This has been going on for a while now, and I can only recount the hi-lites. Some deep background here:
…and a more detailed time-line of recent events, filling in the gaps, here:
https://www.dawn.com/news/1916920
The condensed version: boy oh boy, it’s been a tough couple of years for the theocratic thugs in Tehran. To use the academic international relations jargon in which I was educated in my grad school days, back in the antediluvian 1980s, seems like every time they turn around Israel’s giving it to them right where the rhino got the javelin.
First, in October 2023, Hamas, their proxy warriors in Gaza, decided (with how much Iranian logistical and planning support is difficult to say, precisely) to commit the kind of atrocities that provoke just the sort of vicious, merciless, utterly eradicating retaliation that Israel has been delivering for over 20 months now, and whatever you think of the relative rights and wrongs of the horror show in Gaza (and readers will know about my own profound moral qualms) it sure as shit hasn’t been a rip-roaring geopolitical success for the scheming Mullahs.
In April 2024, Israel, continuing to prosecute its years-long campaign against Iranian influence in the region, hit consular facilities in Syria to kill seven high-ranking officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in response to which Iran launched a massive drone and ballistic missile attack on Israel. It was horrifying in the moment, but in the end the unprecedented attack was largely blunted by US and Israeli air and missile defence forces, in what had to be reckoned a major defeat for Iran, whose leaders had long touted its drones and missiles as the ultimate asymmetrical answer to Israeli power.
Then Iran’s other, bigger proxy army, Lebanon’s fearsome Hezbollah, was all but wiped out by an astonishing series of surprise attacks which began with everybody’s pagers blowing up in their pockets. The usual, typically precise and destructive decapitating airstrikes ensued, but that initial gambit with the pagers was so freakishly, diabolically brilliant – it took Israel’s operatives years to set up the dummy supply chain through which the entire force of militants was outfitted with exploding communications gear – that you just had to pay tribute. Honestly, those Hezbollah bastards, whose genocidal cause has never been attended by the sort of moral ambiguities surrounding the Palestinian question, had it coming in the worst way, and there’ll be no crocodile tears shed around here for any of them.
Then, after more back and forth, including further targeted killings of leadership among Iran’s allies, following which yet another massive Iranian drone/cruise missile/ballistic missile attack on Israel was again largely blunted by Israeli and US air and missile defences, Israel carried out a devastating set of air strikes last October which dealt crippling blows to Iranian air defences and other strategic assets. The message was clear: any time we want, anywhere we please, we’ll swoop in to blow up anything we like.
Not long after that Iran’s most important regional ally, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, got himself deposed and had to flee the country for Russia, to be replaced by a regime which apparently has much less interest in facilitating Iran’s grand strategic objectives (so, it seems, there goes the Iranian “land bridge” stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, the better to resupply the IRGC’s now all but exterminated proxy armies of anti-semitic crusaders).
Now, while still in the midst, or so they thought, of a renewed set of negotiations with the Americans about their nuclear program, throughout which Trump has been threatening, but never delivering, military force, who shows up? Who waltzes in, destroys most of what’s left of their air defence systems, achieves what amounts to air supremacy over their entire country, and uses upwards of 200 tactical aircraft to blow the living excrement out of various important military targets while also killing off as many as two dozen key members of Iran’s political and military leadership in targeted strikes? Why, Israel of course.
We’ll be getting to the tough questions in a second, but first, wow. Not long ago Iran was everywhere ascendant and seen as the most dangerous force in the region. Now they’re hanging on by their fingernails, their allies eliminated, their armed forces devastated, and their leadership hunted like rats.
Great. Again, no boo-hoos for the maniacs who’ve been running Iran since the Shah was sent packing. But where is all this leading?
