Article content
It’s more like a courtship ritual between exotic birds than a 21st-century war. First the Israelis assassinate Revolutionary Guard generals in an Iranian embassy on foreign soil. Tag. You’re it.
After a long pause, the Iranians respond with a “massive” strike against Israel using hundreds of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles, but they tell the Israelis and the Americans exactly when the attack is coming and what the targets are, and use mostly obsolete missiles, and most of them are shot down and nobody dies. That was in April.
Article content
Then, in July the Israelis kill Fuad Shukr, the military commander of Iran’s ally Hezbollah, in Beirutand the same night another Israeli strike kills Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh while he is asleep in a guest house in Tehran. But they don’t kill any Iranians, or at least no important ones, so Iran lets it pass.
It seemed the dance may be ending, but then, in late September, Israeli bombs kill Hassan Nasrollah and most of Hezbollah’s senior leaders in Beirut. No pause this time. On Oct. 1, Iran launches 181 weapons at Israel. Most of them are ballistic missiles, and a lot of them strike their (exclusively military) targets. Two Israelis are killed.
Now, it’s Israel’s turn for a long pause, mainly because the U.S. election is looming and the White House doesn’t want a big war in the Middle East, perhaps involving American troops, that distracts voters on election day.
Recommended from Editorial
Israel finally does strike Iran again on Oct. 25, but it’s as restrained as the last Iranian strike. A short list of military targets only, no messing with Iran’s nuclear installations, and only four Iranians killed. And as at every step in the dance, the last one to retaliate urges the other one not to retaliate back.
Article content
But it’s time to drop the avian courtship analogies and call this what it is: the kind of posturing and signaling typical between higher primates who find themselves in a confrontation but are not sure they would benefit from all-out war.
The Yanomamo of the upper Amazon would recognize this behavior, as would New Guinea highlanders. Even the chimpanzee bands Jane Goodall studied in Gombe 50 years ago might dimly comprehend it. Americans, Israelis and Iranians are not primitive. They are just displaying ancestral values and inherited behaviours.
The whole anachronistic institution of war is like that. The same kinds of conflicts that are settled by law or negotiation within a modern country are frequently settled by massive amounts of violence (or more commonly remain unsettled) when they happen between countries.
Once in a while, however, there is a chain of events so obviously futile and counter-productive it becomes a duty to condemn it publicly. The current game of tit-for-tat in the Middle East certainly fits that description.
None of these attacks and counter-attacks has had the slightest impact on the regional balance of power or even on the political stances of the various players. It’s not a real war yet either (except in Gaza). The strikes and counter-strikes elsewhere are just demonstrations of resolve, rituals that would be familiar to our most distant ancestors.
The problem always has been these displays can easily topple into full-scale war: chest-beating is not a precise science.
The existing regimes are so uniformly dreadful there is a temptation to say it couldn’t get any worse, but that is not true. It could get a great deal worse, and very quickly, if the present crisis turns into a full-scale war.
What are the odds on that happening? Nobody knows, but even the fact we can seriously ask such a question suggests we are already in serious danger.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.
Share this article in your social network
