Israel – Globalities

The US-Israel war on Iran: Takeaway #2, the China-Iran angle

Helena CobbanJune 26, 2025June 27, 2025China, Iran, Israel

Very few people in the ‘West’ have yet paid much attention to the very significant contribution that China has made, behind the scenes, to strengthening Iran’s resilience as well as its defensive and offensive military capabilities.

Several Western reporters have written (e.g., Reuters here) about China’s heavy degree of reliance on oil imports from Iran, and many of them have noted that this has made China very vulnerable to any closure of the Straits of Hormuz that could have been sparked by a continuation of the US-Israel war on Iran. But very few Western commentators have taken note of the fact that on May 24, a lengthy freight train carrying electronics and other goods arrived in Tehran, having inaugurated the first ever direct rail link between China and Iran.

Establishing this direct rail link is not the only way in which China has been bolstering Iran’s resilience and capabilities. Of probably even greater importance has been the ability Chinese tech has given many core parts of Iran’s governance and military command systems to free themselves from reliance on the kinds of Western tech that have left users often fatally vulnerable to US-Israeli hacking. As the well-placed Chinese tech expert William Huo noted earlier today, “Iran’s drones… fly coordinated, autonomous, and lethal. That’s Chinese targeting AI and optical systems… Iranian missiles run on Chinese chips, Chinese servos, Chinese nav units.”

He noted that in return, “China gets a combat-proven proxy and real-time telemetry from a U.S.-backed target. If Iron Dome can’t keep up, what happens in Taiwan? What happens to Aegis? To Japan’s missile net? Everyone watching saw the same thing… “

Small surprise, therefore, that earlier today, per Al-Monitor, “China hosted defence ministers from Iran and Russia for a meeting in its eastern seaside city of Qingdao…”

Huo and others have noted that much of the terminal guidance that made Iran’s most advanced missiles, and some of its drones, so effective in reaching precise targets inside Israel, was provided by systems using China’s Beidou navigation system (intriguingly often shortened to ‘BDS’.) Unlike systems reliant on the Western GPS system, BeiDou is not vulnerable to US/Israeli hacking or spoofing.

Evidently, some leading people in Iran’s security sector were still, as of June 13, using Western-based communications systems like WhatsApp or Telegram. Earlier this week, a Washington Post reporter was passed, by “an Israeli individual who obtained the material” an audio recording of a threat that an Israeli security-services operative had delivered over the phone to a “senior Iranian official” warning that he and his wife and family would be murdered unless he either fled Iran or made and sent back to them within 12 hours a video in which he dissociated himself from the Iranian government.

Almost certainly, going forward, all senior Iranian officials will be restricted to using non-Western means of communication.

China’s ability to have started building valuable, concrete operational relations with many parts of the Iranian military should come as little surprise. Back in March 2023, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stunned the whole of the Western world when he succeeded in brokering a reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran that changed the geopolitics of the Gulf region and West Asia very substantially.

Prior to that reconciliation, it was an unquestioned assumption of most Western policymakers that the wealthy (and Sunni Muslim) rulers of the Arabian Peninsula coast of the Gulf more or less shared their desire to see the demise of the (Shi-ite-dominated) Islamic Republic of Iran. During the whole of the current US-Israeli attack against Iran, however, the Arab Gulf rulers of the GCC have largely stood aside from joining the anti-Tehran battles, though Qatar and many of the others do still host significant US military bases. At the June 22 meeting that the UN Security Council convened urgently to discuss the US-Israel-Iran crisis, the ambassador of Kuwait put his name on the speaker’s list and in the name of all members of GCC he decried the Israeli and US attacks on Iran and called urgently for a ceasefire.

On recent developments in China’s policies toward Palestine and West Asia more generally, here are two other intriguing sources:

This piece by Zhang Sheng in Mondoweiss in March. (This tracks how, despite the PRC government’s fairly close economic ties with Israel some years ago, it has more recently distanced itself from it.
English translations of the speech the Chinese rep at the UN made at the June 22 session, and comments by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spox, also on June 22. Interestingly, the Ministry spox noted that Chinese bodies had worked to evacuate 3,125 Chinese nations from Iran during the war, while “China’s Embassy in Israel helped and organized the evacuation of over 500 Chinese nationals from Israel to safety, and helped some nationals from the UK, India and Poland safely evacuate.” So that is ratio of about 6 to 1.

