They could've literally just done nothing, Iran's strike was just a warning after the consulate was bombed and they showed considerable restraint considering that
Israel: Commits war crimes, perfidy, breaches the geneva AND vienna conventions openly, slaughtering and sieging and starving civilian populations in the millions
Iran: Gave warning and gave a limited strike on military airbases
Westoids: These are the same thing! Actually, Iran is even worse!
Trueanon rule number NaN: Never, ever, give up your nukes. If you don't have any, BUILD THEM. If you absolutely have to get rid of them, always keep ONE hid in reserve.
I always thought Iran was perpetually in the “we don’t have nukes but have the capacity to make one in a week if you piss us off” camp. We won’t really know unless history takes a bad turn really fast which it might idk
The Iranians aren’t stupid, they’ve produced their own domestic drones and hypersonics. They’ll reveal their capabilities on their own time.
nation-wide temper tantrum that they can’t pull the US into a war with Iran so they try to provoke a war with the entire region
I think Iran has proxies through Iraq and Syria, in no small part due to US meddling in the region.
They aren't proxies. They are local groups who were willing to fight ISIS, so they got weapons and assistance from Iran, Lebanon and Russia.
I hate it when people call the Iraqi Islamic Resistance "Iranian proxies". They are Iraqis, the only ones who actually stood up to US and ISIS and was willing to fight the occupiers. The US/Israel does this so they can strike "Iranian proxy groups" in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon constantly that are just Syrians, Iraqis and Lebanese who oppose them. They make it seem like they aren't at war with multiple fractured nations.
Spending the next 24 hours on the toilet so I can become an environmental storytelling skeleton
So, clearly Israel wants a regional war. What are the chances that whoever the fuck is the US president next year Zelenskyizes Netanyahu and decides to stop sending them weapons? Can a US president even afford to do that?
I don't think it's plausible at all. Unconditional support for Israel is a really important pillar of post-cold-war US foreign policy. Nothing short of a very large economic downturn is going to make the US stop supporting Israel.
Israel allows the US to play “good cop / bad cop” with the rest of the region. Israel is willing to do what the US can’t / won’t do (due to diplomatic and domestic reasons). If you try to go against US interests, Israel is there to make your life hell until you relent. Israel has zero compunction about bombing, slaughtering civilians, assassinating leaders, etc. But bend the knee to the US and then you can be Israel’s “friend” too.
Israel got so much blackmail it's hilarious
Ain't even gonna mention 911 cause that's verboten but the shit they have done for black ops and intelligence surveillance..
Unconditional support for Israel is a really important pillar of post-cold-war US foreign policy.
why?
I already elaborated elsewhere in the thread, but TLDR Israel is an extremely important strategic position.
One point I didn't bring up elsewhere is the MIC's blowback job security machine is predicated on endless war, and if the CIA's assets in ISIL or other terrorist groups aren't moving the amount of missiles that Northrop Grumman is looking to sell, Israel is always one phone call away from some psychotic military operation. But I honestly don't think this is anywhere near as important of a factor, especially now that we even saw the US abandon Ukraine to help Israel.
I don't even know if I fully understand the difficulty of cutting ties with Israel, and the more they push the limits the less I think I understand what's so goddamn important about them as an ally
They're at a key strategic position that allows the US to project power into several important targets. Doesn't help that they have nukes so the US can't risk leaving them to fend for themselves without committing omnicide.
I guess maybe I've been spoiled by my media choices, I've come to expect my antagonists to be three-dimensional and not straight-up sociopathic.
You hear about the crying drones thing? That was the reality breaker for me. I don't believe in any kind of elemental evil, but I do now see that sufficient depravity can reach more or less the same depths.
I hadn't heard of this. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/reports-israeli-drones-luring-people-093920198.html
Every time I think Israel couldn't get any worse, there's always more.
If I was a lich king who had to charge the demon portal with pure evil for my abyssal army to come invade the earth, I MIGHT think about doing the baby crying drone thing.
Yeah: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They just decided to project that force at 3 countries simultaneously. And if it doesn't work out for them, that's going to be the end of their usefulness.
Not just those, though. The west took a huge L in the Suez crisis, but Israel is a way to still have some control over Egypt (which is more or less a puppet state atm). Israel also sits at an important position for projecting power to Afghanistan (lol) and, to a lesser extent, East Asia. South Korea and Japan are much more relevant for East Asia, but Israel still functions as a hub connecting the east and west.
Israel is the United States' unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East. As current US president Joe Biden said, if Israel did not exist, the US would create one to promote it's interests in the region. That is why the United States considers them important as an ally.
