Connexion
Why does Iran behave the way it does? What geopolitical strategy drives her? What are the secret origins of how the Iranian leadership sees the world? Parables of mountain climbing, wrestling and highways in Persian history..
The IRGC’s Operation ‘True Promise,’ much like the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Flood before it, is poised to be recorded in history as a pivotal, perhaps even terminal, moment for the brief history of the Israeli occupation state…
By Khalil Harb at The Cradle.
The ‘Isfahan incident’: a nail in Israel’s coffin
Tel Aviv’s underwhelming military counter to Iran’s 13 April military strike has destroyed decades of Israel’s carefully cultivated deterrence posture.
Iran’s Operation True Promise strikes on 13 April have reopened the deep wounds Israel incurred during Hamas’ 7 October attack. While Operation Al-Aqsa Flood shook the occupation state’s security bubble at its core, a single night of Iranian rockets and drones left Israelis straggling to hold on to even a sliver of their famed deterrence posture.
As military spokesman for Hamas’ Qassam Brigades Abu Obeida succinctly highlighted in his 23 April speech:
Iran’s response, in its size and nature, established new rules and confused the enemy’s calculations.
This is the region’s new status quo. And Israel’s mysterious ‘Isfahan attack’ has done nothing to shake Iran’s confidence. In short, the alleged Israeli counter has reaffirmed the regional view – militarily, at least – that Tehran has checkmated Tel Aviv and rewritten the rules of engagement.
After years of provocations, and for the first time in its history, Iran has launched a direct offensive against Israel, confidently claiming that it utilized only a fraction of its military capabilities – many of these “obsolete” missiles within its fast-evolving arsenal.
Iran targeted Israel’s key Nevatim and Ramon air bases precisely, despite the spectacular display of lights from intercepted decoy explosions that lit up the skies. Many, quick to judge, misinterpreted the massive salvo as a sign of a broader strategic offensive from the Unity of Fronts – the Resistance alliance that poses a multi-front dilemma for Tel Aviv – aimed at devastating Israel in one blow.
A slap in the face
In fact, Iran conducted the operation alone, which makes the seriousness of Iran’s “slap” all the more significant.
The night of the Iranian missile attack also demonstrated the limits of Iranian patience and Tehran’s strategic shift from caution to calculated aggression, necessitating the intervention of three western nuclear powers and the “Arab fig leaf,” Jordan, to counteract the assault.
The Iranians backed their military actions with public statements and shared images of their commanders orchestrating the operations. Conversely, Israel’s response to the events in Isfahan was ambiguous and poorly communicated, with only sporadic information leaking to the US and Israeli press in a feeble attempt to project resolve.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian mocked the Israeli response in an interview with NBC News, where he dismissed the Israeli drones as trivial, likening them to “toys that our children play with.”
Israel’s ‘ridiculous’ comeback
Israel’s military counter is now widely perceived as a dud, derided even within Israel itself by figures such as Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, who describes it as “ridiculous.”
Despite Tel Aviv’s formidable military arsenal, which includes undeclared nuclear weapons, and its historical posture as a reliable western ally in the region, the events of 13 April have exposed gaping vulnerabilities in its ability to respond to credible threats, especially from Iran.
This ineffectiveness was highlighted amidst the symbolism of Isfahan – home to Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility – where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long positioned himself as a stalwart against Iran’s nuclear ambitions, appeared uncharacteristically passive.
The Israeli PM’s lack of any tangible response was a departure from his usual hyperbole, painting a picture of Israel as unprepared and hesitant – retreating rather than confronting.
Furthermore, Iran’s nuclear program has paradoxically also emerged as a potent tool in Tehran’s strategic arsenal. The explicit warning from the Islamic Republic about possibly revising its nuclear doctrine in response to an escalated Israeli threat suggests a bold new stance, despite Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa (Islamic decree) against nuclear arms.
“On the Road to Quds”: Artwork depicts a Qassam Brigades paratrooper & motorcycle fighter armed with Al-Yassin 105, a Hezbollah fighter firing an anti-tank missile, a drone of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, and Yemeni ballistic missiles all converging on Al-Quds. The sunken British ship “Rubymar” is included off the Yemeni shore.
Is Israeli deterrence dead?
The Isfahan incident did little to bolster Israel’s deterrence posture, which has been eroding since Al-Aqsa Flood and further weakened by Hezbollah’s operations in the north and Iran’s True Promise. These events have deeply impacted the Israeli psyche, challenging the foundational sense of security that underpins the Zionist vision of a “secure Jewish state” established on the lands of Palestine.
Against this backdrop, the conventional rules of engagement that have long governed regional interactions are being re-evaluated. Iran’s bold moves – despite US and Israeli warnings – signal a recalibration of power dynamics, indicating a potentially transformative period in West Asian geopolitics.
The Israeli response, both present and future, must now consider the possibility of a united front from the Axis of Resistance if it chooses to escalate further. This adds a layer of complexity to any military planning against Iran, likely prompting Israel to revert to its characteristic approach of covert operations. These may involve sabotage or targeted assassinations attributed to local agents rather than direct military strikes.
Meanwhile, the US, amid its own internal political issues and upcoming elections in November, is likely to play a dual role. It will monitor its ally’s actions closely while trying to moderate the regional tensions to prevent any significant escalation that could destabilize its broader strategic interests.
A point of no return
Today, it is Iran – not the US, not Israel, and certainly not the Isfahan attack – which has restabilized the regional balance, even temporarily, pending the crystallization of the new rules of engagement.
Tel Aviv’s counterstrike tried hard to mitigate the possibility of any further Iranian retaliation – especially as Tehran’s next move would likely come without warning, involve Iran’s superior missiles, and potentially the mobilization of Iranian allies toward Israel’s borders.
The Axis of Resistance was happy to allow their Iranian ally to take center stage on 13 April and exact revenge for Israel’s miscalculated 1 April bombing of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Damascus. Any further bold moves from Tel Aviv would ensure that the Axis would activate on every front to swarm Israel.
So, for the moment, Tel Aviv does not dare to compromise Iran’s security directly, instead turning their impotent rage toward vulnerable Rafah, where over a million Palestinian civilians are stranded without food, shelter, and water.
The Hebrew media is already spinning for all its worth, promoting Tel Aviv’s “gains” from demonstrating restraint against Iran – whether from last week’s UN Security Council veto of a Palestinian state or the new $26 billion aid package the US Congress just approved for Israel, or obtaining White House support for the occupation army’s Rafah invasion.
Dr Hussein al-Musawi, the spokesman for the Iraqi Harakat al-Nujaba, tells The Cradle that Israel has, in effect, received a blank check for bad behavior from Washington:
It is not surprising that the US supports and defends Israel, regardless of its violation of international norms, and this undoubtedly embarrasses the Iraqi government, which seeks to take a clear position on the US military presence in Iraq.
For these and many other reasons, Israeli leaders are now acutely aware that any overtly aggressive action will not go unnoticed in the current geopolitical climate. The region is embroiled in what could be described as a ‘mini-international-regional war,’ characterized by intermittent flare-ups and periods of relative calm.
True Promise, much like Al-Aqsa Flood before it, is poised to be recorded in history as a pivotal, perhaps even terminal, moment for the brief history of the Israeli occupation state, which now finds itself more isolated than ever and facing an increasingly uncertain future.
Ania K with Larry Johnson and Pepe Escobar on a review of the Big Picture (and some details)
Garland Nixon interviews Laith Marouf — Tuesday’s West Asia update.
Israel (and the combined West) can’t go left.
Iran’s exposure of western air defenses was exploited by Lebanese Hezbollah in the last 48 hours. Send swarms of drones to saturate ADs, followed by the pinpoint kamikaze drones/missiles..
Zionists have switched from direct Iran confrontation (for now) to the non-state actors, starting a spade of Hezbollah assassinations in last week and resuming culling Palestinians, in their fine traditional style.
Hezbollah has matched the raised intensity of attacks — jumping to obliterate command bases 25-30 km from the border with high-value targets (at least one general admitted killed, see Salon)
Israel has been totally defeated on all fronts, including intelligence gathering, with secret commands being taken down several times, including those skulking in arab-israeli community centers used as human shields (!). The only remaining card remains: drag in USUK somehow, but now to save their necks from Hezbollah
a tit-for-tat liquidation of Israeli/Hezbollah commanders is underway in last week, with Hezbollah having acquired unprecedented up-to-date surveillance capability of enemy movements, in addition to precision projectiles.
the zionists, supported to the hilt by western elites, will continue to perpetuate massacres and abominations against Palestinians, until physically stopped by the Resistance. That is the only recourse left.
The masks have been dropped by combined West. This war will continue, and intensify, through at least the US Elections.. (he doesn’t anticipate inclusion of Iran again as a direct front, until after elections)
There was a feeble, symbolic response by Israel on Isfahan, driven by US fear of repercussions, given severe depletion in 404. Most likely they used a few quadcopter drones hoisted by MEK terrorists from within Iran, given their ranges.
… instability in CONUS will be driven by fuel prices … and continuing student protests which will continue as Genocide in Palestine will certainly continue, in echoes of Vietnam, with similar hit pieces by the national guard (NG) to soon play their knuckle-dragger roles… the chaos and agony of West Asia comes home.. and will those NG really turn their guns on their own class?? 
Sunni-Shiite shism, carefully curated by Anglo-Zionists since 2006 Hezbollah victory over Zion, is now kaput. Billions upon billions invested in Hate between sects was exposed by the Shiite led Resistance being sole members coming to defense of Sunni Hamas and Palestinians. The Lie was exposed. Youth are now immunized against these divide et impera lies. The totering criminal compradore regimes are more exposed than ever. The Sunni street can not be tricked now to join a crusade against Iran or Hezbollah or Houthis or Iraqi Resistance — seeing who the real enemies are. The Empire is bereft and isolated in the region.
The Victories of Russia and China will happen in Palestine. As with Napolean and Hitler, obsession over defeating Russia has severely weakened USUK in West Asia, critical center of global trade and commodities and silk/maritime roads…..
Soleimani’s genius: Bury yourself 70m and you cannot be touched by a casualty-averse Empire with insufficient boots. This has been the secret strategy (in addition to cheap tech precision dronification, patience and attrition warfare) to outlast and beat the Last Satanic Empire, as exemplified by Yemen.
Yemen’s gift to mankind: its resolute chokehold over the Bab El Mandeb has sped up the fall of the thalassocratic Anglo-Zionist Empire.
Geography largely determines fate. Sea-based will lose out to land-based that is immovable. The owners and friends of the Holy Land will move the World (take that Mackinder! This is the real Heartland), not those who in senseless futility went to die in the rich black soil of Novorossiya
The Cradle of Civilization, the Triangle between Iraq, Egypt and Yemen, were the land-based empires and powers. As the USUK collapses, this region will regain its traditional heft and role in relations of nations, as China has regained hers in last decades
Yemen, Iran and the West Asian Axis of Resistance have got China’s back in applying commensurate pressure on USUK’s SLOCs if the deranged dare to shut down Malacca and SCS… China has defeated USUK without a single battle
The bluster of USUK has been called by Iran, shown to be weaker than a spider’s web, which will lead to further dominos toppling in Korea, Monroe-lands, etc…
Of occult, entangling alliances…
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens – four dowager and three regnant – and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
“Thereafter the red edges of war spread over another half of the world. Turkey’s neighbors, Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy, and Greece, were eventually drawn in. Thereafter, with her exit to the Mediterranean closed, Russia was left dependent on Archangel, icebound half the year, and on Vladivostok, 8,000 miles from the battlefront. With the Black Sea closed, her exports dropped by 98 per cent and her imports by 95 per cent. The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben.”
“SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING in the Balkans,” Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition.”
“in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August
By Yang Sheng at Global Times.
Xi meets Lavrov, reaffirms China’s emphasis on partnership with Russia
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday in Beijing. Chinese analysts said the meeting sends a strong signal that China will firmly develop its strategic partnership with Russia, despite pressure from the West. The China-Russia partnership continues to be key for the global strategic balance and the hope for promoting a multipolar world in which countries of the Global South will have greater roles to play.
Xi asked Lavrov to convey his sincere greetings to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Noting that this year marks the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries, Xi said China and Russia have embarked on a new path of harmonious coexistence and win-win cooperation between major countries and neighbors, which has benefited the two countries and their peoples and contributed wisdom and strength to international fairness and justice, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Tuesday.
Earlier in the day, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks with Lavrov in Beijing, and both sides expressed hope for strengthening practical cooperation in various fields, Xinhua reported.
Wang, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said that China is willing to work with Russia, in accordance with the consensus reached by the two heads of state, to strengthen the synergy of the two countries’ development plans and promote practical cooperation in various fields.
The top diplomats of the two countries held a joint press conference after their meeting. Wang mentioned “five always” at the press conference. For example, he said that the two countries should always follow the strategic guidance of head-of-state diplomacy, and should always adhere to the principle of no-alliance, no-confrontation and no-targeting at any third party.
China and Russia should always stay on the right course on major matters of principle. As permanent members of the UN Security Council and major emerging countries, China and Russia actively respond to the common aspirations and legitimate concerns of the people of all countries, advocate a new path of state-to-state relations featuring dialogue and partnership rather than confrontation and alliance, and actively promote the building of a community with a shared future for humanity, said Wang.
Yang Jin, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the remarks made by Xi and the “five always” raised by Wang provide a “framework and outline” for the future development of the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination.
Yet many voices from the West, mainly from the US as well as some senior NATO officials, insist on depicting the China-Russia relationship as akin to an “anti-West alliance,” which is completely wrong. By reaffirming the principles of “non-alignment, non-confrontation, and not targeting any third party,” China and Russia are refuting those voices with a clear stance, experts said.
Dress down at the dilapidated Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, March 18, 2021.
Multipolar world
China always attaches great importance to the development of China-Russia relations, and stands ready to strengthen bilateral communication with Russia and enhance multilateral strategic coordination in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Xi said when meeting with the visiting Russian top diplomat.
Xi said that the two countries will show more responsibility, unite countries in the Global South in the spirit of equality, openness, transparency and inclusiveness, promote the reform of the global governance system, and vigorously lead the building of a community with a shared future for humanity.
China and Russia are trying to promote a multipolar world where developing countries and emerging economies of the Global South will play a greater role, which is the antithesis of the unipolar world dominated by the US, analysts said.
“China and Russia will not target any third party, but if hegemonic forces threaten China and Russia, or threaten world peace, China and Russia will stand together and fight to protect their own interests and safeguard world peace together,” said Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University.
This is why China and Russia, as well as other members in the UN Security Council, are pushing an immediate cease-fire and the resumption of humanitarian aid to Gaza, even as the US vetoed these attempts time and again, before the Ramadan cease-fire resolution eventually passed on March 25, experts said.
Wang said at the joint press conference that Russia will hold the BRICS presidency this year, and China will take over the rotating presidency of SCO this year. The two sides will support each other’s chairmanship and light up the “moment of South” global governance.
Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European politics at the School of Politics and International Relations of the UK’s University of Kent, told the Global Times at a forum in Beijing on March 28 that China-Russia relations are “one of the key axes for international politics, and it’s not only very important but also necessary” to maintain the global strategic balance.
Lavrov said at the meeting with Wang that Russia supports the China-initiated Global Security Initiative, and is willing to deepen cooperation with China on multilateral platforms to promote the establishment of a more just and democratic international order.
The two sides also had in-depth exchanges on the Ukraine issue, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the situation in the Asia-Pacific region and other international and regional issues of common concern.
Ukraine crisis and counterterrorism
Wang said at the joint press conference with Lavrov that on the Ukraine issue, China hopes to see a “cease-fire and an end to the war as soon as possible.” China supports the timely convening of an international conference recognized by both Russia and Ukraine, with equal participation by all parties, and a fair discussion of all peace options, whether it is track one or track two, Wang noted.
Cui Heng, a scholar from the Shanghai-based China National Institute for SCO International Exchange and Judicial Cooperation, told the Global Times on Tuesday that “some Western countries have always blamed China for its ‘pro-Russia’ stance, but actually we are just asking for a mechanism that can be accepted by all parties and can treat everyone equally.”
“China’s stance is based on the desire to stop the bloodshed, but the US’ stance is to use the [Russia-Ukraine] conflict to weaken Russia as much as possible. The development of the crisis to some extent depends on the US presidential election later this year,” Cui noted “If Donald Trump is elected, there will be a chance to break the deadlock, but if Joe Biden gets reelected, we might also see some changes, as Washington and its allies might not be able to afford the war anymore.”
Xi stressed at the meeting with Lavrov that China supports the Russian people in following a development path that suits their national conditions, and supports Russia in combating terrorism and maintaining social security and stability.
At the joint press conference with Lavrov on Tuesday, Wang stressed that China must also pay attention to the resolution of other global and regional hot spot issues, including continuing to counter terrorism. “China once again reiterated its condemnation of the terrorist attack in Moscow and its condolences and support for Russia,” said Wang.
“The Chinese people are also victims of terrorism, and terrorism has always been a common threat facing mankind. The international community should resolutely combat all forms of terrorism with a ‘zero tolerance’ attitude, firmly support the efforts of all parties to maintain national security and stability, strengthen international anti-terrorism cooperation, coordinate development and security, and eliminate the breeding grounds for terrorism,” Wang remarked.
“I want to thank China for their condolences in connection with the terrorist attack in the Moscow Region on March 22, and for their support of Russia’s fight against terrorism,” Lavrov said during the meeting with Wang.
All those involved [in the terrorist attack] will be certainly punished, Russia’s top diplomat stated. “Our [Russia-China] cooperation on counter-terrorism will continue, including within the framework of multilateral institutions.”
China and Russia are two major powers in the SCO, and counter-terrorism cooperation between them and other SCO members is significant for regional peace and stability, especially when the threat of terrorism has reemerged in relevant regions, experts said. Apart from the discussion on the diplomatic level, the militaries, law-enforcement and intelligence agencies of the two countries will promote cooperation on combating terrorism, experts said.
Was Israel Going to Nuke Iran as Pepe Escobar’s Source Claims? | Ray McGovern
Note the day after the controversial F-35 mission, the committed Christian Zionist in charge of the US House of Representatives put to a successful vote the $61 Billion funding bill for both the genocided Ukraine and Genocidal Zion.. on the April 20 birthday of Adolf Hitler
From a strategic perspective, Iran achieved all and more of its goals. Iran neutralized US power in West Asia. Impunity reflected in disproportionate savagery is henceforth denied rabid little Zion; USUK will be forced to withdraw from the region. In the larger view, the World System will be remade to reflect the current dominant and multipolar constellation of power in world affairs.
On profound moral loss inherent in the Genocide of Palestine: “The west criminalizes holocaust denial, but denies Gaza genocide happening in plain sight.” The evil doublethink is changing the entire equation of global politics.. the Rest of Humanity flees Psychopathic Generals in their Unreality Labyrinths
Broader implications of Zionist-USUK actions since October 07, 2023, will result in death throws of International Law as a force in international politics:
No body likes US or UK, our embassies are already fortresses and were attacked in the past.. condoning attacking embassies as part of “Rules-based order” in the last weeks will have consequences. [Note the fleeing of zion from 28 or so of its foreign embassies in days prior to Iranian retaliation. This is a Sign and harbinger of Times to come, and already well underway as the French recently shuttered their embassy in Niger … ]A geopolitical sea change in the international system is well underway.
He lapses into habitual imperial exceptionalist contradictions around 35min, regarding China and the Global South. Do they really adhere to International law because they are weaker today? Were these concepts even invented by western “Enlightenment”, or repackaged from several prior civilizations?! One cannot dispense the shared training, weltanschauung and biases of centuries, but he does takes formidable steps in digesting the death of the Old Order.
An early glimpse how the air defenses of the combined Genociders were breached. Jon Elmer takes a look at the Iranian missile counterstrike against Israel.
“You can hear Palestinians in the West Bank underneath these missiles… cheering the Saturday Night LIVE.”
Two short videos.
Le matin du 19 avril, des rapports ont fait état d’une attaque israélienne contre une installation en Iran. L’agence Fars
L’article Israël aurait mené des frappes de représailles contre l’Iran est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
when is it no longer “safe” ?? A free article by Elijah Magnier. Presciently published 2-3 days PRIOR to the Iranian retaliation. Iran moved from Patience to direct Power. Henceforth, there will be consequences for Zio-USUK, as in Novorossiya!
By Elijah J Magnier on 11/04/2024.
In a calculated move of retaliation, Iran has decided to respond to Israel’s actions by earmarking several targets from its extensive list for initial and, if deemed necessary, subsequent more destructive reprisals. Reliable sources reveal that Iran’s strategic planning includes the Israeli Chief of Staff’s headquarters among the range of potential targets. This decision is a direct consequence of Israel’s targeted assassinations of Iranian generals on Monday, 1 April 2024, which targeted the Iranian diplomatic consulate in Damascus, Syria. This attack destroyed the consulate and the death of seven senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officers, including a brigadier general and general, his second in command. In the light of these events, Iran has vowed to retaliate.
Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, proposed a joint attack on Israel. However, reliable Iranian sources report that Sayyed Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, rejected the proposal. Sayyed Khamenei’s refusal is based on a desire to prevent harm to Iran’s allies and a belief that retaliation should be an exclusively Iranian response, especially after the attack on its diplomatic consulate. The purpose of Iran’s planned retaliation is not necessarily to effectively harm Israel by destroying its diplomatic mission but to send a warning. This serves as a deterrent message to Israel and the international community to refrain from similar actions in the future. Iran’s strategy is not aimed at escalating the situation into a wider conflict unless Israel retaliates. Instead, Iran is trying to navigate out of the position it has been placed in by Israel’s actions against its diplomatically and legally protected consulate in Syria.
Israel’s conduct violates essential norms protecting the inviolability of diplomatic premises and representatives, as enshrined in the Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961), the Convention on Consular Relations (1963), and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, including Diplomatic Agents (1973).
Invoking Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which sanctions the right of individual or collective self-defence in response to an armed attack against a UN member state, Iran is in a position to retaliate against Israel without the option of restraint. This stance is based on the need to protect its diplomatic missions around the world. Iran has notified the United States of its intention to retaliate by international legal frameworks while at the same time preparing for possible further escalation by Israel by preparing additional countermeasures in the event of significant Israeli retaliation.
Delaying a retaliatory strike does not put Iran at a disadvantage, as strategic depth and patience define its approach to conflict. This stance emphasises that time serves Iran’s interests by allowing it to respond to any aggression in a calculated manner and by draining Israel’s resources and nerves in anticipation of Iranian retaliation. The notion that the explicit intent of a “damaging strike” would typically come from the “Axis of Resistance” that aims to underscore a strategy of surprise and direct engagement. On the other hand, Iran’s primary goal isn’t just tit-for-tat but to prevent future provocations and maintain established limits of engagement.
