Is this a random act of journalism?
From Hamas attack to U.S. war with Iran, violence forges a new Middle East
Early on a cool autumn morning in 2023, from a tunnel beneath the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar gave an order that sent thousands of Hamas fighters through the fence separating the territory from Israel. That green light has reordered the Middle East on a scale comparable to the Arab Spring or the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century — but not remotely in the ways Sinwar had in mind.
I’m doubting Khamenei and the rest of the Iranian leaders thought it would end this way. Certainly Hamas probably did not consider that Israel would go scorched earth on Gaza, which also led to Israel going after Hezbollah. Remember the pagers?
Twenty-nine months later, the Middle East is almost unrecognizable. Israel stands indisputably as the military hegemon, its enemies demolished or decapitated. Saudi Arabia is emerging as a pivotal economic and political anchor, its Persian Gulf neighbors reeling under Iranian missile fire. Palestinians, mourning 75,000 dead in a shattered Gaza and losing territory in the West Bank, seem marginalized — by everyone, again.
Sinwar is dead — assassinated by Israel in October 2024 — and after nearly two and a half years of bloodshed and upheaval, the network he hoped would ride to his rescue is in ruins. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was blown up in a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike on Saturday. The regime that bankrolled and armed the “axis of resistance” for four decades is on the edge of collapse — perhaps taking with it Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
Tehran, facing a chaotic and uncertain succession, is making enemies of the entire region — firing drones and missiles haphazardly, and often vainly including civilian targets. Bashar al-Assad, the longtime Syrian ruler, now lives in frigid Moscow.
Let’s not forget the initial attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. When Democrats did what they did to Trump and Republicans they never considered how Trump would be Trump if he won the presidency again. How he would go scorched earth on, say, immigration. Well, Iran has learned a hard lesson, a much more violent one than Venezuela’s Maduro learned.
Driving the military campaign and aiming to shape the region’s future is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has survived repeated government collapses, an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court and years of corruption trials to lead Israel to an unprecedented military dominance. And President Donald Trump, who overcame two impeachments, a felony conviction and an assassination attempt to return to the White House and take the United States to war against Iran without a vote of Congress.
Again, perhaps Dems should have thought about the consequences of being unhinged.
While Israel has faced allegations of genocide, a new generation of Israelis are now bearing the traumas of war, like their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. And while American soldiers are once again dying in the Middle East in a war of uncertain duration and unclear goals, what Sinwar set off was not a liberation but an unraveling of everything he and his sponsors yearned for — a defeated Israel, Palestinian hopes for statehood, a Middle East rid of Western influence. The so-called Great Satan looks more like the Great Decider.
“Talk about a colossal miscalculation leading to catastrophic consequences,” said Bilal Saab, a Chatham House fellow and former Pentagon official in the first Trump administration. “That cataclysmic event single-handedly changed the face of the Middle East.”
What happens going forward? Time will tell. It’s actually worth reading the WP article.
War makes climate change worse in many ways, and vice versa. The US-Israel attacks on Iran that began over the weekend have killed hundreds of civilians and sent oil prices soaring, but this war also promises to unleash massive amounts of planet-warming gases at a time when civilization is already hurtling toward irreversible climate breakdown. Not every story about the Iran war needs to make the climate connection, but climate change is essential context if the public and policymakers are to understand the full dimensions of this conflict.
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