As Iran and Israel stand at the brink …

With four points to make this morning, I’ll take things allegro.

POINT One: the Israeli regime does not want peace

Its lead actors never did, ¹ though their hasbara has long made skilful use of what one of Israel’s most persistent critics, Norman Finkelstein – his family on both sides all but wiped out in the camps – calls the Holocaust Industry. In painting Israel as eternal victim, and a people which had no hand in the Shoah  as the aggressor, they frame the Palestine Question in terms no less racist than the apartheid their state practices.

“Why can’t those untermensch Palestinians stop throwing our ubermensch attempts to find a just and lasting peace right back in our faces?”

Now their thinly veiled aversion to peace is personified in a leader boxed in by eschatological fascists and facing jail on leaving office. Naked Capitalism yesterday:

Right before Israel’s assassination of Hassim Nasrallah and other Hezbollah and Iran Revolutionary Guard officials meeting with him, the US was broadcasting that it plus 12 countries, including Arab states, were pushing for a 21 day ceasefire. We thought this a White House gambit, to kick the can of a wider war down the road enough for it not to a hot issue for the US elections. 

While we were drafting our post, Wall Street Journal reported that Israel immediately threw cold water on the idea and launched more airstrikes.

We now learn that Nasrallah agreed to the ceasefire shortly before he was assassinated.

Writing today, October 4, in a piece scathing of Western media complicity, Caitlin Johnstone begins:

The US and Iran are on the brink of war. Israel and the US are planning a major attack on Iran which, according to Biden himself, could entail strikes on Iranian oil sites. Iran is now saying its days of “individual self-restraint” are over, and it is prepared to go all-in if the US and Israel keep ramping up escalations.

In yesterday’s post apropos the strike of three days ago – True Promise 2 as Tehran has dubbed it ² – I wrote:

In its ability to slice through Iron Dome and David’s Sling, Tehran has telegraphed that the era of Zionist impunity is over. No Western asset in the Middle East is untouchable. Be it an RAF base in Cyprus supplying intel for IDF murder from the air, a US warship in the eastern Med, the oil fields of the Arab autocracies, ships in the Hormuz choke point or, indeed, the apartheid state itself – all are vulnerable …

… which segues neatly into …

POINT TWO: iRAN’S oCTOBER 1 STRIKES WERE A BIG DEAL

I’m staying with that Naked Capitalism piece. It goes on, given both Israel’s news blackout and Western corporate media collusion, to quote (I’ve edited for brevity) Military Watch:

Iran’s strike of October 1 hit Nevatim Air Base among other key targets. It hosts both of Israel’s F-35 squadrons and had been due to host an as yet undelivered third. Iran says Nevatim was “completely destroyed”. Footage from Israel confirms dozens of ballistic missiles which Israel’s air defences failed to destroy, with Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv ³ levelled by the attack …

Reports indicate most F-35s destroyed in the attack. These stealth fighters are a high value target. Israel relies on them heavily, as the rest of its fighters use near obsolete avionics and old mechanically scanned array radars. F-35s are key to Israeli attacks on Iran, making their destruction a major step towards limiting Israel’s ability to respond with further escalation …

Maybe. Maybe not. Who can pierce the fog of war with its attendant extravagance of claim and counter claim? Then again, what impartial observer, having seen tweeted footage of skies lit up like Xmas night and the ground below popping like fire-crackers – while pro-Israeli media made Comical Ali claims of its having failed – could deny that True Promise 2  has badly shaken Israeli and Western assumptions? ⁴

POINT Three: There’s a bigger picture …

… supplied in this case by Brian Berletic:

Brian always merits a close listen but, for those who don’t have thirty-two minutes, here’s the executive summary.

The USA is using Israel the way it used Ukraine: as bait, in this case to ensnare not Russia but Iran. To make his case Brian draws on a 2009 Brookings Institute paper; Washington commissioned, CIA reviewed and bearing the title, Which Way to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Towards Iran.

Just as he and others, me included, drew on another think-tank paper – the Pentagon commissioned 2019 Rand Report, Extending Russia – to show how the Ukraine serves US intent to thwart by all available means a rising power, Brian here shows how Israel serves US intent to regime change Iran, the options helpfully laid out in bullet points.

This is consistent with Steve Gowans’ Israel, a beachhead for imperialism and in turn my September 29 assessment, in the wake of Hassan Nasrallah’s murder, that:

Israel is an outpost for imperialism in an oil rich region. A region all the more significant for standing between the West and a Eurasia perceived as a threat by five centuries of European colonial strategists, and some half century of US imperialists. Israel has a very special role in dividing the Middle East but some aspects are common to all colonial and neocolonial rule of the global south.

Like Steve, Brian explicitly rejects the claim, often made in tones tainted by antisemitism, that Israel rules the US.

