Transcript: Can a wider Middle East war be averted?

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Can a wider Middle East war be averted?’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about the Middle East and the risk of a wider war beyond Gaza. Recent days have seen fighting, assassinations and terror attacks across a wide range of countries, including Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, as well as attacks on shipping in the Red Sea from the Yemen-based Houthi militia. To make sense of it all, I’m joined by Kim Ghattas, distinguished fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics. She’s based in Beirut and author of the acclaimed book Black Wave. So is the risk of a wider war in the Middle East on the rise?

Antony Blinken in audio clip
As we said from day one, we have an intense focus on preventing this conflict from spreading and a big part of the conversations we’ll be having over the coming days with all of our allies and partners is looking at the steps that they can take using the influence and ties that they have to do just that, to make sure that this conflict doesn’t spread.

Gideon Rachman
Ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on October the 7th, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has engaged in round after round of shuttle diplomacy. One of America’s main aims has been to avoid a general war in the Middle East that could suck in the US itself. At first, the signs looked good. But in recent weeks, fears of a regional conflict have been rising again, as Kim Ghattas explained to me.

Kim Ghattas
It’s been a very busy, let’s say, beginning of the year in this region. It started off with a bang in Lebanon on the 2nd of January with the strike that assassinated Saleh al-Arouri, deputy Hamas political leader credited with cementing the relationship between Hamas and Hizbollah. He was located in other countries at various times and came to Lebanon after October the 7th, and was killed in a very targeted strike on the second floor of an apartment building in the southern suburbs of Beirut. And the southern suburbs of Beirut are a bastion of Hizbollah and Hizbollah support.

We’ve had, of course, also a US strike against Shia militia leaders in Baghdad over the last few days as well. A senior IRGC commander killed in Syria, IRGC being the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. And particularly they have, of course, the Quds Force, which is their regional expeditionary force, at the end of last year. This week in Lebanon again, the Israelis on Monday targeted a senior Hizbollah commander in southern Lebanon and, as we speak, another strike in southern Lebanon, reportedly killing another three commanders or senior militants, from what we understand so far.

So it’s very active, lots of flashpoints, lots of strikes, and of course, a generalised fear that one of these will go a step too far and lead to a general conflagration in the Middle East beyond what is happening in Gaza, whether it’s on the Lebanon border with Israel or in Iraq, or further violence also in Yemen, because of course, that’s another active front as well with the Houthis there.

Gideon Rachman
Yes. In fact, as you say, as well as that big list that you gave us, there was the Houthi incidents and attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and a major terrorist attack in Iran, which seems to be Islamic State, which is another factor which has been added to it all.

Kim Ghattas
Indeed, it was the deadliest terrorist attack in Iran since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. We had two suicide bombings take place and 88 people were killed and scores injured. The initial finger-pointing went towards Israel because that’s the easiest culprit, always and very often in the Middle East. But Isis, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for that attack. And yet, Iranian leaders claimed that it was still Israel responsible. And some of them said that it was the Israelis that had ordered Isis to carry out the attack, because it remains a more convenient accusation, because that explosion exposed Iran’s vulnerabilities at this point.

Iran’s response to past suspected Israeli strikes on its territory, even the killing of Qassem Soleimani in January of 2020 in Iraq, the current border clashes between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon, the strike against Saleh al-Arouri, as I just described — there’s a sense that Iran’s response has been somewhat restrained, and so it shows that it doesn’t want to escalate into a wider war, and that shows its vulnerability, which groups like Isis can take advantage of. And I know that some people listening will say, well, what do you mean, they’re showing restraint, they’re, you know, lighting the fires everywhere. If Iran and a group like Hizbollah had decided to really go for all-out war, it would look very different. So, yes, the Iranians are very busy with their proxies around the region, but this is still within somewhat understood rules of engagement.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And I think that one of the things that people have been, I guess, clutching at a sort of store of reassurance has been the idea that although there are all these small fires burning or smouldering around the region as well as the big conflict in Gaza, that generally, all of the big players — Iran, the US, Hizbollah, etc, and possibly Israel, do not want a wider regional war. Do you think that’s still true?

Kim Ghattas
For now, I think that’s still true. But I also think that as time goes on, players like Iran and its proxies and allies know how to turn moments of jeopardy into opportunity. We are now over 100 days into the war in Gaza after the horrific attacks of October the 7th, and initially we did not have the Houthis get involved. We had limited engagement clashes on the border between Lebanon and Israel, and also still somewhat limited attacks against US forces in Iraq, because we should talk about that as well. I hadn’t mentioned it so far, but as time goes by, Iran feels that it needs to up its activity. It cannot remain a credible player in the region where it has always said that it supports the Palestinian cause and not deliver somewhat. And aside from trying to look like it is supporting the Palestinians, it is also, of course, now using this moment of opportunity to push back against US influence in the region. Hence, the attacks against US forces in Iraq and Syria and the activities by the Houthis against world trade, basically.

