Chris Hedges
Iran
has a large arsenal of ballistic missiles it can unleash on Israel, as well as
on American military installations in the region. While initial waves can be
intercepted, repeated attacks would swiftly deplete the Israeli and U.S. air
defense stockpiles.
The neoconservatives who
orchestrated the disastrous wars with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — and
who were never held accountable for the profligate waste of $8 trillion
taxpayer dollars, as well as $69 billion squandered in Ukraine — look set to lure
Americans into yet another military fiasco with Iran.
Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not
Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is
not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land
mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe.
It has a population of almost 90
million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as
alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.
Iran launched retaliatory attacks
Saturday on Israel following waves of Israeli strikes that hit nuclear
facilities and killed several top Iranian military commanders and six nuclear
scientists. There have been dozens of explosions over the skyline in Tel Aviv
and Jerusalem.
There is video footage of at
least one large explosion on the ground in Tel Aviv from an apparent missile
strike and reports of other explosions in some half dozen sites in and around
Tel Aviv.
“Our revenge has just started,
they will pay a high price for killing our commanders, scientists and people,”
a senior Iranian official told Reuters. The official added that “nowhere in
Israel will be safe” and that “our revenge will be painful.”
“They think it’ll be an easy
war,” said Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat and member of British
intelligence (MI6) who spent decades in the Middle East. He told me of the
neocons when I interviewed him.
“They want to reassert American
power and leadership,” he said. “They feel that every so often throwing a small
country against the wall and smashing it up is good for this.”
These neocons, bonded with the
Israeli leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, he went on, “will not tolerate any
rival power, any challenge to American leadership and American greatness.” They
will create facts on the ground – a war between Israel and Iran – that will
“pull Trump into a war with Iran.”
You can see my interview with
Crooke here.
While Iran’s air force is weak,
with many of its fighter planes decades old, it is well supplied with Russian
air defense batteries and Chinese anti-ship missiles, as well as mines and
coastal artillery.
It can shut down the Strait of
Hormuz, the world’s most important oil chokepoint that facilitates the passage
of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply. This would double or triple the price
of oil and devastate the global economy.
Iran has a large arsenal of
ballistic missiles it can unleash on Israel, as well as on American military
installations in the region. While initial waves can be intercepted, repeated
attacks would swiftly deplete the Israeli and U.S. air defense stockpiles.
Israel is not equipped to endure
a war of attrition, such as the eight year conflict between Iran and Iraq that
ended — despite U.S. support for Saddam Hussein’s regime — in a stalemate, or
as in Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon that eventually forced it
to withdraw in May 2000, after repeated losses suffered from Hezbollah.
When Iran, in its Operation True
Promise, launched over 300 ballistic and cruise missiles at Israel’s military
and intelligence sites on April 13 and 14, 2023, in retaliation for an Israeli
strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, the U.S. intercepted the vast
majority.
“Israel cannot fight off an
Iranian missile attack,” John Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate and a
professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago,
told me. “You have this very interesting situation where not only can Israel not
win these wars, but they’ve turned [them] into protracted wars” in which
“Israel is heavily dependent on the United States.”
“We have lots of assets in the
Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as in Israel itself and in
the Red Sea,” he said. “These [are] designed to help Israel in its various
wars. This includes not just Iran. It also includes the Houthis. It includes
Hezbollah. So we are deeply involved in helping them fight. That was not the
case in 1973 or any time before this war.”
Israel and its neocon allies
believe they can eradicate Iran’s nuclear enrichment program by force and
decapitate the Iranian government to install a client regime. That this
non-reality-based belief system failed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, eludes
them.
Israel, at the same time, wants
to divert world attention from its genocide and mass starvation in Gaza and the
accelerated ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Internet connection has been
completely shut down in Gaza. The West Bank has been placed under a total
blockade.
“The Israelis understand that if
you have a general conflagration, people will not be paying much attention to
the Palestinians,” Mearsheimer said. He added:
“People
will be willing to give Israel more of a pass than they would in peaceful
times. So let’s really ramp things up. Let’s have a general conflagration, and
the end result will be that we can cleanse, on a massive scale, in Gaza and
hopefully in the West Bank as well.”
