Above photo: People in Iran listen to the speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Majid Saeedi/Getty Images.
Since the early days of this war, the conflict has not been contained to Gaza.
Is a regional conflict with Iran, Hezbollah, and other actors on the horizon?
Over three months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, there is little hope the carnage will stop anytime soon—and with each passing day, the danger of Israel’s war on Gaza spiraling into a larger regional conflict increases. The devastation in Gaza is unlike anything seen in the 21st century, but Israel’s military strikes—like last week’s assassination of Saleh al-Arouri, a top leader of Hamas, in Lebanon—have not been limited to Palestine alone. At the same time, armed resistance groups in Iraq and Syria have launched hundreds of attacks on US bases, confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah has created a simmering northern front along the Lebanese border, and Yemen’s blockade of the Red Sea has created an international crisis for shipping and trade. Should any of these fronts open into a new facet of this war, it could lead to the unraveling of the entire region, with a very real possibility of a showdown between Israel and the US against Iran. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with former war correspondent Chris Hedges on the slippery slope to a regional war.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez: Welcome everyone to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. We are recording this on Monday, January 8th, and it has been exactly three months since the October 7th Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel, designated as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, culminated in the brutal killing of over 1100 people, including nearly 700 Israeli civilians, hundreds of security forces and dozens of foreigners. Hamas forces also captured around 250 hostages from Israel during the attack.
Since then, over the past three months, Israel’s scorched-earth assault on the Gaza Strip has wreaked a kind of devastation unseen in the 21st century. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, nearly 23,000 Palestinians have now been killed in Gaza since October 7th, the majority of whom are women and children, with countless others still buried under the rubble.
As of December, 1.9 million people, 85 percent of Gaza’s population had been displaced. That number is now even higher. This is to say nothing of the violence, death, devastation, and displacement that has resulted over 75 years of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine. Under the manifestly false guise of eradicating Hamas, Israeli forces are carrying out Israel’s long-sought-after goal of eradicating Palestinians from Gaza itself, obliterating civilian lives, homes, and neighborhoods with genocidal abandon. Bombing hospitals, schools, archeological and cultural sites, refugee camps, and the infrastructure of daily life; roads, bridges, waterways, everything. Gaza is being reduced to a moonscape. A full-scale ethnic cleansing is happening before our eyes and the United States, and President Joe Biden’s administration, are undeniably guilty of being full-throated accomplices, allies, and enablers of this carnage. Even though Biden himself, his cabinet and the various administrators of the United States’ global military regime, have tried to paint themselves as mere concerned observers on the sidelines. But make no mistake, as we speak, over on Capitol Hill, tensions are running high and fears are mounting that Israel’s war on Gaza could spiral into a regional war in which the US will be directly implicated.
As Jason Burke writes this week in The Guardian, “Israeli defense officials and former senior intelligence officers have said they expect fighting in Gaza to continue for at least a year, raising the prospect of thousands more civilian casualties, a deepening humanitarian crisis, and a continuing grave threat to regional stability.”
Even at The New York Times, whose reporting on this issue has been, let’s say, at times suspect, the concern is palpable. In a report published last week, Eric Schmitt, Julian E. Barnes, Helene Cooper and David E. Sanger write:
“American, Israeli and Lebanese officials insist that few parties want Israel’s war in Gaza to become a wider conflict that engulfs the Middle East. But the assassination of Saleh al-Arouri, a top leader of Hamas in Lebanon on Tuesday, and the deaths of scores of people in mysterious twin explosions in Iran on Wednesday, threatened to bring the Middle East and the United States closer to the brink of a regional war, which the Biden administration has tried to stave off since Hamas’s deadly attacks against Israel on October 7th. Just hours after the bombs went off in Iran, the United States and 12 of its allies issued a written warning to another militia group in the region, the Houthis of Yemen, who have been mounting near-daily missile, drone and seaborne attacks on commercial vessels. So far, the United States has held back from retaliating against Houthi bases in Yemen, in large part because it does not want to undermine a fragile truce in Yemen’s civil war. Israeli officials would not comment on whether their forces had targeted Mr. al-Arouri, but Lebanese and American officials ascribed the attack to Israel.”