Recall the state of play when we last delved into this mess:
Trump, goaded along by Israel’s Netanyahu, was once again trying to bully Tehran into agreeing to abandon the Islamic Republic’s quest for atomic weapons. This must have been infuriating to the Iranians, since Donald himself had long since torn up the treaty negotiated under the Obama administration, under which Iran already had, verifiably, frozen its nuclear weapons program, complying with the agreement’s terms for as long as the Americans were on board, and then for a further two years after Trump blundered on to the scene. Now Donald was rattling the sabre as noisily as he could, the B-2s were sitting on Diego Garcia’s tarmac poised to strike, and Donald’s ace negotiator, real estate buddy Steve Witkoff, was leveraging his perfect absence of relevant diplomatic experience in conveying Trump’s typically maximalist, uncompromising demands, which nobody, except maybe Trump and Witkoff, expected the Iranians to accept. But then Trump, as is his wont, seemed to chicken out. Iran didn’t quit the negotiations, but they didn’t smile sweetly, bow and scrape before Donald while calling him “Kind Sir”, and merrily sign an unconditional surrender, either, yet nothing much happened. The B-2s sortied back home Stateside to Missouri, Trump called a pause even to the bombing of the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, and there was another negotiation session schedule for last Sunday, when – KA-BOOOM – the Israelis were all over Iranian airspace pounding various targets into rubble, with the avowed aim of wiping out Iran’s nuclear program the old-fashioned way, as indeed Netanyahu has been vowing to do for more than a decade.
So I guess the talks are off now, right?
If Netanyahu was a cool, calculating, prudent sort of fellow, and Donald had the wit God gave geese, here’s what I’d suspect was the master plan. Netanyahu, who in this scenario would simply never, without consultation, initiate such a massive military operation in the middle of delicate diplomatic machinations conducted by his greatest ally and sponsor, would have been preparing his war machine and waiting for Donald to let him off the leash. Donald, bucking for that Nobel Peace Price he’s never going to win, would have been keen for a peaceful outcome – on his brutal terms – but when, after a couple of months of getting nowhere, he’d grown bored and frustrated, he would have told Bibi to go ahead then, and have at it.
But wait – Israel has powerful weapons, the best they can buy from the American military industrial complex, and plenty of their own equally world-class munitions, sure, but they don’t quite have the gear needed to destroy Iran’s deeply-buried nuclear facilities, the most critical of which are located under mountains in the manner of NORAD’s Cheyanne Mountain complex. Why not call the B-2s back, and have the USAF do the job? Well, maybe because that’s doable, but not without risk. What if they suffer losses – unlikely, but you never know, it’s a war after all, and the blow to America’s prestige if any of its gold-plated, multi-billion-dollar stealth bombers ran afoul of some stray fighter, or flew right over a SAM site and sucked up a lucky shot (remember what happened to that F-117 in Serbia?), would be intolerable.
That’s where The Israelis come in. They may not have the planes capable of dropping the 15 ton “Massive Ordinance Penetrators” that are the only possible means of digging Iran’s Manhattan Project out from under its mountain redoubt, but by God, they sure can clear the path, they’ve proved it, so why not let them go in first? They can wipe out the Iranian air force and air defence systems, hit radar and associated command and control, surgically assassinate key military leaders, and then, when they’re good and done with what the air war planners call “kicking down the door”, the heavy hitters from the USAF can gambol in, drop a few dozen MOPs, fly home unscathed, and Donald can do his little victory dance. Easy Peasey, and Bibi is only too happy to pitch in, so what could be better?
Sure, but is that really what’s going on? With these guys, who really knows? At the outset, Donald pushed forward his snivelling, weaselly Secretary of State, the boot-licking Lil’ Marco Rubio, to assert for the record that America had nothing to do with this. Nope. Not a thing. Don’t look at us. When confronted with the intel that for days prior to the Israeli strike, American personnel had been evacuating vulnerable facilities in theatre, implying at least foreknowledge of the coming hostilities, the party line was changed to “yes OK, we knew about it, you know, Bibi did us the courtesy of a heads-up, but we otherwise had nothing to do with it“. However, this, if true, meant that Israel decided to act unilaterally and didn’t give a rat’s ass what the Americans thought, or how it might mess up their ongoing diplomacy, and that made Donald look weak, so instead Trump pivoted to claim credit for the whole thing, bleating out that look, he gave the Iranians a chance to make a deal, they wouldn’t, so now this is what they get, implying it was all part of his own scheme. Look, as long as the parade’s inevitable, you may as well run to the front and claim to be the Grand Marshall, right?