Gideon Rachman
Who are the Houthis?

Kim Ghattas
The Houthis are a rebel movement in Yemen, a Shia Zaydi political-military organisation. They took over Sana’a in 2015, and the Saudis have had a war against the Houthis in Yemen since then, which the US initially supported and then became increasingly critical of that. So there’s an interesting point where we are now, where I think the Saudis are feeling that they’ve been vindicated in their warnings that the Houthis were not just some local ragtag militia. Perhaps at some point they were, but they have been able, to some extent, to humiliate Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia has not been able to defeat them. But at the same time, over the last eight years, since 2015, the Houthis’ capabilities have really increased tremendously because they were one of Tehran’s loose allies, lesser proxies, and over time they’ve become much better armed, much better financed. And that also involves support from Hizbollah.

Gideon Rachman
Let’s talk a bit about the Houthis, because as I say, the US has said consistently and I think I believe them, that they don’t want to get militarily involved in all of this. And yet there is now talk the Houthi disruption of sea traffic cannot be tolerated anymore and there may be some kind of western-led military intervention. Is that how you see it?

Kim Ghattas
That is definitely in the offing, but I’m not sure that we’re there yet. There are reasons why the Biden administration is treading very carefully. This is not how President Biden wanted his last year in office to unfold. A lot of what they were hoping to achieve is now tied to the outcome of how the Middle East is going to unfold this year, whether the fighting in Gaza is going to calm down, whether they will be able to contain a conflagration between Lebanon and Israel.

So I’m not sure that the Biden administration is eager or enthusiastic for a strike, but they may have no choice at some point, because this cannot be allowed to continue. If you even look at a map of world shipping activity, you’ll see very clearly that nothing is going through the Suez Canal anymore, and everything is going all the way down around the Cape of Africa. And so that’s 12 per cent of world shipping, which has an impact on world economy. And so what it does tell us, though, is that the Houthis have gone from a two-bit player to a newly elevated ally of the Iranians in what I see as Iran’s negotiations with the Americans about Iran’s place in the region off the back of this war unfolding in Gaza.

Gideon Rachman
So you assume that the Houthis would not be doing this autonomously, that essentially, it would be Iran that’s pushing them to do these things?

Kim Ghattas
I would think so. Yes, because I think it allows the Iranians, who do not want war on their own territory, to push forward groups like the Houthis to deliver messages, to push the international community, to push the west and the US in particular, without much to lose. There’s not much to lose for the Houthis in Yemen, really, if there are strikes against Yemen. Of course, for civilians there is a lot to lose. But for the Houthis, there wouldn’t be that much to lose.

As opposed to that, Iran is very reluctant to really deploy Hizbollah fully against Israel or against the US, because there’s too much to lose for Iran when it comes to deploying Hizbollah. Hizbollah sits in a very tight corner. It has to again maintain credibility as defender of the Palestinian cause, wanting to, quote unquote, liberate Jerusalem. But it sits in Lebanon, which is exhausted by three years of economic crisis, has been through one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in contemporary history in 2020 with the explosion at the Beirut port. It has a history of conflict with Israel — 2006, the 1982 invasion, which we forget was devastating for Lebanon. Seventeen thousand people died.

And today, Hizbollah sits in a country, as I said, that is exhausted, does not want to go to war. There’s no support for full-on war with Israel. There never has been. But even more so today. And Hizbollah serves one key purpose, in my view at the moment, which is first line of defence for Iran. So Iran wants to preserve that asset, that ally, for the day when and if Iran itself comes under attack. So as opposed to Hizbollah today, which is something that needs to be maintained, the Houthis are, it’s easier to deploy them.

Gideon Rachman
You say that they don’t want Hizbollah to get involved in a full-scale war at the moment, but of course, it’s not entirely their decision. The Israelis seem, from what we know, to have considered going after Hizbollah very quickly after October the 7th. What do you think their calculations are? Because they do keep saying, you know, a lot of Israelis have had to be pulled back from that border, are now internal refugees. They can’t tolerate this situation for much longer.

Kim Ghattas
Yes. We hear those messages from Israel every day, sitting in Beirut. They will turn Beirut into Gaza. They’ll bomb Lebanon back to the stone ages. Equally, in Israel, people who live in northern Israel have not been able to be at home for many months now. In southern Lebanon, you also have 76,000 people who’ve been displaced by this war. I would say two things here. One, we have to make sure we don’t get desensitised to the fact that we are already at war across the region. It’s low-level, it’s sort of metastasising, but I don’t think we should just wait for the big one. We’re in it already. It’s ongoing for the people in southern Lebanon, for the people in northern Israel, for the people who’ve lived through conflict in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. This is an ongoing situation that risks getting worse.

