Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning that Israel is prepared to go to war against Iran itself, not just its proxies in Syria and elsewhere, leaves no doubt about how rapidly the crisis in the Middle East is escalating towards another potentially major conflagration. Coming after last week’s heavy Israeli bombardment of Iranian military bases in Syria and the shooting down of the first sophisticated Israeli fighter aircraft in 30 years, the significance of the Israeli Prime Minister issuing his warning to an audience at the Munich Security Conference that included Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif cannot be overstated.
As Greg Sheridan reported in our pages, “an incredibly dangerous mixture of forces” is at play in the deepening crisis, with Iran posing “a mortal danger” to Israel and the situation immensely complicated by the role of Russian regular and irregular forces buttressing and upgrading Iranian and Syrian fighters.
“Over all of this we have to lay the broader strategic ambitions of Iran and its preparedness for war with Israel,” Sheridan wrote. “The Israel-Arab conflict is a sideshow compared with the Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East and potentially a war between Israel and Iran.”
Mr Netanyahu has made it clear such a war is a real possibility. The international community — especially Britain, Germany, France and Italy, which are negotiating with Tehran to try to save the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal in the face of Donald Trump’s opposition — would do well to heed the gravity of the deepening crisis and the warning from Mr Netanyahu. The future of the nuclear deal cannot be isolated from what Mr Trump’s National Security Adviser HR McMaster warned in Munich is Iran’s building of a network of proxy forces such as Hezbollah across the Middle East and arming them with increasingly sophisticated weaponry. “The time is now … to act against them,” Mr McMaster argued.
Read the full article at The Australian.