We're at War With Iran

Iran launches nearly 200 missiles at Israel; U.S. shoots down many

Photo: U.S. Air Force

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Here’s the takeaway from today’s events in the Middle East: the United States is at war with Iran. 

Washington can try to obfuscate that fact by crediting themselves with avoiding a “full-scale” war, whatever that means, and throwing around jargon like “deterrence” and “escalatory spiral.”

But this is war, and the U.S. is intimately involved. The U.S. cooperated closely with the Israeli Defense Force to prepare for the assault. American ships operating in the eastern Mediterranean shot down Iranian missiles. The U.S. is on the ground, at sea, and in the air, operating along Iran’s entire western border.

There’s a cyber war, a covert war, a special operations war, an espionage war, an influence war, bombing, troops on the ground, ship, satellites; the U.S. is intercepting, thwarting, and countering. Every day. 

One can stand on the parapet with binoculars searching for Iranian tanks to come rolling across the desert to signal what everyone is insisting is something more to come. But reality should have set in today. Only the American people seem unaware because of secrecy and because of the lockstep narrative of the mainstream media, which is not to accept this fundamental reality. 

“In terms of the conflict itself, we still believe, like right now, the conflict has been contained to Gaza,” Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said last week. When a reporter asked how the conflict could be contained to Gaza when the war is killing civilians in Lebanon, Singh doubled down: 

“Sure. But what I would tell you is that it's not how we would characterize an all-out, full scale regional war. What you're seeing is a trade of fires back and forth on that northern border…We're not seeing this widen out to a regional conflict. And that's what we are concerned about.”

It seems high time that we be concerned about more than just an “all-out, full-scale regional war,” an arbitrary threshold that wars these days never seem to clear. Whether it’s politically motivated or just that we have failed to find the words to describe our current world at war doesn’t quite matter. Check out how the NBC News headline today: “White House is desperately trying to avert a wider war in the Mideast”-- and the theme that the Biden administration has "worked around the clock" to “desperately” avert "full-blown war" is so self-serving.

Full-blown war is like a moving red line. No matter what happens, we’re never quite there in the mealy-mouthed narrative. War rages as a non-war, the money flows, Washington credits itself with averting full-blown catastrophe while never having to take responsibility for today’s (and everyday’s) mess. 

War with Iran was here yesterday and will be tomorrow. There’s no diplomatic solution on the horizon. There’s no cutting off the spigot of weapons and war materiel. There’s no decisive encounter where one side wins and another loses. Israel and Iran are at war, directly and indirectly. The U.S., in attacking Iran’s proxies in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and now in using its armed forces to directly shoot down Iranian missiles, as it did in April, is equally at war. Maybe not in the lexicon of those sitting at their desks in Washington. Just in the real world.

Iran launched some 180 ballistic missiles at Israel today, with loud explosions heard in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the Israeli press says. The attack signaled both the limitations of Iran's capacity as well as its studiousness in keeping the pot simmering but not boiling over. No one wants to say it, but Iran is being careful. Though its missile attack is about double the size of its attack in April, it doesn’t seem to have used drones, and it claims that it only aimed its missiles at Israeli military bases.

Iran says that its forces used hypersonic Fattah missiles for the first time, and 90 percent of its missiles successfully hit three targets in Israel, all military bases. But Israel and the U.S. say otherwise. . “The attack appears to have been defeated and ineffective,” President Joe Biden said this afternoon. National security advisor Jake Sullivan used the exact same phrase in talking to reporters, adding that “US naval destroyers joined Israeli air defense units in firing interceptors to shoot down in-bound missiles.” Those destroyers operated in the eastern Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Israel and fired about a dozen interceptors, the Pentagon says.

Israel Defense Force spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari says that a number of Iranian missiles reached Israeli territory. “During the defense, we carried out quite a few interceptions,” he said. “There are some impacts in the center and areas in the south of the country.” Hagari added that after less than 30 minutes for two barrages, no further Iranian moves. That’s it. Stay tuned for the next episode.

None of the attacks appears to have been pointed at the United States directly, not on U.S. military bases in the region, or on the multi-national air defense network that Central Command has cobbled together with Israel and a group of Middle East Arab partners, from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to Kuwait and Jordan.

Almost immediately after the strike, Iran’s U.N. representative announced that his country’s retaliation had concluded:

“Iran’s legal, rational, and legitimate response to the terrorist acts of the Zionist regime…has been duly carried out.”

In other words, Iran is done for now. Of course it threatened retaliation. Iran said if Israel retaliated against the Iranian retaliation, Tehran’s response would be "more crushing and ruinous." Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said: “This is just part of our capability. Do not get into a confrontation with Iran.” The Iranians also benefit by framing this as limited, threatening more, if such and such happens. That way it can justify its own attack as “proportional” or appropriate while also obscuring that it is already at war.  

"We have made clear that there will be consequences, severe consequences, for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case," Sullivan said at his White House briefing. “The United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” Joe Biden said today. 

Israel vows to retaliate at a place and time of its choosing. That will be retaliation for Iran’s attack, which Iran thinks was a retaliation for Israel’s attack, which came after Iran attacked, when Iran’s proxies attacked or were going to attack, which came after you insert whatever the never ending grievance is. It goes on and on.

War is normalized, the U.S. is Israel’s proxy (or the other way around), and the news media intentionally or inadvertently keeps the American people on the edge of their seats waiting — always waiting — for something worse to happen. How any of this is good news for Israel or Iran or the United States or the people of the region or the very concept of security baffles me.

— Edited by William M. Arkin