Israel has fired a missile at Isfahan in Iran in retaliation for the volleys of Iranian missiles fired at Israel five days earlier. For the first time ever, the two countries are making direct military attacks on each other.
Iran warned Israel earlier that it would review its nuclear stance – suggesting that it would finally decide to develop a nuclear device – if its nuclear installations were attacked.
More than a thousand miles to the north of Israel and Iran, Ukrainian leaders were at the same time saying that they face military defeat by Russia unless Congress in Washington votes to give them $61bn (£49bn) in military aid. Otherwise, they said they feared the Ukrainian front line might cave, producing a Russian victory that might lead to a third world war.
The escalating conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine appear very different, yet they have dangerous features in common as both become “forever wars” with no end in sight in either case. This is true of Ukraine, where the war is fought by armies reliant on volunteers, but it is also the case in Gaza, where the highly skilled Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is wholly dominant.
Yet despite killing 34,000 Palestinians and reducing their cities to rubble, Israel has not won a victory. On the contrary, Hamas is still very much in business and the IDF’s savage assault has elevated the Palestinian issue, previously forgotten by the world, to the top of the international agenda.
Baffled as to why their military superiority is not producing political dividends, the IDF may use even greater force and attack Rafah at the south of the Gaza Strip, where 1.4 million Palestinians are trapped. Civilian loss of life will be horrendous, but the Israelis are unlikely to be much nearer their goal of ending Palestinian resistance.
Ukraine has likewise become a “forever war” and this is unlikely to change, even if Ukrainian armed forces receive vast quantities of American aid. This will not address their greatest weakness, which is that Russia has four times the population of Ukraine and a far more powerful army. As the US ought to have learnt in Afghanistan and Iraq, great quantities of sophisticated military equipment do not guarantee success on the battlefield.
Stalemated military conflicts are dangerous because the stalemates never last. All sides will try to break the deadlock by deploying new weapons and tactics, as Germany did in the First World War when it introduced poison gas and unrestricted submarine warfare.
Negotiations between hostile parties ought to be the response to a conflict nobody can win, but hatreds bred during prolonged warfare prevent compromise until all sides are exhausted and fought to a standstill.
These are significant obstacles to ending any hard-fought war, but in the current Middle East and Ukraine conflicts, there is another danger in play. When it comes to foreign policy, US President Joe Biden’s administration is deeply disaster prone.
There were early signs of this in August 2021 during the chaotic American retreat from Kabul. In Ukraine, the White House does not appear to have a policy for winning the war or making a peace, but favours Ukrainians fighting on until something turns up.
Obstinacy on the part of Biden is often blamed for this, but the Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan show similar poor judgement and ineffectuality.
By far the greatest misjudgement by Biden was to allow the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing government to launch an all-out assault on Gaza that has largely destroyed it but has not won the war. The slaughter has discredited the US and its allies in the eyes of much of the world.
The brutality of an attack conducted by Netanyahu’s extremist government was all too predictable, yet Biden refused to use powerful levers in the shape of military supplies and international political protection to bring the war to an end. This was a disastrous departure from traditional American policy under both Republican and Democratic presidents.
As an unforced political error, Biden’s mistake over Gaza vies with President George W Bush in invading Iraq in 2003 and President Vladimir Putin ordering Russian troops into Ukraine in 2022. As a military conflict, Gaza might be small, but it has an infinite capacity to destabilise the region and the US itself.
Israel, helped by the US, has wrecked a status quo in the Middle East that favoured them both and whose destruction they may already rue.
Israel has in the past struck with impunity at Iran and Iranian allies, but for all its rhetorical belligerence, Iran has not done much to hurt Israel.
Hamas did not tell Tehran about its planned attack on Israel on 7 October, probably because Hamas leaders suspected that Tehran would try to stop them.
When Israel killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) generals in the Iranian embassy compound in Damascus on 1 April, it tore up this old rule book. Iran’s vocal but essentially passive support for the Palestinians and hostility to Israel was ended. By firing 300 missiles, while giving 72 hours’ warning of what it was doing, Tehran showed that it was up for a fight. Having retaliated once, it will have to retaliate again if Israel kills one of its commanders and it wants to keep its credibility.
