I don’t agree with everything that Carlos Roa has to say in his piece at The National Interest but there is one passage I wanted to share:
The United States, traditionally Israel’s staunch ally, is also in a precarious situation. That Washington also didn’t see this attack coming speaks ill of its intelligence capabilities, especially in signals intelligence. The Biden administration will find itself under fire. Only mere days ago, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan argued that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now.†On the same day, Semafor revealed that Iran built a significant influence network that reached deep into the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. Finally, the administration’s decision to release $6 billion to Iran in exchange for five American hostages hostage will only face harsher criticism in the coming days; it is not unlikely that some of that money funded or otherwise supported Hamas’ current operation. Pressure to support Israel will be immense, complicating an already delicate situation with a public already tired of supporting conflicts abroad.
He refers to the conflict as the “Simchat Tora War”, in reference to the holiday on which the initial strikes fell and to the Yom Kippur War of fifty years ago.
Much has been said of Israel’s intelligence failure and I think that seeing a U. S. intelligence failure as well is a bit of a stretch. Just how responsible are we? It would be nice to think that our intelligence apparatus is tracking intelligence all over the world but I privately think that our Middle East intelligence in particular is awful and we are highly dependent on the Israelis there. Said another way if they didn’t know it, we wouldn’t know it.
Whether that should be the case is a different subject but I think it has been the case for a very long time.
Anyway, I think there will be a lot of fault-finding about this conflict. People will blame the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Iranians, and us (under the “no sparrow falls” theory). They will blame the Biden Administration and the Trump Administration and, probably, every U. S. administration of the post-war period.
The actual barbarity of the attacks should be blamed entirely on Hamas. The conditions that lead to an attack occurring is largely due to Israel and Hamas. Iran is secondary. Everyone else are fairly peripheral. The US alwasay wants to take more credit than deserved so we get blamed more than we should. Certainly makes it clear that the Abraham Accords were not a big step for safety in the area. The recent efforts to better align Saudi Arabia and Israel probably wont hurt and if it happens we will have a lot fo claims about it being a big deal but in reality it will be just another deal with a far away country that ignores the Palestinians.
Steve