The Palestinian people have, since the Balfour Declaration during the First World War, been the victim of a colonization project by a foreign population, who reserve for them the fate of the Native Americans, whether one acknowledges it or pretends to be ignorant of it. This project has always had the unconditional support of the dominant imperialist power in the region (yesterday Great Britain, today the United States), because the foreign state in the region formed by that project can only be the unconditional ally, in turn, of the interventions required to force the Arab Middle East to submit to the domination of imperialist capitalism.
The Zionist colonial project has always been a threat, beyond Palestine, for neighboring Arab peoples. Its ambitions to annex the Egyptian Sinai and its effective annexation of the Syrian Golan are testimony to that. In the Greater Middle East project, a particular place is granted to Israel, to its regional monopoly of nuclear military equipment and its role as “indispensable partner” (under the fallacious pretext that Israel has technological expertise of which the Arab people are incapable. What an indispensable racism!).
Today to accept the implementation of the Israeli project in progress is to ratify the abolition of the primary right of peoples: the right to exist. This is the supreme crime against humanity. The accusation of “anti-Semitism” addressed to those who reject this crime is only a means for appalling blackmail.
- Samir Amin
This is a good point. US and Israel deliberately formed a joint suicide pact because it is in both of their interests. For Israel, it ensure the global superpower is always willing to cover for them and defend them. For the USA, it creates a colony that cannot revolt against them and a foothold in the region to exert power from. It's not a coincidence that the Zionist project chose Palestine, located on the Mediterranean Sea right next to the Suez Canal as its location. Israel made this clear during the so-called "Suez Crisis" where they invaded Egypt the moment western imperialist powers lost control of the canal and seized the canal. It is only the pressure of the USSR, and the quick thinking of Nasser to scuttle the canal that prevented this power grab and resulted in a ceasefire. The western imperialists eventually got their way anyway, with Egypt being retaken by their own cronies.
Israel is also located in a perfect position to splinter the middle east and control oil production, and the planned Greater Israel takes chunks out of every surrounding nation (Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and even Iraq). It is in a perfect geopolitical location to control the suez canal & a large part of the world's oil reserves. This is why they didn't decide to do their project in West Germany or the US, but in Palestine.
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This is the eventual goal of the Zionists, Eretz Yisrael, from the Nile to the Euphrates (and beyond). You can start to see why their location is very strategic, even moreso than Turkey which is often described as in a very good geopolitical strategic location.
Liberal Zionists will call this "anti-semitic conspiracy theories" but it's not, hardline zionists are quite open with their intentions and openly broadcast them. They plan to dominate the arabs, push north until they eventually connect up with Kurds and Turks. They plan to cross the river Jordan. They plan to re-take Suez Canal.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41144505
Here's a Russian-Zionist hardliner crank's blog where they just give the whole speal right out in the open in 2003, peep how active the comments were this isn't just some tiny fringe.
Reaching these limits is a prescriptive commandment of the Torah. According to the list of Ramban, this is: “The fourth commandment. We are commanded to possess the land that G‑d gave to our forefathers - Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and not to leave it in the hands of foreigners, or completely uninhabited. As it is said: “And take possession of the land and settle in her, for I have given this land to you, to take possession of it.”
https://avrom.livejournal.com/116574.html
And it's not just cranks who are like this, this is the mainstream position of Likud and Ben-Givr and the Israeli right.
I dug more into this blog, and it's the rabbi Avraham Shmulevich who lives in Hebron, Israel (a settlement) and has a youtube channel in Russian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syl-Ouyy7gw
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All the rhetoric I've seen from the Israeli establishment is full of religious allusions, like some crusader battle speech. So many in the West talk about Israel like they are making rational choices but it really is based on this sort of shit.
Yes there were many reasons that the Middle East was chosen as the primary outpost for the current imperial system and the "first strike" by the US in the 21st century. The same article by Amin states that:
The project of the United States, supported to varying degrees by their subaltern allies in Europe and Japan, is to establish military control over the entire planet. With this prospect in mind, the Middle East was chosen as the “first strike” region for four reasons:
- (1) it holds the most abundant petroleum resources in the world and its direct control by the armed forces of the United States would give Washington a privileged position, placing its allies—Europe and Japan—and possible rivals (China) in an uncomfortable position of dependence for their energy supplies;
- (2) it is located at the crossroads of the Old World and makes it easier to put in place a permanent military threat against China, India, and Russia;
- (3) the region is experiencing a moment of weakness and confusion that allows the aggressor to be assured of an easy victory, at least for the moment; and
- (4) Israel’s presence in the region, Washington’s unconditional ally
https://monthlyreview.org/2007/12/01/political-islam-in-the-service-of-imperialism/
The article is from 2007, so a lot has changed since then. But it is still relevant.