A whole new array of frightening possibilities are coming into play in the Middle East, where nobody knows the new rules of the game. Biden said he would not help Israel retaliate against Iran, but would he do so in the face of a hypothetical Iranian counter-strike? Knowing that he possessed such an insurance policy might embolden Netanyahu to launch a full-scale attack on Iranian nuclear installations. Netanyahu has long wanted to lure the US into a war with Iran and might see this as an opportunity.
The US and Iran are both held responsible for the actions of their local allies, although they do not fully control them. This is obviously true of the relationship between the US and Israel. But Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen and Shia paramilitaries in Iraq are primarily the highly professional non-state military forces of the Shia communities in these countries.
Iranian control over their activities has limits, though it may be blamed for them. In January 2020, for instance, the IRGC general Qassem Soleimani was killed by a US drone at Baghdad airport in retaliation for an invasion of the US embassy in Iraq by the Iran-linked militia, Kataib Hezbollah, although Tehran strongly disapproved of what was done.
Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu and his government since 7 October last year, so far from restraining him, has empowered him to destroy Gaza and make the attack on Damascus that has brought the Middle East to the edge of outright war.
As Winston Churchill said of another escalating crisis in the Middle East in 1914: “The terrible ifs accumulate.”
I was aware of the huge impact of working from home (WFH) post-pandemic on many aspects of social and economic life, but I had never until recently taken on board its effect on criminals.
Burglars were in trouble even before the Covid-19 pandemic, but now their entire “business model” is in danger of foundering. The vastly expanded use of credit cards means that people have far less cash at home to steal. The cost and resale value of home electronic equipment – once a favourite target for burglars – is right down. Houses have much improved locks and security devices.
But it is the spectacular growth of WFH that is the main explanation for a 30 per cent drop in burglaries in England and Wales since 2019. Burglars prefer to break into houses that are empty, but today there are far fewer of these than in the past. The same is true in the US, where the number of burglaries fell 9.8 per cent last year, according to the FBI quarterly report. The number of major crimes in general has fallen dramatically since the early 1980s, but the biggest drop is in burglaries, which, since the pandemic, have led the way and are down by 86 per cent since 1980.
Crime was already changing and WFH has speeded up that transformation. Old criminal skills are becoming obsolete and new ones highly profitable. Burglary of residential homes has become more risky and less rewarding for reasons explained in a fascinating piece by Justin Fox in Bloomberg. Called “The work-from-home era is bad for burglars“, it explains how WFH doubled in the US between the early 2000s and 2019, but quadrupled during the pandemic.
A sign that residents at home during the day deters burglars is that break-ins into non-residential properties are slightly up, while burglaries of residential properties in day time are down more than at night.
The skillset required is very different, but your intelligent thief knows that a safer and more profitable way of stealing other people’s money is through internet fraud. “This move from cracking physical safes to cracking virtual ones is unsettling, and will surely get worse as more cybercriminals incorporate artificial intelligence in their work,” says Fox.
Mass revulsion has greeted the sight of Post Office executives seeking to explain away how they ruined the lives of hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters. They went out of their way not to know what was wrong with their Fujitsu computer system, despite being repeatedly warned of its failings. Post Office investigators and prosecutors acted with all the self-righteous fury of 17th century witch-finders, hunting down the innocent and extracting false confessions of guilt through threats of dire punishment.
The media has been quick to jump onto its moral high horse over the Post Office scandal, blaming everybody but itself for ignoring or downplaying it. The Post Office was clearly culpable and so too were politicians like the Liberal Democrats leader, Ed Davey, former junior minister in charge of the Post Office, but what about the newspapers, magazines, television and radio programmes that were silent for so long? They cannot claim that they knew nothing about these huge injustices because Private Eye doggedly wrote about it in issue after issue from 2011 onwards. Other news outlets ignored the story, presumably because it appeared legally complicated and the victims were sub-postmasters judged to be unappealing to readers.
A sign of covert media embarrassment over their collective failure over the Post Office scandal is that they now give the impression that the exposure of this hideous injustice came about almost entirely thanks to the ITV docudrama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. This effectively dramatised what Private Eye had been going on about for years, but conveniently offered an excuse for news editors to start reporting a story they had neglected for so long. When they do so now, the central role of Private Eye in exposing the scandal is routinely omitted.
For understanding what is happening in Israel during the present crisis I find the Israeli newspaper Haaretz essential reading.
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