Singapore urges all parties in conflict to exercise restraint

None of the players in this historic shift knows how the showdown will unfold

- Jonathan Eyal

LONDON - Soon after his country unleashed a wave of attacks on Iranian military and nuclear targets, Brigadier-General Effie Defrin, the spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), said: "This is a different kind of event than anything we have experienced before."

On this point, Brig-Gen Defrin is undoubtedly right.

Nobody — not the Israelis, the Americans or even Iran's leadership — knows where this confrontation may lead, or how the current showdown will unfold.

The only certainty is that we are witnessing an epic struggle and a historic shift in the Middle East's strategic landscape.

US administration officials are at pains to deny any involvement in the Israeli operation.

"Israel took unilateral action against Iran", US Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed. "We are not involved."

Yet, it is inconceivable that the US had no prior knowledge of the attacks.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent more than a decade arguing that attacks against Iran's nuclear installations were an inevitability.

Still, Mr Netanyahu always accepted that Israel would not be able to launch such attacks on its own, not because the Jewish state did not have the capabilities to mount the initial offensive, but because Israel would not be able to sustain the subsequent confrontation with Iran, which may involve hundreds — if not thousands — of missile exchanges.

There is no indication that Mr Netanyahu has moved away from this strategic assessment, so the conclusion must be that the Israeli leader secured at least the tacit agreement of the Americans to launch the offensive.

The withdrawal of some personnel from American embassies throughout the region, and the evacuation of the families of US servicemen in the Gulf — both of which happened over the past few days — were clear indications that Washington was fully aware that an Iranian-Israeli showdown was imminent.