Iran’s decision-making process is not hasty or impulsive but deliberate and methodical. It is based on a thorough assessment of the immediate facts, strategic evaluations, and broader implications on the regional and international stage. This approach instils confidence, as it shows that Iran’s actions are not driven by the clamour of public opinion on social media but by a complete understanding of the potential consequences.
The leadership’s emphasis on strengthening the resilience of the Iranian people, increasing national enthusiasm, and reinforcing ideological cohesion is not just a prelude to military action but a testament to Iran’s commitment to its citizens. The Iranian leadership considers this internal fortification more important than the act of retaliation itself, highlighting the depth of their commitment.
The symbolic gesture of Sayyed Khamenei appearing with a Russian Dragunov semi-automatic sniper rifle during the Eid al-Fitr sermon, an action usually reserved for Friday sermons, is a deliberate display of readiness for conflict. This act is not just a message of defensiveness but a declaration of Iran’s readiness and resolve, reinforcing its strategic position and ideological steadfastness.
In sum, Iran is a nation that approaches the prospect of conflict with caution, strategic planning and a deep-seated commitment to preserving its sovereignty and principles rather than being swayed by external pressures or immediate provocations.
‘Operation Faithful Promise’ written in a red rocket
Iran’s measures
Iran has upgraded security measures around more than 91 Iranian sites deemed ‘sensitive’ as a defensive measure. These measures included its infrastructure, nuclear facilities and military installations, underlining its comprehensive approach to hardening its critical infrastructure against potential Israeli threats. This strategy appears to mirror tactics seen elsewhere, including by Israel and highlights a trend towards multi-layered defence systems that combine physical interception measures with electronic warfare capabilities.
Indeed, Iran’s deployment of anti-aircraft and interceptor missiles at critical sites, including nuclear facilities and military bases, represents a direct approach to countering air threats such as human-crewed aircraft, drones and missiles. These systems range from short-range air defence (SHORAD) systems designed to engage targets at lower altitudes to advanced long-range missile defence systems capable of intercepting high-altitude threats and fighter jets.
Furthermore, the Iranian deployment of GPS jamming systems throughout Iran indicates a significant emphasis on countering precision-guided munitions and navigation-dependent drones and missiles. By degrading the accuracy of GPS-guided weapons, Iran aims to reduce the effectiveness of potential attacks on its territory, particularly on sites critical to its national security and infrastructure. GPS jamming can create a defensive buffer, making planning and executing air strikes more challenging.
By publicly demonstrating the enhancement of its defensive capabilities, Iran seeks to deter potential adversaries from considering direct attacks by projecting a willingness to defend its critical assets. This move reflects the ongoing technology race in military capabilities, where corresponding improvements match advances in offensive weapon systems in defensive technologies. Also, strengthening Iran’s defensive posture may have implications for regional security dynamics, potentially affecting the calculus of NATO, Israel and other regional actors regarding their security strategies and policies.
Using GPS jamming on a national scale highlights the growing importance of electronic warfare in modern defence strategies. It not only complicates adversaries’ operational environment but also represents an investment in non-kinetic means of warfare.
(L): Il Papa kisses the Ring ; (R): Christian Zionist former Vice Prez Pence at Christians United for Israel (CUFI)
Israel measures
Israel’s approach to missile defence is indeed multi-layered and highly sophisticated, designed to counter a wide range of threats from short-range rockets to medium-range ballistic missiles. This defence strategy includes several key components to provide a comprehensive shield. In addition, the involvement of NATO, particularly with naval assets equipped with missile interceptors, provides an international dimension to regional missile defence efforts.
Israel’s missile defence architecture consists of several layers, each designed to engage different types of threats at various ranges and altitudes:
Iron Dome: Primarily aimed at intercepting short-range rockets and artillery shells. It is known to have been effective in intercepting projectiles from Gaza.
David’s Sling: Targets medium- to long-range rockets and cruise missiles, filling the gap between the Iron Dome and Arrow systems.
Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 systems: Designed to intercept ballistic missiles at high altitudes, including outside the Earth’s atmosphere, providing a last line of defence against long-range threats.
Role of Patriot Missiles in Israel’s Air Defense: Israel’s inclusion of the Patriot missile system in its air defence arsenal is a significant component of its multi-layered defence strategy aimed at countering various aerial threats. Initially developed by the United States, the Patriot missile system is designed to detect, track, and engage incoming ballistic missiles at high altitudes, as well as aircraft and drones.
GPS jamming and non-GPS-guided threats: The Israeli army uses GPS jamming to mitigate the threat posed by precision-guided munitions, including missiles and drones that rely on GPS for navigation. By jamming or spoofing GPS signals, defenders can degrade the accuracy of incoming threats, potentially diverting them from their intended targets. However, as noted above, not all missiles and drones deployed by Iran and its allies rely on GPS for guidance. Many systems may use alternative navigation methods, such as inertial guidance, which uses gyroscopes and accelerometers to maintain a course without external references. Others may use Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) or optical or radar-based homing technologies that are not susceptible to GPS jamming.
Furthermore, NATO’s deployment of missile interceptors around Israel and in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean demonstrates a high level of cooperation and commitment to Israel’s defence. These ships will likely be equipped with Aegis combat systems capable of tracking and shooting down enemy missiles and aircraft, enhancing Israel’s national missile defence capabilities.
(L): Display of satellite rockets, Khorramshahr missile, and Qiyam-1 missile in the national day parade, 11.02.2024 ; (R): Iran’s missile strikes against Mossad & terrorist targets in Iraq and Syria, 15.01.2024
Countermeasures
However, missile guidance systems, especially those used by countries such as Iran and its allies (Hezbollah, Iraqi Resistance), have evolved to incorporate a variety of technologies aimed at improving accuracy and reliability while evading countermeasures. One such technology is using gyroscopes in the missile’s guidance system. Let’s look at the basics of how these systems work, their advantages and their potential limitations.
A gyroscope in a missile guidance system performs a critical function: it provides inertial navigation data. This means that it can measure and maintain the orientation and angular velocity of the missile without external references. It tells the rocket whether it has rolled, pitched or yawed during flight and by how much.
How it works? A gyroscope maintains its orientation using the principle of angular momentum. In the context of missile guidance, it can provide a stable reference that indicates the missile’s orientation relative to the Earth’s surface. By integrating data from gyroscopes with accelerometers (which measure acceleration), the missile’s inertial navigation system (INS) can calculate its position, orientation and velocity without needing external references such as GPS.
One of the main advantages of using a gyroscopic guidance system is its independence from external signals such as GPS. This makes the missile less susceptible to jamming and spoofing techniques, which are common electronic countermeasures used to disrupt the guidance of GPS-guided weapons. Relying on an internal guidance system allows the missile to be guided to its target even in environments where GPS signals are compromised.
Gyroscopes make missiles more resistant to jamming and spoofing. They do not rely on external updates and can operate in GPS-denied environments. When combined with accelerometers in an INS, gyroscopes can provide precise navigation capabilities.
However, Inertial navigation systems, including gyroscopes, can accumulate errors over time. The longer the missile is in flight, the greater the potential error in its calculated position. Thus, implementing a robust gyroscopic guidance system can be complex and expensive compared to simpler GPS-based systems. Still, it is necessary when facing an advanced enemy with a GPS jamming system. Gyroscopic missile guidance systems offer significant advantages regarding autonomy and resistance to electronic countermeasures, making them particularly useful for countries such as Iran that can anticipate GPS jamming techniques.
Legal approach
The attack on the consulate of a nation, which caused both material damage and fatalities, is a severe violation of international norms, in particular the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which stipulates the inviolability of diplomatic premises and the protection of diplomatic personnel. In response, Iran lodged a formal protest with the United Nations, highlighting the international condemnation by entities such as the United Arab Emirates, the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (except Bahrain), Russia and China, all of which emphasised the sanctity of diplomatic premises and condemned the violation of these principles.
The collective condemnation by the 121 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement demonstrates global solidarity with Iran and highlights the significant geopolitical implications of disregarding diplomatic norms. Yet the Western response has been muted, with minimal public condemnation, reflecting a polarised global perspective on the incident.
Iran’s efforts to rally international support to isolate Israel diplomatically, coupled with Israeli Minister Benny Gantz’s call for a coalition against Iran, reflect the complex global dynamics at play. Iran is criticising the United States, Britain and France for not supporting a UN Security Council condemnation of the Israeli attack on its consulate in Damascus, which Iran blames on US-supplied weapons. This position is being portrayed as a tacit endorsement of the aggression, risking further instability in West Asia. Iran asserts its right to seek legal redress and retaliation under international law for this affront.
In solidarity, Ansar Allah in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon expressed their unwavering support for Iran and condemned the attack on the consulate. The support of Iran’s powerful allies was manifested during Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian’s talks in Muscat, Oman, which focused on sending the right message and soft warning to the US administration to remain neutral.
Since 7 October, the United States has already sent four indirect messages to Iran, urging Tehran to remain in control and not to be provoked into joining Netanyahu’s conflict. The messages stressed that the US administration would do everything in its power to contain the conflict. However, Iran perceives that the US has not lived up to its commitments and points to Israel’s actions, which have further antagonised Iran, including the destruction of its consulate in Damascus, as evidence of this failure.
Iran is aware that the US will not abandon Israel, just as Israel and the US know that Iran’s main allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen will stand by it. This mutual recognition is what led Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to believe that he could carry out a strike on the Iranian consulate with impunity and expect no retaliation from Iran.
The US is limited to intercepting missiles and drones aimed at Israel and using its diplomatic clout to defuse tensions and prevent Israel from escalating the situation, given the potential for full-scale conflict. The prospect of the US becoming embroiled in a Middle East conflict, especially one it could start but find difficult to end, is particularly unappealing as President Joe Biden faces a presidential election in two months. The US administration, already unhappy with Israel’s conduct in the Gaza conflict, is putting pressure on Netanyahu to cease hostilities and facilitate humanitarian aid. As a result, there is little appetite for escalation, which could only benefit Netanyahu by prolonging his tenure and aiding his domestic political survival while significantly undermining Biden’s re-election ambitions. This precarious situation encourages all parties to remain vigilant and avoid Netanyahu’s potentially dangerous strategies, especially as he faces declining domestic and regional support due to various failures.
One might ask, was this “out-of-control” situation planned and prepared by the Zionist-dominated west?
Peter Koenig
17 April 2024
Israel’s Minister of War, Joav Galant, told his troops the Iranian attack was not successful; that of about hundred drones and rockets, Israel downed them all but four, thanks to our good preparation. This is a lie on many levels.
Both Netanyahu and Galant expressed their determination to retaliate, after a well-thought-out plan. Netanyahu qualified, it needs to be a “clever response”.
Likewise, army chief Halevi is crystal clear in his attempt of launching a response for Iran’s retaliation attack on Israel, but he does not want to cause a war.
The Israeli Cabinet is also “mulling” over what they call a “political offensive” – whatever that may mean.
Interesting though, is that both sides, Israel and Iran, do not seem to want war, or better a HOT WAR, where sable rattling could surreptitiously convert into a mushroom cloud. They know, when NATO gets involved, Russia and China may get involved – and then – the sky is open and Armageddon is on the table – or, rather, all over Mother Earth.
If indeed, Israel goes ahead with such a counter-attack, however benign or non-benign it may be, it is like giving Biden the finger. Because, according to the latest news, Biden backtracked from his earlier limitless commitment to support Israel and to always fight for Israel’s security. Biden’s “back-stoppers” must have told him otherwise: “America is not going to war with Iran for Israel.” – Israel – you are on your own, so to speak.
That was a smart decision. Will they stick to it? The US is divided. There are the Zionists, who so far have called the shots in Washington and in the Pentagon. But the balance is gradually shifting in favor of the more level-headed thinkers, those who do not want to risk WWIII which could become nuclear – and global.
Similar messages of “caution” seem to emanate from British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a strong supporter of Zionism. He called Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting prudence in any further action he may take. An escalation – that could spin out of control, is in nobody’s interest.
Nevertheless, PM Sunak assured Netanyahu of UK’s support to “guarantee Israel’s security”.
If this sounds like a game of words, probably it is a game of words. Maybe hiding a surprise – and perhaps during the days of “thinking about prudence”, something much bigger may be under preparation. Knowing the Israel-Zionist’s own supremacy concept, they will not let the Iranian attack, even if well justified, go unanswered.
Just to refresh memories, because they are systematically wiped out by the bought mainstream media: Iran launched a measured, but well calculated retaliation attack on Israeli military targets in the early morning hours of 14 April. The drone and ICBM missile assault of some 300 projectiles was a response for Israel’s unprovoked attack of 1 April on Iran’s Consulate in Damascus, leaving 7 people dead, including 2 high ranking Iranian military officers.
By the multitude of rockets Iran fired on Israel in sequence, first the drones than the missiles, Iran suppressed Israel’s and their allies air defense system that concentrated on intercepting drones and was unable to intercept the subsequently launched hypersonic missiles.
Tehran having entered a new stage of political and military stature beyond the Middle Eastern boundaries, had to react to Israel’s Damascus provocation of 1 April, in terms of a clear message, “Don’t mess with Iran – or else”.
Iran, now militarily speaking, one of the three key members of the newly ten BRICS nations, must assure the west that sanctions and threats and random unprovoked attacks will not cut it anymore.
The 14 April attack by Iran, was not just a retaliatory strike, but established a new order, depriving Israel of her absolute impunity, which until recently had been guaranteed by the US.
Important to note is, that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander-in-Chief, Hossein Salami, said that from now on, if Israel attacks the interests of Iran and Iranian citizens, Tehran will strike it again (RT – 16 April 2024).
This means, that if Israel now hits back, Iran will not just swallow whatever Israel does to harm Iran. And there is the danger – a real risk of escalation out of control.
One might ask, was this “out-of-control” situation planned and prepared by the Zionist-dominated west?
Let us not forget, whatever Zionist-Israel does in pursuit of her ultimate goal, the establishment of Greater Israel, is to control the Middle East’s inexhaustible energy resources.
Achieving Greater Israel depends very much on Israel conquering Iran, not only because Iran is literally in “command” of the oil and gas rich Middle East, but also, a Greater Israel needs control over the Strait of Hormuz, now controlled by Iran.
Currently about 30% or more of the world’s total oil and gas consumption is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. See this
With a Greater Israel, the bulk of Middle Eastern hydrocarbons would be under Zionist-Israeli control — and, with the Strait of Hormuz under Israeli control, shipments of the energy resources, how much and to whom, would be under Zionist command.
Not to forget, Zionist-Israel is already in the process of appropriating the enormous gas reserves off-shore of Gaza – conservatively estimated already some 20 years ago at about a trillion cubic-feet, worth between 2 and 3 billion dollars, depending on the market price. And as we know, he, who controls the resource, decides its “market” price.
An updated assessment of the Gaza off-shore reserves may be exponentially higher. Of course, kept secret, given the current war and expropriation scenario by Zionist-Israel.
The huge port that is rumored to be planned just outside Gaza – maybe construction has already begun, has little to do with food delivery to Gaza (certainly not), or “exporting” the remaining Gazans to unknown destinations.
Much more likely will this be the port for handling the Gaza off-shore hydrocarbons through a yet to be built (but planned since 1971) Ben-Gurion Canal, all the way to the Red Sea. The new canal, would probably bankrupt the Suez Canal, possession of Egypt, an Arab state.
The Suez Canal is already suffering due to lack of transshipments of at least 20 European countries, who are afraid the Yemeni-Houthi attacks on US and Israeli controlled merchandise vessels could also target their ships.
’Twas the night afore Armageddon
This Big Picture vision speaks for Israel not letting go. From their point of view, they MUST conquer Iran. The Zionists may be so blinded by their delusion of “grandeur”, that they may not see the Mushroom Cloud that may wipe them out along with much of the rest of the world.
The reality is that Iran is no longer alone. Iran wants to make sure that their power and presence is accounted for by Israel, the US, its European vassals, and the west at large – because they are now a member of the new BRICS which is not just an economic association.
Their membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – a strategic and economic Chinese agency – protects them from outside attacks, the same way NATO members are protected. Attack one NATO member you attack them all.
Attack One BRICS state, you attack them all.
Retaliation in the case of an attack on Iran can come from all or selected members of the ten BRICS countries, especially from Russia and China; which would pretty much mean WWIII.
This may be the reason for Iran’s relatively benign retaliation against Israel. It was a warning.
Iran does not want war. They may follow the Tao philosophy, as expressed by Sun Tzu in ancient times, “To fight 100 battles and win 100 battles is not the height of skill. The best way to win is not to fight at all.” This is Iran’s strategy. Its strike against Israel was not so much a military response as a grandmaster’s move in a big chess game. And the game is not over yet (RT, 16 April 2024).
May President Putin’s words resonate and be taken seriously, “I hope WWIII can be avoided” – meaning that an Israeli assault on Iran would not remain unanswered by Russia – which would bring in NATO – and WWIII could explode overnight.
————
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
‘Anything that was good and true about Western civilization is preserved and thriving in Russia.’ And after a millennium of playing catch-up, she now has the dominant military heft and osmotic alliance with Iran and China to help craft new civilizational calculations.
By Pepe Escobar at Sputnik International.
A Holy of the Holies was shattered in the Holy Land as Iran staged a quite measured, heavily choreographed response to the Israeli terror attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus, a de facto evisceration of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity.
This game-changer will directly interfere on how the Anglo-American system manages its simultaneous conflagration with Russia, China and Iran – three top BRICS members.
The key problem is escalations are already built in – and will be hard to remove. The Total Cancel War against Russia; the genocide in Gaza – with its explicit policy masterfully decoded by Prof. Michael Hudson; and the decoupling/shaping the terrain against China won’t simply vanish – as all communication bridges with the Global Majority keep being torched.
Yet the Iranian message indeed establishes a “New Equation” – as Tehran christened it, and prefigures many other surprises to come from West Asia.
Iran wanted to – and did send – a clear message. New equation: if the biblical psychopathic entity keeps attacking Iranian interests, from henceforth it will be counter-attacked inside Israel. All that in a matter of “seconds” – as the Security Council in Tehran has already cleared all the procedures.
Escalation though seems inevitable. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak: “Netanyahu is influenced by his [fundamentalist] political partners to go into an escalation so he can hold onto power and accelerate the coming of the Messiah.”
Compare it to Iranian President Raisi: “The smallest act against Tehran’s interests will be met with a massive, extensive, and painful response against all its operations.”
(L) July 2019: IRGC Aerospace Force General Amirali Hajizadeh in a meeting with his Russian counterpart General “Armageddon” Surovikin before the Russia-Ukraine war: ‘Help us build our aerospace command force, and I will help you build Russia’s drone command force’ [01] [02] ; (R) April 10, 2024: After Imam Khamenei said Israel must be punished, a subtle smile appeared on the face of General Hajizadeh. [03] ; April 17, 2024: [04]
For Tehran, regulating the intensity of the clash in West Asia between Israel and the Axis of Resistance while simultaneously establishing strategic deterrence to replace “strategic patience” was a matter of launching a triple wave: a drone swarm opening the path for cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
The performance of the much-vaunted Iron Dome, Arrow-3 and David’s Sling – aided by F-35 fighter jets and the US and the UK naval force – was not exactly stellar. There’s no video of the “outer-layer” Arrow-3 system shooting down anything in space.
At least 9 ballistic missiles penetrated the dense Israeli defense network and hit the Nevatim and Ramon bases. Israel is absolutely mum on the fate of its Golan Heights intel installation – hit by cruise missiles.
Amidst classic fog of war, it’s irrelevant whether Tehran launched hundreds or dozens of drones and missiles. Regardless of NATOstan media hype, what’s proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the supposedly “invincible” Israeli defense maze – ranging from US-made AD/ABM systems to Israeli knockoffs – is helpless in real war against a technologically advanced adversary.
What was accomplished by a single operation did raise quite a few professional eyebrows. Iran forced Israel to furiously deplete its stock of interceptors and spend at least $1.35 billion – while having its escalatory dominance and deterrence strategy completely shattered.
The psychological blow was even fiercer.
What if Iran had unleashed a series of strikes without a generous previous warning lasting several days? What if US, UK, France and – traitorous – Jordan were not ready for coordinated defense? (The – startling – fact they were all directly dispensing firepower on Tel Aviv’s behalf was not analyzed at all). What if Iran had hit serious industrial and infrastructural targets?
Establishing an Equation Without Disturbing a Pivot
Predictably, there has been less than zero debate across NATOstan about the sudden collapse of the Fortress Israel Myth – which underpins the larger myth of Zionism offering Impregnable Security for those living in Israel. No more. This narrative spin is D.O.A.
Iran, for its part, could not care less about what NATOstan spins. The shift towards the New Equation in fact was generous enough to offer Tel Aviv a de-escalation escape route – which will not be taken, at Israel’s peril.
For Tel Aviv, everything that happened so far spells out Strategic Defeat across the spectrum: in Gaza, in Lebanon, with the economy tanking, totally losing legitimacy around the world, and now with the added painful loss of deterrence.
All eyes are now on what may happen next: will it finally become clear whether the Hegemon prevails or whether Israel runs the “wag the dog” show?
It’s essential to consider the Russia-China strategic partnership view. The consensus among Chinese scholars is that the Hegemon prefers not to commit too many resources to West Asia, as this would affect the – already collapsing – Project Ukraine and the strategic planning to counter China in the Asia-Pacific.
When it comes to Russia, President Raisi personally called President Putin and they discussed all relevant details over the phone. Cool, calm and collected.
Additionally, later this week Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani – who said Iran will respond “within seconds” to any new Israeli attack – visits Moscow for the Conference on Nonproliferation and will also meet with the top echelons of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
It’s quite remarkable that Iran managed to establish the New Equation without disturbing its own pivot to Eurasia – after the collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal – while protecting the complex framework engaged in the defense of Palestine.
The Hegemon’s options are dire. They run from being eventually expelled from West Asia and the Persian Gulf to an unwinnable existential clash against three civilization-states – Russia, China, Iran.
What’s left as the number one feasible scenario is a carefully calculated retreat to an easily controlled backyard: Latin America, especially South America, manipulating new, convenient, sovereign-deprived asset Argentina.
And of course maintaining control over a de-industrialized and sovereignty-deprived Europe.
That does not change the fact that US power projection on the wane, globally, is the way the wind is blowing. The Straussian neocon psycho-dementia is unsustainable. The question is whether they can be progressively purged from the US power structure before they attempt to plunge the Global Majority into their irrational depths of doom.
And Don’t Forget the New BRICS Equation
By contrast, on the Global Majority front, over 40 nations want to join BRICS – and counting, according to the head of the Russian Council Committee on International Affairs, Grigory Karasin.
