The announcement late Sunday night by the US Central Command [CENTCOM]
headquartered in Doha about the arrival of a Ohio-class American nuclear
submarine in its "area of responsibility" presages a significant escalation of
the situation around the Palestine-Israel conflict.
It is very rare that the use of these submarines is publicised. The CENTCOM
provided no additional details but it posted an image that apparently showed an
Ohio-class submarine in Egypt's Suez Canal Bridge. Interestingly, CENTCOM also
separately shared an image of a nuclear-capable B-1 bomber operating in the
Middle East.
Taken together, these US deployments, coming on top of the formidable presence
of two aircraft carriers and warships hundreds of advanced jet fighters in the
Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea respectively, are with an eye on "the
other side of the equation," as Secretary of State Antony Blinken quaintly
described Hamas, Hezbullah, and Iran during his latest visit to Tel Aviv on
Friday.
In a related development, perhaps, the CIA director, William Burns arrived in
Israel on Sunday for urgent consultations. The New York Times reported that the
US is "looking to expand its intelligence sharing with Israel."
Arguably, the most charitable explanation for the deployment of a US nuclear
submarine, which forms part of the Pentagon's "nuclear triad" -Ohio-class boats
are the largest submarines ever built for the US Navy - near the war zone is
that the Biden Administration is preparing for an escalation of the war into
Lebanon to draw out Hezbollah, which may in turn trigger an Iranian reaction.
In his speech on Friday, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrullah seemed to anticipate
precisely such a turn of events when he explicitly warned the US of consequences
that couldn't be any different from the catastrophic American involvement in
Lebanon's civil war in the early 1980s. Ironically, this is also the 40th
anniversary year of the suicide bombing of the barracks housing US forces in
Beirut International Airport in October 1983 in which 220 Marines, 18 sailors
and three soldiers were killed forcing a US withdrawal from Lebanon. (See me
blog Hezbollah takes to the high ground.)
Clearly, the locus of the US strategy in the present Middle situation may be
shifting from diplomacy, which has anyway lost traction. Blinken's desperate
attempts to address the mounting international criticism of Israel's horrific
war crimes by diverting attention to a "humanitarian pause" in the fighting, et
al, has been unceremoniously shot down by Netanyahu.
-- Cont'd at https://www.indianpunchline.com/us-israel-to-open-second-front-in-lebanon/
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