Though my post late last night predates Israel’s early hours strikes today, my e-alert to that post does not. Had I checked the morning’s news first, I’d have written differently.
This much is obvious. The ethno-supremacist entity which is Israel is unviable without ongoing support from a US led West whose reasons for supplying that support I have examined in posts like this and this. That support is not confined to military and economic, but to shielding Israel from international censure and, via corporate media, from widespread public opprobrium in the West catching up with that in the global south. Today’s strikes come at a time when those same media can no longer stem the tide of revulsion. Israel is losing the propaganda war. Its need to draw the US into a hot war in the region, regardless of wider consequences, has never been more acute.
To date Iran’s responses to Israeli provocation have been calibrated. It is difficult to see how that can continue, and in this respect these strikes have succeeded. Since Tehran will have to respond, and not in a token way, the likelihood of a region wide war to which neither the West nor axis of resistance – China, DPRK and Russia – can remain bystanders has, to the delight of Netanyahu’s beleaguered government and its beleaguered state, been massively boosted.
Here to consider this and more, with a lucidity all the more admirable for its promptness, is Dr Pascal Lottaz of Neutrality Studies. I have only one carp. Pascal rightly notes that Netanyahu’s designation of the strikes as pre-emptive – “get your revenge in first” being a key concept of the Neocons’ War on Terror – is already dutifully parroted by corporate media. But in emphasising the point by referring, again rightly, to Iran’s civilian need for enriched uranium, he unwittingly denies its right – in the face of the ethno-state’s unofficial membership of the nuclear club, and all that comes with that – to develop its own thermonuclear deterrent.
I do not. And neither, it seems, do the Iranian people. In my previous post I cited, pace Alastair Crooke, a survey showing 69% of Iranians wanting precisely such a deterrent. That figure, bet your shirt on it, went up this morning …
Since posting this, my good friend Jan Oberg of Transnational Foundation (TFF) cross posted a transcript.
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