Can Iraqi militias be deterred from attacking Israel? - analysisThe Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iranian-backed militias, targeted Eilat on Wednesday evening. It was one of a number of escalating attacks from Iraq over the past two weeks.The militias have targeted Israel with drones and also claim to have launched cruise missiles. This is a dangerous escalation. The strike on Iraq included several drones, one of which was intercepted.Can Israel deter the Iraqi militias? It would seem that they cannot easily be defeated because they are so large. and there are so many of them.
The problem is that people, Frantzman included, keep forgetting that this is a single war, not separate wars against Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, Syrian and Iraqi groups.
None of those would fire a single rocket or drone if Iran didn't want them to.
I understand losing sight of the big picture, but that is entirely the point of Iran's use of proxies.
Israel has already redefined what war is with the phenomenal attack on pagers and other equipment. It has to do this further.
Part of the appeal of using massive amounts of rockets is that they are much cheaper than Iron Dome interceptors are. Iran knows that a coordinated attack would overwhelm Israel, but also that economics is on their side - they can churn out the rockets much less expensively than Israel can intercept them.
Economics can help stop this war as well.
Iran's economy is not in good shape, and the West has not done enough to use economic pressure to stop Iran from its support for terror. But there are other ways besides sanctions to hurt Iran's economy, both of which Israel can do without any Western help at all.
The first one is kinetic. Israel could attack Iran's oil export infrastructure. It is essentially a single point of failure that would cripple Iran's economy. It would involve a direct attack and it would be difficult to gain support for such a move; international law is not mature enough to deal with a scenario where a state actor broadly tells a proxy what to do without saying anything specific. Iran's proxy strategy has great advantages, which is why it employs it.
But Israel can also hurt Iran's economy using cyberattacks. And that is a twist on Iran's own strategy o f plausible deniability, since proving who the attacker is in a cyber attack is very difficult.
Iran has been hit with cyberattacks before, at least one of them probably from Israel - the shutting down of Iran's Shahid Rajaee port terminal. It caused chaos but it could have been much worse. Israel could shut down all commercial imports and exports.
There were other attacks on Iran's infrastructure, like the 2023 attack on Iran's petroleum stations that may have been linked to Israel.
The point is that war is no longer only fought with bullets, as we saw with the pager attack. We are too used to looking at war through a prism of physical battle, but terrorism, cyberwar and espionage have changed the definitions.
Israel needs re-couple Iran with its proxies. It needs to send a message to Iran: The next time a single rocket hits Israel from Iraq, Syria or Yemen, it will cost Iran's economy tens of millions of dollars. After a couple of cyberattacks, along with Iranians protesting the government policy of hurting them to hurt Israel, then Iran's appetite to use proxies will go way down.
Especially since, so far, the long distance attacks have been more for show and honor than causing actual damage. Just like Iran doesn't care about putting the lives of its proxies at rick, it doesn't care about their honor, either. The cost/benefit analysis of these rockets will change drastically.
And as a bonus the world will more clearly see the linkage between Iran and its proxies, which dilutes the effect of using proxies for plausible deniability to begin with.
