The Twilight Struggle
Opinion by Ben Everidge for Thomas
in the cradle of civilization …
Okay, let’s take on one of the most contentious issues imaginable in the 2024 election cycle – the Israel-Hamas War.
The Middle East has been a cauldron of hate for as long as humankind can remember, back as far as Cain and Abel. War has been a constant in a region that the world recognizes as the cradle of civilization.
An October 7th massacre of 1,139 innocent Israelis by the terrorist group Hamas, a radical Sunni Islamist political and military group currently governing strategic parts of the occupied Gaza Strip since 2007, set off the latest battle the likes of which the world has only witnessed a few times in modern memory.
Israel, predictably, responded with an intense military response that has killed 27,000 Palestinians and injured more than 67,000 others; many in both categories have been women, children, and the elderly.
If Hamas wanted war, then Hamas got its wish and then some.
Until then, foreign policy officials and members of official Washington were hopeful that efforts for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia were bearing fruit and might reduce the United States’ role in the region so we could focus on other critical priorities.
America’s nemesis in the region since 1979, Iran, had other ideas fermenting unrest by funding and training militias like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi in Yemen. These Iranian militias attacked U.S. forces in the Middle East on more than 160 occasions before killing three American service people and injuring 30 more at their base in Jordan with an undetected drone attack on January 28th.
The United States, which had been attempting to keep the Israel-Hamas conflict from broadening into a wider regional war, launched reprisal attacks against militia facilities in Syria and Iraq. The U.S. reprisals for the Jordanian event were in addition to other reprisals the U.S. and allies like Great Britain had launched against Iranian-backed Yemeni militia members who had been attacking commercial shipping and U.S. Naval vessels in and around the Red Sea, negatively impacting freedom of navigation.
The Biden Administration, believing that helping broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas would help relieve pressure on the United States on the Red Sea and around the Middle East, announced through U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the final days of January that the United States is not at war with Iran.
Substantial evidence to the contrary indicates that Iran is most definitely at war with the United States and many Western governments, despite Washington’s denials otherwise.
A significant criticism of the Biden Administration is that they do not have a clear and consistent foreign policy. In fairness, the Trump Administration was just as erratic with its foreign policy. The absence of a coherent U.S. foreign policy for the past seven years at least has harmed American foreign interests, not only in the Middle East region but globally, I would argue.