After a meeting of the chairmen of the international affairs committees of BRICS Parliaments last week in Moscow, Karasin noted how many BRICS member-nations understand that they should not rush to create a rigid charter, “seeing how counterproductive and even provocative the European Union is acting.” The name of the game is flexibility.
Alastair Crooke has touched on a key theme that runs through my new book, Eurasia v. NATOstan: “Anything that was good and true about Western civilization is preserved and thriving in Russia. This is the unspoken insight that so infuriates the western elites. And it is also why, in part, BRICS states so evidently look to Russia for leadership.”
The New Equation established by Iran, a sovereign BRICS member, will do wonders to solidify this – multilateral, multicultural – state of cooperation as the Empire and its “aircraft carrier” in West Asia, except in the covert ops department, are increasingly reduced to the role of a paper tiger.
Israel is now vowing to respond to Iran’s retaliatory attack, and while the Biden regime claims to have told Netanyahoo that the U.S. won’t aid in any offensive action, they are still promising to provide air defense… just like they did when Tehran retaliated for Israel’s deadly attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria.
Journalist and Editor-in-Chief of The Cradle, Sharmine Narwani, reported that an Iranian military security official revealed exclusively to The Cradle that the U.S. reached out and asked Iran to allow Israel “a symbolic strike to save face,” which was “outright rejected” and met with warnings that any attack from Israel targeting Iran will be met with immediate action.
~~~~~
Choreographed retaliations impacting Iran proper, or its interests anywhere else, as during the mild and lawful Round One Iranian barrage, were rejected by Iran for Round Two.
Iran warned ANY support of Zion’s aggression by the deranged West (such as needed aerial refueling and air defense) will bring retaliation on their bases throughout the region, and closing Hormuz, perhaps selectively a la Houthis?!
Zion is committed to regaining permanently lost deterrence. F-UKUS is committed to Zion. The circle is about to be squared
Les États-Unis ont l’intention d’introduire prochainement de nouvelles sanctions contre l’Iran dans le contexte de son attaque contre Israël, a
L’article Washington prépare des sanctions contre l’Iran après son attaque contre Israël est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Garland Nixon interviews Laith Marouf — West Asia update — on a seismic week which changed our world. Le roi est mort, vive le roi!
Iran’s retaliation is historic for Palestine, the region, our world. Zio-USUK suffered a strategic defeat, on top of moral defeat of Gaza
the regional war has moved from non-state actors to state-on-state [with the implications of aligned alliances a la 1914]
Iran forced Anglo-Zionist-NATO alliance to reveal their air defenses (AD), including radars, locations, capabilities, occult allies (GCC), tactics, etc. It made clear Franco-Brits are vassals; the combined West is a totalitarian Empire under a single diktat, for those oblivious the last six months of Genocide…
Iran has started bleeding both their budgets/treasure ($3+ BILLION cost in a few hours!) and air defense interceptors/warjets wear & tear/munitions through massive unprecedented swarm of cheap drones
Iran demonstrated, in addition to precision of its older drones/missiles (! Thx Comrades BeiDou & GLONASS), significant deterrence
Israel demonstrated its survival is dependent on combined West – demoted to abject vassal like Bahrain from its former optical strut
even this western defense is proven worthless, as in 404. US funded and part-built air defenses were thoroughly exposed.
as they proved they could take down western AD using older drones and Scuds, in real war they would rapidly degrade airbases and hardware required for the sole remaining advantage of Anglo-Zionists – air power; Hamas has exposed ground war inadequacy and Houthis the lost naval force projection.
Everything in Israel today exists by Grace of Iran (!!!). It can be leveled
Hezbollah today salted the wounded by blasting another “Iron” Dome AD complex in north occupied Palestine
during the Iranian aerial slap, Netanyahoo hid in the Jerusalem bunker of the messianic Jewish billionaire funding the Red Heifer sacrifice, destruction of Al Aqsa Masjid and building of the Third Temple on its ruins. The crazed want Armageddon. The Danger remains
A lesson learned by multipolar Global Majority during this measured & mild Iranian deterrence action: the US will need to bring all its forces for zionazi proxy to have a chance! Thus dominoes will quickly fall everywhere else, whether 404, Korea, etc.. [unfortunately, this INCREASES risk of total West Asian war.. all now have a vested interest in finishing off the Last Satanic Empire in such a distant and predictable weak theater, also given its tenuous logistics and abject emotional messianic devotion. iow, an emotional albatross]
As Houthis have same weaponry as Iran, they are shown to have pulled their punches in Red Sea.. more proof of imperial lunacy to keep fighting a lost war, merely for optics
if USUK persist, they will end up third world countries at the end of this mad devotion to Zion [AHH: actually, a best case scenario at this point]
Jordanian compradore regime will soon cease to exist; its fate is linked to zionism now
the Arab region now plans for the day after collapse of Zion, and eviction of USUK (provided we’re still alive); this is not merely Greater Syria but other natural agglomerations which used to exist prior to arrival of West or even Turks
Garland: the strike on Israel was an Exclamation Point of the [arrival] of the Multipolar World
Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel were not conducted alone. Strategic partners Russia and China have Tehran’s back, and their role in West Asia’s conflict will only grow if the US doesn’t keep Israel in check.
By Pepe Escobar at The Cradle.
A little over 48 hours before Iran’s aerial message to Israel across the skies of West Asia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed, on the record, what so far had been, at best, hush-hush diplomatic talk:
The Russian side keeps in contact with Iranian partners on the situation in the Middle East after the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria.
Ryabkov added, “We stay in constant touch [with Iran]. New in-depth discussions on the whole range of issues related to the Middle East are also expected in the near future in BRICS.”
He then sketched The Big Picture:
Connivance with Israeli actions in the Middle East, which are at the core of Washington’s policy, is in many ways becoming the root cause of new tragedies.
Here, concisely, we had Russia’s top diplomatic coordinator with BRICS – in the year of the multipolar organization’s Russian presidency – indirectly messaging that Russia has Iran’s back. Iran, it should be noted, just became a full-fledged BRICS+ member in January.
Iran’s aerial message this weekend confirmed this in practice: their missile guidance systems used the Chinese Beidou satellite navigation system as well as the Russian GLONASS system.
This is Russia–China intel leading from behind and a graphic example of BRICS+ on the move.
Ryabkov’s “we stay in constant touch” plus the satellite navigation intel confirms the deeply interlocked cooperation between the Russia–China strategic partnership and their mutual strategic partner Iran. Based on vast experience in Ukraine, Moscow knew that the biblical psychopathic genocidal entity would keep escalating if Iran only continued to exercise “strategic patience.”
The morphing of “strategic patience” into a new strategic balance had to take some time – including high-level exchanges with the Russian side. After all, the risk remained that the Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate/ambassador’s residence in Damascus could well prove to be the 2024 remix of the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Marco Polo with elephants and camels arriving at Hormuz on the Gulf of Persia from India – Boucicaut Master
And don’t forget the Strait of Hormuz
Tehran did manage to upend the massive Western psychological operations aimed at pushing it into a strategic misstep.
Iran started with a misdirecting masterstroke. As US–Israeli fear porn went off the charts, fueled by dodgy western “intel,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) made a quick sideways move, seizing an Israeli-owned container ship near the Strait of Hormuz.
That was an eminently elegant manoeuvre – reminding the collective west of Tehran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, a fact immeasurably more dangerous to the whole western economic house of cards than any limited strike on their “aircraft carrier” in West Asia. That did happen anyway.
And once again, with a degree of elegance. Unlike that ‘moral’ army specialized in killing women, children, and the elderly and bombing hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, and humanitarian convoys, the Iranian attack targeted key Israeli military sites such as the Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev and an intel center in the occupied Golan Heights – the three centers used by Tel Aviv in its strike on Iran’s Damascus consulate.
This was a highly choreographed show. Multiple early warning signs gifted Tel Aviv with plenty of time to profit from US intel and evacuate fighter jets and personnel, which was duly followed by a plethora of US military radars coordinating the defense strategy.
It was American firepower that smashed the bulk of what may have been a swarm of 185 Shahed-136 drones – using everything from ship-mounted air defense to fighter jets. The rest was shot down over Jordan by The Little King’s military – the Arab street will never forget his treachery – and then by dozens of Israeli jets.
Israel’s defenses were de facto saturated by the suicide drone-ballistic missile combo. On the ballistic missile front, several pierced the dense maze of Israel’s air defenses, with Israel officially claiming nine successful hits – interestingly enough, all of them hitting super relevant military targets.
The whole show had the budget of a mega blockbuster. For Israel – without even counting the price of US, UK, and Israeli jets – just the multi-layered interception system set it back at least $1.35 billion, according to an Israeli official. Iranian military sources tally the cost of their drone and missile salvos at only $35 million – 2.5 percent of Tel Aviv’s expenditure – made with full indigenous technology.
A mural in Palestine Square, Tehran, reads in Hebrew: “The next slap will be harsher”
A new West Asian chessboard
It took only a few hours for Iran to finally metastasize strategic patience into serious deterrence, sending an extremely powerful and multi-layered message to its adversaries and masterfully changing the game across the whole West Asian chessboard.
Were the biblical psychopaths to engage in a real Hot War against Iran, there’s no chance in hell Tel Aviv can intercept hundreds of Iranian missiles – the state-of-the-art ones excluded from the current show – without an early warning mechanism spread over several days. Without the Pentagon’s umbrella of weaponry and funds, Israeli defense is unsustainable.
It will be fascinating to see what lessons Moscow will glean from this profusion of lights in the West Asian sky, its sly eyes taking in the frantic Israeli, political, and military scene as the heat continues to rise on the slowly boiling – and now screaming – frog.
As for the US, a West Asian war – one it hasn’t scripted itself – does not suit its immediate interests, as an old-school Deep State stalwart confirmed by email:
That could permanently end the area as an oil-producing region and astronomically raise the oil price to levels that will crash the world financial structure. It is conceivable that the United States banking system could similarly collapse if the oil price rises to $900 a barrel should Middle East oil be cut off or destroyed.
It’s no wonder that the Biden combo, days before the Iranian response, was frantically begging Beijing, Riyadh, and Ankara, among others, to hold Tehran back. The Iranians might have even agreed – had the UN Security Council imposed a permanent ceasefire in Gaza to calm the regional storm. Washington was mute.
The question now is whether it will remain mute. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, went straight to the point:
We have conveyed a message to America through the Swiss Embassy that American bases will become a military target if they are used in future aggressive actions of the Zionist regime. We will consider this as aggression and will act accordingly.
The US dilemma is confirmed by former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof:
We have got some 35 bases that surround Iran, and they thereby become vulnerable. They were meant to be a deterrence. Clearly, deterrence is no longer on the table here. Now they become the American’ Achilles heel’ because of their vulnerabilities to attack.
All bets are off on how the US–Israel combo will adapt to the new Iranian-crafted deterrence reality. What remains, for the historic moment, is the pregnant-with-meaning aerial show of Muslim Iran singlehandedly unleashing hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, a feat feted all across the lands of Islam. And especially by the battered Arab street, subjugated by decrepit monarchies that keep doing business with Israel over the dead bodies of the Palestinians of Gaza.
Iran’s Retaliation: Implications of the Attack on Israel | Syriana Analysis W/ Mohammad Marandi
Join us as we explore the recent unprecedented Iranian attack on Israel, which consisted of a wave of drones and missiles launched in retaliation for an attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria. Dr. Mohammad Marandi, a Professor at the University of Tehran, provides insights on the implications of this attack.
“The era of strategic patience is over.” As with Bears forced to awaken over Genocide in Novorossiya, it is active deterrence from now on.
Dans la nuit du 14 avril, l’Iran a attaqué Israël avec plus de 300 drones et missiles, c’était la première
L’article Après les frappes de l’Iran sur Israël, quelle sera la réponse de l’Etat hébreu ? est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Last night, Iran carried out retaliatory strikes on Israel in response to the Israeli attack on the consulate in Damascus. We are joined by veteran war correspondents Hala Jaber and Elijah J. Magnier to discuss the significance of the strike, what it means for the conflict in Gaza, and its geopolitical implications.
Hala Jaber, a Lebanese-British journalist, was honored with the Amnesty International Journalist of the Year Award in 2003. She garnered the title of Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the British Press Awards in both 2005 and 2006 for her exceptional coverage of the Iraq War.
Elijah J. Magnier, a veteran war correspondent with over 37 years of experience covering West Asia. He has resided in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, and Syria for extended periods, specializing in political assessments, strategic planning, terrorist organizations, and non-state actors.
Peter Koenig
14 April 2024
The warning was on the wall. Ever since Israel attacked “out of the blue” on 1 April 2024 the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing 7, including two generals, an Iranian retaliation was to be expected.
The New York Times (NYT) reports “Iran mounted an immense aerial attack on Israel on Saturday night, launching more than 200 drones [other sources talk about 300 drones] and missiles in retaliation for a deadly Israeli airstrike in Syria two weeks ago, and marking a significant escalation in hostilities between the two regional foes.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) say there were over 300 aerial threats, including some 200 drones, 100 ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles. See this.
Israel and her western friends claim that many of the drones were intercepted by IDF and the help from allied military support. The latter apparently include the UK, France, and Jordan – and most likely also US-NATO forces that have long been stationed in the region.
Nevertheless, according to several RT reports, a large-scale missile and drone attack against Israel has been a success, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has said in a statement published by IRNA news agency. The Islamic Republic’s military managed to “hit and destroy” some “important military targets,” it added, without providing any further details.
Short video clips published by Iranian media on social networks, viewing Islamic Republic’s missiles hitting their targets in Israel. Several missiles appeared to have been striking targets in a settlement, RT reports, however without being able to confirm the veracity of the clips.
The Guardian informs, that it was the Islamic Republic’s first-ever direct attack on the Jewish State, a development that brings the two countries to the brink of all-out conflict after more than a decade of shadow war and soaring stress six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, following the Hamas attack last October.
It was reported on Israeli television that Iran had launched more than 100 drones as well as cruise missiles towards Israel, and Iran later said it had fired a “first wave” of ballistic missiles. See this.
This latest war theatre is in full development. At this point it is unclear what exactly happened and to what level the conflict may escalate. A regional war – that could expand to a WW-scenario is a real danger. It depends largely to what extent foreign – non regional – players, will get involved. Arab states have already warned against any “foreign”, meaning non-regional, intervention. Specifically, that means the US / NATO. The latter would include of course almost all of the spineless European nations.
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Iran has many reasons for retaliation. Other than the Syrian Consulate event, the killing of General Qasem Soleimani with a targeted US drone attack on 3 January 2020 in Baghdad. This assassination was still carried out under President Trump, but the question remains, did he act on behalf of Israel – as many analysts suspect?
After a public mourning of Major General Soleimani, Iran launched missiles against US military bases in Iraq wounding at least 110 troops. Deaths were not officially reported.
Over the past several decades Israeli provocations on Iran abounded no end. Israel’s intent is to wipe out Iran as part of its “master plan” towards “Greater Israel”, and control of the Gulf of Hormuz with access to the Arabian Sea – and ultimately Asia. And in the north, where Israel is currently attempting to brutally genociding Palestinians – evicting them from their homeland, an atrocious slaughter supported by most western un-human leaders (sic).
This is not only Apartheid “social cleansing” – it is also taking possession – stealing – of tens or hundreds of billions worth of Gazan off-shore gas reserves.
To be sure, Israel is an illegal state, on Palestinian land stolen through the 1917 UK-sponsored Zionist-initiated Balfour Declaration, with the support in 1948 of the then 52-member young US-dominated United Nations. See this.
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For the past 100 years or so, Washington was – and still is – tacitly as well as openly manipulated by a strong worldwide Zionist movement. Zionists control the world’s – at least the western world’s – financial system, Big Finance, Wall Street, and not least the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), in Basle Switzerland, also called the Central Bank of all central banks, controlling about 90% of the worldwide monetary flow. All in Zionists command.
There is a strong symbiotic relationship, an interdependence between the Zionists, today’s Israel, and the US. The Zionists, the self-declared Chosen People, wield the scepter of Big Finance, aspiring for world domination through Greater Israel (see provisional map, below), with the might of military power by the United States.
Iran is the major stumbling block for Israel’s Zionists to achieve their goal. Once Iran is conquered, they dream, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States will fall in place.
Zionist-Israel has been allowed by the discreet influence of the US and UK secret services to become a “clandestine” nuclear power. They know they can count not only on the US tax-payers financial support, but more importantly, also with the Pentagon’s military might. By the way, US tax-payers have been footing a considerable portion of Israel’s budget for its 75-year existence.
Sounds controversial, doesn’t it – with the Zionists in control of worldwide Big Finance.
Israel’s provocations on Iran are openly or tacitly supported or even encouraged by Washington. The Washington war-mongers would love to go to war with Iran, a military and economic heavy weight, way beyond the Middle East.
And now, as a new BRICS member (BRICS-plus 5 [the sixth nation, Argentina, dropped out]), Iran’s strength has expanded almost exponentially, with such heavy-weight allies like China and Russia.
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Israel’s assault on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, may have been the spark that lit the fire. The extent of the “fire” cannot be assessed yet, as it will depend on clear-thinking and levelheadedness – or not – of western decision makers – specifically NATO countries.
President Biden has been clear, so western media: “Our support for Israel’s security is ironclad. The United States will stand with the people of Israel and support their defense against these threats from Iran.”
How serious is this American promise? – There is more at stake than words, especially considering Israel’s ever deeper falling within the world’s sympathy for her non-stop onslaught against Gaza and Palestine in general – having killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, about 70% of whom are women and children.
Strategically speaking, can the US afford this “unwavering” support for an outright genocide nation? And secondly, Washington knows that Iran has full support from Russia and China, Iran’s BRICS allies. BRICS association has similar meaning to that of NATO’s: Attack one country means you attack them all – and retaliation may be massive.
Are there still a few clear-thinking western political human strategists left, not to risk total destruction of civilization as we know it? – As President Putin has warned on several occasions, A Third World War, turning nuclear has no winner.
Let us hope reason and the sense for Peace will prevail.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Forgive the young man, radiant and exuding like the Sun. We were all firebreathers once. He doesn’t realize this is round one. Last night, the messianic midgets received the biggest gift of their foreshortened lives; they will run with it now, fully suiciding USUK and the demented Old Order….
the main discussion begins around 30 min; the preamble is worthwhile too. He discusses the first glimmers of dawning realization of absolute defeat in the messianic madmen — a Haaretz article from yesterday (paywall). Nothing new to the “Reality-based” but the limits appear to have been reached in saner liberal quarters — beyond the cope of drugs, hedonism and mindless chest-thumping.
What happens when conventional means are no longer sufficient, effective attrition and siege have been laid, and one’s sugar daddy is shown to be a naked, flaccid and geriatric dementia-patient long denied admittance to the padded sanitary homes for the criminally insane?? We are about to find out…….
Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat
The war’s aims won’t be achieved,
the hostages won’t be returned through military pressure,
security won’t be restored
Israel’s international ostracism won’t end
US Ambassador April Glaspie with Saddam Hussein, 1990: ‘[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait…’
Israel is provoking an expanded regional war that it cannot win
By Abdel Bari Atwan at Rai Al Youm.
When and how will Iran retaliate?
Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a man of few words. When he publicly threatens a harsh response to Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus — which killed seven people including senior Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) commanders — that means retaliation is impending.
The question is whether it will be immediate or postponed for few days; and, also, if it will be carried out directly by the IRGC or by its paramilitary allies in South Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, or both.
If there’s a war, there is no need for the element of surprise, and it may be militarily or politically unwise to defer it. The decision to retaliate was already taken by Iran’s Supreme National Security Council at an emergency meeting convened immediately after news broke of the airstrike on the consulate, according to a source close to the council. This could entail launching hundreds or thousands of missiles at Israeli targets, and even striking Israeli diplomatic missions in the Gulf region or elsewhere.
The demonstrations held by thousands of Iranians in Tehran to condemn the Israeli attack were different to previous rallies held in support of Gaza. This time, demonstrators criticised their own political leaders for their failure to respond firmly and directly to a succession of earlier Israeli assassinations and attacks, and demanded they retaliate decisively this time. Iranian leaders are bound to take account of this growing frustration with their policy of ‘strategic patience’.
Allied resistance groups are likely to play a role in this retaliation. Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has said retaliation is certainly coming. Abu Ali al-Askari of Iraq’s Kataeb Hezbollah spoke of thousands of armed fighters prepared to cross from Jordan into occupied Palestinian to join the struggle there. As for the Yemenis, they have no need for a call-to-arms. They began their battle against Israeli-linked shipping — and then the US navy — in support of Gaza months ago.
The reference to Jordan was significant. Some weeks ago, tens of thousands of Iraqi Hashd ash-Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) members rallied at the Iraqi-Jordanian border and chanted calls for it to be opened so they could reach Palestine and fight in defence of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In the event of an expanded war, US military bases in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and the Gulf region could also be targeted. Washington had reached secret understandings with Tehran not to expand the Gaza war into a regional one. But it did not live up to its side and failed to restrain its Israeli ally. By carrying out a succession of deliberately provocative attacks against Iranian targets, and further escalating the genocidal war against civilians in Gaza, Netanyahu belittled and humiliated Biden, and demonstrated that it is he who calls the shots in the White House.
If the Iranian state join the prospective war directly alongside its Lebanese, Iraqi, and Yemeni allies, I expect that the Syrian army will do to. Shortly after the al-Aqsa Flood operation, the Iranian foreign minister visited Damascus to sound the Syrian president out about the need to join the war on all fronts in support of the Palestinian resistance. According to high-level Syrian sources, President Bashar al-Asad replied: “Syria is a state, not a front. If the Iranian state enters into this war, we will be by its side, without hesitation.”
Iran is a regional superpower with a huge arsenal of missiles, drones, and submarines. It has been a nuclear breakout state for three years and may have already manufactured nuclear weapons. If it enters a war that Israel forced on it by attacking its consulate — a blatant violation of its sovereignty — it may prove to be the region’s last war, and the beginning of the end of the Zionist occupation state in its current form.
It would probably be a rolling conflict, starting with a limited retaliation and escalating into all-out war. The occupation state has been reopening public shelters. Its settlers have been stocking up on food and cash. The military has been placed on alert, air defence reservists have been called up, and home leave for combat units cancelled. Its current leaders want a war and are preparing for one.
But it is a war it cannot win. It failed, despite the full backing of the US, to overcome the resistance fighters of the miniscule and vulnerable Gaza Strip after six months of merciless bombardment. Can it withstand a war against the Axis of Resistance led by Iran?
A sweet & succinct debunking of perennial Anglo-Zionist wetdream meme of the “irreplaceability of Russian/Iranian generals” — as rationale for engaging in self-defeating terrorism against potent civilizational-states. Meanwhile, the latter remain focused and busy burying the sinking Legion.
by Julian Macfarlane at News Forensics
Ritter? Wrong?