So what are the chances of Israel’s war on Gaza spiraling into a larger regional war? And what position will that put the United States in? What would such a war look like and what are the global implications here? What are the guardrails, for lack of a better word, currently keeping that reality at bay? And how close are those guardrails from breaking down right now? To talk about all of this, I’m honored to be joined today by my Real News colleague and host of The Chris Hedges Report, the one and only Chris Hedges. Chris, thanks so much for joining me today, man.
Well, I mean, first let me just say for the record, since we don’t often get to do this on The Real News where you and I get to chat to each other, I am just immensely proud and grateful of the incredible work that you’ve been doing on The Chris Hedges Report. And I’m grateful to the whole team in the back room, Kayla, the studio team, David, Cameron, Adam, everyone who’s made this show a reality. It’s really, really important, powerful, and we really appreciate the work you’re doing here, man. And I know that you’ve been running yourself ragged covering this, not just since October 7th, but for most of your adult life.
And so I often find myself wondering what you think about these big issues that we’re trying to cover here at The Real News every week. And this is one that I really wanted to not just have us talk about by the coffee machine in between your recordings, I wanted us to sit down and talk for our audience about how likely a regional war is here. I mean, I don’t want us to try to predict the future. We can’t do that, things may change by the time this video gets released, but I wanted to just start by sort of getting your general thoughts on where we are right now. How concerned should regular people be that this war on Gaza, which is horrific in and of itself, that it is enough to want to stop this war on Gaza and it shouldn’t take a larger regional war for people to finally be concerned about what’s happening over there. But given where we are right now, I wanted to just ask you from your vantage point, how close are we to this war in Gaza spiraling into a larger regional conflict?
Chris Hedges: At this particular moment, I don’t think we’re that close. And that’s because Iran, in particular, but also Hezbollah, do not want a conflict with Israel. They’re not logistically prepared, in particular Hezbollah. One of the reasons Israel has bombed more than once the airports in Damascus and Aleppo is because that’s the supply route to Hezbollah. Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon, is funded and backed by Iran.
But all that said, the longer the conflict goes on in Gaza, the more things can spiral out of control. If you go back and read Barbara Tuchman, for instance, most of the people, with maybe the exception of Kaiser Wilhelm, did not want World War I. But events, unfortunately, once you open that Pandora’s box of war, have the ability to drive you rather than you driving it. So the longer it goes on, the more we flirt with that possibility. I think striking the Houthis is probably… if they continue attacks on shipping, I think we will see US strikes on Houthi bases in Yemen. This is what was done when there was all that problem with pirating, Somali pirates, if you remember, they started striking the bases.
But it could happen, and if it does, it will be absolutely catastrophic. Because a war with Iran, throughout the region, will not be interpreted as simply a war with Iran, it’ll be interpreted as a war against Shiism and 60% of Iraq is Shia, Bahrain, 3 million Shias in Saudi Arabia. So it will be interpreted by Shia, the Shiites, as a religious war and will immediately extend beyond the borders of Iran itself.
The big question in Gaza, we know what the Israeli goal is, whether they can achieve it or not, is an unknown. They want to push the 2.2, 2.3 million Palestinians out. They want them ethnically cleansed. That’s why they’re destroying the infrastructure. That’s why they’re engineering a humanitarian crisis. 500,000 Gazans, Palestinians in Gaza, according to the UN, are literally starving. We are already seeing huge rates of intestinal diseases, especially among children. Pretty soon you’re going to see cholera. And many people are living in… it’s winter, so it’s cold, it’s rainy. So really, the goal of Israel is to offer the Palestinians a choice between death by bombs, bullets, infectious diseases or exposure, or leaving Gaza.
Now, the problem that Israel has run into, although Anthony Blinken tried to run interference, is that none of the countries, especially Egypt which borders Gaza to the south, is willing to accept the Palestinians. And Blinken’s first trip throughout the Middle East, he was roundly rebuffed by King Abdullah in Jordan and everywhere else, because he apparently was carrying a kind of quota list, 1.1 million Palestinians in Egypt, 700,000 in Iraq, this kind of stuff, which was just rejected throughout the Arab world. And now we know, and this has been public, by the Netanyahu government, they are reaching out to countries in Africa and South America to take the Palestinians and offering them, reportedly, financial inducements to do so.
