I happened to glance at my phone as I was getting ready to leave services and go to dinner, and found that on both Skype and Telegram, a dear friend of mine (who happens to live near the center of Tehran) was frantically trying to get in touch with me, wondering whether I was awake. This is a surprisingly a propos question, given my recent problems with sleep apnea, but as I happened to be awake and alert, I replied about fifteen minutes after she had sent me the messages, and while I was in the course of a very interesting dinner conversation, I also periodically found it necessary to provide comfort as best as I was able to my frantic friend, who was convinced that with the missiles sent by Iran towards Israel that the world was headed towards World War III and that she would be doomed. She told me about what was said on the news, about fears of running out of food and high rates of inflation as confidence in Iran’s currency would tank, and later I was able to read about how fearful Iranian motorists were making long lines in the night at gas stations, trying to make sure that they could get enough fuel in their cars, all while Iranian ministry officials ineffectually tried to convince motorists that there was enough oil and that everything was safe.

While seeking to comfort my friend, I also found it unavoidable to put on my military historian hat (which may or may not resemble one of those late 19th century German military helmets) and to ponder what this meant from the point of view of that profession. Two weeks after an Israeli attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, where notable Iranian members of the Republican Corps were killed, Iran decided to retaliate by launching more than 300 drones and missiles, mostly from within Iran but also from within Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen where Iran’s military operates within the region, at a variety of places within Israel, including the Golan Heights and a military base in the Negev that was slightly damaged. By all accounts, the attack was unsuccessful, in that nearly all of the missiles and drones were successfully deterred by Israeli and American forces within Israel as well as Jordan. Apparently twelve people had to go to a hospital near the Negev base that was hit, one a child with serious injuries, another few with minor injuries from missile shrapnel, and three people hospitalized because of anxiety.

It is unclear, though, how and whether Israel will respond to this. By their own accounts, in opening up their airspace only hours after the attack, they have shown to the world that what Iran did was basically worthless as far as retaliation is concerned. Yet such a massive attack in terms of numbers likely requires some sort of response from Israel. Making it all the more baffling and complicated is that the issue has creeped into local American politics in that it is being affirmed that Biden “green-lit” the Iranian response even while claiming that he would stand by Israel, thus leaving open Biden to accusations that he is not doing enough to stand by Israel and that he is supporting Iranian military endeavors, which could very easily prove dangerous in an election season where for some reason rattling the saber against Iran is always good to score political points. Given the fact that as I write this the UN Security Council is discussing the attack, and probably what sort of response Israel would be allowed to make, it is clear that this is not the end, but rather a step in what looks to many (myself included) like an escalator path to war.

It may be an escalator path to war, but it is far from a quick or a straightforward way to war. Perhaps the fact that war is frequent in human existence leads us to think of it often as inevitable, when perhaps we should view it as something like an airline crash, with a Swiss cheese model to show how something failed in a given instance and that how a lot of failures put together made something inevitable that should not have happened at all. There were choices that could have been made differently and should have been made differently, and when those mistakes and blunders were added one on top of the other, the catastrophe that we know to have happened ends up happening when it could have ben stopped many points along the line. Was this how it felt in July 1914 in Europe, after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the supposed cause of the catastrophe of World War I that took more than a month to light the fuse to war? If we want to use an imperfect metaphor of the situation, perhaps we may judge Hamas in Gaza to be something like the Black Hand of Serbia, terrorists willing to use violence to support their political aims, attacking a larger nation that is willing and able to defend itself but hardly wishes for a larger war. Yet Israel is no tottering Austria-Hungary, but something smaller and fiercer. The metaphor soon breaks down, even if one is looking at a situation where it feels like a similar dynamic is happening with a delayed response and redlines that have a possibility at being crossed that push the next nation from peacetime into war mobilization, and put everyone else on edge as their turn comes to decide on their course of action.

It is perhaps worthwhile to note that even when it seems like everyone else is involved in a war, not everyone has to be a belligerent. Spain was officially neutral in both World Wars, as were Switzerland, Sweden, and Iran. Romania, with all of its neighbors mobilized for war since 1914 (and indeed earlier, as its Balkan neighbors had been fighting since two years earlier at least), did not enter into World War I until 1917, when lured by promises of territory gains in Transylvania it opportunistically joined in as an ally of collapsing Russia, only to face total defeat until managing to spring alive at the end of the war and achieve its objectives as Austria-Hungary and Germany collapsed in turn. Here we know that a nation’s involvement in World War I was not forced upon it, and was not inevitable, because Romania’s leaders consciously chose to fight, and made what at first seemed to be a horrible mistake before that mistake was redeemed by factors out of its control, including having an ally in France that delighted in seeing in gain land, at the cost of what seems like a permanent enemy in Hungary, whose loss of land alienated many of its people from its truncated surviving successor state. Israel and Palestinian governments of all types know what permanent enemies are, alas.

We should not view, though, being neutral in a war as meaning unaffected by it. The fate of Iran during World War I is one such example, as the nation found itself occupied partly by Russia in the north and Great Britain in the south, and the resulting food shortages that the nation suffered under unprovoked occupation led to the deaths of between one and three million people. When the government of Iran, on behalf of its suffering people, wanted redress for their losses at Versailles, they were denied entry by British diplomats to the treaty negotiations because, as a nonbelligerent nation, they supposedly had no right to discuss the ending of a war where they had not been involved, even if they had suffered great losses as a result of the war. Perhaps, if the often corrupt and incompetent rulers of the world really wanted a just peace in the world, they should not behave in ways that push other people to fight and to kill, knowing that otherwise they will die without acknowledgement and without recompense. For once some people are prompted to avenge themselves, the temptation will exist for each act of retaliatory justice to provoke another retaliation that, because of its imprecision, only creates more people with a thirst to avenge.