Last week’s attack on Israeli forces near the Lebanese border was motivated not merely by revenge or deterrence, argues Tony Badran. Nor was it simply the latest round in Hizballah’s sporadic war with the Jewish state. Rather, it represented a signal to the U.S., from Tehran, regarding the Syrian civil war. Writes Badran:

The U.S. and Iran are already partners in Iraq. Now, through its Hizballah arm, Iran is positioning itself as an interlocutor with the U.S. regarding security on the border with Israel. If Washington wants to keep that border quiet, it needs to talk to Tehran. And, the way the Iranians see it, insofar as the Israelis (and the Jordanians) are U.S. allies, the White House needs to lean on them to make sure that Syrian rebels don’t approach southern Lebanon.

Hizballah is playing a dangerous game. It has already brought Lebanon to the edge. Sooner or later, it’s bound to push it over.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].