We Are Entirely Too Close To Another Major War In The Middle East

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The US and its allies have published a joint statement warning Yemen’s Houthis to cease the attacks they’ve been making on commercial vessels in the Red Sea. The Houthis, officially known as Ansarallah, have successfully slashed Israeli port activity by an extremely massive margin with their maritime tactics in response to Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza.

The statement asserts that the Yemeni attacks “are a direct threat to the freedom of navigation that serves as the bedrock of global trade in one of the world’s most critical waterways,” complaining that they are “adding significant cost and weeks of delay to the delivery of goods,” and ultimately threatens that the Houthis will “bear the responsibility of the consequences” should these attacks continue.

Many critics have been pointing out the irony of the western power alliance threatening military intervention to protect shipping containers and corporate profits while actual human beings are being butchered by Israeli airstrikes and starved by Israeli siege warfare with nothing but friendly support from these same powers.

“Palestinians would really love to get the same amount of attention and protection as shipping containers,” tweeted Palestinian-Canadian journalist Yasmine El-Sawabi.

That the US and its allies would go to war against the people who are trying to stop an active genocide tells you everything you need to know about them. The fact that they’d do it for corporate profit margins tells you even more, and the fact that they’d do it to a nation they’ve already helped inflict unfathomable horrors upon in recent years tells you more still.

And that’s just one of the potential wars looming on the horizon in connection with the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. As Trita Parsi recently explained in The Nation, there are three other fronts along which wars could also erupt in the region apart from a western conflict with the Houthis: in Iraq and Syria where US forces have been repeatedly under attack by militants in response to the Gaza assault, in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, and the absolute nightmare scenario of a full-scale war with Iran.

“That risk exists on four fronts: Between Israel and the Lebanese Hezbollah, in Syria and Iraq due to attacks on US troops by militias aligned with Iran, the Red Sea between the Houthis and the US Navy, and between Israel and Iran following both the assassination of an Iranian general in Syria and the explosion in Kerman today at the commemoration of the death of General Qassem Soleimani that has killed more than 100,” Parsi writes.

It is a potentially ominous sign that Israel has begun focusing on ramping up aggressions against Iran and Hezbollah while simultaneously withdrawing thousands of troops from Gaza. Some analysts argue that we are seeing an attempt by Israel to pull the US into a direct war with Hezbollah, which is something US officials have reportedly been worried would happen ever since the Gaza assault began.

There are entirely too many fronts along which a new horrific war in the middle east could potentially erupt, and things are entirely too close to the brink on all of them. And all for land, money and geostrategic control, same as always. The sooner the US-centralized power structure crumbles, the better it will be for humanity.

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