Centcom Cannot Hold

The Israeli, and now also US, attacks on Iran signify major consequences that are poised to shape the things to come

We’re over a week into the most recent mad rush towards death and destruction in the Middle East, I suppose it’s time to talk about its like consequences that transcend any of the events currently flooding the zone.

Back in October 2023, I wrote the following:

Israel’s continued existence is at stake, which is very much in line with statements issued by Mr. Netanyahoo and others.

Arguably, this has been the case since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, but so far successive Israeli governments have always enjoyed the overwhelming (mainly military) support of ‘the Collective West’, in particular the US…

With the US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities in Fowdor, Natanz, and Isfahan—didn’t Western politicos™, experts™, and journos™ castigate ‘ze Rooskies’ for allegedly doing that in Ukraine? (e.g., see here)—and Iran’s documented ability to inflict damage on Israel in response to the Israeli attack, I submit the essential question to be (as I wrote in October 2023):

The only question here, to my mind, is when will these casualty numbers exceed the ‘toleration threshold’, either on the Israeli side or on the Palestinian side.

The adjustment needed here is on the Israeli side: how many US casualties will it take before said ‘toleration threshold’ is exceeded? Logistics and material support are one thing, heck, even the occasional downed plane isn’t an issue here. As I pointed out in October 2023:

In the end, it won’t matter, if only because Israel cannot ‘win’, for the following reasons:

• If Israel ‘wins’, it means the mass expulsion (ethnic cleansing) and/or mass slaughter of Palestinians (genocide) in Gaza and, arguably, across the West Bank.

• If Palestinians ‘win’, it means the mass expulsion (ethnic cleansing) and/or mass slaughter of Israelis (genocide).

None of the above applies to the uptick in Israeli-US aggression against Iran as, absent a nuclear attack, their ‘toleration threshold’ will not be exceeded before Israel looks like Gaza.

Why? There’s mountain ranges all around the Iranian heartland and Iran’s population stands at 92m people. I’m not claiming historical comparisons here, but that’s in about the ballpark of Germany in WW2, and you know what it took to destroy their military machine. Geography, economics—the US was about 50% of industrial manufacturing back then—and logistics aside, I simply don’t see how Iran can or will be brought to heel by airstrikes.

Please find the rest here, if you’re interested:

The End of Israel

With the stage thus set—plus I prefer to revisit earlier statements to ensure how (in)correct I may have been—let’s turn to the main course: I envision three major changes to the world from this concatenation of events.

The Myth of Israeli/Western Military Superiority

Among the first and most obvious notions to go is certainly the myth of Western military technology as having no peer.

For quite some time, well-informed experts™ hailed Israeli air power, including its vaunted air defence system as ‘the best in the world’—just consider, as pars pro toto, this fawning piece in The National Interest from mid-January 2024 (source; archived, for the original website might be taken down…).

Both ‘Iron Dome’ and ‘David’s Sling’, as well as the US PATRIOT system were widely considered as the state of the art until 2-3 years ago; then came the Ukraine conflict, which showed the limits of esp. NATO’s arsenal, which was quickly brushed aside by claims that Kyiv wasn’t given ‘all the goodies’ in Western arsenals. (As an aside, cynics might now point to Ukraine as the landfill/dumping ground for outdated Western military hardware that would otherwise be ridiculously expensive to decommission and ‘recycle’.)

Israel was not considered to be, well, very different. Turns out, it isn’t. From the few pictures and videos one gathers still from Israel, as well as what I gather from (partially) Israel-based colleagues, there is considerable devastation in Israel, which calls into question the myth of Israel’s de facto invincibility.

I doubt that the US strikes on the Iranian nuclear sites will do much, if anything about all of the above—that is, except rendering into legitimate Iranian targets all US assets in the region. Then there are the continued air strikes on Israel, which the US attacks won’t do anything about.