When experience and training trip you up
I read Scott Ritter a lot and regard him as an intelligent and well-informed reporter of events. On occasion, however, his analyses are somewhat lacking – not that my own aren’t also.
Most recently, he was interviewed by Danny Haiphong about the Israel strike on the Iranian embassy— as well as the WCK humanitarian convoy atrocity.
In the interview, Ritter “puts on his military hat” to say that Israel has dealt Iran a crushing blow by assassinating the Quds team in Damascus, coordinating Iranian military assistance to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. This team was led by Gen. Zahedi— who Ritter notes has had 20 years of experience in the region— according to him, drinking tea with everyone who matters. These people, he says, are irreplaceable.
He also says that the Americans must have known the Israelis would be hitting the WCK food aid workers. That the Americans and the Israelis— well, share more than just pizzas, as he used to do with Israeli intelligence colleagues.
The US and Israeli militaries are highly integrated, he suggests.
What’s wrong with this analysis?
What’s wrong with it is Ritter’s “military hat”—which is old issue and worse for the wear.
Ritter joined the military as a private in 1980 and was commissioned as an officer in 1984 eventually becoming the Marine Corps Rapid Deployment Force lead analyst for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran–Iraq War. He worked as a weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission from 1991 to 1998.
So, he has both training and experience.
But sometimes training and even experience gets in the way of accurate assessment. Things change – especially in war. And suddenly what you thought was the case just isn’t anymore.
This has been shown to be the case especially in Ritter’s strategic analysis of the war in Ukraine. He thinks as American military people do— his perceptions shaped by military doctrine passed down as truth over the years. Keep in mind his experience is more than 30 years old. Putting on that “military hat” invites trouble.
The American military is an authoritarian top-down system with great emphasis on seniority rather than competence. If Lloyd Austin were assassinated, things might actually improve with the US military! But he will be protected at all costs. And keep on doing stupid stuff.
In other countries, military leadership is different. Russia has lost a lot of generals who are expected to lead from the front, exposing themselves to risk – something that does not happen with Western militaries.
When a Russian general is killed, he is replaced by either his second-in-command which is often an improvement because these people are used to handling the details of command rather than executing policy as it’s handed down from above—or a younger commander who may not have years but has demonstrated real ability. The leadership in either case often turns out to be pragmatic, practicable, and innovative.
Ritter is wrong about the Iranian generals being “irreplaceable”.
Command will shift to capable leaders who may not have been drinking tea with Hezbollah leaders for 20 years—but are knowledgeable, flexible and motivated— and can cooperate tactically and think strategically. That’s what the Quds Force is all about.
The Americans may be sending the Israelis long-range F-15 fighters to threaten Iran —but these aircraft cannot change the military balance in a conventional war between Iran and Israel, given Iran’s rapidly developing air defense system and its strategic position.
It’s a bit like sending F-16s to Ukraine. Good for the US defense industry – but nothing else.
In a worst-case scenario, the Iranians will close down Persian Gulf—which could precipitate an economic crisis that would sink the American economy already dog paddling frantically.
As I said before, Israel is surrounded. Its economy is already tanking and it’s managing its two-front war with Hamas and Hezbollah very badly.
So far, the Russians do not use their air defense systems – such as the S 400 – in Syria except to protect their own bases. But their attitudes towards the Israelis are hardening— as we can see with the new treaty between Russia and Iran. The Russians can use proxies, too.
Sorry Scott – this aint 1995.
The advent of the Zircon missile means the end of American naval supremacy. If push came to shove, the Americans could leaves every one of their aircraft carriers on the high seas– within hours. Billions of dollars gone and thousands of lives lost. The capability of Chinese long-range hypersonic missiles has always been questioned but the Zircon has demonstrated efficacy. Apart from its warhead, it delivers a 2000 kg punch with kinetic energy alone! And it cannot be intercepted.
My criticism of Ritter should in no way diminish his excellent work in other areas and his huge contributions. Nor should it be taken as denying that the US and Israel are not bedmates—they do cooperate where their needs and interests will align.
They have been married a long time – but that doesn’t mean they can’t be divorced.
I am quite sure that Israel forewarned the US that it was conducting a strike on “Hezbollah assets”in Syria – which usually means the Quds force.
I’m equally sure that they did not tell the US they were attacking an embassy.
Now, the US is in the unenviable position of not only defending genocide but violations of international law which will put its own international missions at risk. No US Embassy, no Israeli Embassy is now safe.
As for the attack on the humanitarian convoy, Larry Johnson has the best take on that! It’s obvious that Israeli commanders knew what they were doing. It is also unlikely that they shared this information with the US – any more than they would share information on other atrocities.
As I and many others have pointed out, the faux mea culpa of Israel rings quite hollow because this kind of criminal behavior has been a Standard Operating Procedure of Israel since the start of hostilities on October 7. The following video is quite good. Looks like some key Brits are now pissed off enough that they will pressure the Rishi Sunak’s Government to cut off aid to Israel.
The US will keep on doing what it’s doing – or rather what is not doing. Because it really doesn’t allow itself any options. The Israelis will keep on doubling down on stupid.
The Axis of Resistance will continue doing what it’s doing. But with an up side.
Yes, a lot of Palestinians are dying and things may get worse before they get better. But Palestinians have been dying since 1948. They have nothing to lose – and everything to gain through resistance. At some point, the international community will step in and there will be elections in Palestine – which will confirm the will of the Palestinian people 20 years ago – that Hamas is the rightful government.
Israel is by definition a rogue state—determined not to abide by the UN’s 1967 resolutions. But, by the time Palestine achieves statehood – which appears inevitable – it will also be a failed state.
Maybe the US will give Israel Rhode Island.
O Mockers, ‘Ask not for whom the Bell tolls, it tolls for thee!’
Pepe begins ~38th min; Prof Marandi at ~1:19 min.
The entire is worthwhile, especially the introduction putting Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital barbarity into perspective.
Rubicons were crossed on one-way paths…. The absolutely shocking events of last week harken and were last seen during the open Drang of the Third Reich against mankind; Pax Judaica presented its calling card back-to-back-to-back with the annihilation of historic Al Shifa Hospital, the missiling of the sacrosanct Iranian Embassy of Damascus, immediately followed by the measured triple-tap droning of the caravan of the western aid workers. Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi? Urbi et Orbi on Pax Judaica? We are all guilty of lèse-majesté, or are we? We shall see. The Fat Lady hasn’t sung.
Regardless, it is the End of the Line for the Old Order — in every way on every theater of confrontation, internal and external. Note Pepe’s sense of indignities suffered by all BRICS and the SCO through the savage attack on the Iranian Embassy in Syria. Responses are now due from the Axes of Civilization of this joined Global-SMO.
The Lebanese resistance has utterly gutted Israel’s years-long strategy of denying its access to weapons. Tel Aviv’s strikes on Syria have failed to impede Hezbollah’s arms, which grow qualitatively and quantitatively with each passing day, and are now produced en masse domestically.
by Khalil Nasrallah at The Cradle.
Israel’s ‘battle between wars’ has failed
Work is ongoing to open new warehouses and bring in new land, sea, and air missiles that are more accurate and of higher quality. What we used to store in six months before 7 October, we now restock in a month.
So said Hezbollah resource and border official Nawaf al-Musawi, one of the Lebanese resistance’s strategic minds and a former deputy in Lebanon’s parliament. His 26 March disclosure carries significant weight amid the ongoing war in Gaza and notable escalations between Hezbollah and the Israeli forces, particularly along the southern Lebanese front, where events inch closer to full-scale warfare.
Musawi’s big reveal is evidence that Israel has not only failed to prevent the supply of quality weapons to Hezbollah but that the resistance group has managed to accelerate its accumulation of armaments in the past half year.
More importantly, it demonstrates that Tel Aviv’s escalated strikes on Syria have failed altogether. Since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, the Israeli attacks, described by Tel Aviv as the “battle between wars,” had several objectives, foremost among them to prevent the arrival – via Syrian territory – of a “balance-breaker” weapon that could surprise or even cripple Israel’s defenses. And, of course, to impede the quantitative flow of arms to the Lebanese resistance.
To grasp the significance of war developments since 7 October, it’s imperative to delve into the historical context of the “battle between wars” strategy initiated by Israel in Syria. Through this campaign, Tel Aviv has tried to prevent the growing armament capabilities of the resistance across various domains, thereby securing its own superiority in multiple spheres and pre-empting Hezbollah’s ability to dictate qualitative terms even in the event of a full-scale war.
Syria’s ‘battle between wars’
Following the civil war in Syria in 2011 and the influx of western–Arab–Turkish-backed armed extremists to overthrow the Syrian government, concerns arose within Israel about the potential transfer of advanced weaponry from Damascus to the Lebanese resistance.
Concurrently, Tehran’s involvement in Syria, through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) working to enhance Hezbollah’s precision weapons, drones, and air defenses, further heightened these apprehensions.
In turn, Israel initiated the “battle between wars” aimed at preventing the transfer of “game-changing” weapons to Hezbollah – including precision armaments, air defense systems, seaborne missiles, advanced drones, military techniques, and manufacturing technologies – disrupting the supply route to the Lebanese resistance, undermining the Syrian army’s armament and capabilities, keeping Iran away from occupied-Palestine’s borders and establishing a “security belt” extending 40 to 80 kilometers into the occupied Syrian Golan.
To achieve these objectives, the campaign in Syria unfolded in stages. Initially, it involved supporting armed groups with the support of the US and Persian Gulf states. They aimed to gain control over southern Syria and dismantle Syrian air defense units, thereby granting Israel unhindered access to the country’s airspace.
This strategy proved successful until 31 January 2013, when Israel directly intervened by launching the first attack conducted by the Israeli Air Force, targeting the Scientific Research Center in the Jamraya area of the Damascus countryside. Israeli media portrayed this strike as disrupting a convoy purportedly bound for Lebanon.
Since then, Israel has repeatedly violated Syria’s sovereignty, having conducted 288 air operations in Syria on thousands of assets that Tel Aviv describes as arms shipments, air defense systems, “Syrian, Iranian positions,” infrastructure, high-quality weapons stores, scientific research centers, radar sites, civilian and military airports, and other sites.
In response to Israel’s aggression and the stated objectives of its Syria campaign, Hezbollah and its allies embarked on a fierce security war, succeeding in disrupting Tel Aviv’s objectives.
Furthermore, Hezbollah has embarked on a project to domestically manufacture missiles and drones within Lebanon, a fact acknowledged by Israeli political circles, research institutes, and former generals. In this context, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly characterized the so-called battle between wars as a failure.
In a 2022 address, Nasrallah stated: “I tell the Israelis that what they call a ‘battle between wars’ has turned the threat into an opportunity for the resistance.”
“We now possess the ability to transform our thousands of rockets into precision-guided missiles,” Nasrallah added.
After Operation Al-Aqsa Flood
Which brings us to the present day. Following the Palestinian resistance’s 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood operation, the Israeli Prime Minister declared a state of war, igniting the war front in southern Lebanon the very next day and plunging all of West Asia into a state of insecurity.
In response, Israel hurriedly launched strikes in Syria, disrupting Aleppo International Airport and Damascus Airport on 12 October 2023. These preemptive actions were driven by fears that the Axis of Resistance could utilize these airports to transport weaponry and fighters.
Over the past six months, Israel has conducted 30 attacks targeting more than a hundred sites across various regions of Syria, including the north, south, east, and center. These strikes encompassed assassinations and the targeting of Iranian advisors involved in supporting the resistance, notably General Razi Mousavi, responsible for aiding the resistance front in Syria, and most recently, the 1 April strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing senior Iranian military advisors safeguarding the Quds Force, led by Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi.
An analysis of the nature of these attacks reveals Tel Aviv’s strategic maneuvers to circumvent wartime constraints, including on the Lebanese front, albeit within certain limitations. These strikes were aimed at disrupting the resistance’s armaments in Lebanon, weakening resistance positions in Syria, and exacting reprisals against Iranian figures supporting the resistance forces.
Hezbollah brings out the big guns
Amidst the ongoing confrontation, the resistance has showcased several types of advanced weaponry, signaling its preparedness and capabilities and warning off the enemy by forcing its military to step back and recalibrate its attainable objectives.
Since 8 October, those reveals have included the Almas – or “Diamond” – missile, which carries a camera in its head, hits fixed and moving targets, has a range of more than ten kilometers, and has been used in several operations, most notably hitting the “Meron” base and successfully penetrating Israeli tank defenses.
Precision-hit drones have also been used in several operations, including targeting Israel’s Northern Command headquarters, its army positions, armored vehicles, and tanks.
We have also seen unidentified Hezbollah air defense missiles successfully intercepting Israeli drones, such as the Hermes 450, and neutralizing others flying over border areas, as confirmed by resistance statements. In addition, we have seen modified Burkan and Falaq-1 rockets with high destructive capabilities, targeting Israeli military sites, troop gatherings, and illegal settlements.
While these revelations represent only a fraction of the resistance’s arsenal, they illustrate its success in accumulating weaponry deemed by Israelis as destabilizing the regional balance. Hezbollah’s ability to procure and potentially domestically manufacture and develop such armaments over preceding years is further proof of its strategic prowess.
A losing ‘battle’
It is undeniable that Israeli actions have resulted in casualties within the ranks of the resistance, particularly evident in their constant violations of Syria’s sovereignty, using it as a battleground to settle scores against Iran.
Nevertheless, the strategic implications of these actions have not halted the resilience of the resistance. Despite the ongoing conflict, the resistance accumulates capabilities and bolsters its qualitative armament in unprecedented numbers.
Ali Haidar, an expert on Israeli affairs, informs The Cradle that Hezbollah’s ongoing arming during the current war signifies the failure of Israel’s “battle between wars” strategy. He emphasizes that Hezbollah’s continued accumulation of weaponry illustrates the enduring effectiveness of its deterrence umbrella over strategic facilities.
According to Haidar, “There is a new phase that Hezbollah has risen to, which constitutes an additional challenge to the enemy entity and its will to confront.”
The group’s uninterrupted accumulation of weapons during these years, Haidar says, shows that:
Hezbollah’s deterrence strategy continues to protect its strategic facilities, and that this umbrella is very effective, contrary to the impression created by Israel carrying out some strikes here and there. This is also reflected in the level of development reached by the resistance in expertise and production and its determination to improve those capabilities.
The ongoing battle between wars has seen the resistance in Lebanon significantly augmenting its weapons capabilities in terms of quantity, quality, and diversity. This represents a substantial strategic setback for Israel, which has expended vast sums on its strategy in Syria without achieving its objectives.
The impact of Hezbollah’s significant armament operation will undoubtedly influence Israeli war calculations, especially if Tel Aviv’s War Council favors stepping up hostilities against Lebanon. The ramifications of these efforts in terms of armaments during the war will be keenly felt as the battle edges closer to war.
Garland Nixon interviews Laith Marouf — West Asia update: ISRAEL ATTACKS IRANIAN CONSULATE – RUSSIA FURIOUS
wide ranging talk includes:
Anglo-Zionist terrorism on sovereign diplomatic territory of Iran in Damascus
— use of F-35 and weaponry just delivered by the US to attack Iran [a double provocation, carrying imprimatur of Anglo-Americans]
— the calculated savagery in holy time, at time of breaking fast, among top military cadre of Iran in a protected establishment [the banner photo on right is of the martyred General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, assassinated yesterday in Damascus, with future Leader Ayatollah Khamenei during Iran-Iraq war frontline in the 1980s. This was the highest ranking general killed since Soleimani, and a personal friend of Khamenei]
— Iran directly blames the USA
— Israel admitted they obtained permission from USA for the terrorism (!!)
— Likely retaliation at either Israeli embassy in Azerbaijan or Jordan [this is debatable. I disagree. If so, Jordan, to speed along the fall of its odious regime, would be more likely. No need to stir up the gung-ho Azeris tied at the hip to the Sultan in the fragile Transcaucasia as well]
Jordan is tottering and not for long in current condition and regime; Iraq is mobilizing Jordanian Resistance with arms for initial 12,000 cadre as well as severing the “Abraham Accords” land bridge running through the kept GCC concubines
Israel has lost the battles in both Gaza and Lebanon; all this is a provocation to draw in USA, directly against Iran. They are losing the attrition war and are on precipice of Collapse. Lunatics count on dramatic war expansion to the entire region, involving the equally sinking USUK, to save them
Zionism will be conclusively defeated, having already morally defeated itself. A global civilizational siege is on
The occupied Golan height is a front that has been shaped by Hezbollah, Iraqis and Syrian resistances. They degraded much of the installations and hardened military sites. In major upcoming war expansion, these critical height will be an objective, and to deny Israel its tremendous water resources.
Iraqis, like Yemenis, have upgraded missiles and drones which now overcome Jordanian, US, and Israeli air defenses, hitting the most sensitive sites in occupied Palestine with pinpoint precision! The building of the naval commander in Eilat was struck a night ago..
Zionists appear to hit targets in civilian areas within Lebanon due to lack of up-to-date knowledge. Some are Hezbollah offices abandoned since 2006! They just lash out for the optical value, and to harm civilians, focusing on first responders and civil defense teams, due to the usual viciousness
ISIS, Zionists, UkroNazis — rabid imperial tools, are thoroughly exposed, and condemn their USUK patron
ISIS in Syria is on last legs — why Idleb largely ignored, to focus on Damascus and major population centers; and for depleted Syria to regain strength. Russia is also busy on so many other fronts, chiefly 404 but also Sahel, Transcaucasia, Asia-Pacific, etc..
Erdogan: punished at local elections due to anger over his two-faced Palestine policy, which no longer fools Turks…
the sheer satanism of Al Shifa Hospital
the purposeful targeting of medical and humanitarian aid (food delivery) workers in Gaza
the shelf life of the Zionist project: sayonara! Put a fork in the bastards
the future consolidation of region around Greater Syria — with the end of the zionist project, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Palestine (and northern KSA) will disappear to return into the historic Greater Syria of the Holy Land, connectivity center of the Afro-Asian World Island.
the moral midget Little Blinkie returns to Saudi today to push them to normalize with the Zionists (!) And zionazi-controlled western media also is pushing Saudi normalization with Zionists. Unbelievable. You can’t fix Stupid
The West is fatally sucked into West Asia — as its last gasp and energy is fully devoted to zionism– other regions such as the Sahel, 404, slip through the dripping claws…
the contraction of Empire began at Syria, with the loss of that war during [official] Obama days
the loss of Israel will mean the loss of this Empire’s crown jewels, as with the Brits losing India.. a retreat across the Pond..
China is an active member of the Axes of Resistance — backstopping Russia, Iran, the Sahel, and others through its hefty wallets and protecting them from vicious imperial sanctions tool. There is a Global-Resistance. The two major civilizational states built up Iran, Yemen, other middlings to serve as firebreaks of Armageddon. The delusional Empire will exhaust and shatter itself long before it can get to a direct contest..
within the next two weeks, the messianic madmen will try to engineer Armageddon through ritual sacrificing of a Texan GMO red heifer, demolishing the Al Aqsa Mosque and turbo-charging a contrived civilizational war
mankind will come to appreciate and thank the 1.5+ century anti-imperialist sacrifice of the Palestinian nation. Being part of Greater Syria, they were simply the rock that could not be budged from the middle of the road
Today, we are joined by Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a Professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, to dispel the Western myths surrounding the Islamic Republic and examine its rise to power, foreign policy, and leadership in the axis of resistance.
Jon Elmer of the Electronic Intifada with his weekly update, focused on guerrilla war around Al Shifa Hospital. Kevork Almassian, originally from Aleppo, Syria, reviews the Anglo-Zionists’ return to bombing Aleppo in coordination with Al-Qaeda, Jordan, and the US base at Al Tanf; back to the sordid future! Does a criminal ever deviate far from a favored MO? Will it matter in the end, as during the last decade?
Yemen’s fearless escalation
Ansarullah challenge Egypt’s compliance with Israeli Gaza aid curbs
By Abdel Bari Atwan at Rai Al Youm
While many Arab governments that possess hundreds of tanks and warplanes have been passively watching Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the Yemeni government in Sanaa — though exhausted by eight years of war and suffocating blockade — has taken the lead in acting to oppose it.
Yemeni naval forces responded to Israel’s criminal escalation in the Gaza Strip with a parallel escalation first targeting Israeli-linked commercial shipping, and then the US and UK warships deployed to protect it. The two countries’ threats and their repeated airstrikes on Yemen, including the capital, failed to intimidate the Yemeni leadership or people. They had the opposite effect, prompting an intensification of attacks on ships that do not comply with instructions in the Red and Arabian seas, and then missile strikes on the Israeli-held port of Umm al-Rashrash (Eilat) last Thursday.
On Friday, Abdelmalek al-Houthi, spiritual leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah movement, gave a fiery speech to millions of marchers who have been taking to the streets of Yemeni cities every week in solidarity with the Palestinian people and resistance groups in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. He affirmed that Yemeni naval and land forces would step up their actions in the Red Sea and also introduce their submarine force into the conflict. He hinted that plans were in place for future actions and surprise moves which he could not disclose.
On Thursday, Yemeni military spokesman Yahya Sarie had announced three further operations: a missile strike on a British-owned cargo ship in the Gulf of Aden which set it on fire; the targeting of a US destroyer; and a missile and drone barrage against Eilat that sent thousands of Israeli settlers scurrying into shelters.
History will record with awe this Yemeni courage at a time of Arab silence and collusion, and how the Yemenis dared cross the reddest of red lines by taking action against the warships of the two mightiest empires in modern times: Britain, whose sun has set but remains a powerful force, and the US superpower that wields an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons.
The Yemeni armed forces’ next step could be to ‘punish’ the Western powers that have been ‘punishing’ various regional actors for supporting the Palestinian. That may entail moving the battle from the Red and Arabian seas to the coastal waters of occupied Palestine.
That was hinted at by leading Ansarullah figure Ali al-Houthi in his response to Egyptian spokesman Dia Rashwan’s attempt to justify Egypt’s failure to force open the Rafah border crossing to allow in thousands of aid trucks to provide relief to Gaza’s starving children. Rashwan had explained that Israel would bombard any trucks that tried to enter the Gaza Strip without its permission.
Ali al-Houthi’s riposte was, verbatim: “We are willing to send people to escort the trucks and transporters taking food, humanitarian, and medical aid into the Gaza Strip. We have much proven experience in this regard gained during the eight-year war when aid was delivered under bombardment.”
The Egyptian authorities are unlikely to take up this proposal, which is hugely embarrassing for them and exposes their collusion in Israel’s policy of starving the Gaza Strip’s more than two million inhabitants. But it has at least served to call them out and publicly challenge their lame excuses for inaction.