I am in 90% agreement, the other 10% falling into two caveats. One is that the Israel Lobby has a grip on US policy which falls well short of upholding the Israel-rules-the-USA thesis but gives the relationship its unique toxicity. Neither Kiev nor Taipei have anything remotely analogous to AIPAC’s cancerous hold on the Beltway.

The other was aired in my September 30 post, Israel as the end-times fanatics see it. This terrorist-state-with-nukes has a mad dog aspect which, as Alastair Crooke argues with quiet cogency, is not wholly subject to rational analysis.

Those caveats aside, few who find the time to do so regret giving Brian Berletic a viewing. Most important is his constant argument, repeated here with my 100% concurrence, that none of the three likeliest flash points for WW3 – the Middle East, the Ukraine, the China Seas – can be understood in isolation. All must be seen in light of a weakening hence triply dangerous global hegemon seeking to maintain supremacy at whatever cost to the rest of us.

POINT Four: Escalate to De-escalate

Just yesterday I wrote that:

Tehran, unlike Netanyahu’s unhinged cabinet, does not seek a region-wide war which could go global. This truth has thus far begotten a restraint misread in Jerusalem and Washington as fear thinly concealed by bluster, much as Moscow’s restraint in the face of NATO provocations had been misread.

That last links to my post of December 2022, Is Vladimir Putin too soft? It houses a piece by Paul Craig Roberts. Like the late Stephen Cohen, PCR was a young Reagan appointee who – naively taking the cold war at face value ⁵ – had assumed it over, and with it NATO’s raison d’etre, with the dismantling of the USSR. When NATO didn’t follow suit, he joined the swelling ranks of gamekeepers turned poacher disappointed and scathing of every US administration from Clinton onwards.

In a catchily titled, Putin Has Misread the West And if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon Armageddon Is Upon Us, he identifies two threats to world peace: US belligerence and continual provocation of Russia, and Kremlin appeasement of the same:

Two factors are driving the world to nuclear war. One is the constant stream of insults, false accusations and broken agreements that the West has been dumping on Russia year after year. The other is Russia’s response, or more correctly the lack thereof.

Park that thought. I closed yesterday’s post with a reference to Orwellian use of language. My target was Western media and politicians but I also spoke of the Axis of Resistance – meaning China, Russia, DRK and Iran – concluding that they may have to escalate to de-escalate.

Writing October 2 on his substack, Alex Krainer assesses the Iranian strike on Israel. Like me, for reasons I set out yesterday and repeated at the end of Point One, he refers to it as a game changer. He goes further though:

I may be succumbing to wishful thinking myself, but I believe we will shortly see leaders in the West pull hard on the handbrake and effect the quickest 180 degree turn yet! In the end, perhaps they will arrive at the calculation that sacrificing Benjamin Netanyahu and allowing Israel a break so they can sober up and reassess their predicament is a much better deal than following the unhinged fanatics and committing a collective suicide. We’ll know soon enough. Who knows, maybe we can avoid World War 3.

Maybe. Maybe not. Have a good weekend.

* * *

1. As has become increasingly clear, Israel’s most powerful advocates have always been expansionist. Desirous for reasons scriptural or secular of a Greater (Biblical) Israel, its current leadership now sense a golden opportunity to make that happen even at risk of WW3.
2. Iran’s April strikes on Israel – part probe, part IOU – in the wake of Israel’s attack on her Damascus Embassy, had been dubbed Operation True Promise.
3. “Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv …”  Yet the terrorist state routinely defends collateral damage ratios of 50:1 and above as all on “the terrorists” who use their own people as human shields.
4. For more detail on True Promise 2, see this post today by Simplicius the Thinker.
5. In a post seven years ago, apropos Trump’s 2017 u-turn on rapprochement with Russia, I wrote:

   Suppose the old cold war was not about ‘defending our freedom’. Suppose it was instead about one sixth of the world’s land mass – its vast resources and markets – being closed off to Profit. Why suppose any such thing? Because for reasons beyond my current remit, capitalism’s inner laws of motion demand ceaseless accumulation, even as they drive a tendency to falling profits. I haven’t the space here to prove these things, nor do I ask anyone to accept them on my say so. I ask only that for purposes of inquiry we suppose  them true. Things that don’t make a lot of sense otherwise suddenly snap into focus.

   Like why there’s still  a cold war on Russia.

   The Reagan administration won the old cold war for western capitalism. It forced the USSR into ever greater arms-spend when every rouble on defence bled the Soviet economy whereas, such is the insanity of capitalism, every dollar the Pentagon spent boosted a $10trn for-profit arms sector, biggest driver of the US economy. By this and other means – sanctions, manipulating world oil prices, funding terror in Afghanistan – Washington, aided by the USSR’s ossified leadership and brittle top-down economy, prevailed. Such was Reagan’s vacuity, and such the figurehead nature of his office, he genuinely believed the cold war over.