Over the past ten days, West Asia has been engulfed in a conflict whose consequences are already rippling far beyond the battlefields. After the United States and Israel launched a joint air assault on targets inside Iran, Tehran responded by declaring not only Israeli territory but also American military bases legitimate targets for retaliation.

Those bases are scattered across the Arab states of the Persian Gulf—installed decades ago, now woven into the region’s political geography. During the twelve-day exchange between Iran and Israel, they functioned as a quiet nervous system: gathering intelligence, feeding radar data, supporting what some analysts have called Operation Midnight Hammer. In the fog of war, it is no longer unreasonable to suggest these facilities played a supporting role in strikes against a neighbouring country. And if that is true, then Iran’s retaliation—reaching into the airspace of Arab states—was not an escalation but a consequence.

The question here is not about who holds the moral high ground, rather what happens when a powerful state, unable to bear the full cost of a war it started, decides to manufacture the conditions for a wider one?

The question here is not about who holds the moral high ground, rather what happens when a powerful state, unable to bear the full cost of a war it started, decides to manufacture the conditions for a wider one?

That question leads directly to the concept of false flag operations. For Israel’s security establishment, these are not a theoretical abstraction. They are a documented tool of statecraft, used in moments when overt action seemed too costly or too controversial. Consider Operation Susannah, better known as the Lavon........

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