Netanyahu has grossly underestimated Iran’s formidable military capabilities, naively expecting the Islamic Republic to be a walkover like Lebanon and Syria, and has overestimated protection offered by Israel’s fabled Iron Dome air defense system that until now proved effective only against unguided rockets launched by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel.
Although effective against aircraft and drones, even the
best of air defense systems, such as THAAD that Israel has deployed, offer only
70-80% protection against incoming ballistic and cruise missiles. Back in the
day, there was even a heated debate among military strategists should costly
missile defense systems be even built, because they offer only a false sense of
security, and the advent of hypersonic missiles has made them completely
worthless.
Despite Netanyahu’s repeated provocations, Iranian
leadership has displayed remarkable restraint during the conflict. It has
strictly forbidden Iraqi militias, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen
from jumping into the fray on Iran’s side, at least for now. And despite
mobilizing troops towards Iran’s western coast, it has thus far avoided
striking Western assets in the Persian Gulf.
This is a turning point in the conflict. Netanyahu will
obviously beg Trump to join in airstrikes against Iran in order to get a
face-saving. But Trump has to decide whether it’s worth risking an all-out war
whose outcome will be massive turmoil in global markets, oil price will
skyrocket, stocks will plummet and global economy will witness worst recession
since, I don’t know, the great recession of 1930s. Choose peace over war, Mr.
President, lest you too go down in history like the rest of warmongers,
including Bush, Obama and Biden.
As I predicted in February that after sacking Gen. CQ Brown
as Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff and appointing a partisan political appointee
retired air force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine in his stead, the institutional policy of
US military would now be collectively determined by chiefs of staff and combatant
commanders.
After ingratiating American Step-President Donald Trump by
deploying National Guard and Marines in LA to crack down on anti-ICE
protesters, the Politico
reported on Thursday that Iran hawk CENTCOM’s chief Gen. Erik the Gorilla
is calling the shots in Iran-Israel conflict, requesting deployment of
additional aircraft carriers and fighter aircraft in the Middle East, while Def
Sec Hegseth and Chairman Caine are simply playing the role of liaison officers
between the White House and the military brass.
It appears the toddler-in-chief lacks the capacity to learn
from past mistakes. Trump should recall how Jim Mattis, McMaster and Mark Milley
stabbed him in the back during the first term by overruling his
non-interventionist agenda and fueling conflicts in the Middle East, leading to
electoral defeat in 2020 presidential elections.
Since the Cold War, the Pentagon’s top brass has developed
an uncanny expertise in brinkmanship. For the initial few months of the Ukraine
War, the Pentagon’s declared policy was that US would only provide defensive
weapons to Ukrainian proxies, then the policy was revised to include
short-range offensive weapons so that trigger-happy Ukrainian troops don’t
strike deep inside Russia, but eventually the Pentagon provided everything
short of nukes in its arsenal to Ukrainian proxies, including HIMARS, ATACMS,
tanks and even F-16 aircraft.
It even floated the idea of providing JASSM missiles with an
extended range of up to thousand kilometers to Ukraine, but as Ukrainian pilots
weren’t skilled in operating F-16 and couple of aircraft crashed in Ukraine,
therefore the idea was dropped. Besides, Storm Shadows provided by Britain
didn’t prove game changer in the conflict.
Now, the same cat-and-mouse game is being played with Iran.
First, it was decided to let Israel bomb Iran for a week to bring it to
negotiating table. After Iranian leadership agreed to resume negotiations, then
it’s been decided to let the standoff continue for a while to see what happens.
In the meantime, if a compulsive arsonist lights up a matchstick in the
powderkeg and the critical oil infrastructure of the Persian Gulf goes up in
flames, then they’d say, oops, we made a mistake, let’s punish Iran for
fomenting the worst energy crisis of the industrial era.
Before Trump, former President Obama also claimed to be a
peacemaker. He even managed to withdraw US forces from Iraq in 2011, but only
to redeploy them after ISIS overran Syria and western Iraq in 2014. Obama also
made the fatal mistake of listening to his generals and fawning Netanyahu’s
persistent groveling and ended up simultaneously bombing seven countries in the
Middle East.
Netanyahu has become the longest-serving prime minister of
Israel, consistently being elected since 2009, as he embodies the deep state
logic. Obama initiated a proxy war in Syria on Netanyahu’s behalf in order to
eliminate a security threat posed to Israel’s northern borders from Hezbollah,
backed by Iran and Baathist gov’t of Bashar al-Assad, fomenting the worst
humanitarian crisis of the Middle East in the decade-long proxy war, causing
hundreds of thousands of fatalities, displacing over half of Syria’s 25 million
population and reducing the whole country down to rubble.
Moreover, the decade-long conflict in Syria gave birth to
myriads of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict
spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014, it was directly
responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Western
countries from 2015 to 2017.
Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to
June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal
pact existed between the Obama admin, its regional allies and jihadists of the
Middle East against the Iranian resistance axis comprising Iraq, Syria and
their Lebanon-based proxy Hezbollah that posed a security threat to Israel’s
northern borders. Therefore, in accordance with the pact, militants were
trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey
and Jordan to battle the Assad government.
This arrangement of an informal pact between the Obama admin
and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iran-allied forces worked well
up to August 2014, when the Obama admin made a volte-face on its previous
regime change policy in Syria and began conducting airstrikes against one group
of militants battling the Assad government, the Islamic State, after the latter
overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where
the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.
After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Obama admin
and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian
government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists expansion in Syria and
Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery
against the jihadist cause, hence they were infuriated and rose up in arms to
exact revenge for this betrayal.
If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate
of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran
Mosul in June 2014, the Obama admin began conducting airstrikes against the
Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of
almost a decade since the horrific Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005,
respectively, the first such incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil
at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.
Then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November
2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016
truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in
the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after
that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona terrorist attack in August
2017.
20 June 2025.
No comments:
Post a Comment