Can that be achieved? I think we don’t know. At some point, despite the very, I would say, largely successful resistance put up by Hamas and other resistance groups, there’re actually 12 in Gaza, they’re going to run out of ammunition. I mean, they don’t have the logistical supply chain to continue this forever. And so that’s the big conundrum. I think that we will continue to see both Hezbollah and Iran act with considerable restraint. Of course, we hear about the Houthis as being Iranian-backed. That’s true up to a point. But I don’t think the Iranians are in any way directing the attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, which I’ve crossed in a dhow. It’s very big, it’s about the size of California. We’re talking about a very large water body.
But yes, as with any of these conflicts, there are just so many ways it can spiral out of control so quickly despite whatever the intentions are within the region. But I think what you’re seeing with Israeli strikes against Hamas leaders, Hezbollah commanders, drone strikes, these targeted assassinations, Netanyahu and his government is counting on that restraint to prevent a wider conflict. I read The New York Times this morning, it was kind of a remarkable front page story about all of the provocations that were being carried out by Iran. In fact, it’s the complete opposite, the provocations are carried out by Israel. And the nation that has exercised, up until this point, considerable restraint is Iran.
Maximillian Alvarez: I’m going to ask a question that’s going to sound very boilerplate and dumb, but it’s one that I know is on a lot of people’s minds, especially people who have been so underserved by corporate media for many years and not given the context to understand what we’re actually seeing right now.
But I think for your average person, when you see, oh, Israel targeted a suburb in Lebanon and assassinate someone, doesn’t that start a war? How the hell does that not spiral over into something? And so you’re right, it’s bonkers to read places like The New York Times, who I cited in the introduction here, and have them talking about the provocations from Iran. I’m like, Israel’s assassinating people in their own countries. How is that not a provocation? And so, I guess, the very obvious question for people who are trying to understand this is, there’s been a lot of talk about the rest of the Arab world and why aren’t people coming to Palestinians’ aid or why aren’t these other countries willing to accept all of these displaced Palestinians from Gaza and beyond? And so that’s my question, is just from a basic general audience standpoint, where is that restraint coming from? What is keeping these other countries from getting more involved, even as Israel flagrantly violates international law, including in their own countries?
Chris Hedges: Well, in the case of Iran and Hezbollah, it’s the fact that they don’t want to go into an open conflict with Israel because that will also probably, in the case of Iran, include a direct conflict with the United States. Netanyahu has long wanted to attack Iran, in particular the nuclear sites in Iran, and he has periodically made pushes to get the United States involved. That has been fiercely resisted by the Pentagon. Iran is not Lebanon. It’s a large country, 60 million people. It virtually controls Iraq, courtesy of our disastrous invasion and occupation. So it’s not an easy entity to take on. It has very sophisticated, apparently, very sophisticated aerial defense systems, and that’s why Israel is unable to attack Iran by itself. It would just bring down too many warplanes. So the push by Netanyahu is to get the United States to take out the aerial defense systems and then allow Israeli jets to bomb in particular nuclear sites. But if they bomb those sites, we’re talking about thousands and thousands of deaths, Iranian deaths.
In terms of the other Arab countries, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, there’s a real hostility towards Hamas because Hamas comes out of the Muslim Brotherhood. And Sisi, of course, overthrew a Muslim Brotherhood government and has instituted very harsh measures, repression, against the Muslim Brotherhood, jailing thousands of them, carrying out assassinations itself, torture, along with the dissidents and all sorts. So in fact, the Egyptian government works fairly closely, especially Egyptian intelligence, with Israeli intelligence, and they don’t want Hamas, number one, to cross over the border into the Sinai. I mean, I will say for Sisi, the president of Egypt, he makes the point that if the Israelis want to move the Palestinians out of Gaza, which is being carpet bombed, into the desert instead of putting them in the Sinai, which is neither want to put them in the Negev, which is in Israel. But of course the idea is to push them out and they’ll never return.