It’s clear that the Israelis have said that they cannot return to the status quo before October 6th, that they will not allow Hizbollah’s presence on their border any longer, because that is not an acceptable threat for their citizens. You have Lebanese people tell you, well, what about Israeli overflights over Lebanon? What about Israeli strikes on farmland in southern Lebanon? What about the strike that Israel conducted in the middle of the capital?

What we’re seeing right now is real efforts to try to come to a diplomatic solution that would entail the application of UN Resolution 1701, which says that no armed personnel, except for Lebanese government, Lebanese army personnel, should be along the border with Israel, and that would involve the withdrawal or departure in some way of Hizbollah forces who are positioned along the border. UN Resolution 1701 came into effect in 2006, after Hizbollah and Israel waged a 34-day-long war. I don’t really see Hizbollah packing up and saying, see you later, we’re shipping north of the Litani river, 20km away from the border. That’s not how it’s going to happen, but you’ll have some kind of new understanding of how that resolution can be applied for everyone to save face. Because when Israel demands the application of Resolution 1701, there are aspects of that resolution that involve Israel abiding by it and not conducting overflights over Lebanese territory anymore. And I don’t see the Israelis going for that either. If there is another Hamas leader that they want to target in Lebanon, I suspect they’ll go for it, even if that means they’re in breach of Resolution 1701.

What I found so interesting over the last few months is the messaging from Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbollah, and the way he is constantly moving his own red lines to try to avert a conflagration and explain to his own base why he’s not doing more: because they have a credibility problem. Some people in the Arab world are calling him “Hassan Nusf Lira”, which means “Hassan Half a Pound”, as in the man who doesn’t deliver, he’s worth only half a pound, because you have those who expected Hizbollah to do more for the Palestinians in Gaza right after October 7th, and certainly since then. And it’s much to the relief of Hassan Nasrallah and Hizbollah’s critics that he hasn’t, but much to the dismay of some of his supporters who would have liked him to do more. And so his messaging has been very interesting to observe right after the strike against the Hamas leader in Beirut. He had a speech and he said, if Israel wages war against Lebanon, we will respond with no limits. In other words, a strike in the southern suburbs of Beirut killing a Hamas leader is not a war against Lebanon.

And the other sentence that struck me, Gideon, is this. He said, if the Israelis in northern Israel want to live in peace, they have to pressure their government to stop the war in Gaza. That is very interesting terminology, and maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I did not realise that for Hizbollah and Nasrallah, Israelis living in peace was part of their worldview. I find that interesting, and I’ve heard several signals across the region, including from Iranians, that they would like to see some kind of arrangement whereby the survival of the regime in Iran is guaranteed, and they might turn a blind eye to the idea that the Palestinians might go for a two-state solution.

Gideon Rachman
Interesting. And the other front that you mentioned earlier that we should talk about is Iraq, because I think many people may have almost forgotten that there are still American troops in Iraq.

Kim Ghattas
Nine hundred, indeed.

Gideon Rachman
And they’ve come under attack. And that, too might be something. Well, it’s already actually caused a military response from the United States. So talk us through what the tensions are there.

Kim Ghattas
There have been repeated attacks against US forces, both in Iraq and in Syria. Over 120, if I’m not mistaken. Which is why we saw this US strike, very rare one that killed a Shia militia leader in Iraq. And I think that’s where we’re going to see more action, if I may put it like that, in the coming days and weeks. Because going back to Hassan Nasrallah’s speech, amidst all this signalling about Israelis living in peace and we’re ready to talk and negotiate about the border between Lebanon and Israel but after the end of the war in Gaza, amidst all that, there was also a very clear message to the US: that the time has come to push against the US presence in the Middle East, and the key place to do that would be Iraq and Syria.

And I’ve been speaking to people in Beirut about this who are in the know as well, and one thought was very interesting is that Hizbollah apparently sees this as something that is a debt towards Qassem Soleimani. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, the IRGC’s regional paramilitary outfit who was killed in January of 2020. Hizbollah sees this push against American forces as their payback for that assassination, that they owe Qassem Soleimani some kind of victory against America in retaliation for his killing. Because in fact, despite all the rhetoric at the time from Iran that they would respond at the time and place of their choosing, we haven’t really seen much of a response. So that’s where I expect more action. And we’ve had the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Sudani, say that he wants the US presence in Iraq to end. It is, in fact, still part of the US-led coalition against Isis. Nine hundred American soldiers are there. Mohammed Sudani, the Iraqi prime minister, is forming a bilateral committee to study how to end that presence. So I think he’s also trying to buy some time.