The US-Israel war on Iran: Takeaway #1, the stalemate

Helena CobbanJune 26, 2025June 26, 2025Iran, Israel, U.S. military

London-based security analyst Mark Sleboda gave one good initial summary of the takeaways from this war, as summarized here by Bernhard of Moon of Alabama.

I agree with most of Mark’s points, especially his bottom-line conclusion that the biggest loser was “the NPT and international law.” We’ll come back to that, later.

Here are just some quick clarifications on Mark’s point that the US and Israel came to realize that a war of attrition “was going to go badly for Israel”:

People who consume mainly western corporate media need to understand that they have NOT gotten anything like the full picture of the damage that Iran’s strikes have caused to Israel’s society and economy. All foreign media reporting from Israel is subject to very strict military censorship, as I know from experience. None of the journos for Western corporate media who report from Israel tells their viewers/readers that. Shame on them!
In a small slip, the Israeli Tax Authority recently released (but then speedily deleted) some docs reporting that as of yesterday they had already received 32,975 claims for damages to buildings. The Twitter account of MENA Unleashed reproduced some parts of this Israeli Tax Authority report. You can read their whole analysis of this and other damage data from Israel here.
The Electronic Intifada’s indispensable Jon Elmer also presented a great assessment on June 20 of how the war was going for Israel, by then. You can see his 31-minute here, or read a transcript here. (The still photo above is from his report.)

Mark Sleboda wrote that the Iranian government had agreed to Trump’s ceasefire proposal “because they too have been badly shaken through Israeli covert warfare and their own air defense all but collapsed.” The first part of that assessment is almost certainly true, given that on the first day (Friday the 13th) of Israel’s massive initial assault, Israeli covert ops succeeded in killing more than a dozen key, top IRGC leaders and commanders, and top nuclear scientists.

However, after many decades of facing different types of attack from Washington, Israel, and their allies, the Iranians have become very accustomed to building redundancy and resilience into their command and control networks. And within just a few hours of Israel’s atrocious and quite illegal sneak attack, Iranian units were able to send 100 missiles against Israel on that first day, and then to maintain the capability to shoot missiles and drones against Israel until the very day of the ceasefire, June 24.

The image here, taken from the Haaretz website, lists just the 532 ballistic missiles that Iran sent against Israel during the war, not those low-level drones that also got through. It indicates that 31 of the missiles managed to evade Israel’s multi-layered (and generously US-funded) interceptor system.

Toward the end of Jon Elmer’s June 20 report, he gave some intriguing figures on just how expensive Israel’s anti-ballistic and anti-drone interceptors are, compared with the often minimal cost of the incoming Iranian weapons. (As with Yemen’s Ansarallah, as he noted.) There have also been several reports that Israelis were just plain running out of interceptors for their high-level Arrow system.

Mark Sleboda was right to say that Iran’s air-defense system had “all but collapsed” as of June 13– when, on the first day of Israel’s attack one of its main target sets was precisely the Iranian air-defense radars and associated systems. And that left many, many parts of Iran woefully unprotected against Israel’s many waves of bomber aircraft, which received considerable, active help from the USAF along the way in the spheres of both intel coordination and in-air refueling as the Israeli planes streaked across the skies of Syria, Iraq, and possibly also Jordan, with huge amounts of help from US Centcom.

Source, IISS via Jon Elmer. Click to enlarge

However, Iran is a very large country and it’s nearly 1,800 km away from Israel. So though Israel has a very large, very capable (and did I mention US-funded and US-supported?) Air Force, it was still, after eleven days, quite incapable of breaking the Iranian military in any meaningful way. And meantime, though the USAF and the IAF were able to act with a high degree of safety for themselves inside that air-bridge from Israel to Iran, the Iranian military/IRGC was able to get to Israel using two different layers of the atmosphere: both by shooting their large and capable missiles very much higher than the USAF-IAF air bridge and by send their Shahed drones very much lower, as Jon Elmer very helpfully explained.

