White House still denies Mideast turmoil linked to Gaza
Acknowledging the connection would make it harder to justify unconditional backing for Israel’s war.
ANALYSIS | MIDDLE EAST
Regions Middle East Middle East
DANIEL LARISON
FEB 02, 2024
The Biden administration continues to deny any connections between the war in Gaza and the ongoing conflicts involving U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
The White House’s position that these are all unrelated conflicts that are just cropping up at the same time can’t be squared with the evidence showing that the war in Gaza has fueled regional instability and violence, including the recent drone attack by an Iraqi militia that killed three American service members and injured more than 40 at a base in Jordan earlier this week.
As much as the administration might want to keep the conflict confined to Gaza, the truth is that it has spread to several other countries. It is a disservice to the American people and to American military personnel to pretend that U.S. support for the war in Gaza hasn’t already had serious negative consequences for regional stability and for American forces in the region when it clearly has.
When he was asked about this “same, larger conflict” at a press conference on Wednesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby dismissed any link between Gaza and the U.S. fight with the Houthis or the back-and-forth strikes between local militias and U.S. forces.
“I absolutely don’t agree with your description of the same, larger conflict. There’s a conflict going on between Israel and Hamas…and we’re going to make sure that we continue to get Israel the support that they need to defend themselves against this still viable threat,” Kirby said. “There were attacks on our troops and facilities in Iraq and Syria well before the seventh of October, certainly in the last administration as well. As for the Houthis, they can claim all they want that this is linked to Gaza, but two-thirds of the ships that they’re hitting have no connection to Israel whatsoever. So it’s just not true, it’s a falsehood.”
Kirby’s answer is misleading and false. The umbrella group in Iraq that claimed responsibility for the attack in Jordan, the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, explicitly stated that its attack was connected to the war in Gaza. The Houthi leadership has been emphatic that their attacks will continue for as long as the war does. The decision of other actors to jump on a cause’s bandwagon may be cynical or not, but there is no denying that they have jumped on the bandwagon.
Refusing to face the reality of the connections between these conflicts guarantees that the U.S. will pursue ineffective and counterproductive policies by ignoring that the key to defusing regional tensions is to bring the war in Gaza to an end as quickly as possible.
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He echoes the Israeli propaganda campaign which focuses only on Oct 7 and ignores the Gaza war campaign, the Al-Aqsa mosque attacks, West Bank settler attacks, and the long history of Israeli provocations and reprisals surrounding the October 7 event. It is open knowledge in Israel that the government policy is to encourage a cycle of settler-initiated provocations and Arab reprisals in order to deploy the military to clear out the Arab homes. This was borne out in the JP investigation into Israeli government archives that confirmed the long-standing informal policy. |
