A massive explosion rocked the Beirut Port on Tuesday,
August 4, killing 100 people and injuring nearly 4,000. Although the blast
occurred in a storage facility containing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, used
in fertilizers and bombs, stored in the warehouse since 2013, a subversive attack
cannot be ruled out, considering that regional spy agencies and their moles
were well aware that highly explosive material was stored in the unguarded
facility for nearly seven years.
In fact, US President Donald Trump has described
the explosion [1] as a “bomb attack.” In an opening statement at a news
conference, Trump expressed solidarity with the people of Lebanon, and said: "We
will be there to help. It looks like a terrible attack." When pressed by
reporters about characterizing the incident as an "attack", Trump
stood by his statement, saying US generals believe the explosion was caused by
a "bomb of some kind."
Although Trump was likely pointing out the “bomb attack” was
a handiwork of Lebanon-based resistance group Hezbollah, the fact is a joint
American-Israeli program [2], involving a series of short-of-war
clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations,
industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on
since early this year when commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem
Soleimani was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport in January.
As the US presidential race is heating up, the pace and
sophistication of subversive attacks in Iran and Iran-aligned countries,
including Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, is picking up simultaneously. Since June, “mysterious
explosions” were reported in a missile and explosives storage facility near a
military base in Parchin, east of the capital Tehran, in power stations in the
cities of Shiraz and Ahvaz, and the Natanz nuclear site on July 2 that has
reportedly set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least two years.
Besides whipping up nationalist sentiment among America’s
conservative electorate on the eve of US presidential election slated for
November, another purpose of the subversive attacks appears to be to avenge a
string of audacious attacks mounted by Iran-backed forces against the US
strategic interests in the Middle East that brought the US and Iran to the
brink of full-scale war last year.
In addition to planting limpet mines on oil tankers off the
coast of the UAE in May last year and the subsequent downing of the US
surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf by Iran, the brazen attack on the Abqaiq
petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi
Arabia on September 14 was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf against
the assets of Washington and its regional clients. That the UAE had forewarning
about imminent attacks is proved by the fact that weeks before the attacks, it recalled
forces from Yemen battling the Houthi rebels and redeployed them to man the
UAE’s territorial borders.
Nevertheless, a puerile prank like planting limpet mines on
oil tankers can be overlooked but major provocations like downing a
$200-million Global Hawk surveillance aircraft and mounting a drone and missile
attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing
functions for weeks could have had serious repercussions.
The September 14 attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in
eastern Saudi Arabia was an apocalypse for the global oil industry because it processes
five million barrels crude oil per day, more than half of Saudi Arabia’s total
oil production. The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets
and the oil price surged 15%, the biggest spike witnessed in three decades
since the First Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though the
oil price was eased within days after industrialized nations released their
strategic oil reserves.
Unless Iran got the green light to go ahead with the attacks
from a major power that equals Washington’s military might, such confrontation
would have amounted to a suicidal approach. Therefore, the last year’s acts of
subversion in the Persian Gulf should be viewed in the broader backdrop of the
New Cold War that has begun after the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 when Russia
occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions against Russia.
The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by
Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a
clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the
IRGC’s Quds Force. When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to
Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional
clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite
heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of
the Assad government.
With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian
government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents,
excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and
Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a
humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional clients.
Moreover, several momentous events have taken place in the
Syrian theater of proxy war and on the global stage that have further
exacerbated the New Cold War between Moscow and Washington:
On February 7, 2018, the US B-52 bombers and Apache
helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces
in Deir al-Zor province of eastern Syria that reportedly
[3] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the
Russian private security firm, the Wagner Group.
The survivors described the bombing as an absolute carnage,
and Moscow lost more Russian nationals in one day than it had lost throughout
its more than two-year-long military campaign in support of the Syrian
government since September 2015.
A month after the massacre of Russian military contractors
in Syria, on March 4, 2018, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for
the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found
unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury. A few
months later, in July 2018, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after touching
the container of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned the Skripals.
In the case of the Skripals, Theresa May, then the prime
minister of the United Kingdom, promptly accused Russia of attempted
assassinations and the British government concluded that Skripal and his daughter
were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, Novichok.
Sergei Skripal was recruited by the British MI6 in 1995, and
before his arrest in Russia in December 2004, he was alleged to have blown the
cover of scores of Russian secret agents. He was released in a spy swap deal in
2010 and was allowed to settle in Salisbury. Both Sergei Skripal and his
daughter have since recovered and were discharged from hospital in May 2018.
Nevertheless, the motive that prompted the Vladimir Putin-led
government to escalate the conflict with the Western powers was that the
Russian presidential elections were slated for March 18, 2018, which Putin was
poised to win anyway but he won a resounding electoral victory with 77% vote by
whipping up chauvinism of the Russian electorate after the war of words with
the Western powers.
In the aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018,
the US, UK and several European nations expelled scores of Russian diplomats
and the Trump administration ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in
Seattle. In a retaliatory move, Russia also expelled a similar number of
American, British and European diplomats, and ordered the closure of American
consulate in Saint Petersburg. The relations between Moscow and Western powers
reached their lowest ebb since the break-up of the former Soviet Union and the
end of the Cold War in December 1991.
A month later, an alleged chemical weapons attack took place
in Douma, Syria, on April 7, 2018, and Donald Trump ordered a cruise missile strike
in Syria on April 14, 2018, in collaboration with the Theresa May government in
the UK and the Emmanuel Macron administration in France. The strike took place
little over a year after a similar cruise missile strike on al-Shayrat airfield
on April 6, 2017, after an alleged chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun,
though both cruise missile strikes were nothing more than a show of force.
But the fact that out of 105 total cruise missiles deployed
in the April 14, 2018, strikes against a military research facility in the
Barzeh district of Damascus and two alleged chemical weapons storage facilities
in Homs, 85 were launched by the US, 12 by the French and 8 by the UK aircrafts
demonstrated the unified resolve of the Western powers against Russia in the
aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings in the UK a month earlier.
Finally, a word about the venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds
Force General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated in a US airstrike at
Baghdad airport in January. He was the main liaison between Iran’s Supreme
Leader Ali Khamenei and the Kremlin. Not only did he invite Russia to strike at
Washington’s Achilles heel in Syria’s proxy war but he was also the main
architect of the audacious September 14 attacks at Abqaiq petroleum facility and
the Khurais oil field in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.
Alongside deploying several thousand American troops and
additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in
the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, Washington also took out its most fearsome
nemesis General Soleimani in January, and now it can freely stage subversive
attacks in Iran and its allies without the fear of reprisals.
It’s worth pointing out that Trump
initially rejected [4] the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani
on December 28 due to the fear of full-scale confrontation with Iran, and
authorized airstrikes on an Iran-backed militia group in Iraq instead. But
after the attack at the US embassy in Baghdad by Iran-backed forces, Trump
succumbed to pressure from the American deep state, led by the Pentagon and the
State Department, which had a score to settle with General Soleimani for giving
the global power a bloody nose in Syria’s proxy war.
Footnotes:
[1] Trump says Beirut explosion was an 'attack':
[2] Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s
Nuclear Program:
[3] Russian toll in Syria battle was 300 killed and wounded:
[4] Trump initially rejected the Pentagon’s option to
assassinate General Soleimani:
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