So after eleven days it was a mutually hurting stalemate. But there have been several indications that Israel’s society and economy were much closer to collapse than Iran’s. (Hence, Trump’s rush to the ceasefire.)

[More takeaways to come!]

Netanyahu’s big roll of the dice in Iran

Helena CobbanJune 21, 2025June 21, 2025Iran, Israel, U.S. policy

In the early hours of June 13, the Israeli Air Force, reportedly aided by special forces/spy units pre-deployed into Iran, launched a barrage of massive strikes against Iranian air-defenses, nuclear facilities, command-and-control nodes, and individual targeted Iranians, military and non-military. Iranian government negotiators were planning to meet in Muscat, Oman, just two days later, in the next phase of the talks that U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had maintained for the previous two months. (Israel’s attack reportedly killed some of the Iranian specialists who were planning to attend those Muscat talks.)

The Israeli attack almost certainly took the Iranians by surprise. Israel killed many senior military leaders, especially in the elite Iranian revolutionary Guard Corps. But within just a few hours, Iran’s command system proved capable of responding in kind; and since June 13, every night has seen an exchange of deadly missiles between the two countries. Israel has delivered much of its ordnance against Iran from air-force planes flying right over Iran, or close to its Western border in the skies of Iraq and Syria protected by U.S. surveillance (and potential interception) capabilities, while Iran has delivered its missiles, including some hypersonic missiles, from its own home turf.

The Israelis claim they have destroyed many significant Iranian military and nuclear-research facilities. Their attacks– along with calls from Pres. Trump for the “evacuation” of the whole of Tehran–have caused deep disruptions in the lives of millions of Iranians.

The human casualties of this war have been very much higher in Iran than in Israel–though not on a per-capita basis. In Israel, families who have never previously experienced “incoming” attacks that caused more than minor damage have now been seeing the much larger level of damage inflicted by those Iranian missiles that manage to evade Israel’s multi-layered (and partly U.S.-supplied) anti-missile shields.

The two sides have seemingly become locked into a deadly war of attrition with no clear end– or even a plausible diplomatic off-ramp– in sight. (There have meantime been some reports that Israel’s stock of “Arrow” anti-ballistic missiles has been depleting at a rate that can’t be sustained for very much longer.)

Within this picture of a possibly lengthy, slugging-it-out war of attrition, there are a number of possible wild cards:

For the commanders of Western hegemony, cruelty is a vital tool

Helena CobbanApril 19, 2025April 20, 2025China, Global governance, Indian Ocean, Israel, Settler colonialism, U.S. policy

The painting above is of Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque

For Pres. Trump, cruelty is a vital tool as he bulldozes through all constitutional requirements to undertake (and publicize) exemplary deportations of undocumented immigrants and of any legally documented visitors like Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil whom he arbitrarily chooses to punish.

For Israel’s PM Netanyahu and his ministers, cruelty is similarly a vital tool as they deploy waves of bombers and incendiary drones against two million Palestinians huddling under tarps on Gaza’s trash-piled shores while totally blocking the entry into Gaza of all the basic necessities of life.

Indian Ocean trading routes before da Gama. Click on image to enlarge.

It’s worth noting that cruelty has been a vital, and deliberately deployed, tool for the architects and commanders of “White” empires ever since the 15th century CE. In 1415, Portuguese navigators started carving their way down the coast of West Africa to establish heavily fortified “trading” (plunder) posts in their quest for gold. Those navigators were also intent on finding a sea-route to the richest trading zone they’d ever heard of, the one that traversed the Indian Ocean and wove the riches of East Africa, India, and distant Cathay (China) into the most advanced manufacturing and consumption area then known to humankind…

Speech policing, LSE style

Helena CobbanMarch 19, 2025March 19, 2025Discourse suppression, Gaza, Israel, United Kingdom

The above photo shows, l. to r., Dr. Michael Mason, Dr. Catherine Charrett, me, and Dr. Jeroen Gunning just before our LSE event March 10

In mid-March, I visited the U.K. for the London Book Fair and decided to add a few days to my visit to catch up with colleagues, friends, and family there. On learning of my visit, my esteemed colleague Dr. Jeroen Gunning of Kings College London and the London School of Economics suggested he could invite me to an event at LSE where we could present and discuss the book that we– along with others– had worked together on, Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters.