Quintessential Donald: Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, and, oh yeah, God bless! This new version of reality was bolstered by obnoxious threats and moronic boasting, as could only be expected from Dear Leader:
Ah yes, the Good ol’ US of A! Always the very best, er, “stuff”. Murrica!! Fuck yeah!! Hey, wait though – what do you mean “we now have”?
I just love the demented little “thank you for your attention to this matter”, which I guess to Donald makes it sound more formal and sort of legal, like a demand letter issued after a missed mortgage payment or something.
Within another few hours, he was posting this on his Truth Social fever swamp social media cesspool:
So OK, in a couple of days we’ve gone from “don’t ask me, I barely even know this Netanyahu guy” to “Everybody skip town before we level the joint and kill every mother-scratching one of yuz, ya pricks, including your miserable Supreme Leader, we feel like it”.
Meanwhile, the carrier battle group led by USS Nimitz is leaving the Western Pacific en route to the Persian Gulf, the USS Ford battle group has been dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean, and last night there was a mass deployment of US aerial refuelling tanker aircraft, perhaps as many as 28-30, assets that would be crucial to any effort to join Israel’s air campaign and deliver the final blows that the IAF cannot. Is this what’s up, though? Not necessarily. Maybe they’re going to support Israeli aircraft, not American (Israel doesn’t have a lot of tankers, which makes me wonder, actually, how they’re supporting so many airstrikes all the way over in Iran, close to 2,000 km from Israel, while the brochure combat radius of even the longest-legged fighters like the F-15I is about 1300 km, and that’s pushing it; I’m missing something here). Or maybe they’re going to support defensive operations by American air assets protecting Israel, or US facilities in the region if Iran escalates. Maybe they’re going in case the US has to respond to an Iranian move to plug up the crucial Strait of Hormuz. Maybe they’re going just in case, while Trump still decides what to do. It wouldn’t be surprising if behind all the bluster, Donald is still sweating bullets and clutching his pearls, desperate to avoid any big decisions he can’t take back.
I can’t help but wonder if there really was a grand scheme in place, all carefully planned and laid out like it was authored by some guy named Schlieffen, and now Bibi is fuming, Israel having done its part, while Trump dithers and wets his pants. The scary possibility, just as likely, is that Lil’ Marco’s initial statement was indeed the truth, and that Bibi decided to launch this thing without seeking US permission, with the aim of dragging America into the fray. It’s perfectly plausible that Netanyahu is leading Donald around by his nose ring, and in effect deciding on his own when America goes to war.
Who knows?
Speaking of which, I just ran and checked the CNN website to see if events had already overtaken my analysis. The latest:
Well, let’s all wait and see if the Iranians roll over like Donny wants.
Failing which, I’m not sure what the end game is here. Suppose Donald does send in the B-2s, and they do manage to blow the bejesus out of all of Iran’s current nuclear research and production facilities, mountains be damned; is that supposed to be the tidy conclusion of the matter? Isn’t some sort of regime change still going to be necessary, absent which the Iranians, surely, stung by their abject impotence against US/Israeli conventional forces, will crave a nuclear weapon even more keenly, and start in again, this time digging deeper and dispersing assets more thoroughly? And absent regime change, won’t it be necessary to destroy all of their stockpiles of ballistic missiles and drones, which are huge, and hard to eradicate entirely? Iran may not be doing as much damage as it wants, but despite everything thrown at them so far, day after day they’re still generating nightmarish scenes like this, filmed from an airliner:
And these, filmed from the ground in Israel:
Israel has formidable air and ballistic missile defences, bolstered by the Americans on land and sea, but there is no defence that can’t be saturated, and some warheads will always get through. If you’re Iranian, the success rate of these repeated strikes is hugely disappointing, but if you’re on the ground in Tel Aviv, it’s still bloody terrifying, and people are dying – tens of victims, instead of the thousands the Iranians would prefer, but the toll will rise – and for the survivors it’s a hell of way to live, crouching under 24/7 ballistic missile bombardment. We denizens of peaceful Canada can’t even imagine.