You can see my interview with
Mearsheimer here.
Iranian attacks would eventually
leave hundreds, then thousands dead. Iran will appeal to Shi’ite Muslims
through the region in what the Iranian leadership will describe as a war
against Shi’ism, the second largest branch of Islam.
Saudi Arabia — which condemned
the attacks on Iran — has two million Shi’ites who live in the oil-rich Eastern
province. There are significant Shi’ite communities in Pakistan, Bahrain and
Turkey. Shi’ites form the majority in Iraq.
The Shi’ite-dominated government
in Baghdad will side with Iran. Yemen will continue to disrupt maritime traffic
in the Red Sea and hit Israel with drone attacks. Hezbollah, however crippled,
will renew attacks on northern Israel.
Expect terrorist attacks on U.S.
bases in the region and perhaps even U.S. soil, as well as widespread sabotage
of oil production in the Persian Gulf.
Iran will soon have enough
fissile material to produce a nuclear weapon. A war will be a powerful
incentive to build a bomb, especially with Israel possessing hundreds of
nuclear weapons.
If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon
Saudi Arabia will be next, with Turkey, Iraq and Egypt not far behind. The
efforts to blunt nuclear proliferation in the Middle East will evaporate.
A war, as Mearsheimer points out,
will also solidify the alliance between Iran, Russia and China.
“The United States has pushed
China, Russia, North Korea and Iran very close together,” he noted.
“They
form a tight knit bloc. Largely as a result of the Ukraine war, the Russians
and the Chinese have been driven together, and given what’s happening in the
Middle East, the Iranians and the Russians have been drawn together. The United
States may be helping Israel, but it’s important to understand that the
Russians are helping Iran. It’s not to America’s advantage to have China and
Russia aligned closely against Washington. It’s not in America’s interest to
have Russia and Iran working together against Israel and the United States.”
“There’s
always the possibility that if a war heats up involving Iran on one side and
the United States and Israel on the other side, that at some point down the
road that the Russians will get dragged into that war, because the Russians now
have a vested interest in supporting Iran.”
A war could last months, if not
years. It will be an aerial duel, one largely between Israeli warplanes and
missiles and Iranian missiles. But to subdue Iran it will require perhaps a
million U.S. troops being deployed to invade and occupy the country.
An occupation of Iran will end
with the same humiliating defeat the U.S. experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The fantasy of Israel and the
neocons is that they can break Iran with aerial assaults, an updated version of
Shock and Awe, the bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003. But the amount of
ordinance required, especially to pulverize Iran’s underground nuclear facilities,
will be massive.
Israel, in its decapitation of
the leadership of Hezbollah in Beirut, including Hezbollah’s General Secretary
Hassan Nasrallah, had to employ Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) 2,000-pound
bunker-buster bombs.
“If you’re going to fly F-35’s
with JDAM missiles, each of those is about 14 tons,” Crooke said. “It’s not
just the weight, but the fuel they use. So you have to refuel maybe once,
refuel twice, then you’ll have to fight your aircraft to suppress their defenses.
You’re talking about a huge performance. Is America going to be able to do
this? The Iranians have multiple air defense systems and good radars, over the
horizon radars as well.”
So why go to war with Iran? Why
walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a
government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other Takfiri
groups, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL)? Why further
destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?
The generals, politicians,
intelligence services, neocons, weapons manufacturers, so-called experts,
celebrity pundits and Israeli lobbyists are not about to take the blame for two
decades of military fiascos. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran.
The humiliating defeats in
Afghanistan and Iraq, the failed states of Syria and Libya, the proliferation
of extremist groups and militias, many of which the U.S. initially trained and
armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone
else’s fault.
The chaos and instability we
unleashed, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant
country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to
reverse this other than to attack it.
International law, along with the
rights of almost 90 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of
the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The
Iranians, whatever they feel about their leadership, do not see the United
States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be attacked or occupied.
They will resist. And the U.S. and Israel will pay.
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