I eagerly accepted his invitation. LSE’s Middle East Center agreed to host the event on March 10, and billed it as a “book launch” for our book. Palestinian scholar Mouin Rabbani, who had also contributed to the book, agreed to take part remotely from his home in Canada and University of Westminster scholar Dr. Catherine Charrett agreed to serve as our discussant. We were set to go, and on February 24 LSE/MEC opened public registration for the event.

All hell broke loose. Local pro-Israeli organizations and even the Board of Deputies of British Jews, mounted a strong protest and called on the LSE leadership to cancel it. LSE stuck to its (figurative) guns, and did so even after, on March 7 or 8, Israel’s ambassador took the The Daily Telegraph to call openly for the event to be canceled.

It is to the credit of the LSE leadership that they refused to bow to that grossly unwarranted external pressure. But the form and content of the speech policing they imposed on me and my fellow presenters as their condition for continuing to host the event was truly Orwellian. Here’s my recollection of how it went.

Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and AIPAC

Helena CobbanJanuary 8, 2025January 8, 2025Israel, U.S. politics

The death of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter feels like the end of an era– and all the more so, since it will be followed very speedily by the launch of the Trump/Musk presidency.

There has been much discussion about the echoes between Carter’s failure to win re-election after his first term back in 1980 and the crash-and-burn that doomed Pres. Joe Biden’s more recent, far too-long-pursued attempt to win re-election. The reasons for the two failures were very different. Age, which was the major factor (of many) for Biden certainly wasn’t a factor for Carter. The explanations most U.S. commentators have given for Carter’s resounding failure back in the elections of November 1980 have nearly all centered on his failure to resolve the lengthy and very debilitating crisis over Iranian students’ holding of U.S. hostages and the (linked) issue of the massive disruptions that the collapse of the Shah’s regime in Iran inflicted on the U.S. economy.

But by contrast, very little attention has been paid to the significant effect that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s decision to run against Carter in the Democratic primary much earlier in 1980 had in weakening Carter’s ability to organize a successful re-election campaign. And crucially, the role that dedicated pro-Israel organizing played in encouraging Kennedy to mount that primary challenge to Carter.

Back in 2009, I secured and was able to report on a short series of interviews with the Kennedy staff member who had been the linchpin of that pro-Israel organizing effort. That was Tom Dine, a man who in 1979 joined Kennedy’s staff in the senate after some years working for the Senate Budget Committee and as a defense-affairs staffer for Sen. Edmund Muskie. “With Ted Kennedy, I was ostensibly doing defense policy, but really I was orchestrating his Jewish-vote efforts,” he told me during those interviews.

Setbacks for the Axis of Resistance and for progress to a multi-polar world

Helena CobbanDecember 21, 2024December 21, 2024BRICS, Gaza, Global balance, Israel, Russia, Syria

The above photo is from a meeting Pres. Putin had with PM Netanyahu in 2018, when they fine-tuned some arrangements for coordination (“deconfliction”) in Syria

On December 13, I made a first stab at analyzing some of the regional and global repercussions of the recent rapid disintegration of the Asad government in Syria– and indeed, also, of the Syrian state’s entire defensive capability, which Israel bombed to smithereens in the days (and hours) right after the collapse of Pres. Asad’s government on December 8.

Over the past week I have learned more, and I hope come to understand more, about the decision-making in Moscow that was a vital factor in Asad’s collapse– and also, about the possible effects of this collapse on the regional dynamics within West Asia, and on the worldwide balance of power in an era of rapid geopolitical change. In this essay I will sketch out some of my current thinking/understanding on these matters so crucial to the fate of humankind.

Syria’s collapse and the global balance

Helena CobbanDecember 13, 2024December 13, 2024Global balance, Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria

The above image shows some of the Syrian navy vessels destroyed by Israel this week.