Gideon Rachman
And how do you think the Americans themselves see it? I mean, they’ve, for the moment, reinforced in the Middle East with the aircraft carriers and so on, but would they necessarily think it’s, over the long term, such a terrible idea that they did pull troops out of Iraq, given, you know, the desire to reduce their footprint in the Middle East?

Kim Ghattas
Well, that desire to reduce the footprint certainly hasn’t worked out. I think there’s one thing that can be said about the Middle East, is that no matter how many times you try to leave, it always pulls you back in. But when it comes to leaving Iraq and Syria, you know, I think we have to remember that it was after the departure of US troops from Iraq that Isis was able to form and do what it did in 2014 and 2015, which is conquer large swaths of Iraqi and Syrian territory. So I think the Americans will think twice about packing their bags and leaving, because clearly Isis has not completely come undone if it can strike inside Iran. How they navigate that with the Iraqis in the long term is something that will likely be on the plate of the next president after November, whether it’s President Biden again or President Trump.

Gideon Rachman
Indeed. What about the Saudis, who we haven’t even mentioned yet? I mean, they have these big ambitions to be a major, well, power and certainly the biggest power in their region. And yet on this stuff, they seem to be sitting on the sidelines, not really sure what to do.

Kim Ghattas
The Saudis are in a very difficult position because they were keen to normalise ties with Israel and were proceeding on quite a fast clip, I think, to some extent. They were hoping to reach a deal by the beginning of this year. It was going to be called the Jerusalem-Jeddah Declaration. There was a very small Palestinian component to that, and my understanding is that actually, it was mostly the Americans who were pushing the Saudis to ask for more on that front. If you want to resume normalisation talks now between the Saudis and the Israelis, you can be sure that it’s going to require a considerable Palestinian component. And I think that’s where the Saudis have an opportunity if all the stars align — and they’re certainly not aligned right now — to deliver something substantive for the region and for the Palestinians, and to really burnish their credentials as leaders of the Arab and Muslim world. But that’s not how the trajectory is going at the moment.

And so the Saudis are walking a very fine line between maintaining that option open, because I think the option of resuming normalisation talks is still open, and maintaining their position in the Arab world, which is seething when it looks at the images coming from Gaza, which are really devastating. And aside from that, they also are keen to maintain their rapprochement with the Iranians. When that rapprochement happened in March of last year, I described it as an exercise in buying time, a way for both the Iranians and the Saudis to let off some steam because they were getting very close to a full-frontal confrontation. I think that rapprochement has come in really handy in the wake of October 7th, because it’s allowed both sides to make sure they continue to communicate at a moment when things could go really wrong. And it’s been an avenue for the Iranians to indicate to the Saudis that they don’t want this to escalate. And it’s been an avenue for the Saudis to make sure they hug their friends. They may be hugging their friends close, but they need to hug their enemies, if you will, the Iranians or their rivals in the region, even closer at this particular time, or they might find themselves targeted.

Look, the ambition of the Biden administration, I think, remains that they could somehow come to a point where the Israeli military campaign against Gaza decreases in intensity. You start talking about more humanitarian aid, release of hostages, reconstruction at some point. Talk about revamping the Palestinian Authority, getting a new leadership in Israel, putting the idea of a two-state solution on the table. It’s not gonna happen this year, but on the table as an end goal, whereby you then use Saudi normalisation as a lever to push it forward and show the Israelis that there is an alternative way to live in this region which does not involve war, but can involve the jackpot of normalisation with one of the most important countries in the region. I think the Americans are worried that the Israelis are not listening, and I think that’s something that I’m seeing a lot in this region. Trying to understand what your opponent is doing and saying is important. Trying to read between the lines is important, but all the different players at the moment, particularly Israel, I think are on a trajectory that is driven by fear and that’s a dangerous place to be in.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. So to finish then with Israel and with Gaza, where, as you say, the images and what’s happening on the ground continues to be pretty devastating. If there was a deceleration in the conflict and an ability to at least begin some kind of reconstruction, do you think that is the key to lessening all these other regional tensions that we’ve been talking about, or might have taken on a life of their own now?

Kim Ghattas
The longer the war in Gaza goes on, the more these other flashpoints will take on a life of their own. I think we’re in that window where it’s still possible to change the trajectory of the region, but it’s getting tight. The longer it lasts, the harder it is to even utter the word peace in this region. And so I think a first potential diplomatic success for the Biden administration might be Lebanon, whereby they find a way to get Hizbollah and the Lebanese government on the one hand, and Israel on the other side, to agree on a formula that may not be the exact application of UN Resolution 1701, but an OK application that allows both sides to disentangle and for Lebanese citizens to go back to the south and for Israeli citizens to go back to the north. That is the one to watch, while at the same time looking at how Hizbollah and the Iranians handle their efforts to pressure America via strikes in Iraq.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Kim Ghattas in Beirut, ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening. Please join me again next week.

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