How To Avoid Another War in the Middle East

The deaths of three soldiers forces the U.S. to retaliate. Yet, using tit-for-tat tactics can get out of hand.

Tower 22 is one of the dozens of U.S. military bases in the Middle East. It is located in Jordan, near the border with Syria and Iraq. There are 350 troops serving there. On Sunday morning, it was attacked by four drones from Syrian territory. They exploded near the barracks at the base.

Three soldiers died and 30 more sustained injuries of varying degrees. The attack was claimed by an organization called the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which has been acting on behalf of four Shiite and Iranian-backed militias in that country for several years.

Three U.S. soldiers were killed and at least 34 were wounded in the drone attack that took place in the southeastern part of Jordan near the border with Syria. U.S. President Joe Biden blamed the attack on Iran-backed militants.

The IRI said in a statement that the attack was a “continuation of our approach to resisting the American occupation forces in Iraq and the region.”

Retaliation Is Inevitable

Washington has left no doubt that the attack will not go unanswered. It’s part of the rules of the game in the region.

Last week, the U.S. forces retaliated by attacking Kataib Hezbollah headquarters in Iraq, one of the organizations that make up the IRI, which was a response to an earlier shelling of the U.S. air base in Iraq. There have been additional incidents similar to that; however, not all of the 160 attacks on American bases in Iraq and Syria have been met with a response. In general, the Americans have tried not to overreact. Yet this time it may be the different, since the three soldiers killed in the Tower 22 base were the first U.S. fatalities since the beginning of the crisis in the region after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

Few expect the U.S. to attack targets in Iran.

Message from Tehran

The strings connecting all activities against the U.S. lead to Iran, which supports many organizations fighting with Israel and the allies of the Jewish state in the region. They make up what is known as the axis of resistance, and they target U.S. military bases in the Middle East.

“We know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq,” President Joe Biden said a few hours later, and announced that it will not go unanswered.

“Iran has nothing to do with the attacks in question,” said a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Monday, without denying that the attack was carried out by the pro-Iranian militants. As he explained at a press conference, the militants “do not take orders” from Iran and act independently to oppose “any aggression and occupation”

“Such assurances are meaningless. It’s obvious that the attack of the pro-Iranian forces in the region are, in fact, Tehran’s message to Washington that Iran is the one who deals the cards in the region, and that it has adequate means,” Nadim Shehadi from Beirut, the former director of the Lebanese-American Academic Center in New York, told Rzeczpospolita.

According to him, the goal of such a strategy is to stir a debate in the U.S. in the election year about the advisability of continuing military involvement in the Middle East. A few days earlier, talks began in Baghdad about the departure by the American contingent of 25,000 soldiers who have been stationed there for a decade with a goal of fighting the so-called Islamic State.

To Prevent Escalation

“It cannot be ruled out that the attacks on the base in Jordan were initiated by Tehran, but it is also possible that a pro-Iranian organization in Iraq did it on its own with the hope that America would leave this country,” Richard Dalton, former British ambassador to Iran, told Rzeczpospolita.

He pointed out that regardless of the degree of Iran’s involvement in the last attack on the American base, the whole situation may potentially lead to escalation. Yet he is convinced that Iran as well as the administration in Washington remain committed to preventing the outbreak of a regional war.

Just a few hours after the attack on the base in Jordan, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cooled things down, explaining that the U.S. doesn’t want the escalation of the conflict in the region, which could lead to an all-out war. It is clear to everyone that this would lead to a direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iranian forces, with devastating consequences for the latter country. The price would be an unimaginable scale of destabilization of the entire region and have catastrophic impact on the world economy, not to mention geopolitics.