And the same is true with Jordan. The Jordanian regime is also very hostile to the Brotherhood and to Hamas. You’ve actually had the Jordanian army move up to the border with the West Bank to make sure the Israelis do not expel people into Jordan. Saudi Arabia is… So traditionally the Arab regimes have paid lip service to the plight of the Palestinians, but done very, very little to help them. That’s a long history going on for 75 years back to the founding of the state of Israel. That’s not changed.
So the Palestinians… I mean, I will say, with the exception of the Houthis, who have actually been proactive in defense, both in terms of trying to fire missiles and make them, to Israel itself and attacking shipping, the Arab regimes have done nothing other than rhetorical calls for ceasefires. But there’s always been that hypocrisy within the Arab world towards the Palestinians.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. I mean, it’s like it is wild to see, out of all the people in all the countries in the region, knowing what Yemen has been through, that these are the guys who are out on these boats actually taking the most concerted steps to try to stop this genocidal violence and disrupt it however they can. I mean, I wanted to just kind of build on that for a second and ask the question that I brought up in the intro, which is what would it take for these sort of guardrails that you’ve laid out, these sort of reasons and justifications for avoiding at all costs this boiling over into a larger regional conflict in which Iran, US and others are implicated? What would it take for those guardrails to break down? I mean, if people are watching this and saying, how bad does it have to get for other countries to get involved, I guess, what would you say in response?
Chris Hedges: Well, I would say constant provocations in a sense, repeated assassinations of Hezbollah leaders, a bombing of southern Lebanon. I mean, we already have artillery duels, but I mean severe Israeli strikes against either the leadership of Hezbollah or the use of Israeli warplanes to begin to, especially, target areas in Beirut.
There would come a point in which Hezbollah would not have a choice, but it would clearly be driven by Israeli actions. Because Hezbollah, since the beginning of this conflict, has shown a deep reluctance to put… they have fired across the border, and there have been thousands of Israelis who have had to evacuate the northern part of Israel. But we have to remember that Hezbollah has about 150,000, people don’t know, 100, 150,000 serious rockets that could do tremendous damage if they landed in Tel Aviv and elsewhere. So if they wanted to truly do damage, they could, and they haven’t. They’ve been very, very restrained.
But I think that the longer Israel carries out these kinds of strikes, the more those provocations take place, the closer we come… despite a reluctance on the part of Iran and Hezbollah, the closer we come to a regional conflict. Which, I mean, it probably would start with clashes with Hezbollah, Iran does supply Hezbollah. Does Israel and the United States attack those supply lines? Is that considered by Iran to be a direct strike on Iran? I mean, this could go bad in many, many ways, but I would say it would probably begin with Hezbollah just being pushed over the edge by Israel.
Maximillian Alvarez: As a great poet once said, things fall apart, right? I mean, you could have all this restraint. You could have these different respective reasons for avoiding a larger regional conflict. But I think as you rightly pointed out, the more that this violence goes on, the more that these provocations, the more that Israel feels empowered to effectively do whatever the hell it wants without anyone stopping them, the more that that reckless evil of war that you’ve written about and documented over the course of your life. Like you said, the Pandora’s box is opened and no one necessarily knows where it’s going to go from there.
And so like I said, I know we got to round out in a sec and I don’t want us to try to predict the future, which is very unpredictable at this point. But I think, again, another question that’s on folks’ mind that is being kind of prodded and poked by that sort of orgiastic mainstream coverage where they talk about like, here’s the scenario that will lead to nuclear arms being used or US forces being used. So we are getting questions from folks of what would happen, what would it take for more US troops to be involved in this? Or how possible are nuclear weapons? Things like that.
So I guess I just wanted to ask if you had any final thoughts on that, for folks who are watching this, they’re scared, they’re being even more scared by mainstream media, I guess, about what that falling apart could look like in this case.
Chris Hedges: Well, apparently the US has told Israel that if they carry out a ground incursion into southern Lebanon, they will not get involved. They said that if Hezbollah carried out a ground incursion into Israel, which is highly unlikely, that that would be a different matter. In terms of Iran, I think that Iran would have to be active, which it has not been, actively engaged in carrying out strikes, which I find unlikely, against either Israeli or US targets. And at that point then we’re in deep, deep trouble. So again, I think if the match is lit, it’s lit in Lebanon.