The fearlessness of the Yemenis is legendary. Having defied the US and UK’s armadas, and humiliated Israel by closing the Bab al-Mandeb straight to its shipping without it daring to retaliate, I wouldn’t be surprised if they send their own aid shipments towards Gaza and challenge the Egyptian authorities to let them in via Rafah.
The Yemenis are masters of the impressive surprise. They act as they say, and do as they threaten. I fully expect they will match the Afghans and Vietnamese in giving the US a taste of defeat, one that may be the beginning of the end of its military presence in the region.
The flourishing Iran-Russia alliance
The US is paying the price for its strategic short-sightedness
By Abdel Bari Atwan at Rai Al Youm
Russia is making military and economic advances in the Middle East, while the US is in rapid retreat in most of the region’s countries.
This is not only due to the cleverness of its foes, especially the Russians, but to its own stupidity: its arrogance and short-sightedness, and placing all its strategic eggs in the basket of the Israeli occupation state. This is now entangling it in wars – especially in Yemen and Iraq — that could result in the foreseeable future in its military bases being dismantled and its forces and fleets ignominiously exiting the region.
The US’ biggest failure lies in the way the blockades and sanctions it zealously imposes on several states in the region — especially Iran but also to a lesser extent Syria and Yemen — are backfiring.
Iran has succeeded in breaking the embargo imposed on it by developing its domestic military and civilian industries and scientific and technological expertise, including a nuclear programme that enables it to build nuclear weapons in a matter of weeks should its self-imposed prohibition of such a step be lifted.
On Thursday, Reuters news agency, citing six separate sources, reported that Iran was supplying Russia with guided ballistic missiles from the Fateh-110 family, such as the road-mobile Zolfaghar which can hit targets from a distance of 300 to 700 kilometres. Its sources said around 400 missiles had already been sent to Russia by air or by ship via the Caspian Sea, and more would be delivered in the coming few weeks.
This cooperation between two countries subject to draconian US sanctions naturally worries the Biden administration and its Western allies, especially at a time when Russia is making major gains in the Ukraine war that enable it to consolidate its control over the four annexed eastern provinces and Crimea.
Because of the US embargo and sanctions, Iran made its mind up from day one of the Ukraine war and chose to side with Russia — not just verbally, but in practice. It sold the Russian army drones that are considered among the most sophisticated in the world, and is now coming to its ally’s aid by supplying it with smart missiles to replenish its stocks.
Meanwhile, Iran’s paramilitary allies are doing Russia a great service by engaging the US in costly military and economic wars of attrition. Yemeni naval forces now hit out at US warships in the Red Sea and Arabia Sea on an almost daily basis, while Iraq’s Hashd ash-Shaabi assumes the task of striking US bases in Iraq and Syria — and maybe Jordan next.
This growing military cooperation between Iran and Russia is unlikely to be a one-way street. In exchange for its arms supplies, Iran will almost certainly be provided with top-of-the-line Russian military and civilian, possibly including nuclear, technology.
The Iranian-Russian alliance has borne fruit in the form of successes in the Ukraine war, while the US-Israeli alliance has only reaped a succession of failures and defeats: in the Gaza Strip, and — coming soon — in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq. Just wait and see.
A solid spiritual analysis by a sensitive and aware native. He rises above the labyrinthine politics and minutiae of Pakistan to focus on the two big picture points: (1) the persistent vassalage of elite Pakistani military corps to the British Empire mission against mankind (more recently the Anglo-Zionist), and (2) the interesting role Pakistan plays in Islamic eschatology. Once the terrible half-century fire of war was put out in Afghanistan with the fleeing of USUK in 2021, a new darkness settled onto Pakistan. “AfPak” was always intertwined for centuries in the Pashtun heartlands, but the deep concern at the moment is inside Pakistan proper, namely their Punjab heartland, perhaps driven mad with pleonexia.
There is much prospective speculation with which I disagree, being based on one man’s interpretation of Scripture, but the current reality of Pakistan’s near-total geopolitical isolation is manifest. It is at a sharp crossroads. Its tribulations are just ahead, as with most nations under the thumb of the Anglo-Zionists. They are all slated for such terrible political division and internal trials. The farmers revolt in Europe is merely the beginning everywhere…
Rockefeller’s four scenarios began with the planetary COVID Op. Total loss of confidence in political authorities was built-in. They got the compradore elites in most nations to commit the greatest crimes — against their own values and peoples! — then exposed it in most painful public terms, as happening now to those who carried out COVID. This implodes most societies, with “elites” being delegitimized. It facilitates the desired subsequent chaos, civil wars, and disintegration, after which they can “build back better” using the same old rebranded satanic paradigms at the hands of supranationalist zionist technocrats. The target is really the modern understanding of Westphalian nationhood… So they plan and hope.
Undoubtedly calm and mature oases of civilizational resilience will remain after the imperial planetary hybrid war. These will serve as surviving magnetic poles gathering allies to fight back the universal onslaught, such as through BRICS, SCO, EAEU, BRI, ASEAN, etc…
Pakistan serves as an instructive test-case, being an amalgamation of dissimilar tribes cobbled together by the departing British; whether studied from geopolitical dead-end or spiritual dead-end, the fall of Pakistan may be our universal conundrum right now. Most imperially created borders of the past are under question for the New Order — whether the Ukraine/European (Yalta-Potsdam), African (1885 Berlin Conference), the greater Middle East (WW1 Sykes-Picot), Balkan (post-Yugoslav NATO), Latin American (pre-WW1 Monroe), even lands stolen from Mexico or the Russian Empire.. The Interregnum labors mightily.
US Bombing Spree Won’t Reverse Decline of US Primacy in Middle East
Update on US military operations in the Middle East…
US retaliates for deadly attack on US bases in the region by targeting Iranian-linked infrastructure and formations in Iraq and Syria;
The US base was allegedly hit by a drone and despite attempts to depict it as a “lucky hit,” it demonstrates how vulnerable US troops occupying the region have become;
US air defenses are insufficient in terms of quantity and quality to protect US bases from a growing number of missiles and drones;
While the US insists it is not seeking conflict in the region, its sole purpose in the region is to violently overthrow the Syrian and Iranian governments and coerce the rest of the region to advance US interests at the cost of their own interests and sovereignty;
US Department of Defense officials have admitted that in Syria the US is deliberately withholding the nation’s own energy and agricultural resources to use economic recovery and reconstruction as “leverage” over Syria and its allies;
References:
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Lundi, le Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU tiendra une réunion d’urgence à l’initiative de la Russie dans le cadre d’une
L’article Washington frappe des “pro-iraniens” en Irak, en Syrie et au Yémen est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Message for Joe Biden: Don’t Mess with Iran
In this week’s episode of the New Rules podcast, we delve into the recent escalation between Iran and the US, with Biden administration reportedly considering striking Iran. We hosted University of Tehran professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi who warned that if a new war breaks out in the Middle East, the US will lose against Iran and its allies in the Axis of Resistance.
“The attacks that are taking place in Syria and Iraq show how vulnerable the Americans are. But the real reason right now, why the Americans are occupying Iraq and Syria? They say it’s to contain Iran and to limit Iran’s influence. But in reality, it’s about taking away the sovereignty of countries and to strengthen Israel,” he told the New Rules podcast.
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Journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar joins to discuss the latest in the widening U.S. war in the Middle East, a coming Gaza ceasefire, how travels to Russia 
, the conflict in Ukraine and much more in the multipolar world!
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Journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar:
https://t.me/rocknrollgeopolitics on Telegram
https://twitter.com/RealPepeEscobar on Twitter (X)
Danny Haiphong YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@geopoliticshaiphong
Danny Haiphong: We talk US forces slain in Syria/Jordan, an impeding Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the possibility of a broader war with Iran, the state of the Russia Ukraine conflict plus much more!
Ritter [on fighting Iran]: “We can’t beat the Hoootis! How stupid can you be?”
Lavrov: “They believe that for 500 years they have ruled the world as they wish, living at the expense of others, and they think this should continue…”
by Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar at Indian Punchline
There is an old proverb that when misfortunes come, they come in battalions. Coming on top of reports of American soldiers going down like nine-pins on a drone strike against the super secret CIA station for intelligence and covert operations on the Syrian-Jordanian border, ’nyet’ is the word from Beijing to the Biden administration’s entreaties seeking intervention with Tehran to rein in the Houthis of Yemen, against the foreboding backdrop of the Axis of Resistance expanding its operations against American and Israeli interests.
President Biden deputed his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to handle this highly delicate mission with Beijing, instead of the US’s top diplomat Antony Blinken. Sullivan is uniquely placed to switch roles between the US’ domestic and foreign policies. He is a trusted hatchet man of the president and is actively involved in Biden’s re-election campaign.
Sullivan stayed overnight in Thailand On Friday/Saturday to launch his charm offensive vis-a-vis Foreign Minister Wang Yi. But he came away with no sign that China is willing to use its influence with Tehran.
Later, an unattributable media briefing by a senior NSC official via teleconference was hastily arranged by the White House to cover Sullivan’s back side. It brought home that reading the Chinese tea leaves is an art in itself. As the NSC official put it, “Beijing says they are raising this with the Iranians … but we’re certainly going to wait before we comment further on how effectively we think they’re actually raising it.”
Sullivan seems to have hit a brick wall. This is curious because the Biden Administration should have learnt from previous experience with Beijing in trying to prod China to convince close ally North Korea to scale back its nuclear weapons programme or roll back its “no limits” friendship with Russia over Ukraine.
Actually, South Korea’s military said on Sunday that North Korea fired several cruise missiles, extending a streak in weapons tests that are worsening tensions with the US and reflecting Pyongyang’s efforts to expand its arsenal of weapons designed to overwhelm remote US targets in the Pacific, including Guam!
Evidently, the Biden administration failed to comprehend that Beijing was under no obligation to use its influence on Pyongyang for serving American interests. It is sheer naïveté to expect Beijing to fall for selective engagement on issues that aim to buy time for the president to give his best shot in the upcoming November elections.
What does China get in return? The question doesn’t occur to the Biden Administration. The assumption in DC is that China is on an ego trip and begging for selective engagement with the No 1 military and economic power on the planet. On the contrary, China too has some legitimate demands to make — such as, for instance, the US not inciting Taiwan surreptitiously to travel on the path of independence, or allowing China a level playing field for setting new technology standards at the global level as an innovative country.
Interestingly, compared to the taciturn readout by the White House on the Sullivan-Wang Yi meeting in Thailand, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a candid full-bodied statement on Saturday to set the record straight and pre-empt the spin doctors in the Biden White House from scripting some false narrative. The relevant excerpts from the Chinese statement titled Wang Yi held a meeting with Sullivan, assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs are reproduced below:
(Unofficial translation)
“The two sides conducted frank, substantive and fruitful strategic communications around the implementation of the consensus of the San Francisco meeting between the heads of state of the two countries and the proper handling of important and sensitive issues in Sino-US relations.
“Wang Yi said that this year marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States.The two sides should take this as an opportunity to summarise their experiences and learn lessons, treat each other equally rather than condescendingly, seek common ground while preserving differences rather than highlighting differences, effectively respect rather than harm each other’s core interests, and work together to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation to build a correct way for China and the United States to get along.
“Wang Yi emphasised that the Taiwan issue is China’s internal affairs, and Taiwan’s regional elections cannot change the basic fact that Taiwan is a part of China.The biggest risk to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is “Taiwan independence”, and the biggest challenge to Sino-US relations is also “Taiwan independence”.The United States must abide by the one-China principle and the three joint communiqués between China and the United States, implement the commitment not to support “Taiwan independence” into actions, and support China’s peaceful reunification.
“ Wang Yi pointed out that all countries have national security concerns, but they must be justified and reasonable. They cannot engage in pan-politicisation and pan-security, let alone curb and suppress the development of other countries.The two sides agreed to further discuss the boundary between national security and economic activities…
“The two sides also discussed international and regional issues such as the Middle East, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea.”
The Chinese readout did not even make any specific mention of the Houthis or Tehran! Instead, it underscored the perceived threat of Taiwan independence as “the biggest challenge to China—US relations.” And, furthermore, it reiterated Beijing’s concerns that the US is using export restrictions “to contain and suppress the development of other countries” and said that the two countries will discuss “the boundary between national security and economic activities” in future meetings.
What do we make out of this? Simply put, China’s reluctance to use its diplomatic and economic heft to support US moves to address the Red Sea disruptions by reining in the Axis of Resistance (or restrain North Korea’s behaviour) underscores the limitations of the Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach efforts or charm offensive to win over Beijing and get it committed to a selective engagement over Washington’s priorities on flash points that might otherwise become raging controversies in electoral politics till November.
By the way, the Chinese readout also acknowledged that there are areas where Beijing is indeed interested in an engagement with the US at this transformative point in time — viz., the joint implementation of the so-called “San Francisco Vision,” which translates as:
How come the US and its western allies get it all horribly wrong? For an answer, the final word must go to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who said in New York while on a brief visit to the UN hqs last weekend:
“They believe that for 500 years they have ruled the world as they wish, living at the expense of others, and they think this should continue. This logic completely ignores the objective reality, in particular the fact that the vast majority of former colonies have gained independence, become aware of their national interests, want to strengthen their national, cultural and religious identity and are growing so fast that they have left the West behind – at least the BRICS members are.”
The bottom line is, Beijing will not fall for US attempts to create misperceptions in China’s relations with Iran or North Korea. China has no intentions to help the US to pull its chestnuts out of the fire in West Asia or the Far East. The international environment is rather fraught and Beijing has set its compass to be on the right side of history.
What Putin, Xi and Raisi have been explaining to the Global South, explicitly or in quite subtle ways, is that we are right in the crux of a civilizational war.
by Pepe Escobar at Sputnik
In the late 1930s, with WWII in motion, and only months before his assassination, Leon Trotsky already had a vision of what the future Empire of Chaos would be up to.
“For Germany it was a question of ‘organizing Europe’. The United States must ‘organize’ the world. History is bringing mankind face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism…Under one or another pretext and slogan the United States will intervene in the tremendous clash in order to maintain its world dominion.”
We all know what happened next. Now we are under a new volcano that even Trotsky could not have identified: a declining United States faced with the Russia-China “threat”. And once again the entire planet is affected by major moves in the geopolitical chessboard.
The Straussian neocons in charge of US foreign policy could never accept Russia-China leading the way towards a multipolar world. For now we have NATO’s perpetual expansionism as their strategy to debilitate Russia, and Taiwan as their strategy to debilitate China.
Yet in these past two years, the vicious proxy war in Ukraine only accelerated the transition towards a multipolar, Eurasia-driven world order.
With the indispensable help of Prof. Michael Hudson, let’s briefly recap the 5 key variables that are conditioning the current transition.
Losers Don’t Dictate Terms
1. The stalemate: That’s the new, obsessive US narrative on Ukraine – on steroids. Confronted with the upcoming, cosmic NATO humiliation in the battlefield, the White House and the State Dept. had to – literally – improvise.
Moscow though is unfazed. The Kremlin has set the terms a long time ago: total surrender, and no Ukraine as part of NATO. To “negotiate”, from the Russia point of view, is to accept these terms.
And if the deciding powers in Washington opt for turbo-charging the weaponization of Kiev, or to unleash “the most heinous provocations in order to change the course of events”, as asserted this week by the head of the SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, fine.
The road ahead will be bloody. In case the usual suspects sideline popular Zaluzhny and install Budanov as the head of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the AFU will be under total control of the CIA – and not NATO generals, as it’s still the case.
This might prevent a military coup against the sweaty sweatshirt puppet in Kiev. Yet things will get much uglier. Ukraine will go Total Guerrilla, with only two objectives: to attack Russian civilians and civilian infrastructure. Moscow, of course, is fully aware of the dangers.
Meanwhile, chatterbox overdrive in several latitudes suggest that NATO may even be getting ready for a partition of Ukraine. Whatever form that might take, losers do not dictate conditions: Russia does.
As for EU politicos, predictably, they are in total panic, believing that after mopping up Ukraine, Russia will become even more of a “threat” to Europe. Nonsense. Not only Moscow couldn’t give a damn to what Europe “thinks”; the last thing Russia wants or needs is to annex Baltic or Eastern European hysteria. Moreover, even Jens Stoltenberg admitted “NATO sees no threat from Russia toward any of its territories.”
2. BRICS: Since the start of 2024, this is The Big Picture: the Russian presidency of BRICS+ — which translates as a particle accelerator towards multipolarity. The Russia-China strategic partnership will be increasing actual production, in several fields, while Europe plunges into depression, unleashed by the Perfect Storm of sanctions blowback against Russia and German de-industrialization. And it’s far from over, as Washington is also ordering Brussels to sanction China across the spectrum.
As Prof. Michael Hudson frames it, we are right in the middle of “the whole split of the world and the turning towards China, Russia, Iran, BRICS”, united in “an attempt to reverse, undo, and roll back the whole colonial expansion that’s occurred over the last five centuries.”
Or, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov defined at the UN Security Council this process of BRICS leaving Western bullies behind, the changing world order is like “a playground scuffle – which the West is losing.”
Bye Bye, Soft Power
3. The Lone Emperor: The “stalemate” – actually losing a war – is directly linked to its compensation: the Empire squeezing and shrinking a vassalized Europe. But even as you exercise nearly total control over all these relatively wealthy vassals, you lose the Global South, for good: if not all their leaders, certainly the overwhelming majority of public opinion. The icing in the toxic cake is to support a genocide followed by the whole planet in real time. Bye bye, soft power.
4. De-dollarization: All across the Global South, they did the math: if the Empire and its EU vassals can just steal over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves – from a top nuclear/military power – they can do it to anyone, and they will.
The key reason Saudi Arabia, now a BRICS 10 member, is being so meek on the genocide in Gaza is because their hefty US dollar reserves are hostage to the Hegemon.
And yet the caravan moving away from the US dollar will only keep growing in 2024: that will depend on crucial crossover deliberations inside the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and BRICS 10.
5. Garden and Jungle: What Putin and Xi have essentially been telling the Global South – including the energy-rich Arab world – is quite simple. If you want improved trade and economic growth, who’re you gonna link to?
So we’re back to the “garden and jungle” syndrome – first coined by imperial Britain orientalist Rudyard Kipling. Both the British concept of “white man’s burden” and the American concept of “Manifest Destiny” derive from the “garden and jungle” metaphor.
NATOstan, and hardly all of it, is supposed to be the garden. The Global South is the jungle. Michael Hudson again: as it stands, the jungle is growing, but the garden isn’t growing “because its philosophy is not industrialization. Its philosophy is to make monopoly rents, meaning rents that you make in your sleep without producing value. You just have a privilege of a right to collect money on a monopoly technology that you have.”
The difference now, compared to all those decades ago of an imperial free lunch, is “an immense shift of technological advance”, away from North America and the US, to China, Russia and selected nodes across Asia.
Forever Wars. And No Plan B
If we combine all these variants – stalemate; BRICS; the Lone Emperor; de-dollarization; garden and jungle – in search of the most probable scenario ahead, it’s easy to see that the only “way out” for a cornered Empire is, what else, the default modus operandi: Forever Wars.
And that brings us to the current American aircraft carrier in West Asia, totally out of control yet always supported by the Hegemon, aiming for a multi-front war against the whole Axis of Resistance: Palestine, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraqi militias, Ansarullah in Yemen, and Iran.
In a sense we’re back to the immediate post-9/11, when what the neocons really wanted was not Afghanistan, but the invasion of Iraq: not only to control the oil (which in the end they didn’t) but, in Michael Hudson’s analysis, “to essentially create America’s foreign legion in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq.” Now, “America has two armies that it’s using to fight in the Near East, the ISIS/al-Qaeda foreign legion (Arabic-speaking foreign legion) and the Israelis.”
Hudson’s intuition of ISIS and Israel as parallel armies is priceless: they both fight the Axis of Resistance, and never (italics mine) fight each other. The Straussian neocon plan, as tawdry as it gets, essentially is a variant of the “fight to the last Ukrainian”: to “fight to the last Israeli” on the way to the Holy Grail, which is to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran (copyright John McCain) and provoke regime change.
As much as the “plan” did not work in Iraq or Ukraine, it won’t work against the Axis of Resistance.
What Putin, Xi and Raisi have been explaining to the Global South, explicitly or in quite subtle ways, is that we are right in the crux of a civilizational war.
Michael Hudson has done a lot to bring down such an epic struggle to practical terms. Are we heading towards what I described as techno-feudalism – which is the AI format of rent-seeking turbo-neoliberalism? Or are we heading to something similar to the origins of industrial capitalism?
Michael Hudson characterizes an auspicious horizon as “raising living standards instead of imposing IMF financial austerity on the dollar block”: devising a system that Big Finance, Big Bank, Big Pharma and what Ray McGovern memorably coined as the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex) cannot control. Alea jacta est.
La Chine demande à l’Iran de freiner les attaques des Ansar Allah (Houthis) du Yémen dans la mer Rouge, car
L’article La Chine demande à l’Iran de contenir les Houthis, selon Reuters est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Joining us today is @CarlZha , a Chinese-born political commentator and the host of the “Silk And Steel Podcast.” We’ll be delving into Zelensky getting shut down by China at Davos, the Taiwan Elections, and exploring safe methods for traversing the Red Sea.
He discusses at length:
Even Lavrov was forced to use the Palestinian Authority as official face of Palestine at the UN, despite being discredited and reviled by Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza in most recent polls, since the PLO remains the only consensual modus vivendi to enforce an urgent permanent ceasefire. Yet both Hamas and the Zionists are dead set against coexistence (and do you blame Palestinians after the frank unrepentant satanism they face??). The forms must be observed, including this two-state offer by the arabs, guaranteed to be rejected by the combined West through their zionist proxy, further exposing them. This will serve as the equivalent of the Russian Ultimatum of December 2021, with a subsequent free hand given to the Resistance Axis to enforce peace. Organized by the same Russians at the UN and through the Saudis and OIC! Priceless
L’Arménie, située dans la région du Caucase en Eurasie (qui marque la séparation entre l’Europe au nord et l’Asie au
L’article L’Arménie: dernier obstacle entre Turquie et Azerbaïdjan est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
US-British Strikes on Yemen Seek to Provoke Wider War with Iran
US-British strikes on Yemen have predictably only escalated regional tensions;
Yemen has been targeted for years not only by US-British backed Saudi air and missile strikes, but also a multi-year, Saudi-led ground invasion, neither of which impacted Ansar Allah’s military capabilities;
US-British strikes on Yemen have only made passage through the Red Sea more dangerous, delaying by many months the possibility of commercial shipping returning to the route;
US policy papers have laid out the ultimate objective for the region is removing Iran as a competitor through regime change using covert action within Iran while undermining Iranian allies across the region;
Rather than attempting to de-escalate and stabilize the region, it is clear the US is determined to do exactly the opposite, ultimately hoping to draw Iran into a direct confrontation;
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Join us as the renowned economist discusses Russia’s new status as largest economy of Europe, the Red Sea economic crisis brewing and China’s forecasted collapse despite becoming the largest car producer in the world this year. All this and much much more!
