April 15, 2024
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.
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.
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 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.
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