Since Friday, the US military has launched dozens of airstrikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Joe Biden’s administration portrayed the wave of attacks as a response to a drone strike that killed three US troops at a military base in Jordan on 28 January, and to ongoing attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthi militia. “If you harm an American, we will respond,” the US president said on Friday, adding that there will more retaliation to come.

Biden, the president who withdrew the last US troops and ended America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, could now become the same leader who started a new regional war in the Middle East that entangles the US in a conflict with Iran and its allied militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

For now, the fallout from US reprisals seems to be contained, especially since Biden did not order the Pentagon to strike targets inside Iran. But Biden has promised more US attacks on Iranian-backed Shia militias operating in Iraq and Syria, including on bases where members of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards train and advise the militias.

And that’s where the US military and Iran’s allies are caught in a loop of tit-for-tat escalation: attacks on US bases in the region, or shipping vessels in the Red Sea, lead the Pentagon to hit back, risking new reprisals that could spiral out of control. The US keeps hoping that its overwhelming military power will create a “deterrent” and stop the militias from carrying out new attacks.

Despite Biden’s insistence as a presidential candidate and in his first year in office that he wanted to end the “forever wars” that the US unleashed after 9/11, the president is once again hoping to bomb his way out of a problem in the Middle East.

The cognitive dissonance of unleashing more bombing to achieve stability is even more stark because Biden and his top aides have insisted that their highest priority since the brutal 7 October attacks by Hamas militants inside........

© The Guardian