In a new discussion with Danny Haiphong, Michael Hudson continues his analysis of why US policies aimed at hurting Russia, China, and Iran are damaging US allies, particularly Europe. That both shrinks US markets and the resource base the US has available were it to be so dumb as to act on its military escalation threat display.
HAIPHONG: Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the stream. It’s Danny Haiphong, your host. As you can see, I’m joined by the renowned economist and author, Professor Michael Hudson. You can find his website in the video description. Please do hit the like button as we begin. That helps boost this stream. And, of course, you can find not only Michael’s website, but all the ways you can support this channel in the video description. How are you doing today, Michael?
HUDSON: Pretty good. It’s snowing here in New York, so I’m pretty much snowed in.
HAIPHONG: Yep. Yes, yes, it is quite bad out there today. But I am glad to have you here because there’s a lot of economic news. But you emphasize, and this channel tries to emphasize, the relationship between geopolitics and economics, geopolitical economy, as you, Radhika [Desai], and Ben Norton, and other great journalists have attempted to do.
And so I wanted to start, then, let’s talk about Ukraine first. Let’s begin there. There’s all kinds of talks about there being a quote-unquote stalemate with regard to Ukraine.
However, the realities, especially economically and on the battlefield, are a lot different. So, Michael, I’m just going to let you go on what you would like to comment on with regard to Ukraine, because the situation is not as hot in the news, but there are massive changes happening in this conflict.
HUDSON: Well, it’s the United States that’s saying that it’s a stalemate in Ukraine. What they mean is that the Ukraine counter-offenses have been utterly ineffective. Ukraine has lost the war.
And there have been almost all of the discussions that you get, for instance, on Judge Napolitano’s interviews, and the European press, the Russian press, the Chinese press, they all say, Well, the war is over. Russia can just continue to take however much it wants, but there is no point in Russia trying to take more land right now because Ukraine, or rather Mr.
Zelensky, is sending all of the Ukrainians he can find, especially the Hungarian Ukrainians, the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and the Romanian Ukrainians, in the fight to get killed.
So, maybe we can convince Russia, Don’t mop up, don’t lock in your victory. Why don’t we just say it’s a stalemate and leave things the way they are since you’re winning so strongly?
Well, obviously, Russia has already said, We’ve already given the terms for our peace. Of course, we can negotiate anytime. Our terms are simple, total surrender. We’re going to get rid of Nazism. We’re going to make sure that Ukraine will never join NATO. And we’re going to make sure that the Russian speakers and Crimea are part of Russia. So anytime you want to negotiate, meaning, say yes to our terms, we’ll be glad to. But meanwhile, we’re just going to sit here. And if you want to send more and more troops in, that’s fine.
Now, the Americans think that, okay, if Russia isn’t taking any more land, it’s a tie. But it’s really not a tie because if you read President Putin’s speeches and Foreign Secretary Lavrov’s speeches, he says, Well, Ukraine is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking about the big picture. The big picture is, for instance, that Russia on January 1st became the lead administrator of the BRICS+.
And the United States is meanwhile losing the fight all over the world. It’s losing the economic fight against Russia and China. Russia is increasing its industrial production, not only military, but in the production of aircraft, automobiles. China is growing and the United States is not. And most of all, Europe is going into a depression led by the collapse of, or I should say, the destruction of German industry as a result of the sanctions against Russia. And also the sanctions that the United States are insisting that Europe impose against China.
The United States has told Europe, you really can only trade with us and our NATO allies.
We want you to reduce your trade with China to what the head of the EU, Mr. Borrell, has said. He said, Well, you know, China, we import a lot more from you than we export. It’s got to be even. And China said, well, there are plenty of things we’d like to import from you, Europeans, such as the chip-making etching machinery for ultraviolet etching that’s made by Holland. And Borrell says, Oh, we can’t, the United States won’t let us send you, sell you anything that potentially is used in the military. And China says, well, anything that can be used economically can be military because the military is part of the economy.
So I guess we’re quite happy to agree with you and have balanced trade between China and Europe. We’ll just cut back our trade with you to maybe the $100 a year trade that you have to trade with us.
So Europe is voluntarily isolating, limiting its trade and investment to the United States, cutting off the trade with Russia. And without Russian gas and oil, you’re going to have the German, French, and Italian manufacturing industry, chemical industry, fertilizer industry, and agriculture continue to shrink.
And so the stalemate that America is talking about really means we’re shrinking our allies in Europe. We’re losing the third world. And what is happening in Ukraine, fighting to the last Ukrainian, now looks like a similar fight in the Near East, where it looks like there’s a similar stalemate, which really has been inflaming the world’s global majority and the global South into thinking that all of a sudden this is something awful. I’ll get to that later.
But the important thing is that I think the Americans have already realized that they’re going to lose the war in Ukraine. And the problem, as you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, and especially the Financial Times, is if we lose the war in Ukraine, how will Biden win the election in November? Because he’s been pushing, his whole policy is we can essentially wreck Russia. Our sanctions are going to lead to the collapse of Russian industry. The Russian people will get so upset with the war, there’s going to be a regime change. They’ll overthrow Mr. Putin and we can get another Boris Yeltsin in who is going to really wreck Russia in the way that our neoliberal advisors were able to wreck it in the 1990s.
Well, that hasn’t happened. So what’s going to happen? Well, the public relations people of the Democratic Party have got together and they’ve all decided, Okay, what we want to tell the people is, it really didn’t matter in Ukraine. It doesn’t matter because we don’t have to win in Ukraine because America can fight [with] a kind of soft power. And we have other ways of dominating the world and maintaining America number one, even though we’re de-industrializing our economy. Even though we’re the largest debtor in the world, we’re going to be able to dominate. And the new Democratic Party public relations push is what’s called “soft power”.
And in yesterday’s January 15th Financial Times, there was a long discussion. They had a whole page by a man who had been President Clinton’s advisor, National Intelligence Council advisor Joseph Nye. For a whole page. And it was Nye who coined the term soft power. A few decades ago, when he was arguing with Paul Kennedy, who was saying that the Americans were on the decline. And he came up with this idea to say, the United States can still be able to exert influence, but not of a military type, but of financial power, regime change.
And what he said, he gave five reasons why the United States would not necessarily be eclipsed by China or by Russia or by any other countries. And it’s hilarious to look at the five reasons that the Financial Times yesterday trotted forth for why there’s not going to be any threat to the United States.
The first reason he gave was geography and friendly neighbors. Well in the last few months, especially since the fighting and Israeli attacks on Gaza have occurred, America’s lost public opinion. And even Secretary Blinken has said that the fight in Israel is creating antagonism, not only against Israel, but America has lost its moral dominance as a result of backing the genocide and opposing any criticism of Israel within the United Nations. So it’s lost foreign support. There’s a growing anti-Americanism, not only in Asia, Africa, and the global South, but in Europe.
Well, the second reason that Nye cited was domestic energy supplies. America controls oil. Not only does it produce its own oil, but it’s just been able to block the rest of the world from importing Russian oil, and it’s been able to blow up Nord Stream. And now it’s pushing Israel to essentially act as another Ukraine. It’s pushing Israel to incite Lebanon and Iran into a provocation, into a military response to the Israeli attacks that is going to enable Israel to do what a Senate majority leader, the Republican leader, has been pushing for, and what Biden is pushing for, and what the neocons have been pushing for for 20 years, war with Iran to grab the oil reserves of what were Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. And if it can control the oil reserves of the Near East and be able to block off their energy exports to all the other countries, just as it’s been able to block Russia’s oil exports to Europe, then it can control the industrialization of other countries because industry basically runs on oil and gas. Industry is energy, and without energy, you’re not going to be able to have your own industrialization independently of the United States. So the U.S. foreign policy, as we’ve talked before, I think, in our last show, for 100 years, the United States has used oil as an attempt to control the world’s economy.
Well, the third point that Nye points out is the dollar-based financial system. Well, it’s amazing that he could say that in yesterday’s Financial Times when the whole world was trying to de-dollarize. You’re getting one speech after another, not only from Russia and from China, but from the global South countries. And even in the Near East, they’re saying now that America has grabbed Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, $300 billion, all of the money that we’ve saved in our domestic monetary reserves are subject to confiscation by the United States. And they’ve already told Saudi Arabia that if they do not keep their international reserves from oil exports in the form of United States stocks and bonds, that would be treated as an act of war. So here in the Near East, you’re having Saudi Arabia and Bahrain under increasing pressure to support the Arabs being attacked by Israel, and yet they’re afraid to act because the United States is holding their dollars hostage. Well, very quickly, you’re seeing other countries move out of dollars as quickly as they can.
And finally, the fifth argument that Nye points out for why America cannot lose is demo-graphic and technological leadership. But that’s the one fatal Achilles heel of the United States economy. Its hope, its idea of technological leadership is to get monopoly power over information technology, pharmaceuticals, and other areas that it can dominate for intellec-tual property through copyrighting and through essentially suing countries that will adopt the technology that’s developed in the United States.
Prof. Hudson steps away for a minute.
HAIPHONG: That summary, Joseph Nye outlined it, and Professor Hudson broke it down, broke down the facade, or the reality behind the facade that the neocons spread. And what’s so interesting about this piece is that, I mean, Joseph Nye, I mean, he is a Carter and then Clinton functionary, someone who served as an Undersecretary of State and Undersecretary of Defense for these administrations. And he is someone who actually has been considered less hawkish, but if we went through this article, you would see that what he is arguing with regard to soft power is actually regime change by other means.
And that regime change is heavily connected to the economic realm, as perhaps Professor Hudson outlined so eloquently. There is so many connections to be made. We have a lot of them I’m going to raise with Professor Hudson, including on Russia, Russia being now the biggest economy in Europe by purchasing power parity terms.
Also, the China collapse theory. There’s new news. There’s recent news about China actually surpassing Japan and leading the world now in car manufacturing and how its electric vehicle production is causing so much alarm.
Prof. Hudson returns
I wanted to now ask you about a development, given all that you outlined with regard to Joseph Nye’s assessment and analysis on soft power in the US’s so-called advantages. I wanted to talk to you about this story here. Vladimir Putin was just meeting with business leaders in the Far East, and he made a claim about Russia now being the biggest economy in Europe by purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, becoming Europe’s first economy, despite pressure from all sides.
And here’s what he said. He said, It seems that we are being strangled and pressured from every side, but still we are the largest economy in Europe. We left Germany behind and climbed into fifth in the world. China, the U.S., India, Japan and Russia. We are number one in Europe. And so there’s reports in that conversation with business leaders from the region that Russia is set to grow three percent year on year, and it’s likely to be even higher, maybe four and five percent.
Now, there’s also the news, you brought it up, but there is a huge stagnation going on in Europe. In an analysis also in Financial Times, there are 48 economists that talked about the eurozone set for weak growth this coming year. And the prediction was across these economists, zero point six percent on average, with many indicating less than that. And of course, some indicating more. But the vast majority said it was going to be less than half of one percent. So, Michael, your thoughts. How did this, how did this happen? And perhaps you can explain the economic intricacies on how this happened.
HUDSON: Well, we’ve discussed in the past how it happened. The United States, starting with President Clinton and actually with President Carter, decided to help American firms make higher profits by moving their labor force out of the United States, by trying to shift manufacturing first to Mexico, along the maquiladoras under Carter, and then under Clinton to China and Asia.
And the idea was to create increasing industrial unemployment in the United States to prevent labor’s wages from rising. And the theory that has guided the Democratic Party’s economists is, if you can cut wages, there will be higher profits and higher profits will lead to more prosperity.
Well, the reality is that you cut wages by moving your industry outside of the country, by de-industrializing. And that is still the policy that America has taken. And it has replaced industrialization with financialization to make money financially, hoping that the companies that have now moved out towards China and Asia and other countries are going to be able to have higher profits and essentially become more prosperous for the donor class to the Democratic and also the Republican parties.
But what President Putin was talking about was something much more. Russia already, along with China, have begun to produce their own airplanes. Take a look at the last week’s news, all about Boeing, yet again, having other accidents on its airplanes. Boeing used to be a technological leader in aircraft, but then it was merged with McDonnell Douglas and became a financial company. So it broke up the Boeing system of making airplanes and began to outsource to various other companies, all the little parts. And all Boeing is now is assembling diverse parts that it buys from various suppliers, very much like television sets are made. You buy different parts from different suppliers.
Well, the reason Putin is making his speech in the Near East is Russia and China are working together for an enormous industrial development to take place in eastern Siberia, which has been obviously underpopulated because of the bad weather for many centuries now, but also is now beginning to warm up. And the idea is to integrate Chinese industry and Russian industry and technology and to design entire cities that are going to be technological complexes producing all sorts of interrelated parts together, computer parts, airplanes, trains, automobiles. China is already the largest automobile exporter in the world. And so you’re going to have this whole new center of industrial growth in eastern Asia.
Well, the idea is that this is going to be a great increase in prosperity. And the way in which these cities are developing, when I first went to Russia in 1994, I stayed at the home of the professor who had designed Togliatti City, the city where they were going to begin producing automobiles designed by the Italians. And he explained how he designed the whole city together to combine the factories and production to workers’ housing, to workers’ entertainment, to workers’ health, and all of the different forms of supplying materials and parts of cars all dovetailed together. Well, he was basically an industrial engineer. And that is how Russia and China are developing the cities that they’re creating along with universities, training systems in East Asia and Siberia.
So essentially, Putin is saying to the world, if you’re a global south country or an Arab country, and you want to have your economy grow and trade more, who are you going to tie your economy to? The world is being split into two parts, the US-NATO “garden” and the rest of the world, 85% jungle. The jungle is growing. The garden isn’t growing because its philosophy is not industrialization. Its philosophy is to make monopoly rents, meaning rents that you make in your sleep without producing value. You just have a privilege of a right to collect money on a monopoly technology that you have.
But China and Russia are way ahead of the United States in most of the growth technologies that we’re talking about, not yet in the ultraviolet etching of computer chips, but in many areas.
So you’re having the whole shift of technological advance move away from North America and the United States, where it was ever since World War I, to Russia and China.
How is the United States going to cope with the rest of the world industrializing and not needing any contact with the United States?
President Biden keeps saying China is our enemy. Ultimately, our military says we’re going to have war with China within two or three years. We’re at war with Russia right now in the Ukraine. That’s our objective, war.
But the rest of the world, essentially, its response is not a mirror image of this, is not to say, well, we can go to war. We’re going to have Russia fighting Europe.
Just in the last few days, you had numerous American military magazines and especially European spokesmen saying, if we lose in Ukraine, Russia is going to march right through Poland and Romania, right to retake Germany. It’s going to conquer Europe, and maybe it won’t even stop in England.
Well, that’s just nonsense. The reality is that Russia and China don’t need Europe anymore.
They don’t need the United States. Whereas under the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright said, America is the unique country. It’s the necessary country.
The fact is that the rest of the world not only finds America unnecessary, but America and its NATO allies to be the major threat to their own prosperity. So they’re essentially splitting into their own world. And the BRICS group is expanding its trade relations, its investment relations, and especially its financial clearing and monetary operations to be independent of the dollar, de-dollarizing, and certainly independent of the euro, which seems to have no visible means of support right now, and going their own way.
Now, that is exactly what has led the United States to push Israel [essentially] to follow Netanyahu’s belligerence, because the United States says, We realize we’re losing power.
We know that it’s really not a stalemate. We know that we’ve lost the chance for world dominance. We may be re-elected by telling people, you know, it doesn’t really matter.
But we know that it does matter. The last chance we have to assert American power is military. And the main military prize is the Near East now, just as it was after 9-11, when Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld pressed for an invasion of Iraq to begin grabbing its soil and to essentially create America’s foreign legion in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda Iraq. So now America has two armies that it’s using to fight in the Near East, the ISIS/al-Qaeda foreign legion (Arabic-speaking foreign legion) and the Israelis. The plan is—and America is willing to fight to the last Israeli, just as it’s willing—it’s trying to fight to the last Ukrainian in order to make this final grab of the Near East in fighting Iran.
This is a crazy idea, but it seems that that’s exactly what is being planned.
General Petraeus, who lost the war in Afghanistan, has said, we’ve got to conquer Iran. That’s going to be—we can regain all the power that we’ve lost by attacking Iran. And so now it looks like President Biden is hoping to make a political comeback by saying, Well, we may not have blocked Russia and Ukraine, but at least we’ve conquered the Near East.
But the way in which it’s conquering it [somehow has] become a catalyst to make the whole global majority, the whole rest of the world, especially Africa, South America, and South Asia, to think, Wait a minute, what’s happening in Israel and Palestine today is exactly what happened to us at our beginning.
In the United States, what did the Americans do? The White people came, the Anglo-Saxons and the other Europeans, and they killed 90% of the Indians, drove them out, isolated them, put them in basically concentration camps. And then when they found out that there was oil under these concentration camps, they essentially murdered the Indians there or drove them out to grab the oil.
Same thing in Latin America. When the Spaniards came to Latin America, they grabbed the land, drew up land grants, and these land grants created latifundia, which has been the great problem of Latin America for the last five centuries, because it’s prevented Latin America from growing their own food. It’s fought against the indigenous population feeding itself to turn the land into export crops, largely under World Bank guidance for all of this.
Same thing in Africa. They say, wait a minute, what is happening in Israel is what happened to us, with the colonizing powers. This is what Germany did in Africa. It’s what the Dutch did in South Africa. It’s Germany in Namibia, the Dutch in South Africa, the English through Africa, and especially the French in its territories. All of this has occurred before.
And all of a sudden, just as Americans go to the movies and mourn more for the Westerns, they’re cheering for the Indians against the cavalry. You’re having the rest of the world cheering for the underdog because the underdog is who they were. The underdog is them today.
And this idea is turning into a feeling of, Let’s throw off all of the barriers to colonialism.
Let’s start with French Africa, which we’re throwing off the French there. We’re not going to let French banks, French mineral companies, mining companies, French oil companies simply take all of our wealth because they conquered it five centuries ago. We can identify with the—we know what the Palestinians are fighting for.
And yet, in a way, they’re also saying, well, wait a minute, look at what Israel’s doing.
Israel says, God gave us this land. We used to have it. Well, the South Americans and Africans and Asians are saying, Well, this is our land, but we never left it. We’re still on the land. And even though we’re on the land, we’re still locked up, like Israel is treating the Palestinians. We don’t have to live this way. We can decolonize.
And the whole split of the world and the turning towards the China, Russia, Iran, BRICS
access is an attempt to reverse, undo, and roll back the whole colonial expansion that’s occurred over the last five centuries.
HAIPHONG: You just gave an incredible summary in breaking down the interconnections of these developments, and I wanted to, given that the Near East, West Asia, is so “hot” right now.
Iran just launched numerous strikes in Erbil, in Iraq, against a Mossad headquarters, as well as other targets locating certain terrorist groups that Israel supported. There are reports now of Pakistan, also in northern Pakistan.
There also is the situation with regard to Yemen, the Red Sea crisis that is ongoing. The Ansar Allah movement has just hit an American ship. There’s constant activity there. And of course, there’s still the conflict you mentioned, the fighting going on in Gaza, the brutal attack on the people of Palestine that has been correctly labeled a genocide.
And here’s what Joseph Nye had to say, and I’ll kick it back to you, Michael. He said it with regard to U.S. soft power. In that Financial Times article, he said, The U.S., even so, can seem powerless. It has failed to convince its ally, Israel, to act with restraint in Gaza. Could it have done so in the past? It’s not clear they could have done it 20 years ago. George W. Bush intimated in 1991 that American aid could be cut and that they may have helped to stimulate the Oslo process, but that didn’t bring about two states. Israel is not only, not the only ally that has proved quite capable of resisting the U.S., pointing to Saudi Arabia and others. For the moment, Israel is hurting its own soft power and by extension hurting American soft power.
Kick it back to you, Michael.
HUDSON: This is the big lie that America is trying to promote. The idea that, the pretense that when Blinken goes to talk to Netanyahu, he says, when you drop the next bombs and kill the next 20,000 Gaza-era Palestinians, please be gentle with them. Please obey the laws of war and stop bombing the ambulances, stop bombing the hospitals.
That’s all public relations crap. The reality is that he’s telling Netanyahu to go forward.
It’s America. All these bombs that are dropping are made in America and sent to Israel to drop. Every week, America is saying, Here is a new delivery of bombs. Go to it. Here is billions of dollars more for you to get by while you’ve drafted your working population into the army. America is pushing Israel.
Beginning 50 years ago, I used to travel to work with Netanyahu’s main Mossad and now National Security Advisor, Uzi Arad. I remember, I think I’ve mentioned before on one occasion, we were going to Japan and stopped off in San Francisco for some discussions.
An army officer came up, threw his arms around Uzi and said, you Israelis are our landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Well, that was 50 years ago.
Last week in the New York Times, I hear exactly the same phrase. Israel is our aircraft carrier. To the United States, Israel is America’s Ukraine in the Near East. It’s the United States that is pushing Israel to goad first Lebanon and then Iran into doing something that will justify a huge American attack, trying to do to Iran what Hillary Clinton did to Libya, utterly destroying it and destroying the population. In the process, grabbing its gold supply, we don’t know what’s happened to that, installing ISIS as its foreign legion in as much of Libya as possible and grabbing the Libyan oil supply.
In the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal and on TV, whenever they talk about Hamas or Hezbollah, they don’t say Hamas and Hezbollah. They say “Iran-backed Hamas”,
“Iran-backed Hezbollah”. They don’t talk about the Yemeni army, the Houthis. They say the “Iranian-backed Houthis”. There is a huge public relations push to convince the American population that Iran is the big enemy and President Biden says again and again that Iran is the enemy. The army, Petraeus, and the neocons have said from the very beginning, Iraq and Syria are merely the dress rehearsal for where we really want to go, Iran.
Their hatred of Iran stems from the fact that they overthrew the Iranian government of Mosaddegh back in the 1950s, along with British help as usual. And they’re sure that, well, we’ve hurt you so much that we’re sure you must hate us. And since we know you hate us because of what we’ve done to you, we’ve got to attack you because we’ve made you an enemy by overthrowing your government when we grabbed your oil and put in the Shah that ran a murderous torture regime for a few decades in Iran. Well, that basically is the 7
American policy that is goading it into a war that probably will be more disastrous for the United States than the war in Ukraine was.
