Iran vs. Israel: The dangerous leap to ‘what’s next?’

One of the problems with breaking news and spur-of-the-moment punditry is the exclusion of the time necessary to absorb, digest and understand meaningful events. That’s exactly what’s happening with Iran’s attack on Israel, and nowhere on earth it is more useless to offer snapshot analyses of complex, eternal dynamics than the Middle East.

Decades ago, Tom Friedman wrote about how to understand the Middle East. The passage of time hasn’t obscured its clarity; it comes to mind especially now, in a region not defined by horizons but constantly shifting brinks.

Friedman argued that symbols are important indicators of how societies frame existential events across eons. Western civilization is largely defined by the cross: an impatient image of only two directions, yes or no, right or wrong, today or tomorrow. The emblem of Israel is the six-pointed star: confusing, complicated, built on multi-directional inner conflict. The symbol of the Muslim world is the crescent, a long, slow, timeless curvature.

In other words, we want instant answers applied to a world of maybes. Black and white clarity on a million shades of gray.

Nowhere is the snapshot reflection more distorted than when applied to Iran, whose civilization mastered the intricate, time-consuming weaving of carpets.

Like an episode of the Israeli TV thrillers “Fauda” or “Tehran,” we want to know what will happen next, and by next, we mean no later than next week, or, perish the agonizing wait, next season. We ask breathlessly: What is Israel’s next move? Proportional or asymmetric? A rocket assault or cyberattack? What will Hezbollah do in southern Lebanon? The Houthis in Yemen?

The most complex geopolitical calculations are reduced to the frenetic play-by-play of a hockey game.

The instant punditry was significantly misguided in January 2020, when Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who led the powerful Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was killed by an American MQ-9 Reaper drone. We heard predictions about the likelihood of a swift, kinetic retaliation by Iran; the outbreak of war and even the breakout of Tehran’s nuclear missile program.

In fact, Iran’s response was more calibrated. A full year after the assassination, NPR evaluated the regime’s actions: “Within days of the assassination, Iran launched Operation Martyr Soleimani, which included a number of missile attacks mainly against the Al Asad base in western Iraq. Iraq had been warned of that attack in advance by Tehran, and there were no U.S. casualties, although eventually the Pentagon said more than a hundred military personnel had suffered traumatic brain injuries.” To be clear, Iran, over time, orchestrated additional lethal attacks on U.S. military personnel. Not a direct confrontation, but Tehran’s usual pulling the strings of, and hiding behind, its puppets (the word “proxies” gives its cowardly terrorist fixers too much credit).

I am disturbed by one news development that preceded the attacks. Lost in the swirl of headlines about the solar eclipse last week was FBI Director Chris Wray’s testimony to the House Appropriations Committee in which he warned about renewed calls by terrorist groups for strikes in the U.S. Wray told lawmakers, “Our most immediate concern has been that individuals or small groups will draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home.” His assessment before the attack, and Tehran’s warning to the U.S. not to defend Israel immediately after the attack, suggest a troubling possibility. But we’re talking about the Middle East, where even two plus two has an unforeseeable outcome.

But two things seem clear enough. First, Iran’s attack not only changed the conventional rules of the game, but started an entirely new long game. I’m disciplined to appreciate the long view because I’m a Mets fan. I know that no matter how good the first inning goes, it’s a long, meandering path to the bottom of the ninth.

Second, the safest prediction of where this ends is that there will be no end. The history of Middle East conflict is that events ebb and flow, spike and spiral, largely unresolved, in a constant state between simmering, percolating and exploding. Most important will be how various parties calculate long-term interests, which often conflict with or eclipse short-term interests.

There’s one clear truth: Iran’s reckless decision has astronomically raised the potential for a range of catastrophic scenarios. We’re best served observing and calculating not in the moment, but over the foreseeable future.

Not based on “breaking news,” but “stay tuned.”

Steve Israel represented New York in the U.S. House of Representatives over eight terms and was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015. Follow him @RepSteveIsrael.