Pre-game for World War Three

This was a weekend where no news would have been good news. Instead, we got a steady stream of violence and mayhem that may push us down a path to a massive regional conflict with 130,000 US troops in the middle of it.

Israel is fighting a two front war, staring down the barrel of 13,000 rockets in the Hezbollah arsenal in Lebanon. You can faintly hear the war drums beating for Syria. Afghanistan is teetering on the brink again. The Saudis, Egyptians, and Jordanians are nervously standing on the sidelines. Meanwhile, Iran is sitting in the catbird seat, watching its proxy army attempt to level Haifa and its neighbor and longtime rival, Iraq, melt down into failed state mode.

This is just a prelude to how bad things can get if this situation is not cooled off quickly. The real danger here is the sort of domino effect similar to the start of WWI. What began as a localized, Balkan conflict hastily drew each side’s allies into a Europe wide conflagration. Here’s the scenario:

Israel decides to go all in and launches an invasion of Lebanon and Syria. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) would probably make short work of the Lebanese Army but would need to slug it out a bit before Syria would fall. Iran would then step in on Syria’s behalf, as they have already pledged. The most logical way for Iran to get significant amounts of personnel and equipment into Syria would be a march straight across Iraq and into the American Army and/or the Kurdish militias in the north. The Iranian Army (regulars) number 350,000. Add to that several hundred thousand Revolutionary guard and nearly one half million veterans, the potential ground force Iran could bring to bear would overwhelm anything we could bring to the field at this point. That force could wipe out our presence in Iraq, with nothing to stop it until it reached the Israeli border. With a hostile force that size preparing to invade, I think Israel launches its nukes. Tehran and Damascus become fireballs. There is no way that the Egyptian populace will allow the government to sit on its hands after Israel pulls the nuclear trigger; Egypt will either invade or erupt in the streets. Same goes for Pakistan. The Pakistanis may even fire off a nuclear weapon of their own at Israel. If Israel is still standing at this point, they nuke Cairo and Lahore.

At the end of this little picture, we have chaos from Egypt clear across the Middle East to the Chinese border. I even left out the possibility that Pakistan and India go after each other and the Turkish reaction to Iran marching across a piece of Iraq that they consider Turkish homeland. Admittedly, this is not the most likely outcome and a million different bad things have to happen before Israel fires off a nuclear assault. But if the Israelis are faced with the real possibility of an overpowering invasion and potential extinction of the Jewish state, they will go down swinging. And they will take as many of their enemies down with them as they can.

We need some serious diplomacy and leadership before things get out of hand. World War I started with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, an Austrian Duke, in Sarajevo (then Serbia). The state of affairs in the Middle East is quite a bit more serious than that. In the grand scheme of things, Ferdinand’s murder should have been a minor blip on the historical timeline of Europe, but the situation spun out of control. I think we are in danger of a similar confluence of events.