At least in Ukraine, all the Americans lost were Ukrainians. And I guess they had a few mercenary troops that they hired over there. But in the Near East, they’re going to lose a lot more than it was at stake in just Ukraine. They’ll probably lose Israel’s role as a landed aircraft carrier. And in fact, they’re going to lose a lot of their own floating aircraft carriers that are near there. And they’ve already lost control of the Red Sea and the oil gulf, basically, between Iran and Egypt.
And there’s also a possibility that they’ll even lose the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Because even though in the Arab Spring, the Americans pulled a “color revolution”, Arab Spring, where they replaced the hated Egyptian President Mubarak with his own protege, Sisi, who is now running it. Sisi is totally in the US pockets. And yet, the Egyptian population, needless to say, being largely Arabic, is supporting Gaza, not the United States.
Similarly, in Saudi Arabia. Here, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine were in the process of making a rapprochement, actually an alliance with Israel, along sort of the same lines that Greece had been making with Israel for a Mediterranean military force. Well, now much of the Saudi population is Palestinian. They’ve found jobs in Saudi Arabia, and they’re outraged at Saudi Arabia’s trying to sit on the fence at the same time that it has joined the BRICS.
It realizes that all of its foreign reserves are held hostage by the United States. What’s going to be more important to Saudi Arabia? Fighting to protect the Islamic population under attack, or saving its own reserves that are kept in the United States, not to help Saudi Arabia at all.
Same thing with Egypt.
The population there, between Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, these were the main American bastions in the Near East. And now it’s in danger of losing them if, in the case of war, they’re under tremendous political pressure and instability.
And further to the West in Africa, you have the former French colonies also being Islamic.
You can imagine, you know, they’re breaking away not only from France and supporting the rest of Africa, Central Africa, from breaking away from France, but essentially moving into an alliance with the BRICS countries, with Russia and China.
So all of a sudden, the American decision to go to war with Russia in Ukraine after the 2015 Maidan massacre and regime change, putting in the neo-Nazis, you’re having the fighting in Israel. And those two US-sponsored attacks have had the exact opposite effect of what the United States politicians promised. Just as they promised that Russia would break up and essentially the economy would crash under the sanctions and under the force of war, they believed that Israel’s army was so strong that it was going to simply be able to wipe out Hamas.
And the big fighting — there’s not a word of this in the United States press — but the big fighting is on the West Bank. Netanyahu is saying, well, here while they’re all looking at what we’re bombing the civilians and the hospitals and the ambulances and starving Gaza, we’ve distracted the world and we can now wipe out the Arabs on the West Bank and move right into Syria on the Golan Heights. And apparently the United States has promised Israel that it can take whatever it wants of Syria, which it’s still opposing.
We don’t know what Russia is going to do in all of this. Russia, China have been completely silent in all of this. And I can understand they’re silent. China has moved naval ships into the area because it’s itself is very dependent on the Red Sea and the sea lanes to oil in Saudi Arabia.
When the United States keeps saying, threatening, oh, the Yemenis are going to bomb ships there and block the trade, that’s what they want. The United States realizes that if they can goad Yemen and Iran into blocking the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf, this will indeed stop the oil trade. And it’s true that as Yves Smith pointed out in Naked Capitalism today, the sea lanes to Saudi Arabia were closed for many years after the 1967 war. They were closed numerous times for many months. And it’s not unthinkable that they’re closed. But that was then.
Now, if you close them, it will be the main energy buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that is, from the United States point of view, that will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international order.
So you’re having the United States basically play the only tactic that it can actually use.
It can’t use the tactic to say, “We’re the growing economy and you want to trade with us, not with China and Russia,” because they’re growing faster than the U.S. and Europe. They don’t really have anything to offer except the ability to disrupt foreign trade and foreign monetary and financial systems and agree to stop disrupting it if other countries will simply let the United States be the unipolar decision maker.
And I should have added the dimension before when we were talking about China and Russia and the Siberian development. The Eurasian countries have one great advantage over the United States and Europe. The United States and Europe have essentially privatized what was the whole public infrastructure system. And being privatized, they’re now natural monopolies. And they’re run in the way that, say, Thames Water is run in England. They’re run as monopolies that are under-investing and simply using a choke-hold to increase their monopoly rents, which they report as profits.
But China, Russia, Asian countries have kept the basic infrastructure—transportation, education, health care, communications—as public utilities. And they are investing, they are run by engineers, industrial engineers, not financial engineers. And they are run not only much more efficiently, but they don’t have the financial overhead and the monopoly rent overhead that plagues privatized infrastructure. So the cost of production in the non-neoliberalized world, I guess we can call it the world moving towards socialism, is so much more efficient than the neoliberal financialized West that you can see the magnetic pull of Africa and South America.
And as it happens, these are also the main raw material suppliers of the world. So if the United States and Europe don’t have raw materials, don’t produce their own oil, except what the Europeans have to pay enormous markups to American producers, you’re going to have Europe looking pretty much like post-Soviet Latvia and Estonia. The population is going to emigrate. They’re going to shrink. You’re going to have a flowering of interaction throughout all of Eurasia and Africa.
And essentially, the United States can try to stop this by triggering a new oil war in the Near East. But that’s really the last gasp. It’s very unlikely that this is going to lead Taiwan to say, Well, you know, we’re going to follow Ukraine and Israel and you can fight to the last Taiwanese, just as you’re fighting to the last Ukrainian, the last Israeli. I think that the United States is creating a turmoil that is demonstrating to the other world the need for essentially, I won’t call it an iron curtain, but for it to go its own way and for a break in economic systems.
And as President Putin has said again and again, this is a civilizational war. It’s a war to say in what direction is civilization going to go? Is it going to be towards neo-feudalism, back toward feudalism, which is the neoliberal rent-seeking 1%? Or is it going to be towards where industrial capitalism was originally evolving towards, towards socialism and towards raising living standards instead of imposing IMF financial austerity on the dollar block? So that’s the choice that America is seeing in the Near East and in other countries right now.
Are you going to have a future of austerity or essentially prosperity and economic growth?
HAIPHONG: I don’t think there’s a better way to connect all of those developments, especially with regard to what’s happening in the Near East, or what some call the Middle East, or what others call West Asia. I mean, the clashes are escalating. There’s clashes even between Egypt and Israel, which is almost unheard of.
With everything that you said, you’re saying that this is not going to work at all, that the United States won’t be able to wrestle control as it is seeking in the region. How do you see this playing out? Maybe we can close on this point, given that it’s not going to work.
And if it’s not going to work, then what other options do the United States and maybe the broader collective West have? Because you’ve outlined it perfectly, this is an economic war, this is a war for economic dominance and control. So will it just crumble on its own, or will the United States and whoever it can drag along with it, you know, escalate and maneuver in a manner that we should all be aware of?
HUDSON: The United States has one dynamic more than any other country of the world, and that is rage. That is the feeling that you have in Washington now. Not only rage, but as with most rage, it’s combined with fear. The Democrats fear that they’re going to lose the election and that Donald Trump is going to come in and clean up the FBI police state and to get rid of the CIA. That’s basically what he’s pledged to do, the deep state.
So the deep state is worried that it’s going to be, not that the United States is going to be left to stagnate, but that they themselves, their control of the United States will stagnate.
And the deep state is willing to destroy the U.S. economy. The Democratic Party, since Clinton, has the objective of destroying the U.S. economy in order to benefit the control of the 1% over the 99%. And it’s willing to use military war to fight, to escalate in the Near East, to escalate in Ukraine, and to escalate, presumably, in the China Sea to somehow provoke and essentially saying, Well, we’re going to go to war. We’re going to have a grab bag because who wants to live in a world that we don’t control?
Well, just, you know, this is like what Russia said when America was threatening to atom bomb it with its withdrawal from the arms agreements. Russia said, Don’t think that we won’t fight back. Who wants to live in a world without Russia? Well, the United States government is saying, who wants to live in America that we can’t control? That the banks and the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical complex and basically the finance-monopolist sector can’t control. If we can’t control it, we’re willing to have the whole country go under. That’s really what it is. And they’re using the control of the press for any of this.
For instance, on Saturday and Sunday in Washington, there were huge demonstrations against the attacks on the Palestinians. Not a word of this in the New York Times or not a word of it on television. There’s not a word of what’s happening in the Near East or what President Putin and President Xi are saying in the news at all. It’s as if the world is already divided into a visible world, the deep state world and the invisible world, reality, of the 95% or 85%.
The fight politically towards November is, are people going to be able to really believe that the Biden administration is helping the economy instead of defending the CIA, the FBI, the national security state, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical complex, real estate, and Wall Street against the population by de-industrializing? Or has all this been a detour that’s made us poor? That’s going to be the question.
And the fact that you’re already having on social media, blocking of any criticism of Israel or the United States, you’re having a kind of control here that is a very similar control that you’re having in the Ukraine.
HAIPHONG: It really is mind blowing how quickly all of these developments have, in many senses, spiraled out of control. Even if we can look at this in years, but even in just the last few months, of course, with October 7th being another breaking point.
HUDSON: I think you should say October 2nd. That was the destruction of the attempt to destroy the mosque. It’s October 2nd that triggered all of this. It was the Israeli attack on the mosque that was intended to say, We are going to destroy the Islamic presence in Palestine so that it can be entirely non-Islamic. That was the declaration of war. So don’t be suckered into the New York Times saying it’s all October 7th.
It began the week earlier, just as in Ukraine. The Ukraine war did not begin with Russia moving to protect its population, its Russian speaking population in Donetsk and Luhansk.
It began not only with Maidan, but with the Ukrainian army shelling, bombing civilian apartment buildings and civilians in the Russian speaking territories and refusing to pay any social security or healthcare to the Russian speaking territories and banning the Russian language. Russia was the country under attack, not the attacker.
So again, you have to be very careful as when you date the beginning of this. And the Americans want to date all wars as when after it attacks and when other countries are protecting themselves. They call other countries protecting themselves an attack on the United States. Yeah.
HAIPHONG: October 7th, February 22nd, 2022. I mean, it’s a tactic. So it’s a great point that you brought up.
And maybe, Michael, we could close our conversation with China because China, you mentioned earlier in your analysis. And, you know, I believe China is the end game here. And there are a few developments. You mentioned China surpassing, in terms of car exports, car manufacturing, Japan, and becoming number one in the world. There and I’m going to pull up the articles as you speak.
There’s also the boards of the major auto manufacturers, the monopolies in a state of shock over BYD, the car manufacturer in China that has essentially taken over the world market with regard to electric vehicles. And there’s also reports that China is going to meet its 5
percent growth target. Despite the fact I’m sure you’ve seen this, Michael, there is collapse after collapse after collapse theory being bandied about in the mainstream media by the deep state. “China’s on the collapse. China’s economy is flailing. It’s declining. It’s crashing.”
So, Michael, I’m going to pull up the pieces as you go. But perhaps you can give your take, your reaction to this development and the notion of China being the end game for the neocons and the monopoly system of post-industrial capitalism, finance capitalism that you write and analyze so much about.
HUDSON: Well, there are a number of reasons why China is becoming the main car producer. This is led by the shift towards electric vehicles. And there’s one key dimension of electric vehicles.
Number one is they’re electric. You need electricity. How are you going to produce the electricity: with American oil, with Russian oil? How are you going to make it with atomic power? The other thing is once you get the electricity into the car, how are you going to get a battery to run the car and not have to keep stopping at the filling station even more often than you have to go to the bathroom?
Well, the answer is you need lithium for that. And China has been controlling most of the lithium sites. And you also need to have computerized vehicles. You need all sorts of materials that are cobalt, the rare earths that also are controlled with China. And China has gained control of most of the metallurgy, of the refining of the key metals that are needed for automobile production and for other industrial production.
So you have China as an integrated economy producing all of these. And you have the West becoming dependent on achieving these same metals. Now, let’s look at what could have happened back in 1990. Suppose there had not been a Cold War. Suppose that America actually in 1990, when the Soviet Union disbanded, America would have disbanded NAT and really had a mutual kind of growth with open, continued international trade.
Well, without the world splitting into the two parts, somehow there wouldn’t have been enough motivation for other countries to explicitly make the civilizational break from neoliberalism to socialism. There would have been a kind of social democracy in Asia, but it could have been the social democracy going the oligarchic way that it’s gone in, say, Sweden, which used to be called a great social democracy. And now it’s the most unequal country in Europe. You could have had slowly that development, but there would have been world trade and anybody could have bought the various metals, lithium, the rare earths. There would have been oil. There would have been continued trade and the whole world economy could have grown.
All of that was broken up by the American insistence that if we can’t control world trade, there won’t be world trade. If we can’t control world international finance and make the whole world use the U.S. dollar that we can print on computers and print and issue to finance all of the military spending to encircle the rest of the world with military bases, if we can’t do that, then there won’t be a world financial system because the United States believed that without the dollar, there couldn’t be de-dollarization because there was no alternative.
They’re tricked into the Margaret Thatcher type slogan. There is no alternative. And they really believe that the rest of the world could not prosper without using the dollar. They could not prosper without selling off and privatizing their public utilities and making natural monopolies that would be bought up by American buyers printing the dollars to say, we’ll print the dollars and we’ll buy your transportation system, your communication system and your factories. They couldn’t believe that there was an alternative to neoliberalism. And yet you’re seeing this. They couldn’t believe that if they simply bombed another country, that somehow the population of that country would say, Oh, we don’t want to be bombed.
We’re going to overthrow our government and support a government that supports you so that you won’t bomb our country anymore.
Instead, the effect of bombing a country when the United States does it is the same as bombing a country when any other country does it. It galvanizes the population together to oppose the country that’s bombing it and defend the country that’s under attack. So the whole image that the United States has is, there’s only one actor in the world, and that’s us. And we can smash other countries. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll upset the chessboard and just wreck the whole game.
So the United States is acting in the role of wrecker and other countries are in the role of builder. And the whole global majority is saying, What side do you want to be on, the wreckers or the builders?
And you can look at Ukraine as an example of how the United States would like Russia, China, and the Arab countries to exist. You would suspend elections once you have your guys, your president in there. You would become the most corrupt country in your region, as Ukraine has been. You will ban local languages and religions that are not Judeo-Christian.
You will essentially prevent strikes.
And you know the joke, the aristocrats. A stage group of actors talks about a family coming on and doing all sorts of horrendously devious sexual acts and incest, and it goes on and on. The producer who’s being offered this act and said, what do you call this act? And the answer is, the aristocrats.
Well, what do you call the Ukrainian act of suspending elections, banning foreign languages, assassinating critics? We call it democracy. Well, that’s hilarious. That’s indeed what America calls it. America has two models of democracy, Ukraine and Israel. Again and again in the press, it says Ukraine is the model of democracy that we want for what used to be the whole Soviet Union. And you have Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania clapping, and we want the democracy in Israel. Israel is the only democratic country in the Near East.
We want Israel to be the model for the Near East.
Well, what are they saying? That there won’t be any more Arabs in the Near East? That they’ll all be Americans with dual citizenship? This is what it’s all come to. We’re living in an Orwellian world is trying to deter people’s consciousness from realizing the reality of work and the dynamics that are at work. And how long can you convince people that they’re really not doing well just because the 1% is doing well? How can you convince the people that America is really a model leader when it’s trying to destroy the whole rest of the world instead of helping it, as at least it could pose to be doing back in 1945 when World War II ended?
You’re having really unwinding of the whole world system of the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations, the whole diplomatic system of the world that was put together in 1945 is now being outmoded. And you could see the inability of the United Nations to cope with the war in the Near East, to cope with the war in Ukraine. This is the death knell of the old world. And you’re seeing a new world being created spontaneously, not ideologically, but basically spontaneously in an ad hoc fashion by China, Russia, and the 99%.
HAIPHONG: Yes. Yeah, yes, indeed, Michael. And, you know, final thoughts on the fact that given all that you said, and this reality, I mean, it’s this myth and reality, the myth, the idea, that China’s collapsing, you know, China’s economy is in decline. And yet you have not only these recent developments, but you also have these broader developments that you speak of.
So can you just give a sense, you’ve been to China, you’ve studied China’s economy very deeply. Just to close, help our audience here understand why China’s economy is able to industrialize like it is.
Europe is about to go through this probe. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, this probe of the, you know, Chinese auto manufacturing, especially around electric vehicles, because of these nefarious state subsidies. Can you talk about this, talk about China’s economy, how it works, and why Europe and the United States, of course, has been waging economic war as well, why they would resort to what seems to be counterproductive measures?
HUDSON: Well, the key to understanding the West is neoliberalism is privatization of basic needs and basic utilities. The most important public utility throughout history has always been the ability to create money and credit.
And what China has that no other country had was its central bank created the own money.
And when the government creates money through the treasury, spending money into the economy, it spends money in order to actually build things, mainly to build real estate, to house the Chinese, but also to build the high speed railroads, to provide an educational system, universities all over China, to build communications.
Other countries, such as the United States, don’t have this. Money is created, especially in the United States, by commercial banks, and they create money not to finance new construction of factories or new investment of any sorts. Banks lend money in the West against collateral that is already in place. You can go to a bank to get money to buy a building that exists, an office building, although the office building’s prices are all collapsing now. You can go and borrow money to buy a whole company. That’s what private capital does. It buys money to buy Sears. It drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and fires the [workers].
It can buy Toys R Us, drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and it’s gone. You can buy companies and loot them and essentially close them down and turn factories into gentrified buildings for the 1% of financial operatives who are doing the looting.
But banks in the West do not fund public utilities, and once you cut the taxes and force a government into deficit, you then finance the deficit by privatizing your roads, turning them into toll roads. You privatize your postal system. You privatize your health care system so that there’s not much health care anymore, as you have in England, for instance, the crisis that you’re having in English medicine and hospitals and privatization. You make the whole economy in the West look like England after Margaret Thatcher, where people who are actually wage earners can’t afford to live in London anymore. That’s for the foreign investors or the people who work in the financial sector. The wage earners have to live in suburbs to take privatized rail transportation.
In the United States, for instance, Greyhound, the bus system, was just bought out by private equity. They did exactly what Stagecoach, England’s largest bus company, did in England. They sold off the bus terminal that was in the center of the city that people would go to to catch the buses, and they sold it for gentrified real estate and told people, there’s now a parking lot we have on the outside of the city. You go and wait in the parking lot.
We hope it’s not raining or too cold or snowing, but we don’t have a terminal anymore. Well, you can just imagine this way of doing things. It turns into a race to the bottom.
Well, China, by [keeping control of] finance, really controls who is going to get the credit, and credit is really the economic planner. Neoliberalism in the West says the government shouldn’t do the planning. Wall Street should do the planning because Wall Street is what provides the credit that determines who is going to get the resources and what they’re going to do with it.
Well, Wall Street gives the credit to financial engineers that are trying to make money by increasing stock prices, increasing capital gains, and making money financially.
It’s true that China has made many billionaires. That was part of the Let 100 Flowers Grow, but now that it’s had that spontaneous growth, now it’s seen what forms work and what forms don’t work. Now it’s consolidating the economy to essentially create credit to finance tangible industrial growth, tangible infrastructure growth, tangible agricultural modernization, and general improvement of living standards.
The whole aim of the Chinese economy is growth, not looting and downsizing and a smash-up of corporate raiding. There’s no corporate raiding going on in China. There’s not going to be any financial interest that’s going to buy Huawei or the other Chinese developers. You don’t have the parasitical financial class that have become the central economic planners of the United States.
Because that’s what libertarianism is. Libertarians want a centralized economy, not run by government but run by Wall Street and the financial sector. The libertarians are essentially the advocates of what normally used to be called fascism, central planning by the wealthy financial and monopoly sector against the population at large.
You have the Republican and the Democratic Party both supporting a dismantling of government just with a different kind of rhetoric, but the same policies, the same military policies and the same anti-industrial policies. China, Russia and their now more and more BRICS countries are rejecting that whole self-defeating neo-feudal path of growth.
HAIPHONG: Well, Michael, you’ve been very generous with your time today. I really appreciate you giving this what was an incredible rundown of all the interconnections, all the developments geopolitically that have, at their base, economic roots. And so, Michael, thank you so much.
Where can people find you? I have your website in the video description.
HUDSON: My website is michael-hudson.com and there’s a Patreon list associated with that. But all my articles are on my website and the other sites that I publish on, Naked Capitalism and Counterpunch and other such sites.
HAIPHONG: Well, definitely check out his work. He has a number of books that are key reads. So, Michael, it was great to be with you. Thanks so much for joining me today and I’ll talk to you again soon.
HUDSON: Thanks for having me. We were lucky politically, but the whole world was at a turning point this week, it looks like.
Western Cold War win? Israel’s collapse, Iran’s rise, China’s dominance & Russia’s conquest prove otherwise
Cold War II includes 4 blocs, not only 2
with thanks to Ramin Mazaheri via Ramin’s Substack
The Cold War was always only “cold” for the two main combatants – the USSR and the USA. For everyone else it was as hot as blood, and nowhere more so than in the attempted colonisation of Palestine.
It’s often forgotten that the 1947 creation of Israel is permeated with the West’s three primary Cold War goals: fending off de-colonisation (failure), destroying the rise of socialism (failure) and entrenching as many far-right reactionaries as possible to foment the 1%-er ideology of liberal democracy (successful).
The propping up of Israel immediately after the end of World War II didn’t happen by accident: it was the Western beachhead to try and ensure Western control of oil, French domination of West and North Africa, and Anglo-American control of the Indian Ocean and its passageways.
Israel is now crumbling internally and externally, and their atrocious military and diplomatic decisions ensure that it’s not a viable colony for much longer. The writing is on the wall, and the biggest graffiti reads: The West lost the Cold War.
We can imagine the incredible grudging with which The New York Times two longtime Middle East correspondents – David Sanger and Stephen Erlanger – were forced to publish the following analysis on January 7th:
“‘I see Iran as well positioned, and it has checkmated the U.S. and its interests in the Mideast,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, aka the British Royal Institute of International Affairs. Vakil isn’t being lawyerly (forgive a Persian language joke) – the Beltway, Wall Street and 10 Downing Street have been forced to admit that they have been outplayed by a revolution expressly unobsessed with earthly profit.
The fundamental Achilles’ heel of Western thought – and elevated to a global scale by pretentiously aristocratic and arrogantly bourgeois Liberal Democracy – is that the natives are simply incapable of any progress.
It’s a belief which has existed for over five centuries (and which allegedly permitted the genocide of so many peoples) and it explains why the West has been repeatedly caught off-guard by military advancements by Russia, urban planning advancements by China and nuclear technology by Iran, to name just a few key areas. The non-West is playing for survival, but the West merely plays for the profits of a few.
This Achilles’ heel is destined to be endlessly pierced and poisoned by that arrow of the 99% – socialist-inspired democracy, which demands more progress, more distribution of wealth and more social peace.
Those four major Western defeats helps explain the world’s new political architecture.
