Fears of kock-on effect across region after Jordan drone attack
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00:00 More details have come out over a drone attack in Jordan that left three U.S. troops dead.
00:06 Officials now say U.S. forces may have mistaken an enemy drone for an American one and let
00:11 it come unchallenged into the base, leaving dozens more wounded.
00:15 Joe Biden now facing a difficult balancing act, blaming Iran for the deaths and looking
00:20 to strike back in a forceful way without causing any further escalation of the conflict in
00:25 Gaza.
00:26 For more on this, let's bring in our international affairs editor, Philip Terl.
00:29 Philip, first of all, who are the militia groups who attacked the U.S. troops and what
00:33 do they want?
00:34 Well, there are many in the region over Syria, in Iraq, and of course in Iran and in Yemen,
00:40 and without even talking about Hamas in Gaza.
00:44 What they basically want is the U.S. to remove their forces from within Iraq, and they also
00:53 want to call for the destruction of Israel.
00:56 And they have been causing a lot of trouble for U.S. forces in Iraq.
01:01 And mind you, there are about 2,500 U.S. soldiers based there, basically to stop the running
01:08 of weapons supplies, illegal weapons supplies, and to act as an ally to the Iraqi forces.
01:16 They are not seen with too much of a fond eye by the Iraqi leadership, especially over
01:21 some of the attacks that the U.S. have undertaken against what they say is proxy Iranian targets
01:26 within Iraq.
01:27 But this has made this into a much more serious situation, the death of these three U.S. servicemen.
01:34 One of the groups that's being looked at as being possibly behind all of this is called
01:38 the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.
01:39 It was created in 2020.
01:40 It's an umbrella group bringing together several different militant groups inside, but notably
01:46 Hezbollah.
01:48 And there is a worry now that this could lead to further attacks in the region.
01:53 There have been a series of attacks against U.S. forces, especially since the invasion
01:58 of Gaza back in October by Israeli forces.
02:03 And there is a feeling also that this is going to have a knock-on effect in the region.
02:09 That is why President Biden is in such a difficult position as to what exactly he needs to do
02:13 now to fight back against this attack.
02:16 So what are Biden's options at this point?
02:18 Well, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has said just yesterday that the
02:25 Middle East is facing a crisis probably as great as the one that it faced in 1973.
02:32 There has been no greater crisis facing the region since then.
02:35 So there are several things that President Biden can do, but none of them are very easy
02:40 to be able to carry out.
02:42 The first one is to launch attacks against the militia groups themselves.
02:47 The second one is to try to organize some kind of cyber attacks to disrupt their communication
02:54 between the different groups in the area.
02:56 And the third one is to launch an attack against Iran itself, which many of the far right in
03:03 the U.S. Republicans are calling for, saying this has gone far enough, we need to give
03:07 Iran a bloody nose, because if we don't, this is going to carry on afterwards and it will
03:11 get much worse.
03:13 I don't think that as far as President Biden is concerned, actually striking Iraq is one
03:18 of the options that he has at the moment on his agenda.
03:22 But the problem for the president, the U.S. president, is that if he doesn't go hard enough,
03:27 he's going to be seen as being weak.
03:29 If he goes too hard, he could push this into a much wider conflict in the Middle East.
03:34 And he has to keep an eye on the fact that his popularity ratings aren't very high in
03:38 the U.S. right now.
03:39 Just a poll released this week by Quinnipiac has found that only 16 percent of Americans
03:44 think Joe Biden is doing a good job as far as foreign policy is concerned, notably over
03:49 the U.S. role in trying to solve the problem in the Gaza Strip.
03:54 So there is a feeling that the U.S. president is going to have to react.
03:57 He's going to have to react pretty soon.
04:00 This might be a long drawn out series of attacks against Iranian interests in the region.
04:04 At the moment, we still don't know exactly what President Biden is going to be doing,
04:08 but it's certainly a question of trying to weigh out the difference between a deterrent
04:13 on one side and retaliation on the other.
04:15 I think we'll know more about what President Biden is going to do within the next day or