Iran Strikes On Israel Raise Risk Of A Global War

Iran has said it fired the missiles into Israel as retaliation for attacks on Hezbollah, Hamas and the Iranian military.

A coalition of groups and organizations has now been labeled as Iran's“Axis of Resistance .” Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini, and senior military commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, or the IRGC, have issued unifying guidance to all the different elements, whether it is Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Shia militias in Iraq and Syria.

Before October 7, 2023, all of these groups were ideologically opposed to Israel, to a degree. But they were also fighting their own conflicts and were not rallying around supporting Hamas. Now, they have all become more active around a common goal of destroying Israel.

Iran and Hezbollah, in particular, have a deep relationship, dating back to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon in order to thwart cross-border attacks the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other Palestinian groups were launching into Israel. The newly formed Iranian IRGC sent advisers and trainers to southern Lebanon to work with like-minded Lebanese Shiite militants who were already fighting in Lebanon's civil war .

They wanted to fight against the Israeli military and elements of the multinational force comprised of US, French and other Western troops that were originally sent as peacekeepers to put an end to the fighting.

The relationships between these Iranian experts and Lebanese militants during Lebanon's 15-year civil war led to the formation of Hezbollah as a small, clandestine group in 1982.

During the following few years, Hezbollah launched a brutal campaign of terrorist attacks against US, French and other Western interests in Lebanon. The group, then known as Islamic Jihad, first attacked the US embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983 .

That attack killed 52 Lebanese and American embassy employees. However, at the time, US intelligence personnel and other security experts were not clear who was responsible for the embassy bombing. And given this lack of understanding and insight on Hezbollah as an emerging terrorist threat , the group aimed even higher later in 1983.

Following the embassy attack, Hezbollah carried out the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing that killed 241 US service personnel. Before the 9/11 attacks, this was the biggest single act of international terrorism against the US.

Hezbollah was also responsible for the kidnapping and murder of American citizens , including William Buckley, the CIA station chief for Beirut. And it carried out airplane hijackings, include the infamous TWA 847 incident in 1985, in which a U.S. Navy diver was murdered.

So, Hezbollah has a long history of regional and global terrorism.

Within Lebanon, Hezbollah is a kind of parallel government to Lebanon. The Lebanese government has allowed Hezbollah to be this state within a state, but they don't collaborate on military operations. Currently, the Lebanese military is not responding to Israel's attacks on Lebanon. This shows how dominant of a force Hezbollah has become.

Hezbollah has clearly taken losses in fighters, but Hezbollah is a far bigger group than Hamas and operates on a much bigger physical territory across Lebanon.

It has far more inventory of advanced weapons than Hamas ever did, and a large fighting force that includes 40,000 to 50,000 regular forces organized into a conventional military structure. It also has 150,000 to 200,000 rockets , drones and missiles of varying range.

It operates a dangerous global terrorist unit known as the External Security Organization that has attacked Israeli and Jewish interests in the 1990s in Argentina and Jewish tourists in 2012 in Bulgaria .

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The Israeli military assesses they have destroyed at least half of Hezbollah's existing weapons stockpile, based on the volume and intensity of their operations over the past few weeks. If true, this, would present a serious challenge to Hezbollah's long-term operational capability that took decades to acquire.

What security risks does this evolving conflict present for the US?

Looking at how Hezbollah demonstrated these capabilities over a 40-year stretch of time, and based now on how Israel has hit the militant group, it would not be a stretch to speculate that Hezbollah has ordered or is considering some kind of terrorist attack far outside the region – similar to what the group did in Argentina in 1992 and 1994.

What that plot would like look, how many people would be involved, and the possible target of any such attack are not clear.

Hezbollah's leaders have said that they blame Israel for the attacks on it. About a week before Nasrallah's death, he said that Israel's exploding pager and walkie-talkie operations in Lebanon were a“declaration of war” and the“the enemy had crossed all red lines.”

Since then, Hezbollah has remained defiant, in spite of the significant losses the group has sustained by Israel these past few weeks. Questions also remain about how Hezbollah's leadership will likewise hold the US responsible for Israel's actions.

And if so, would that mean a return to the type of terrorism that Hezbollah inflicted on US interests in the region in the 1980s? As recent events have shown, the world is facing a dangerous and volatile security environment in the Middle East.

Javed Ali is associate professor of practice of public policy, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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