A missile capability on show to traumatised Israelis in response to June 13, together with the prospect of a Hormuz closed by Iranian mines, saw Trump – misled by Netanyahu’s hubris into thinking Iran could be regime-changed by chutzpah, without drawing the US into its deadliest quagmire since Vietnam – back off. But few think the ceasefire can hold. Lightning decapitation failed but a rubicon was crossed, direct military force against Iran no longer off-limits in Beltway conversations. Regime change in Tehran is now of burning concern for Neocons who care nothing for Trump and his MAGA base. Given realities set out in broad brush forms that ignore powerful details, yes, but ultimately debarring either China or Russia from allowing said regime change, we are closer to the edge than any of our systemically compromised media are capable of acknowledging, far less holding the guilty to account.
The road to WW3. Part 1: Iran
Iran sits on routes from Russia to Persian Gulf, China to Europe, and commands the world’s most critical maritime choke point
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Early on June 13, Israel launched Rising Lion, a surprise attack on the Islamic Republic. As state of the art electronic jamming paralysed its air defences, Israeli jets entered Iranian air space to strike nuclear plant, cities, and military facilities while seeking to limit Iran’s ability to deploy a long range missile capability demonstrated last October when True Promise 2 overwhelmed Israeli air defence shields. At the same time Mossad cells long dormant in Iran, or entering from Azerbaijan in the northwest, used short range (10 km) drones to murder Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders and nuclear scientists – all, incredibly, using Samsung or i-phones despite Mossad’s ‘Grim Beeper’ atrocities in Syria and Lebanon last year – as they and their vaporised families slept in apartment blocks as opposed to fortified military compounds.
Key points:
- Rising Lion, though predictably hailed as “audacious” and “daring” by our Israel-fawning media, was unprovoked and by that fact criminal under international law as determined at Nuremberg, 1946, which ruled the waging of aggressive war “the supreme crime”. The stated goal was to set back Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability by years, if not to destroy it for all time. This was neither achievable nor the true goal, which was regime change by decapitation or, failing that, by drawing the US into a war of attrition with a formidable adversary. A war that Israel, more used to blitzkreig and rapid victory over vastly inferior forces, could not hope to win alone.
- US involvement is beyond doubt, both in military capacity Israel does not possess – such as the mid-air refuelling of warplanes, heavily laden, on flights exceeding 2,000 km – and in the timing, with Iran caught off-guard in the midst of nuclear negotiations led by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi …
- … furthermore, Secretary of State Marc Rubio having denied foreknowledge, Trump went all caps-lock on Truth Social to boast that “WE” did it. Given the threat to two cores of his support base – MAGA, and white collar Democrat deserters repelled by Biden’s Neocons – I see two likely explanations, not mutually exclusive. One, Trump is more a prisoner of his own Neocons, 1 as exemplified by Lindsey Graham, than the fast thinning ranks of his admirers had realised. Or, to give that notion more nuance, his vanity and low attention span leave him prone to heeding the last voice to lace advocacy with levels of flattery a leader less narcissistic would find suspect. This applies equally to explanation two: that a Netanyahu soon to nominate Trump for Nobel Peace Prize convinced him that Rising Lion would decapitate Iran’s leadership, leaving an oppressed people to rise up and finish the job. No unpleasant downsides. No Vietnam II, with GIs returning in body bags to America First fury. Just an instant fix to a 46 year old problem for the US empire, 2 and the allure of a spectacular triumph for its 47th frontman. How could he resist?
- Though Western media relayed Israeli claims to have total freedom of the skies over Iran, it soon became clear this was not so. First, within eight hours Iran’s air defences were, to the surprise and dismay of Rising Lion planners, once more fully operational. (Even if the IDF was up for risking its F-35s, the Pentagon was not.) Second, though there is extensive footage of drone and missile hits, none shows Israeli air presence. To the extent it was in Iranian skies at all after sunrise on June 13, it was likely over the mountainous and hard to defend northwest, around the border city of Tabriz. Third, had it gained control of Iranian air space, the missiles rained down on Israel, to the consternation of people and leaders alike, on June 14 and for eleven days thereafter – leading the ethno-supremacist state to sue for a doubtless treacherous peace – would not have been possible. 3
- That sleeper network, having shown its hand, is being rolled up and its agents can expect no mercy. Within days the drone and missile attacks from within Iran had been degraded to the nuisance level of car bombings. Though embedded months if not years before, and effective at the start, its cells were a once-only asset. As with those phones, so recklessly permitted for IRGC and nuclear scientist use, Iran will not easily be wrongfooted again.
- Once again 4 a supposedly impartial international body stands compromised. Here’s an exchange starting just after 11:17 of a June 30 interview, by Judge Andrew Napolitano, of the ever circumspect former UK diplomat and Middle East specialist, Alastair Crooke:
AC: The secretary general [sic] of the IAEA has acted on behalf of the west And the Russians are furious with what they see as him giving the pretext on the 12th for the 13th of June surprise sneak attack by Israel. So the the West’s spies in Iran are out. The Iranian parliament has passed a law. [The IAEA] have got to go and won’t be allowed back. All their cameras and all surveillance equipment is being removed. The supreme leader foresaw this and said “we will continue with our enrichment process”.
