When the United States and Israel launched Operation Roaring Lion/Epic Fury on 28 February 2026 — nearly 900 strikes targeting Iranian leadership, nuclear infrastructure, missile arsenals and IRGC facilities, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei within hours — the strategic calculation in Washington and Tel Aviv was framed around Iran. What was not foregrounded, at least not publicly, was the catastrophic collateral pressure the war would generate on two already-fragile Arab states: Lebanon and Iraq.
Sixteen days into open interstate conflict, neither country is merely a bystander. Both are being consumed by the war's spillover — and both now stand at a threshold that serious analysts are beginning to describe not as crisis, but as potential state failure.
The mechanism is not identical in each case, but the structural logic is the same: the US-Israel war on Iran activated Iran's regional network of armed proxies and affiliated militias at precisely the moment when the host societies carrying those networks had the least remaining resilience. Lebanon and Iraq did not enter this war strong. They entered it already hollowed out — by financial implosion, governance paralysis, years of protest, and the accumulated weight of external intervention. The war did not create their fragility; it is now detonating it.
Lebanon: War On A Corpse
Lebanon had already, by any conventional measure, ceased to function as a sovereign economy before the first Israeli strike on Iran. Its banking system has been effectively insolvent since 2019. Its currency has been hyper-devalued. Large segments of its population live in poverty. The state lacks the fiscal capacity for meaningful relief or reconstruction. Political paralysis has become structural. What the 2026 conflict introduced was a military dimension onto a society already in free fall.
Israel had been explicit in its warnings. In the days before 28 February, senior Israeli officials stated publicly that Lebanon would be hit "hard" — including civilian infrastructure, explicitly including the airport — if Hezbollah chose to participate in any US-Iran confrontation. The warning was not heeded. After Khamenei's killing, Hezbollah escalated from calibrated support fire to open military engagement with Israel, under heavy IRGC influence and drawing on months of prior re-armament. On 2 March, it fired rockets into Israeli territory for the first time since the November 2024 ceasefire. Israel responded the same day with more than 250 strikes across Lebanese territory.
The Lebanese state's response was, in a tragic sense, revealing of its own impotence. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam publicly condemned the Hezbollah attack as "irresponsible" and announced a ban on its military activities — a declaration the government had no actual means to enforce. The formal state and the armed non-state entity dominating its security environment were openly at war with each other's logic. Hezbollah, meanwhile, entered this round from a weaker and more domestically contested position than in any previous conflict. Analysts argue the 2026 war may complete its transformation from Iran's "northern army" into a battered, more localized insurgent actor — but that transformation, if it occurs, will be paid for in Lebanese blood and infrastructure.
Israeli strikes have continued to hit the Bekaa Valley and the south. Casualties have exceeded 820 dead. Infrastructure damage compounds a state incapable of reconstruction. The trajectory now points toward accelerating fragmentation: further economic contraction, potential bank shutdowns, intensified social unrest, and an erosion of whatever residual central authority remains — replaced, progressively, by the logic of armed factions and localized patronage networks.
Iraq: An Unwilling Frontline
Iraq's situation is in some respects even more structurally exposed. It shares a long border with Iran, hosts significant US military and diplomatic interests, and contains within its own security architecture a constellation of Iran-aligned factions — principally within the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — that are simultaneously embedded in the state apparatus and operationally responsive to Tehran.
From the first hours of Operation Roaring Lion, Iran-aligned Iraqi groups activated. On 1 March alone, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed 21 drone attacks on US bases, including at Erbil and Baghdad's Victory Base. By the time this analysis goes to print, the group has claimed over 200 attacks on US positions since 28 February. US forces have responded with strikes on militia and PMF facilities across multiple provinces — Babil, Nineveh, Kirkuk, Mosul — effectively turning Iraq into a major theater of the US-Iran confrontation, whether Baghdad wishes it or not.
The Iraqi government's position is untenable. Following contentious 2025 elections, Iraq is governed by a caretaker administration with limited authority — Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani holding office in the context of US opposition to Nouri al-Maliki's nomination, leaving Baghdad without the political capital to restrain militias or manage escalation. Iran-linked actors have also struck Kurdish groups in northern Iraq, after reports that Washington might arm some Iranian Kurdish elements — further complicating an already fractured internal security map.
The economic consequences are severe and worsening. Regional instability has disrupted energy infrastructure and export routes, reducing Iraqi oil output. Iraq's heavy dependence on Iranian energy imports exposes it acutely to power shortages should sanctions or fighting interrupt supply — a dynamic that has historically proven a reliable trigger for large-scale unrest. Electricity protests have repeatedly turned violent in Iraq. They will again.
The broader pattern is one that Iraqis have named themselves: the PMF-linked parties that dominate the political economy are now widely perceived not as protectors, but as a predatory "hydra" embedded in the state. Escalating strikes by both Iran-aligned groups and US forces, combined with the looming possibility of US demands to expel American troops and the risk of expanded targeting of PMF leadership, threaten to unravel the governing coalition entirely — and reignite large-scale intra-Iraqi conflict.
The Convergence Of Catastrophes
What makes the situations in Lebanon and Iraq so analytically alarming is not that either is experiencing a crisis — both have been in crisis for years. It is that the 2026 war is now driving both toward a qualitatively different condition: one in which formal institutions are hollowed out to the point of irrelevance, real power is exercised by armed non-state actors and external patrons, and governance collapses into fragmented zones of control.
In Lebanon, the convergence of pre-existing financial implosion, minimal state legitimacy, Hezbollah's quasi-state role, and now direct large-scale warfare generates a system that can no longer sustain itself. Israeli threats to target critical civilian infrastructure, combined with the central government's demonstrated inability to enforce its own security orders, push the system toward de facto fragmentation.
In Iraq, the war amplifies chronic structural weaknesses — fragmented security architecture, a paralyzed political class, unresolved protest movements, and an oil-dependent economy whose revenues are now at risk — while simultaneously generating the conditions for a direct military confrontation between Iran-aligned groups and US forces on Iraqi soil.
For both populations, the humanitarian dimension is immediate and devastating. Displacement, infrastructure destruction, energy insecurity, food insecurity — these are not abstractions. They are hitting societies that have already endured years of compounding catastrophe and have, to put it plainly, very little resilience left.
The US-Israel war on Iran was designed and executed as a campaign against Iranian power. Its most visible and lasting consequences may well be the accelerated disintegration of two of the Arab world's most populous and historically significant states — neither of which had any meaningful voice in the decision to start it.
Photo: Perplexity