Since news came in yesterday evening of Iran’s strike, I’ve been reading and listening to every non-corporate media account I can get my hands on.
What can we say, right now, with any confidence?
- Iran has shown it can inflict real damage on Israel – its vaunted Iron Dome scant defence for a small and densely populated country against hypersonic missiles. Needless to say, Israel’s hasbara industry will be working over time, aided by Western corporate media, to minimise this truth.
- The West-enabled IDF can in turn hurt but not take out Iran, a threshold nuclear power whose formidable conventional capabilities are scattered across a vast area, and have built in dead hand capacity. Moreover, should Israel attack Iranian oil fields, Tehran has the power to do likewise across the region to trigger – on top of Europe’s economic suicide apropos Nordstream – global recession and further isolate the Arab autocracies from their incandescent subjects.
- Israel knows all of this. Its criminal provocations, most recently flattening an entire block in Beirut to murder one man at cost of countless – because buried by rubble – Lebanese civilian lives, are calculated to widen the conflict and draw the US into a regional hot war with every possibility of going global. Israel is the only state in this equation which needs to escalate. While the US has elements straining at the leash to “cut off the head of the snake”, it’s not yet clear whether they have the upper hand within its ruling class. (Though all out war in the region would threaten Israel’s annihilation in the absence of direct US entry.)
What seems likely:
- While this is more serious than the April attack, Iran is still pulling its punches. Accounts I’ve read say Tehran warned Washington – too late to allow the incoming missiles to be countered but in time to allow the high prestige F-35s to be sent into the air, where they are safer – of the attack. For now it may be content with telegraphing that it can and will inflict a terrible cost on Israel, the one actor with the power to end this nightmare today.
- US elites, with an election next month, are in turmoil. That the majority of its decision makers do not want war with Iran is no guarantee of that not happening.
What is anyone’s guess:
- How will China and/or Russia respond should the US directly attack Iran? The positions of both as regards Iran mirror that of Iran vis a vis Hezbollah.
Watch this space.
* * *