AN: Did the IAEA effectively become a Mossad asset? 5
AC: Indeed yes. There’s pretty credible evidence the independent international nonpartisan examiner of all nuclear equipment under the Non Proliferation Treaty was gathering information from Iran and passing it on to the Israelis, who haven’t signed the treaty and don’t abide by it, and don’t even admit they have nuclear weapons. I think for a long time it’s been suspected – I can only use the word suspected – by not only Iran but other states that the ability of Israel uh to kill, I think it’s 12, senior nuclear scientists – to assassinate them in their homes with their families on the 13th [was down to the IAEA having supplied Israel with identities of senior figures on Iran’s uranium enrichment programme].
That reference to Russia applies also to China, which this week stepped up arms sales to Iran, including the J-10 combat planes which did so well against India in the April/May Kashmir face-off, brings me to this post’s core conclusion. In the twelve day war which followed Rising Lion, and Iran’s True Promise III retaliation the next day, both sides took serious blows while a crestfallen Trump, deceived by his own vanity and Netanyahu’s mix of hubris and cunning, had to make an unpalatable choice. He could double down by committing American forces; not only carrier groups in the Gulf of Persia, their vulnerability laid bare by Yemen’s Ansar Allah in that other maritime choke point to the southwest …
… but in all likelihood, and sooner rather than later, US boots on the ground in a vast country long prepared for such an eventuality. A country whose size and topography leave it far less favourable to an invasion force than any of the other Middle East states so far put to the sword. And a country no longer isolated but, for reasons discussed in Part 1, with super power allies.
(This, moreover, with the Pentagon overstretched by proxy war in Ukraine, and mindful of the one to come in East Asia – and with a US military industrial complex unable to match China or Russia, as explained in footnote 1 of Five things to know about Kiev’s ATACMS, on arms and ordnance output.)
In the event, the tangerine narcissist took the face-saving option, entirely in keeping, of blinking while claiming victory. He ordered the June 20 attacks on the centrifuges at Fordo and Isfahan while signalling, likely via the Swiss, that Iran would be allowed an equally face-saving token strike on a US base in Qatar. Experts say Fordo’s deep and dog-legged construction is such that its centrifuges could not be destroyed, even with the 30,000-pound GBU-57 “massive ordnance penetrators” allegedly dropped repeatedly on the same precise locations by B-2 bombers. And if reports of Iran having been forewarned are accurate – and, given the circumstances, even if they are not – some 400-500 kg of 60% enriched uranium will have been removed in the days preceding. 6 7
Such theatrics really would be funny if not for the fact that, while Trump had good reason to run with the story – and Tehran to refrain from gainsaying it – that any capacity for developing a nuclear deterrent has been destroyed, others have equally good reasons to dispute that claim. These go beyond US liberal establishment eagerness to ridicule the president. If that capacity was not destroyed (and those who assure us it wasn’t have compelling arguments) the door is left wide open for Israel and the US Neocons to push for a second strike on Iran.
But Iran is unlikely to be sucker-punched again. With Mossad’s cells exposed, the IAEA expelled and, more important than either, China and Russia making clear they will not tolerate – cannot tolerate – regime change in the Islamic Republic, a repeat strike will, whatever its form, bring us to the brink of global confrontation in which the kinetic wars of Ukraine and Middle East, and looming confrontations in South Asia and Africa, will fuse in dynamic, intricate and appalling ways.
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- “Biden’s Neocons” and “Trump’s Neocons” are figures of speech. By definition, these are not bound by party loyalty: witness Victoria Nuland, midwife to colour revolution in Kiev, wife to PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan, and serving under the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden administrations.
- The most important in-their-own-write document on US obsession with taming Iran after the fall of the Shah is the 2009 Brookings Institute Paper, Which Path to Persia? In blandly lucid tones far removed from Israel’s “head of the snake” depictions – but which take as a given that Iran, not Western imperialism or its Zionist beachhead, is the root of all that ails the region – it spells out every permutation of options – carrots of varied allure and hue, sticks of varied severity and stripe and, most chillingly prescient, an entire chapter headed, “Leave it to Bibi” – for bringing the Islamic Republic to heel.
- There are those, not just the usual armchair hotheads but pundits as measured as Alastair Crooke, who say Iran should not have agreed to a ceasefire. Easy for outsiders to say. Yes, Israel failed in at least one of its two objectives. There’s no regime change; au contraire, even Iran’s dissidents rallied behind the Supreme Leader, though whether Trump may yet be dragged into a Vietnam II remains to be seen. And yes, Israel took a mauling the like of which it has never known. But Iran took a mauling too. With news this week of China, for reasons not hard to fathom and discussed in Part 1, sending the J-10 warplanes that gave India and the world food for thought after those terror attacks in Kashmir, Tehran may gain more than it loses from the ceasefire despite having had Israel on the ropes and forcing anxious soul-searching in Washington.
- There is both testimonial and strongly circumstantial evidence of the OPCW, under Washington pressure, doctoring a report by its own investigators to make it appear that Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons at Douma and use that false flag as pretext for escalating the dirty war on Syria.
- Judge Napolitano’s phrasing of the question, “is the IAEA a Mossad asset?” – he did not say a CIA one – reflects his and Alastair Crooke’s belief, not shared by me for reasons I gave in Part 1, footnote 6, that Israel dictates US policy.
- In the interview already cited, Alastair Crook reminds the judge that such a quantity could be carried away on the back of a pick-up truck “or for that matter a donkey cart”.
- Closer accounts of the 12 day war are given in three useful videos, averaging 16 minutes, from Double Down Defense: the first 3 days … June 13 … Iran’s retaliation.