Opinion | The United States Has More at Risk in the Middle East Than You Probably Think
Douglas London
Tue, October 8, 2024 at 10:03 AM EDT11 min read
Who is winning the expanding conflict between Israel, Iran and its proxies? In his fiery United Nations speech, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defiantly justified his expanded war against Hezbollah and boasted that Israel was winning. The rhetoric from the other side, from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, is little different, celebrating the costs their “resistance” is inflicting on Israel and its allies.
I spent many of my 34-plus years in the CIA’s clandestine service living in this region, meeting our Iranian, Hezbollah and Palestinian agents, and working with Israeli and Arab counterparts. And among the most enduring lessons I learned is that measuring winning and losing in the Middle East is often not readily apparent in the moment. The consequence of any single event sometimes unfolds over generations.
Iran’s recent attack on Israel featured some 180 to 200 ballistic missiles and caused minimal damage, according to Israeli claims. Yet in the midst of this same attack, eight Israelis were killed, and at least seven seriously wounded, when two Hamas gunmen opened fire in the normally tranquil, tree-lined area of Jaffa. Even as we await what could conceivably be further large-scale direct attacks between Israel and Iran that might further draw in the U.S., the Jaffa attacks show that Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, are adapting and likely steering toward what foreign policy types call a more “asymmetrical” strategy.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-why-israel-war-against-140300378.html