Also explains the posturing on China and their weapons sales to places like Russia. Stir that up a little and make them seem like a bad guy for basically just doing what any country that produces military equipment does. Meanwhile it gets everyone a little more on edge and ready to make military purchases themselves from your friends in the USA.
Well it's a "win-win" assuming Israel doesn't get obliterated
America basically allowed Ukraine to be obliterated and they’re barely less geopolitically relevant as Israel.
Or bibi doesn't throw nukes at Tehran as a final fuck you
Absolutely not. It’s simply political suicide to not support Israel materially. Every now and then you get a pass to criticize them, but if you stop the flow of money and weapons then it might even be physical suicide.
The best case scenario is they plot a coup and install a liberal who’s able to control the fascists and conduct genocide in a peaceful, civilized manner that won’t draw too much attention to the region.
Was always going to happen unfortunately. Israel does not know how to de-escalate, and their fascist local politics would always demand a military response to the Iranian counter strikes.
I like how they did this immediately after the US vetoed UN membership for Palestine. Really shows the "oh, so we can get away with anything?" attitude.
Are we going to be doing a ww3? It feels like we’re heading to ww3.
NATO vs Middle East + Russia + whoever else gets dragged into the stupidity? I really don’t want to die as a nato citizen in ww3 on the side of Ukrainian neo nazis and genocial zionists. If nothing else I won’t get to live to see the climate catastrophe’s full consequences!
why would they do this? what could they possibly gain from starting a war with the entire region simultaneously? where are the geopolitics nerds?
Israel has two concepts at the core of their defense strategy that are now in conflict with each other.
Both are due to being significantly more militarily powerful than any one of their neighbors for about 50-70 years now.
Since their stunning victory in the 6-day war in the 60s, their military concept has been based on being much more powerful than any one enemy, and being able to defeat enemies one by one (“defeat in detail”) rather than taking on all their enemies at once.
Firstly, Israel always massively overreacts. As a rule and intentionally. Kidnap 300 hostages, they kill 45,000, raze your city, and starve 2 million. Massively disproportionate and that’s the point. You scratch them, they murder your entire family. The rationale being you will think twice before scratching them, even if they’re stealing your home.
Secondly, Israel wants to avoid multiple conflicts at once. Their strategy of massively over-reacting to being scratched works best when they can bring their full might against one enemy at a time. If they have to take on two enemies, then their ability to wipe out their foe is halved. So at all costs they want to avoid more than one conflict at a time. Note how they’re somewhat putting the brakes on Gaza now that the Iranian conflict is gaining steam.
These two concepts rely on Israel being much stronger than any one or even any two or three of their opponents which for our entire lives and likely our parents entire lives that has been true.
The decline of the unipolar world order and the rise of the Russia-China entente means having Uncle Sam in your corner no longer guarantees that you’re the strongest player in town.
And the emergence of the “axis of resistance” means Israel isn’t as easily able to take on one enemy at a time because the other players in the region have gotten wise to the fact that if they face Israel 1 by 1, like bad guys in a Kung Fu movie, they will likely lose. So they’re cooperating. They’re often simply described as “Iranian proxies” in the western media but this isn’t accurate, they aren’t mere puppets but rather a group of state and quasi-state actors whose ideologies and interests are closely aligned and who therefore find they’re able to easily cooperate and coordinate. Hezbollah is closely allied with Iran but they don’t take orders from Iran. It’s more like NATO. France doesn’t directly take orders from the USA but obviously the US is the senior partner, likewise Hezbollah are not under Iranian control but Iranian generals play a coordinating role.
Israel is facing a shifting world order where Iran’s de facto alliance with Russia and China and Iran’s domestic military capabilities make it a very serious player.
Israel is facing a world where instead of being able to regularly beat up the local threats by invading Lebanon or Gaza in rotation every five years to “mow the grass” and “preemptively” destroy threats by killing all the young men, now those groups are beginning to coordinate to prevent Israel from simply rotating between them.
When Hezbollah comes to help Hamas by shelling northern Israel, Israel’s geopolitical fundamental of massive overreaction demands that Israel now absolutely smashes Hezbollah.
But Israel’s geopolitical fundamental of taking on enemies one at a time demands they focus on Hamas first and come for Hezbollah later.