And the Israeli leadership has talked about this as an axis of… they’ve stolen this Bush term, axis of evil, that it’s not just a war with the Palestinians, although I don’t know how you can have a war with the people that doesn’t have an army and navy and air force, artillery, mechanized units, anything else. So they’re already speaking in that apocalyptic rhetoric. And I think in the end, it’s really totally dependent on how far Israel goes. And if they do not show restraint, then I could see it beginning with Hezbollah. And once Hezbollah is actively engaged, especially if Israel does make a ground incursion into Lebanon, then you bring Iran a few steps closer to being involved in a conflict. And at that point, it becomes a regional conflict and very, very dangerous.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and since you mentioned Bush, I just kind of want to close on this question. And this should be reserved for a larger discussion, but just a kind of rounding out question to, in terms of asking about the current guardrails that are keeping us from spiraling out into a larger regional war. I’m wondering what role internal pressure here in the United States and public sentiment against the war or for a ceasefire, and just the general lack of desire to get embroiled in such a regional war, what role, if any, that plays? Because I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and you and I were talking about this before we got recording, right? I’ve been very upfront on my show, on The Real News and elsewhere, that I grew up in many ways a typical first gen Mexican-American family. We were raised with that type of conservatism. We came, we did it the right way, we were in the land of opportunity, yada, yada, yada.
And after 9/11, when I was still young and dumb, I bought in fully to the sort of jingoistic fervor. I remember when names like yours came up on Fox News, I’ll be like, “Oh, who are those nut jobs? Those guys, they’re unpatriotic.” And that was… I think a lot of people forget just how dominant that culture was, and that feeling was for so many people. It’s not to negate the tremendous outpourings of demonstrators and brave voices, like yours, speaking out against the disastrous war in Iraq and everything the Bush administration was doing.
But I just keep thinking about how drastically the public mood has changed in 20 years, where you had so many families like mine, regular people, working people, who lived in the heart of empire and still felt that imperial hubris, like we had the right to go around telling the rest of the world how to run their countries, and that we were never going to suffer any consequences for that. And now you just have quite a sea change, at least in terms of the public opinion, about how involved the US should be in this or any other war.
At the same time though, the resistance from the upper echelons of power, in the same way that Bush and Blair could look at these historic outpourings of people, and in the most cynical way use those as justifications for the war and say like, “Oh, you see all those people out there protesting? That’s why the terrorists want to attack us ’cause they hate our freedom. So that’s why we’re going to go and attack… we’re going to go and invade Iraq.” It was one of the most cynical things I’ve ever seen in my life.
But again, right now, as far as Biden, Blinken and their administration are concerned, they seem just as willfully deaf to the opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza and the US getting involved in more foreign wars. Do you see that playing any real role in stopping this or at this point is power just found a way to successfully inoculate itself from the demos completely?
Chris Hedges: Yeah. I mean, look, the Congress is bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. Biden is one of the largest recipients of Israel lobby aid. Both parties are completely wedded to Israel. Our intelligence services are integrated with the Israeli. Israel is the 10th largest arms exporter in the world. So it’s totally, it’s training our police forces. So I think, especially because it’s Israel, it doesn’t really matter what the public and all these demonstrations, which have been very heartening to people like myself, it doesn’t matter. Especially, it’s worse because it’s Israel. So if somehow there began to be a conflict between Iran and Israel, I have little doubt that we would intervene. And at that point, we’re at war with Iran.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, that is the great Chris Hedges, host of The Chris Hedges Report, which you can watch every week, every Friday, noon Eastern Time, right here on The Real News Network. You can also subscribe to Chris’ Substack, which I highly encourage everyone to do if you want early access to those episodes. Chris, thank you so much for talking to me about this, man, and thank you for all the incredible work that you’re doing.
Chris Hedges: All right. Thanks, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez: And thank you all so much for watching. Thank you for caring. Please take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most, and we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.