Over the past 17 days, the system of (Baath Party + military) governance that the Asad family had maintained over Syria for 53 years underwent a catastrophic and complete collapse. This collapse had been many years in the making; and now, it has numerous implications for the regional balance in West Asia– not least for the serious blow it has delivered to “Axis of resistance”, the previously hardy alliance of regional forces working together to resist the cruel, expansionist assaults of the Israeli military. Asadist Syria had not been an active participant in those efforts, but it provided a key land bridge for interactions between the resistance forces in Iran/Iraq and those in Lebanon.

The severing of this land bridge will have significant, though almost certainly not fatal, effects on the capabilities of Hizbullah and its resistance allies in Lebanon. (We discussed some of these effects in the discussion I was part of in the Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday.)

A potentially much more serious effect on the anti-Israeli resistance may well turn out to be the re-emergence throughout West Asia of the same kind of harshly anti-Shi-ite sectarianism that has been publicly displayed by leaders (and rank-and-filers) of the victorious, al-Qaeda-style Hai’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement that rode into glory in Damascus on Sunday and Monday. (We discussed that, too, in the livestream. An imperfectly edited version of the transcript of our convo can be downloaded here.)

But even far beyond West Asia, the collapse of Asadist Syria, and indeed of the Syrian state itself in any recognizable form, and the manner in which that collapse transpired, will have stark– and as of now, only dimly predictable– repercussions on a global balance that has anyway been in an increasing degree of flux over recent years.

Washington’s Israeli Rottweiler: Is it on or off the leash?

Helena CobbanOctober 11, 2024June 21, 2025Gaza, Israel, U.S. policy

In the 40-plus years I’ve been studying the US-Israeli relationship up close, my views of its dynamics have changed (as have the dynamics themselves.) However, one view of the relationship that has lasting validity and some inherent elasticity of its own is to view Israel as a sometimes out-of-control attack dog that over the past few decades has been built and sustained overwhelmingly through the support of– and as a perceived longterm investment for– the U.S. military-industrial-governance complex.

But has the Rottweiler now slipped the leash and started to turn on its master?

Some thoughts on today’s perilous situation in West Asia and the world

Helena CobbanOctober 5, 2024October 6, 2024Diplomacy, Gaza, Global balance, Hamas, Israel, Persian Gulf, Qatar, U.S. policy, West Asia

Back in October of last year, I was already writing that Israel, in its reactions to Hamas’s breakout of October 7, was acting in a distinctly unhinged manner. I suppose you could perhaps understand that, given that within just 2-3 hours on that Saturday morning, the Hamas fighters and their allies destroyed the Israeli military’s entire “Southern Command” along with the aura of deterrent invincibility that Israel has counted on since its founding– through acts of extreme violence and ethnic cleansing– back in 1947-48.

It is now clear, however, that (like, I believe many other people) I seriously underestimated the sheer depth of the derangement to which large numbers of Jewish Israelis succumbed on that day, and in which they have been mired ever since. I have only watched a portion of Al-Jazeera’s excellent 80-minute investigation into the extent of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza. But much of what their team pulled together so cogently there has already been widely known. Not just the deliberate blocking of food and other vital necessities to the beleaguered population 2.3 million Gazans, but also the use of massive (and US-supplied) 1,000-lb and 2,000-lb bombs against urban areas, the deliberate destruction of broad swathes of urban infrastructure, the widespread forcing of Palestinian civilians to act as human shields, the attacks on hospitals, the systematized use of torture in prisons and detention facilities– and also the gleeful self-glorification with which so many Israeli soldiers have share their images of these acts quite freely and proudly on global social media.

At least the Nazis seemed a bit embarrassed by what they were doing inside their concentration and extermination camps. They built high walls around them and worked hard to keep their actions well away from public view. Not so, the very large numbers of Israeli soldiers who seem happy to share the records of their inhumanity very widely… and then seem to suffer no reprimands or disciplining from their superiors. Those superiors, indeed, at many levels of the Israeli military and at some of the highest levels of the government, seem pretty happy to have those acts of brutality widely displayed. I think it is supposed to have a deterrent effect on Israel’s potential rivals or foes. But this blatant brutality also seems designed to signal to Israel’s own domestic public that, “Hey look, we are re-establishing our deterrence! You should all be proud of us!”

