes a journalist Katerina Sergatskova as saying “What are we fighting for — land? We say that we’ll keep fighting until the Russian empire falls apart. But it’s not going to fall apart.” But Oleksandr Solontay, a political organizer, makes the opposing argument: “Russia is trying to erase us as a nation. So we have to ask whether we can keep talking about democracy when our very survival as a people is in question.”
Similarly, the charge that Ukraine is stalked by the “demon” of corruption and that corruption is “pervasive and intractable” come up against the counter-argument that a certain amount of corruption is to be expected in war and is not necessarily an indictment of Ukraine as a nation. “Corruption levels decrease when there is less money,” says Nayyem. “There is a lot of money in war.”
It is hard to extricate Gessen’s piece from a prevailing desire in Western media to be contrary and to look for vices in Ukraine which may or may not exist and which do not, in any case, affect the underlying justifications for offering Ukraine support. In a more belligerent piece for The Financial Times, Martin Wolf argues that “Ukraine Fatigue is unpardonable” and that Ukraine’s progress towards democratic values since the start of the war is astonishing. “A new nation is being born out of the fire,” he writes.
In a long mission statement for Foreign Affairs, CIA Director William Burns employs similar language to argue that “for the United States to walk away from the conflict at this crucial moment and cut off support to Ukraine would be an own goal of historic proportions.”
This is my position too. I believe that Russia’s invasion was entirely unjustifiable; and that the West owes it to Ukraine to remain a stalwart ally, now no less so than at the start of the conflict. In the end, I also believe, looking at the war entirely through the lens of geopolitics misunderstands it. Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Zelensky, has the best line in Gessen’s piece, contending: “Russia is not fighting for land. It is fighting for its right to live in the past.” That view is echoed by Burns, who argues, “It is always a mistake to underestimate Putin’s fixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices. Without that control, he believes it is impossible for Russia to be a great power or for him to be a great Russian leader.”
The war — contrary to Sergatskova — is fought largely in the realm of ideas: Russia for an idea of its historical destiny; Ukraine for a sense of itself as a modern nation-state. “Europe itself is the ideology,” Oleksandr Solontay tells Gessen. “It’s a beacon and we are swimming towards it.”
War is bound to create damage within Ukrainian society — especially now with a mounting sense that Ukraine may be on its own, that the US is no longer the reliable ally that it once seemed to be. Consolidation of power is inevitable; corruption is inevitable; war trauma, bruised egos, and dissension are inevitable. Zelensky appears set to fire the commander-in-chief of the armed forces Zaluzhny after months of feuding — a decision that is “likely to cause an uproar within Ukraine’s rank-and-file military and civil society, among whom Zaluzhny enjoys huge support,” as The Financial Times reports.
But all of this is part of the cost of waging war and does not mean that the society itself is somehow compromised. Gessen cites a prediction by the Ukrainian political philosopher Mikhai Minakov in early 2023 that “society may eagerly accept single-pyramid patronal rule in exchange for victory and fast economic recovery,” and Gessen claims, with the suspension of planned presidential elections in March 2024, that Minakov’s prediction has already been borne out. But, again, this is premature, and ideas like it can have real consequences in terms of eroding Western support. Putin’s Russia has gone down a terrible path, which entails not just the eradication of liberal values but also the attempted conquest of its neighbors. Ukraine is a bulwark against that and has its right to self-determination. As Wolf puts it, “the arguments for stopping Russia from destroying Ukraine have in no way diminished.” If support for Ukraine isn’t as fun as it once was — all the Ukrainian flags everywhere — that doesn’t mean that it’s any less important.
Many thanks. Deep breath!
Sam,
You brought a lot of reading and thought to these three issues and supplied a lot of value.
One takeaway: Inconstancy in foreign policy is often the worst approach.
I was not a fan of the Iran nuclear deal, but I thought it was an awful mistake to back out of it once made without any evidence that Iran had not lived up to its terms.
The same with Ukraine. While Russia bears all the blame for the invasion, I thought our efforts at diplomacy pre-war were terrible. But once the war started and we committed to supporting Ukraine, we "owned" the war and to drop our support would indeed be an awful "own goal" that would have lasting terrible consequences.