When Iran gives Yemen intel and supplies weapons to Hezbollah, overreaction demands they strike Iran but if they’re fighting Hamas and Hezbollah then their doctrine demands they can’t focus on Iran.
Additionally, they just don’t have the power to take on Hamas, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran at the same time. Israel is strong but they aren’t that strong. But since the geopolitical world order is shifting and the power of the US empire is declining, they also see that their window of opportunity for taking on Iran is closing.
They have these competing and outright conflicting geopolitical doctrines and geopolitical interests which is leading to this chaotic mix of responses.
When they say a caged animal is the most dangerous, this is why. Fear and aggression mix and conflict, resulting in dangerous unpredictability.
How it’s played out here:
Israel absolutely cannot afford a direct fight with Iran, but Israel cannot afford to allow itself to be seen to not react or under react to Iran scratching it, else it permanently loses the carefully cultivated deterrence value of being known to always massively overreact that sits at the heart of its defense doctrine and national self-image.
So they strike Syria and Iraq instead of striking Iran.
The doctrine of taking on one enemy at a time demands they avoid striking Iran. But the doctrine of always over reacting resulted in them taking on multiple more enemies instead.
Doctrinal chaos is making them panic. Fight or flight response meaning they flee from a fight with Iran while picking a fight with the weaker friends of Iran.
Doctrinal confusion between wanting to massively respond to the Hezbollah threat while avoiding a fight with Hezbollah resulted in conflicting reflexes and so they targeted the Iranian generals coordinating the groups.
In summary -
They desperately want to avoid fighting all these groups but their fundamental military demand is to massively overreact to any threat. So now that these groups are coordinating they are experiencing doctrinal panic and striking everyone in a limited way as a unworkable and geopolitically bipolar compromise between wanting to strike all their enemies at once while wanting to avoid fighting all their enemies at once.
Firstly, Israel always massively overreacts. As a rule and intentionally. Kidnap 300 hostages, they kill 45,000, raze your city, and starve 2 million. Massively disproportionate and that’s the point. You scratch them, they murder your entire family. The rationale being you will think twice before scratching them, even if they’re stealing your home.
This is the "Communists will kill three generations of your family if you oppose them" propaganda, except it's real. It has always been liberal projection.
I should clarify that Israel cannot afford a direct fight with Iran without full US backing but it could attempt to ignite a war if it believes the US will be forced to defend it, which is plausible and at least some faction of Israeli defense intelligentsia see that as a viable play and might hope to ignite that conflict as “the big one” they want to fight while the US is still nominally the top geopolitical dog.
Do you have any sources for further reading on this? Or is this something you've concluded yourself? I figure now is probably the best time to read up as much as possible on this sort of thing.
Mearsheimer always has good takes. He’s treated as a pariah these days because at the start of the Ukraine war he was saying “the west is provoking Russia and Ukraine will lose” which was verboten wrong think so since then he’s been treated as a crank, but he was fucking right and before then he was highly respected. He’s also an anti-China hawk and is explicitly pro- US imperialism so his angle is very interesting for coming from a perspective of “US power is declining and this is what the US is doing wrong in terms of maintaining its power.”
He writes a lot but also he gives many interviews so for his views on very recent events you have to search him on YouTube.
He’s an interview where he discusses among other things the balance of power tensions in the Middle East between Iran and Israel
https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-interview/2024/02/john-mearsheimer-israel-ukraine-middle-east
Big Serge is a transphobic chud who has excellent insight into the military aspects of geopolitics. He has written about how disproportionate overreaction sits at the core of Israeli defense policy, and how that reflex is no longer viable but that for ideological (he argues even eschatological) reasons, Israel can’t give it up and it’s forcing Israel into a corner.
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-age-of-zugzwang
You can also see western intelligentsia acknowledging the issue, that the “divide and conquer” strategy Israel has employed for generations now has run its course, has failed in the face of the their opponents beginning to coordinate.
https://archive.ph/qz0xj
I also saved this article from an Indian general which analyzed the issue mostly because it was fascinating to see an Indian take that was level-headed and focused on the viability of Israel’s strategy, pointing out that a strategy that relies upon disproportionately overreacting means Israel needs to always be much stronger than its enemies, which dooms the doctrine to failure since Israel needs to be exponentially more powerful than its threats and that is simply not sustainable. That the psychology of Israeli deterrence means the next response is always more violent than the previous and if you keep doing this decade after decade you reach the point where your capacity to inflict violence doesn’t meet your desire to inflict violence.
https://wavellroom.com/2021/09/13/israels-cumulative-deterrence-strategy/
There’s also an amazing article I read talking about the Roman Empire and how, as it declined, it was forced to use more military force. I can’t find it now but I wish I saved it.
