The war so far …

The fog of war is always and necessarily thick but, like banks of cloud viewed from a plane, it shifts in swirling patches which here and there part to bring moments of unexpected clarity. Not everything is anyone’s guess; some attempts to discern and explain trends have more basis in known realities than others …

… though all are subject to falsification in light of those yet to show their hand.

Here, at risk of wiping egg from face at a time of history’s choosing, I offer my take on seven tumultuous days:

It was never about nukes. These are only useful as deterrence, which Iran has in spades. Having for decades invested in missile technologies, its stockpiles and launchers are too dispersed and too deeply subterranean to be taken out by air strikes. Iran can annihilate Israel many times over by ‘conventional’ means, and with the same make the cost of US intervention – its land and air forces in the smoldering tinderboxes of Arab autocracies ruled by US puppets detested by their subjects, its warships in Gulf and Med; all highly vulnerable to hypersonic missile attack – destabilisingly exorbitant.

Then there’s Iran’s capacity to block, or selectively deny entry to, the Strait of Hormuz; a choke point eclipsing even Bab el-Mandeb as the planet’s most critical …

… and the reality that neither China nor Russia can allow Tehran to go the way of Baghdad, Tripoli and Damascus. Of which more in a moment.

Israel’s gamble, greenlit and actively enabled by Washington, has failed. The Israeli leadership, buying its own myths of invincibility and success through chutzpah, saw a do or die opportunity to achieve the outcome it has for decades sought: removing the ‘head of the snake’. Since Washington has for decades sought the same, Israel’s task was to persuade its underwriter that Rising Lion could pass the Macbeth test: ‘if ’twere done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly’.

Team Trump bought it but in the event the decapitation attempt fell short. Rockets rain on a tiny ethno-supremacist colony more used to meting out punishment than taking it. His mythic audacity now looking for all the world like reckless folly, the boy who kicked the hornets’ nest is staring into the abyss of a war of attrition for which – unlike Iran – he has no experience and no realistic chance of winning.

He of course runs to his Uncle Sam, a man with troubles of his own.

Washington is deeply divided, a truth reflected in its president’s self-contradictory and childishly egocentric outpourings on Truth Social. Is his ‘two week delay’ a feint, pending a surprise entry before the ‘deadline’? A feeble attempt to make an Islamic Republic long past the point of no return stew in its own juice? Is Trump – slave to his emotions, given to heeding the last voice he heard, and now boasting that no one knows what he’ll do; not even him till one second before he does it – simply dithering?

Search me, but I’ll hazard this much. Had Lion Rising succeeded, the John Boltons and Lindsey Grahams would be swaggering round the Beltway. Now more cautious voices claim right to a hearing. Even alone, Iran, for reasons just given, would be a daunting foe.

But Iran is not alone.

Neither China nor Russia can allow regime change in Tehran:

• • A US controlling Hormuz through a puppet regime would be catastrophic for Belt and Road as the sole vision for humanity to offer a credible alternative to neoliberalism. More specifically, it would pose a mortal threat to a New Silk Road designed to bypass naval blockade in uniting Eurasia’s east and west poles – a 500 year nightmare for Western supremacism.
  • A huge percentage (not less than 20 and possibly as high as 50) of China’s oil passes through the Strait.
  • North-south routes from Siberia to Persian Gulf are hardly less critical for a Russia brimming with self confidence under Putin’s stewardship, and with both energy and manufacturing output to sell to a world hungry for both.

It’s crunch time. Beijing and Moscow can’t duck this. Even now they are keen to use diplomacy, but let no one read that as weakness. They have the power to check US intervention, and the world is watching.

* * *