The West is mulling its response after the NATO-operated Ukrainian missile strikes into Russia’s western heartland has escalated the Eastern European war to a new, more dangerous level with Russia’s launch of its latest hypersonic ballistic missile on a key Ukrainian city.
Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah Shia militia is hailing the vague ‘ceasefire’ hurriedly negotiated by Washington with the Lebanese Government as Israel’s acknowledgment of “defeat”.
The ‘ceasefire’ deal agreed on by the Lebanese Government and Israel allows invading Israeli forces 60 days to withdraw from Lebanon and requires Hezbollah, the Israeli Defences Forces’ (IDF) primary target, to refrain from “operations” against the IDF during this period. But the agreement is full of un-addressed aspects of this new war launched by Israel into Lebanon after its major offensive in 2006.
Observers in Lebanon and in the region are pointing out that the two-months ‘withdrawal’ window allowed for the IDF enables it to further dispossess the entire Lebanese population inhabiting the strip of Lebanese territory bordering northern Israel. Israel tried the same after the 2006 invasion.
The Israeli–Lebanese conflict peaked during the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s. This was largely provoked by covert Western and Israeli interferences in Lebanese politics in support of the Lebanese-Arab Christian community (about 45% of its population) to offset the slightly larger Lebanese Muslim population. That population includes the Druze and Assyrian minority religious communities alongside the dominant Shia and Sunni communities.
As noted in these columns previously, Israeli is surrounded by over two million displaced Palestinians lodged in camps in the neighbouring Arab states for decades (since the 1948 forcible creation of the Zionist Jewish state).
In response to refugee Palestinian militia attacks from Lebanon, Israel invaded the country in 1978 and again in 1982. It occupied a large strip of Southern Lebanon until 2000, while fighting the parallel Lebanese Shia paramilitaries born out of the Palestinian displacement with the founding of the Israeli State.
Resistance
Israel launched two cross-border offensive operations into Southern Lebanon during the 1990s: Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996. But the unrelenting Lebanese militia resistance – essentially urban guerilla warfare – led to the embarrassing failure to eliminate this resistance.
After Israel’s partial withdrawal from South Lebanon, Hezbollah and other militia continued attacks to dislodged the IDF from the remaining occupied Lebanese territory, which was arbitrarily held as a ‘buffer’ to distance the Arab populations from Israel proper.
Israel used these attacks as the excuse to attempt to ‘pacify’ the many hostile Palestinian and Lebanese militia based in Lebanon.
A new period of Israel-Lebanon conflict began in late 2023 along with the massive onslaught by the IDF besieging the Gaza Strip enclave surrounded by Israel.
While the Hamas counter attack against the IDF siege lines was itself of a minor scale (relative to its enemy), it then triggered a cascade of military and political actions.
The months long, unceasing, IDF offensive against the Gazan population has spurred anti-Israeli militias across West Asia to begin counter attacks in support of the weak Palestinian militias resisting the West-armed IDF’s genocidal might.
Ukraine
In Eastern Europe, NATO planners are flummoxed by Moscow’s bold response to the ‘crossing of the red line’ by Ukraine when Kyiv launched last week a series of medium calibre missiles actually operated by American and British personnel.
Kyiv, unable to push back a slow, bloody, Russian advance all across Ukraine’s Eastern war front, has been pleading with the West to allow its medium range missile batteries be used to offset Moscow’s pressure on the ground.
Western officials insisted that NATO personnel remained in control of these missile batteries in order to ensure the secrecy of the weapons systems, because Ukraine is not a NATO member and could not ensure that technology secrecy.
As analysts said subsequently, Russia was obliged to counter this clear escalation of the war with the role of Western personnel in battle, indeed, in direct assault on Russian territory. And President Vladimir Putin himself announced Russia’s counter-escalation by acknowledging the use of a previously un-announced new heavy missile.
In response to the NATO operated missile barrage, Moscow fired its new intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) hitherto unused in combat at a target close to Kyiv. The Russian President later publicly confirmed that Russia had “tested” an ‘Oreshnik’ hypersonic ballistic missile in an assault on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. The target was a large industrial complex.
Russia launched just one missile. But it is a hypersonic missile almost too fast to be detected and countered and, more importantly, it is an IRBM, just below the ICBM threshold of intercontinental warfare. A clear counter-escalation.
Already, when NATO installed these cruise missile systems in Ukraine earlier this year, Moscow acted swiftly to adapt its nuclear doctrine – with much fanfare, to reassure its own troops and the general population. The new doctrine provides for alerting, arming and launch protocols that speeds up Russian defensive responses, including the anticipation of a nuclear strike.
Arsenal
Putin signed off on Russia’s new nuclear doctrine days after the UK and US authorised Kyiv to use the cruise missiles to attack Russia. Under the amendments, Russia has generally lowered the threshold for using its nuclear arsenal.
Analysts say that Russia and its ally, neighbouring Belarus, can now consider a nuclear response if they are “conventionally attacked by a nonnuclear state, such as Ukraine, that is aided by a nuclear power”. NATO countries supporting Ukraine, the US and UK included, possess nuclear weapons or host nuclear missile batteries installed by nuclear-armed NATO allies. Russia’s new protocols had been drawn up by September, according news agencies. Analysts now argue that its formal authorisation during the recent missile exchange between Russia and Ukraine has raised the stakes in eastern Europe’s war.
So now the West is confronted with a counter-escalation to which it cannot easily respond without endangering its own populations and territories.
It looks like a hot festive season in the West (despite heavy snows) this December.