The thesis was that when a power is strong, it doesn’t need to use its strength since it’s enemies know they will lose so they don’t try. But when a power declines, now it actually needs to use its muscle.
The essay used the example of Jerusalem being destroyed by the Roman’s in the year 70. The Roman Empire at the height of its power faced an inconsequential threat from some religious zealots rebelling, but this was Rome at the height of its power so it used an absolutely profligate display of force to take out the rebels. Four legions were sent to Jerusalem and instead of simply laying siege to Jerusalem and starving them out, they wanted to demonstrate the degree of overmatch to send a message. So they built a sand ramp to climb the walls, enter the city, kill everyone, and the first wave of the modern Jewish diaspora began as their leadership were expelled from their capital.
This was contrasted with the conquest of Dacia centuries later. Rome had been able to rule with remarkably little use of military power for centuries because it was so much more powerful and so when Rome was powerful they didn’t need to conquer Dacia since Dacia would always do what Rome wanted anyway. It’s much more economical to have your enemies fear your power than to have to use your power.
But as Roman power went into relative decline, now Dacia wasn’t scared and so Dacia made the mistake of acting against Roman interests and Rome was forced to conquer Dacia. Rome still kicked Dacia’s ass and won that war but this was a real drain on resources. Rome won the war and reached its territorial zenith, on paper stronger than ever, but this was really a sign of weakness since it was a sign that the threat of Roman power was no longer a deterrent.
The article was fascinating in arguing that frequently deploying military power for its deterrence value is a sign of true weakness even if victorious. Being in a state of having to frequently employ military power is expensive and draining and a sign of imperial decline.
Interesting stuff for sure. Always good to examine non-marxist sources on these sorts of things, even repellent people can still understand something like geopolitics or the US empire collapsing (even if their angle is "this is a bad thing and we should reverse course").
The Roman example does sound interesting, though I do hope America's decline period doesn't last as long as the Romans. Though direct 1:1 parallels between the two are always a bad analysis and usually really incorrect.
“Decline of the Roman Empire” takes are always suspicious because the US empire simply isn’t the Roman Empire and the world we live in isn’t that world so whenever anyone suggests a historical determinism about how empires rise and fall according to a schedule you can safely discard their opinion.
But the take about Roman Jerusalem compared to Roman Dacia is an interesting one in that it makes a point about the utility of deference and when you actually have to use your military to deter your enemies that means you aren’t deterring your enemies.
Which is the same point the Indian general makes, that the fact Israel is constantly deploying its military to “deter” its enemies demonstrates the complete failure of the policy.
Israel only has to lose once and it’s Joever but they’re committed to risking it all every 5-10 years, and they simply won’t win every time.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that's what your analysis was saying, more my own comment about it. People using "The Roman empire fell because of X" sort of arguments are usually white nationalists trying to blame the wokes or wamen or something (and claim that if their personal bugbear isn't dealt with it will cause the collapse of "the west" as well).
And this talk of Israel's "deterrent" also brings to mind their "invincibility" of their Iron Dome and things like that. It isn't enough for them to be stronger, they have to be invincible for their own narrative to work. And of course, as you say, they only have to lose once and it's all Joever. We'll see if that starts now, or within the next few years, but it does seem like they've arrived at the beginning of the end at this point. They can't do anything to prevent their decline.
Yes a ton really but I haven’t compiled them. I have a work meeting I can slack off during today and so ill use that time to dig up some links that give context and viewpoints.
Good assessment, it really shows that the October 7th attack is the real lynchpin of the resistance strategy as Israel’s war strategy really did not account for Palestinian resistance from Gaza of all places.
this is exactly the level of detail i wanted for an answer and part of the reason i hangout here, thanks for the indepth explanation and more sources!
i take it the us will be forced divide their attention between the middle east and asia (russia + china) in the coming war then.
Thanky 420.stalin. good assessment. But only thing missing is that Israel is literally a proxy state. I mean sure there's the US liberty rest in peace and all that but it's integral to US geostrategic interests so they don't really have carte blanche. Or do they. That my comrades is the question
where are the geopolitics nerds?
https://hexbear.net/post/2301742 (newsmega)
Nothing the west loves doing more than giving air cover to ISIS
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2016_Deir_ez-Zor_air_raid
If I had to guess, Islamic resistance in Iraq, the “proxy” that has been striking Israel recently
ive always maintained that iran must get their own nukes
