The war with Iran
Yesterday's Israeli strikes revealed a new strategy that's now beginning to unfold
This morning, people have been trying to work out the significance of the Israeli strikes on Iran that were carried out in the early hours of yesterday.
Given that Israel didn’t strike Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, oil terminals or members of the Iranian regime, in line with the enormous American pressure to limit such an attack, some people have leapt to the conclusion that although this was a tactical success it was a strategic failure in not striking a decisive blow against Tehran.
Such an assessment is distinctly premature.
First, it’s important to register the scale of the achievement. Israel openly attacked Iran in a complex operation involving 100 fighter jets over a distance which presents significant challenges. Iran’s air defences were simply brushed aside and then crippled along with its missile and drone production capabilities. Iran has now been shown to be widely exposed to Israeli attack and its capacity for retaliation has been diminished.
Although Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has stated that the US didn’t dictate Israel’s targets, the Israel Air Force operated entirely within the red lines set down by the Biden administration.
Yet Israel may have achieved what it needed to do at this stage, given a range of factors that have a direct bearing on the urgency of neutralising the threat from Tehran while minimising the likelihood of acute damage to Israeli lives in any possible Iranian response.
The targets struck by the Israel Air Force were far from negligible. The New York Times, quoting three Iranian and three senior Israeli defence officials, reports that targets for attack included defences at the Bandar Imam Khomeini petrochemical complex in Khuzestan Province, at the major economic port Bandar Imam Khomeini, and at the Abadan oil refinery. Air-defence systems were also struck in Ilam Province, at the Tange Bijar gas refinery.
Such strategic targeting, which reportedly shocked Iran, carries a double message: first, as a deterrent against further Iranian aggression, and second, as the essential precursor to a far more significant attack.
The suggestion that Saturday’s strikes were but the first stage in a process was amplified in this interview on Sky News Australia with former IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus. Israel’s strategic aim, he said, had changed. It would no longer tolerate Iranian aggression either directly or through its proxies and would now hold the Iranian regime itself accountable. Saturday’s strikes were the first stage of implementing that strategy.
Israel has widened its strategic aim because of two things. After more than four decades of war to remove Israel from the map, reaching a new level of murderous intensity with last year’s October 7 pogrom and the seven-front proxy war against Israel that has followed, it’s clear that simply nothing will deflect the Iranian regime from its genocidal agenda.
And having seen its proxy armies Hamas and Hezbollah steadily being decimated in Gaza and Lebanon, the regime is now accelerating its nuclear weapons programme to destroy Israel once and for all, a programme that is reportedly reaching a critical point.
This simply isn’t appreciated by much of the west because of two factors: the pernicious attitude of the Biden-Harris administration, and the malicious messaging of the western media.
After Saturday’s strikes, a senior White House official said, while describing the strikes as a legitimate “exercise of self-defence”:
This should be the end of this direct exchange of fire between Israel and Iran. Israel has made clear to the world that its response is now complete.
But this is emphatically not the end of the existential threat to Israel posed by Iran — a threat that is about to become infinitely worse once the regime acquires nuclear weapons. The Biden-Harris administration regards what’s happening not as a desperate war by Israel against an existential enemy that must be defeated but instead as a set of war games whose rules are set by America.
Those rules mean that Israel must suffer the blows rained down by its Iranian enemy, with the US coming to Israel’s defence only if those attacks threaten to take too many Israeli lives (depending, of course, upon quite how the US calculates the value of Israeli lives against its own strategic goals) — but also forbidding Israel from ending the threat under which its population is therefore sentenced to live in perpetuity according to American diktat. But that’s ok, apparently, because the US has warned Iran not to “escalate” — a warning that the regime in Tehran, regarding with satisfaction the craven Americans grovelling before it, will undoubtedly dismiss with even more contemptuous disdain.
America’s attitude would be unbelievable were it not for the fact that, at every stage in this dreadful year that has just passed, the administration has pressured Israel not to respond in a way that would inflict a decisive blow on Iran or its proxies.
And then there’s the part played by the western media in misleading the public about the war that Israel is being forced to fight. Even in some media outlets whose editorial line is reasonably supportive of Israel, the reporting on its foreign news pages is malign.
Routinely recycling Iranian or Hamas propaganda that’s being pumped out by the UN and many purportedly authoritative security and policy analysts in western think-tanks, academic and other institutions — including western intelligence services — these outlets present the Iranian war of annihilation and Israel’s self-defence against that war as mere “tit-for-tat” exchanges of moral equivalence.
Worse, some of these outlets present Iran’s war of annihilation against Israel as Iran defending itself against Israeli aggression, such as this gem today:
For years, Israel has conducted a campaign of assassinations and sabotage in Iran, including killing the head of Iran’s nuclear programme with a remote controlled machine gun as he drove from his holiday home. Iran has in turn attempted attacks including covert operations and cyber warfare in Israel.
According to Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi, head of the Israel Defence and Security Forum (a group composed of robust Israeli military and security analysts), the US election on November 5 is a crucial factor in Israel’s next moves.
If Donald Trump becomes US president and if (second big if) he were to put America at the head of a coalition to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme, says Avivi, such a coalition could achieve that outcome in a matter of days. If on the other hand Kamala Harris wins the election and America turns unequivocally hostile (or if Trump isn’t willing to participate), Israel will have to go it alone.
This would take longer, would doubtless involve different tactics and would be far more difficult. But Israel would do it nevertheless — because it has no alternative.
In fighting the west’s most lethal terrorist enemy, Israel is of course doing the west’s dirty work for it. In response to which, Israel’s perfidious allies have shown their appreciation in a mighty strange way.
In the US, the Biden-Harris administration has withheld from Israel essential weapon supplies and threatened to throw it to the wolves at the UN. In Britain, Sir Keir Starmer’s “Biden-Harris mini-me” government — following its partial arms embargo against Israel — has now threatened to assist the International Criminal Court in its “lawfare” attack against the Jewish state by making available to the ICC information gathered by RAF surveillance flights over Gaza that were ostensibly undertaken to help search for the Israeli hostages.
In fighting Iran and its proxies in this seven-front war, Israel is sacrificing its own young people — so many of them the country’s best and bravest — who are devastatingly continuing to fall in battle. In response, the young in America and Britain are expressing their own gratitude for thus being enabled to live in civilian safety by screaming that Israel is committing “genocide” and chanting for its destruction.
In deeply traumatised, heroic and steadfast Israel, it is impossible to exaggerate the disgust being felt at such western decadence, de-moralisation and the willed defeat of civilisation.