But the same principle of “hands off the big guys” applies in our new Cold War II, only the number of “hands off” combatants has increased to four: there will be no direct attacks on the US, Russia, China or Iran by these four adversaries, and this fact was relayed by one of those same top propagandists of The New York Times (Erlanger) in an article on January 14:
“Yet in Ukraine, nearly two years in, a similar, unspoken set of restraints has worked – somewhat to the amazement of even President Biden’s closest aides. Early on, Mr. Biden directed the military to do anything it could to support Ukraine – as long as American forces did not take on Russia’s directly, whether in land, in the air or on the Black Sea.”
The article relates what appears clear to many: Washington and Tehran are going out of their way to warn each other of attacks so that their own citizens don’t get killed and spark World War III. There’s no red phone between them, but implicit is the idea that both are too powerful to attack each other directly. The idea of a US attack on Chinese nationals is similarly considered impossible.
This is a huge development in modern history.
It means there’s a new Cold War pitting the West versus China, Russia and Iran – everywhere else, including Israel, is part of the front lines again.
The conflict in Palestine is unfolding as I predicted: Iranian allies (falsely called “Iranian proxies” by the West) are doing damage to Israeli and Western imperialism long before Iran ever gets directly involved, and also that we remain just one major unexpected development away from a free Palestine.
Hezbollah is so strong they are not even being tested – instead it’s the Houthis who have proven unexpectedly successful in the resistance. Anglo-American power has rested on the navy for over two centuries – following 25 years of attacks on the progressive French Revolution by reactionary, monarchical England – but Yemen is closing off the Mediterranean from the Indian Ocean for Western interests.
In the January 14 article the illustrious Times reporters published a quote from a retired US Navy Admiral which illustrates both reckless wishful thinking and foolish journalistic analysis, and I am referring to after when the Admiral said, “the Houthi rebels, who are really just Iranian pirates”. He continued, “‘Our experience with Somali pirates shows years ago that you can’t just play defense; you have to go ashore to solve a problem like this.”
Yemen’s involvement isn’t something that can be stopped – they are not like Japan in 1853, to be cowed, “opened” and converted to a lifetime of Western-aping via the arrival of a few gunboats. Pained Western shipping giants, like the Dutch, would like to sabre-rattle that they’re about to disembark and fight in Yemen – a war theatre possibly even more treacherous than even Afghanistan – but the fact is that they’re just going to have pay more to ship tulips until they rein in Israel’s genocidal desires.
The idea that the Houthis have no agency in their relationship with Iran stems from the false mindset of the capitalist-imperialist colonist: i.e. one who wages total societal control to aim at war ends, which is the basis of “totalitarianism”, and who assumes the natives can do nothing without their consent. The mistake here is assuming that Iran is capitalist-imperialist when it’s clearly been fighting that awful ideology since 1979.
Iran has no grand control; did not know about Hamas’ counter-attack on January 7; simply provides support for local grassroots struggles when those struggles are politically righteous. The “guidance” is mainly political and technical – give a man a drone and he can stop shipping for a day, but teach him how to make a drone and he can stop shipping for… who knows how long the Houthis can keep this up? They’ve already resisted American bombs – launched by the House of Saud – for over a decade, after all.
Cold War I wrested away Eastern Europe for the Western 1%’s colonisation schemes – this is the clear result of the European Union. Cold War II finds impregnable and allied China, Russia and Iran – and their loud or quiet allies across the Global South – facing an American superpower in decline with their vassals in turmoil. How can capitalism, imperialism and elitist Liberal Democracy become rejuvenated enough to defeat any of the ideologically-supercharged three, or even supposedly apolitical Yemeni “pirates”?
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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of my articles is approved and appreciated.
Le Pakistan respecte l’intégrité territoriale et la souveraineté de l’Iran, a déclaré le ministère pakistanais des Affaires étrangères après avoir
L’article Le Pakistan porte des frappes sur l’Iran et assure respecter sa souveraineté est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Thanks to Karl at karlof1’s Geopolitical Gymnasium
One of the main points made by Pro-Resistance analysts as well as those who’re genuinely neutral is the degree of predictability regarding the Zionist and Outlaw US Empire/NATO responses to Al-Aqsa Flood, thus the Axis-of-Resistance as they call themselves can react appropriately as they know their opponents’s chess moves before they make them—a very important strategic advantage that almost always results in defeat of the opponent in chess. Those who have followed Alastair Crooke’s analysis of West Asia and Ukraine’s happening will be familiar with that. One piece of evidence that’s part of the long ongoing context to the West Asia’s struggle to become liberated is the Iranian missile strikes in response to the Zionist/Empire Terrorist Foreign Legions attacks against Iranians. We saw what happened after Trump had Soleimani assassinated in 2000—very precise and powerful Iranian missiles wrecked a portion of a key airbase while not killing anybody because it gave warning. The attack today targeted a Zionist collaborator who thought his safe house was safe since it was adjacent to the US Consulate in Ebril—4 Iranian missiles cancelled him, his family and his house without touching the Consulate. Another strike was carried out in Syria targeting a base of Terrorist Foreign Legion assets, but there’s little info now about that outcome. The point is Iran can conduct strikes when it desires, not when it’s forced. AND Iran has the capability to raze all US/NATO military bases in West Asia. Plus, the Ebril strike showed US AD incapable of deterring such an attack.
That event leads us to the next important item, Al-Mayadeen’s interview of military spokesman for the Iraqi Hezbollah Brigades Sayyed Jaafar Al-Husseini published 9 January 2024. Yes, that’s Iraqi, “To stand with Lebanon if Israelis attack: Iraqi Hezbollah Brigades”:
Solidarity and Liaison between the Iraqi and Palestinian Resistance
Al Mayadeen: Greetings and welcome to our esteemed audience everywhere [in the world] to this special interview with the military spokesperson of the Iraqi Kataib Hezbollah [Hezbollah Brigades], Sayyed Jaafar Al-Husseini.
Welcome, dear sir. Let’s get straight into the questions.
Since the onset of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, how would you assess your communication with the Palestinian Resistance Factions on all levels? Is it meticulous politically and in regards to on-field actions [militarily]?
Al-Husseini: In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Since the early days of the Al-Aqsa Flood battle and the criminal aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza or other areas of occupied Palestine, lines of communication have persisted. This communication was not born [now] at this stage but existed prior. However, after the Al-Aqsa Flood, this communication deepened and became a continuous and daily affair, both directly and in liaison with other brothers present in different places. This communication and these connections have become more cohesive than ever before.
Al Mayadeen: On what level? political and field [military] levels?
Al-Husseini: On all levels. We are talking about the military aspect, the political level, and even at the popular level. We are present and engaged in this communication, and we also aspire to be more proximate to Gaza in the coming stage.
Capacities of the Iraqi Resistance
Al Mayadeen: What are the capabilities of the Islamic resistance in Iraq? You announced targeting and hitting a site in the occupied territories with a precision-guided missile, as you mentioned, a developed cruise missile after the Islamic resistance in Iraq [umbrella term of Iraqi resistance factions including Kataib Hezbollah] had previously used one. What are the capabilities of the Islamic resistance in Iraq?
Al-Husseini: In regards to the capabilities of the Iraqi resistance, we have repeatedly emphasized that the capacities of the Iraqi resistance have become more robust, and abundant, and are certainly beyond what the enemy [Israel] might imagine.
We have addressed this in various media outlets, affirming that the resistance in Iraq has capabilities and capacities that perhaps only the Americans are aware of, as they have experienced them [firsthand] in some battles and confrontations [in some areas in Iraq]. However, at this stage, we have become more transparent about using the capabilities we employ.
The Iraqi resistance, after the [Al-Aqsa] Flood, launched operations, primarily targeting American bases inside Iraq and some bases in Syria. They used drones and short-range missiles, including [locally] upgraded [precision guided] short-range missiles in these operations.
In advanced stages, the resistance went beyond that and employed aircraft [drones] with longer ranges that reached the depth of the occupied territories, targeting vital targets within the [occupation] entity.
This includes “Eilat” [Umm al-Rashrash], targets in the Dead Sea, and vital targets even in the Mediterranean Sea that the resistance targeted using these aircraft [drones].
There are also other suitable weapons in our arsenal however it wouldn’t be smart to specify them at this time
[Also] other suitable weapons were employed, but it wouldn’t be smart to disclose the type of these weapons and the tactics used. However, [we can confirm] that the hand of the resistance has reached there [the Israeli occupation].
At this stage, the Iraqi resistance has, for the first time, employed short-range ballistic missiles, targeting prominent American bases such as Ain al-Assad and others.
Al Mayadeen: You targeted American bases in Iraq with ballistic missiles?
Al-Husseini: Yes, Ain al-Assad was one of the [US occupation] bases that were targeted by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq with short-range ballistic missiles. These operations are escalating, and so are the tactics.
The use of this type of weapons and missiles was initially reserved for certain bases and targets. [Prior] there were specific targets being hit by these [high-tier] missiles. However, afterward, the resistance commenced a new phase of escalation by using long-range missiles. We are talking about an upgraded cruise missile targeting a vital position in Haifa by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.
We [in the Iraqi resistance] are now proliferating our capabilities at this stage, but it won’t stop at this level.
[Contending] the scattered American bases and the plots of the [occupation] entity corresponds to the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people, whether in Gaza or elsewhere (Al-Husseini re-emphasizes the equation set by the Islamic resistance that “Israel” and the US will continue to be subjected to operations by the Iraqi resistance so long a ceasefire is not achieved in Gaza).
[The Israeli occupation] seems to be hellbent on escalating the conflict further and it seems determined to shed the blood of the Palestinians. As long as this enemy insists on that, we, as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, will continue to expand the geography of these operations [to widen the scale of the bank of targets] and as well as the nature of the targets [to opt for more sensitive targets]. Geography is not an obstacle…
Intensified aggression against Gaza to be met with escalation
Al Mayadeen: That’s what I was going to ask about. What do you mean by geographical expansion of targets?
Al-Husseini: The battle has erupted, and there is significant potential in it. Geography is open to us, and all American sites are [legitimate] targets for the Islamic resistance. We are talking about the American presence in the entirety of West Asia. The resistance is capable of reaching any point where Americans are present in West Asia, and this is by the grace of God. We are committed to that so long that the Zionist-American war machine persists in its crimes. We will persist in targeting Americans and those that coat-tail them.
Al Mayadeen: What do you mean by those coat-tailing the Americans?
Al-Husseini: To speak blatantly, there are some who support the Zionist Occupation subliminally [in our region]. Specifically, there are some Gulf Arabist [regimes], namely the [United Arab] Emirates which plays a very malicious role. We have heard of some reports about the UAE paving the way for a route into the Israeli occupation (as an alternative to the blockaded Red Sea route). From the UAE to Saudi Arabia through Jordan to reach the Israeli occupation.
If they choose to go through with this initiative, the [Iraqi] resistance will be faced with new options. Other options will be up on the table for the resistance to contend this form of support for the Israeli Occupation.
These countries will be subjected to whatever the resistance surmounts if they choose to go through with this initiative.
This is not to say that they [the aforementioned countries] do not currently play any malicious role: no. They do.
The days ahead of us may involve countries like those we have mentioned, Gulf countries. We are talking about the American bases in the Gulf, and we are talking about other regions. There will be a word for the resistance [regarding these bases] in due time.
Strategy: Ceasefire in Gaza and lifting the Blockade primary consideration
Al Mayadeen: Some hawkishly warn of American retaliation, and allow me to ask you here: Some fear that what is happening with the Islamic resistance in Iraq may come at a cost. Do you take into consideration these potential outcomes, or have you decided to engage in this epic and that’s the end?
Al-Husseini: To be clear and direct with you, anything might befall us now, talking about costs, retaliation, [vengeful] attacks whether targeting individuals, sites, or any party, we do not hyper fixate on these matters [currently].
We do not look at these matters. Before us, currently, there is one primary concern: that the occupation ceases committing massacres against our people in Palestine, that the siege on our people in Palestine is lifted, and that the prospect of displacing Palestinians is devoid [and extracted from political discourse].
I’d say the man is focused on the goal as are his compatriots. Contrast that deeply thought-out strategy with what Crooke describes as Biden’s “gut feeling” choices, what would be called Shoot from the hip—without aim or purpose. Crooke’s latest SCF essay, “Gut Feelings Make for Strategic Errors – U.S. Lured Into Battlescape in Gaza, Yemen and Now Iraq,” follows:
China and Russia have been remarkably quiet, watching carefully the global tectonic plates shifting around in response to the ‘two wars’ (Ukraine and Israel’s ‘multiwar’). Really it is not surprising; both states can sit back to simply watch Biden and his team persist with their strategic mistakes in Ukraine and in Israel’s multiple wars.
The interlacing of the two wars will, of course, shape the new era. There are substantive risks, but for now they can observe with comfort from afar as a climatic juncture in world politics unfolds, gradually raising the pace of the attrition to a circle of fire.
The point here is that Biden, at the centre of the storm, is no cool-headed Sun-Tzu. His politics are personal and highly visceral: As Noah Lanard has written in his forensic analysis of How Joe Biden Became America’s Top Hawk, his own team say it plainly: Biden’s politics is seated in his ‘kishkes’ – his guts.
That can be seen in the disdainful and graphic way in which Biden sneers at President Putin as an ‘autocrat’, and the way he talks about victims of the Hamas attack being massacred, sexually assaulted, and taken hostage, whilst “Palestinian suffering is left vague – if mentioned at all”. “I don’t really think he sees the Palestinians at all”, says Rashid Khalidi, Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.
There is a long and reputable history of leaders making the right spur of the moment decision from their unconscious, without careful rational calculous. In the ancient world this was a highly prized quality. Odysseus exuded it. It was called mêtis. But this ability was contingent on having a dispassionate temperament and an ability to see things ‘in the round’; to grasp both sides to a coin, we would say.
But what happens if, as Professor Khalidi implies, the ‘kishkes’ are filled with anger and bile; instinctive sympathy for Israel, fuelled by an outdated view of the Israeli domestic scene. “He just does not seem to acknowledge the humanity of [others]”, as a former Team Biden member put it to Lanard.
Well, mistakes – strategic mistakes – become inevitable. And these mistakes are luring the U.S. in – deeper and deeper (as the Resistance foresaw). Michael Knights, a scholar at the neo-con Washington Institute think-tank noted:
“The Houthis are high on their successes and will not be easy to deter. They are having the time of their lives, standing up to a superpower who probably cannot deter them”.
This comes on the back of an Ukraine war already reaching – or at – its foregone conclusion. Both in the U.S. and amongst its allies in Europe, it is recognised that Russia has prevailed overwhelmingly, and across all ‘domains of conflict’. There is next to no chance that this situation can be recouped, irrespective of money or fresh western ‘support’.
The Ukrainian military taste the bitter fruits of this fact daily. Many in Kiev’s ruling classes ‘get it’ too, but are frightened to speak out. The cadre of hardliners behind Zelensky however insist to press on with their delusion of mounting a new offensive.
It would be a kindness to ‘those about to die’ in another futile mobilisation for the West to call a halt. The endgame is inevitable: An agreement to end the conflict on Russia’s terms.
Ahhh, but do not forget Biden’s ‘kishkes’: This outcome would mean Putin ‘winning’ and Biden’s hope of a victory garland turning to ashes. The war must be kept going, even if its only achievement be to fire long-range missiles directly into the civilian cities of Russia (a war crime).
It is obvious where this is going. Biden is in hole that only can deepen. Can’t he stop digging? Some in America may wish he would, as the Democratic electoral prospects dim. But it seems probable that he can’t, for then his nemesis (Putin) would ‘win’.
Of course, his nemesis has already won.
On Israel, Lanard continues:
“ … Biden often has traced his unyielding support for Israel … to “a long, long discussion” with Henry “Scoop” Jackson – a notoriously hawkish Senator (once described as ‘more Zionist than the Zionists’).
“After Biden became vice-president, he stuck with his ‘no daylight” belief’: (‘that peace will only come from there being “no daylight” between Israel and the U.S.’). In a memoir published last year, Netanyahu wrote that Biden made his willingness to help clear from early on: “You don’t have too many friends here, buddy,” Biden reportedly said. “I’m the one friend you do have. So call me when you need to”.
In 2010, when Netanyahu infuriated Obama with a major settlement expansion while Biden was in Israel; Peter Beinart reported that whilst Biden and team wanted to handle the dispute privately, the Obama camp took an entirely different route: Secretary Clinton gave Netanyahu 24 hours to respond, warning: “If you do not comply – it might have unprecedented consequences on the bilateral relations – of the kind never seen before.”
“Biden was soon in touch with a stunned Netanayhu … Biden completely undercut the Secretary of State [Clinton] and gave [Netanyahu] a strong indication that whatever was being planned in Washington was hotheadedness – and [that] he could defuse it when he got back”.
When Clinton saw the transcript, she “realized she’d been thrown under the bus” by Biden, one official said. Beinart concluded:
“that during a critical period early in the Obama administration, when the White House contemplated exerting real pressure on Netanyahu to keep the possibility of a Palestinian state alive, Biden did more than any other cabinet-level official to shield Netanyahu from that pressure”.
Clearly such accounts put Biden to being viscerally to the Right of some in Netanyahu’s War Cabinet – “We’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel,” Biden said at a fundraiser this December; “Not a single thing”.
Such unwavering backing is a sure recipé for coming U.S. strategic errors – as Moscow, Tehran and Beijing will have surmised.
Former Israeli diplomat and current Washington insider, Alon Pinkas, considers that although an Israeli-Hizbullah war would be devastating for both sides, “why does it feel Inevitable?”
“Whilst Washington is wary of such a development … Israel seems resigned to the idea. So much so – that a Washington Post article quoted U.S. officials expressing “alarm”, and estimating that [Netanyahu] is encouraging escalation as a key to his political survival”.
Yet, what do Biden’s kishkes say to him? If an Israeli military operation to ‘move’ Hizbullah north of the Litani ‘feels’ inevitable to Pinkas; and with Israel ‘resigned to it’, would it not also be likely – given Biden’s unwavering backing for Israel – that Biden is somehow resigned to a war too?
What of the Washington Post report on Sunday that Biden has tasked his staff with preventing all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah?
That report – clearly purposefully leaked – was likely intended rather, to inoculate the U.S. from blame for complicity, should war in the North break out.
Was a quite different messaging being transmitted via Senator Lindsay Graham to Netanyahu at their meeting last Thursday – and to Mohamed Bin Salman (whom Graham met later at his desert tent) – just as in 2010, Biden was ‘on the quiet’ telling Netanyahu to ignore Obama’s messaging about the necessity for a Palestinian State?
(Senior U.S. figures are not wont to meet both with the Israeli PM and subsequently the Crown Prince without touching base with the White House command).
The key to understanding the complexity for launching military action in Lebanon lies with the need to view it from a wider perspective: From the perspective of the neo-cons, confronting Hizbullah invokes the pros and cons of a broader U.S. ‘war’ with Iran. Such a conflict would involve different and more explosive geopolitical and strategic aspects since both China and Russia are in strategic partnership with Iran.
U.S. Envoy Hochstein is in Beirut this week, and has been reportedly tasked with binding the Lebanese and Israeli sides to the provisions of the (never implemented) 2006 UNSC Resolution 1701.
The Lebanese government has proposed to the UN a road map for implementing 1701. The ‘map’ envisages finalising agreement on all thirteen disputed border points and proposes demarcating the boundary between Lebanon and Israel accordingly. But, as Pinkas points out, such a configuration of the issue is wholly misleading, for Resolution 1701 is not simply an unresolved territorial dispute in Lebanon. The major focus of Resolution 1701 was (and is) the disarmament and displacement of Hizbullah, yet the Lebanese government’s plan doesn’t mention Hezbollah at all, which poses clear questions about its realism and purpose.
Why would Hizbullah be persuaded to disarm, when Netanyahu, together with Defence Minister Gallant, have announced through a joint statement this weekend that “the war is not nearing its end: both in Gaza and on the northern borders” with Lebanon.
Gallant, last weekend, warned plainly enough that Israel will not tolerate the approximately 100,000 Israeli residents displaced from their homes in northern Israel and being prevented from returning home on account of Hizbullah’s threats. Should the Hochstein diplomatic solution not emerge (with Hizbullah disarmed and removed from the south), then Israel, Gallant promised, will take military action. “The hour glass will soon turn over”, he warned.
Perhaps the most daunting and ominous thing about an Israeli-Hezbollah military confrontation is its apparent inevitability, Pinkas concludes:
“The sense that it is a foregone conclusion. In the absence of a mutually agreed upon and durable political agreement, and given Hezbollah’s raison d’être and Iran’s regional motivations, such a war may be just a matter of time”.
So, when Blinken arrived in Israel, he unsurprisingly faced deep scepticism on the possibility of reaching an agreement with Lebanon for Hizbullah to withdraw to the far side of the Litani River, Israeli commentator Ben Caspit reports. (Well, certainly, if the subject has not been raised at all with Hizbullah!).
Were Israel to invade Lebanon in order to attempt to drive Hezbollah away from the border, it would, of course, be invading a sovereign UN member state. Irrespective of the circumstances, it immediately would be denounced internationally as an illegal aggression.
Is the point of these negotiations then, to try to get the Lebanese State to agree to a ‘stripped-down’ (Sheba’a farms ignored) accord that accepts 1701 in principle, so that Israel cannot be accused of invading a sovereign state?
Might this too be a tactic, acceded to by Hizbullah, to avoid blame in Lebanese circles for triggering a war that would damage the state, through placing the onus on Israel for launching an attack on Lebanon? Is this 1701 initiative no more than a charade with its eye on possible legal consequences?
If so, how does this affect any message Biden might be sending Israel on back channels? We know that one set of U.S. messages sent to Iran is that the U.S. does not want war with Iran. Is this setting the scene for Biden again to indicate that his own unwavering support for Israel remains intact? Almost certainly.
Russia, Iran and China and much of the world naturally are watching as the U.S. allows itself to be drawn into a series of overlapping strategic mistakes – one leading to another – that will undoubtedly reshape the global order to their advantage.
Crooke expands on the above and more in his weekly conversation with Judge Napolitano that can be viewed at the link. The half-hour is well spent. There’s one important point regarding Geopolitics Crooke makes about Western relations with the Global Majority related to the censorship shown the South African performance at the ICJ hearings—clips from both sides are shown. All that did was put more holes into the West’s feet it keeps shooting into.
A quick note about the Taiwan election outcome: The pr-independence party candidate won with just over 40% of the vote meaning close to 60% of Taiwanese voted against the DPP, which reflects the recent local and parliamentary elections. It appears most Taiwanese would like a Hong Kong-China type relationship, which means unification but autonomy, a situation IMO the CPC would honor as it has with Macao and Hong Kong.
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