All this to destroy a nuclear weapons program that had already been put on hold by the treaty Donald ripped to shreds. Bear in mind, too, that as we discuss how to handle Iran’s purportedly existential threat, the US intelligence community – as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified recently before Congress – continues to assess that Iran is enriching uranium to a certain level, yes, but so far is not taking the steps necessary to proceed to an actual, deliverable weapon. They could, of course, but they aren’t. In that case, is the emergency really upon us as Netanyahu has been insisting for years and years, and is regime change the only real solution?
If that’s the plan, into which Trump, one way or another, has been drawn, first, be careful what you wish for, and second, what if you don’t get it? What if, at the end of this – days, or months down the road – the battered theocrats are still standing, with a firmer grip on a population that wasn’t so keen on its leadership before all this warfare filled them with rage and spurred them to rally ’round their flag, as people always do when you bomb them where they sleep?
Is there another way out of this mess? I suppose we can still hold out hope that the Iranians will finally capitulate and sign whatever Donald puts in front of them, but I have to ask, as I have so often before, why would anybody bother signing a deal with Trump? Where does that get you? This is the guy who tears up agreements and then has his allies bomb you halfway to the Pleistocene while you’re still sitting across the table from the lying bastard’s doofus real estate crony, talking about a peaceful resolution. Sign yet another treaty? What for? At this point the Iranians have to be thinking that these guys don’t want a treaty, they want blood. Better now, surely, to arm yourself with thermonuclear weapons as fast as possible, before they make good on their threats to kill you personally. No?
Now, in the happier world of my dreamy dreams, the one in which Donald doesn’t shred every bargain he makes, and it doesn’t take an idiot to make a treaty with the Trump regime, the safer route would have been to offer the Iranians the same deal as before, then claim it’s vastly superior to that crappy bargain the crazed Muslim non-citizen Obama made, idiot that he was. Donald did that with NAFTA during his first term, before going tariff crazy and disavowing his own trade pact this time around. The prior Iran deal had multinational aspects that would have been difficult to replicate, but something could have been worked out, and if the Iranians could somehow have been persuaded that there was any use at all in entering into a new treaty with Donald, maybe their nuclear weapons program could once more have been put on indefinite hold, and Trump still could have done his victory polka.
Alas, given the history, probably none of that was possible, but I wouldn’t have minded them giving it the old college try. After all, despite what I maintain about the futility of making deals with Donald, the Iranians were at the table. Confronted with Trump’s steadfast commitment to a zero-compromise, humiliating US diplomatic triumph, they stayed there right until the bombs began falling. Was there really no hope for a diplomatic solution?
Oh well. Too late for that now.
Look, like I say, I’m not going to be weeping inconsolably into my beer if this ends with a massive geopolitical success, the Iranian regime is deposed, the threat of nuclear armageddon is at last quelled, and a new government comes to power in Tehran dedicated to normalizing relations with the West, and abandoning the crusade to eradicate the Jewish state, while governing sensibly. Who doesn’t want that? If we get there, great. Even if it means Donald does his little jig and throws himself another parade, OK, I’ll upchuck in my mouth, but good riddance to the unholy monsters of the Revolutionary Government, and all the terror they foster. Fuck ’em. I’m just saying this is frighteningly risky business, we may not have seen yet how far Iran is willing to go when pushed into a corner, especially if they reckon that regime change is the real idea here, and I’m not particularly sanguine.
Meanwhile, what’s it going to be, Donald? Are you all in or what? Bibi wants to know.
the needlefish 
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Hoping its a thumbs up,and not marking me for death or something.
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