…

So the genocide in Gaza and its many attendant brutalities grinds on. And Pres. Joe Biden has never taken the few simple steps it would take to end it. Such as: Simply ending the flow of US arms to Israel. Simply ordering the US military in the region to end its round-the-clock provision of vital operational intel to the Israeli military. Simply going to the UN Security Council and joining (rather than blocking) the global consensus that the conflict in Gaza has to end, right now.

Instead, throughout the past year, he has prevaricated, endlessly. His alleged “Red Lines” against Israeli escalation have simply dissolved, time after time after time. So PM Netanyahu has continued to push his luck and see how far he could go. He indicated to Biden back in spring that he would support the three-phase ceasefire-for-hostages deal that was the on the table. Then he went back to his cabinet and said of course he didn’t support it. (Biden was left hanging out to dry, after even persuading the rest of the Security Council to adopt his plan.)

In early April, Netanyahu and the hawks with which he surrounds himself considerably upped the regionwide ante when they ordered the assassination by air attack of two senior Iranian generals who were located in a diplomatic facility in Damascus, Syria. No U.S. response. So on July 30-31, Netanyahu ordered the killing in Beirut of Hizbullah military chief Fuad Shukr and also the killing in Tehran of Hamas’s over-all political head, Ismail Haniyeh. That, at a time when Biden administration claimed it was still working hard to negotiate the ceasefire-for-hostages deal for Gaza– and his prime negotiating partner in that effort was none other than Haniyeh itself.

What a humiliating position Netanyahu and his cronies had put Biden into. If Biden had wanted to retain any credibility at all for the role of the United States as a competent and trustworthy mediating force, then he should have punished Netanyahu immediately for that deeply provocative act. (See “cut off arms”, etc, above.)

But nothing.

For their part, both Hamas and the Iranians acted with great strategic restraint. Hamas stayed in the ceasefire negotiations and appointed a new Secretary General. The Iranian government said it would respond to the gross July 31 violation of its sovereignty at a time and place of its choosing, but it would hold its response in check for a while so as not to interrupt the (hopefully) continuing effort to secure the Gaza ceasefire.

Then eight days ago on September 28, Netanyahu– while sitting in the UN headquarters in New York, no less– ordered another extremely serious Israeli provocation: the use of a clutch of U.S. bunker buster bombs to demolish four buildings in Beirut underneath which the Israelis had (accurately) assessed that Hizbullah’s secretary-general Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was located.

At that point, the Iranian government, for whom Hizbullah and its very competent long-time head had long been key allies, decided the time for a firm response– though not the complete abandonment of strategic patience– had come.

On Tuesday evening (October 1), the Iranian forces launched a barrage of around 200 ballistic missiles across the intervening areas of Arab lands and targeted them, with remarkable accuracy, on four or five key military installations inside Israel.

The Israeli government, which as I well know exercises very tight censorship over the reporting of any journalists working inside the country, whether local or foreign, tried to downplay the effects and effectiveness of that missile barrage. But numerous Israelis living near the targeted facilities had their cellphone and their social-media accounts at the ready; and they very widely shared both the clips of the missiles raining down on the bases and the sounds of their own amazement and fear that this was happening. Those clips were all over the internet. See some of them, gathered by the WaPo’s Evan Hill, here.

Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah happened to be in Jordan that evening. In the EI livestream on Wednesday he recalled the previous evening he had learned from Al-Jazeera that Iran had just launched its missiles. So he went up to the roof of his family home in Amman:

“We went up on the roof to watch and everyone was outside on their roofs and balconies cheering. And there’s lots of social media showing that people were celebrating all over Jordan, just as they were in Palestine… And it struck me that if this had been during the daytime, we probably would not have seen very much because the sky would have been too bright. And I don’t know if there were specific tactical or technical reasons why Iran carried out the attack after dark. But one clear result of that is that millions of people across the region witnessed it with their own eyes.

“And if that was Iran’s intention to make it visible in such a spectacular way, then it was a really brilliant move from a public relations standpoint.”

He also noted that of the large number of missiles flowing over Amman, he saw only a few attempts by interceptors to stop them. Pres. Biden very speedily got on the air-waves to assure Americans and Israelis that the air-defense operations against the missiles had been very effective, but the evidence from both Jordan and from Israel showed that this was clearly not the case.

—-

Pres. Biden is now caught in a politically fraught trap that is almost wholly Made In Israel. PM Netanyahu has been “playing” him for a sucker for many years now, and most especially since last October. And when Netanyahu and his cabinet undertook teach step in the series of escalatory provocations that they’ve launched since early April, they must have thought that– especially in a presidential election year here in the United States– they “had Biden exactly where they wanted him.”

But over those past few months, too, the government of Iran has shown considerable strategic wisdom. It acted with restraint in the (very limited) response it launched in mid-April to Israel’s killings of its generals in Damascus. It kept the focus tightly on the need to win the ceasefire deal for Gaza.

But that restraint, like the inaction/complicity of Washington in the face of Israel’s many provocations, served merely to encourage Israel’s many successive escalations. Clearly, the Israelis’ killing of Nasrallah was a tipping-point for Tehran. Tehran’s actions in response to it have thus far been impressively focused and strategic:

The missile attacks launched Tuesday evening were impressive in size and capability but were tightly targeted on military facilities– including three key air-bases and the HQ’s of intel/spy agencies.
The very next day, Wednesday, Iran’s president, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, visited Doha, where he had key meetings with the Emir of Qatar, with the Saudi Foreign Minister, and with representatives of other GCC leaders.
Yesterday, Friday, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i delivered the first public sermon he has given for more than four years, assuring the congregation of tens of thousands who attended that Iran was ready for any response.

Within the past two days many voices have been raised in the United States and Israel calling for further, harsher punishment of Iran. Donald Trump has called for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. Hawkish voices in Israel and the US have called for attacks on Iranian oil facilities. But through their assured and smart regional diplomacy, the Iranians appear for now to have prevented any such escalation– acts that would, if carried out, bring both the global economy and the whole worldwide political balance into extreme jeopardy. (Not to mention the possibility of the bodies of many of the 40,000 members of the US military now strung out throughout West Asia, being brought home in body bags.)

Not a great thing for Pres. Biden and his sidekick Kamala Harris to have happen on the eve of a consequential national election.

I am not privy, of course, to whatever Pres. Biden might have said to Netanyahu and other Israelis in recent days. By Biden’s own (somewhat muddled) telling, he has “been discussing various responses” to the Iranian missile barrage with the Israelis. But the fact that the Iranians have lined up an impressive coalition of Arab parties to stand with them in the present face-off certainly constrains whatever Washington or Tel Aviv might be able to do. (As it very likely constrained whatever their two militaries were able to do to try to intercept the Iranian missiles back on Tuesday night.)

The skimpy nature of the international support Biden thought he could count was also indicated when he mumbled something about “the G7” all supporting his actions on Iran– though the G7 is supposed to be only an economic-affairs bloc… In the current international environment, and in the face of repeated, serious Israeli provocations, not to mention genocide and war-crimes, it seems that not even NATO could agree to line up behind the US-Israel alliance.

For their part, of course, the Chinese must be quietly congratulating themselves on having pulled off a significant Saudi-Iranian rapprochement in March last year; and Beijing, Moscow, and many other non-NATO powers must have notice that the United States’ global standing has taken such a steep nose-dive throughout the past year…

—-

My current expectation, then, is for no large-scale US or Israeli retaliation against Iran within the immediate future. (I may be wrong. I hope not.) But meantime, the Israeli military will be redoubling its efforts to do what it knows best, which is genocide, genocide, genocide. And not just in Gaza, but also now in Lebanon to a very significant degree, and also in the West Bank.

The onset of winter will be particularly harsh for the barely surviving Palestinian population of Gaza. But so long as Washington continues to dominate the whole world system, then those families and amazing people will continue to be abandoned to their fate.