Talk about ‘blowback’, that is, ‘the unintended consequences and unwanted side-effects of a covert operation’.

There’s a more or less direct comparison between events that transpired over seventy years ago—namely the CIA-sponsored coup that toppled the Iranian gov’t under Mohammed Mossaddegh in the 1950s, which brought the Shah to power whose repressive régime was eventually brought down by the Iranian revolution in 1978. We note, in passing, that the Ayatollah Khomeini long-complained about the US role in the Middle East (much like Osama bin-Laden, who voiced similar complaints about US forces in Saudi Arabia), which ushered in the long-standing antagonism between Tehran and Washington (and Israel). I highly recommend the late Chalmers Johnson’s eponymous book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2000).

What the escalation will likely produce—and that’s a consequence irrespective of an eventual return to a less bellicose stance—is the recognition that Western military gear is quite, well, not exactly up to the job. By extension, this recognition will also embolden others to consider doing things the US doesn’t like, if only because military power has undergone a transformation unlike any seen since the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which saw the relegation of previously-important middling powers, such as Bavaria, Venice, or Sweden into the second or third tier. Size began to matter more than skills, in a nutshell.

Advances in drone technology and rocketry once more permit small or middling powers to inflict disproportionate damages: while Israel is, once more, the poster child here (although that’s questionable due to implicit/explicit Western/US backing), consider, say, Yemen, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

One more word about the US (stupidly) joining the fray at this point: consider NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia in 1998/99: it took 78 days of sustained bombing, including targets that were considered off limits and war crimes, that is, civilian infrastructure (hospitals, power stations, etc.). Back then, Yugoslavia’s integrated air defences were never beaten or destroyed, yet it took almost three months of consecutive bombing to achieve a largely political outcome (acquiescence of Belgrade to NATO’s terms).

Now ask yourself: will the much smaller Israeli forces, even if augmented by literally everything plus the kitchen sink the Americans may throw at Iran, be able to pull that off? I mean, we’re talking massive bombing raids until the end of summer.

Exactly my thoughts.

We’re back at the ‘toleration threshold’, for that would signify the Iranians returning fire, with the US/UK assets in the Middle East as additional targets, to say nothing about int’l trade in especially oil and gas.

So, the question becomes: how much longer can this madness go on before something goes horribly wrong, e.g., the closure of the Straits of Hormuz (remember: China is the biggest customer of Iranian hydrocarbons, hence the US target in this matter is likely Beijing) triggering a massive economic crisis, to say nothing about the threat of a nuclear attack.

Let’s move on, shall we?

The End of Israeli/US Exceptionalism (Impunity)

The most direct outcome of this quagmire may be Mr. Netanyahoo being hauled to court once the guns fall silent. It may be whatever political consequences for Mr. Trump.

The overarching consequences will likely be—that Western gov’ts will join the rest of the world in their condemnation of Israel. If one considers the UN General Assembly’s votes on any Middle East/Israel/Palestine matter, world opinion (sic) is quite clear.

The US plus Britain and France hold veto powers in the Security Council since the latter’s creation in 1945; if that’s not a massively outdated distortion of power, I don’t know what is.

Then there’s the massive shift in popular opinion in the West, away from long-standing pro-Israel towards pro-Palestinian stances. We’ll soon observe how much longer Western gov’ts can maintain the former in the face of the ascendancy of the latter.

Of course, the constitutionally enshrined equation of the Jewish creed(s) with the State of Israel merely means howls of ‘anti-semitism’, which will rapidly lose their meaning (if that’s not already the case).

The flip side of this will be the end of any meaning attached to comparisons of this person and that policy with ‘the NAZIS’ and ‘the Holocaust’. They had a good run in the past couple of decades, but given what’s happening in the Middle East since 2023, it’s obvious that these labels have gone well their expiration date.

What this all signifies, I submit to you, is that Israel faces two options: wind down their exceptionalist stance and seek rapprochement with its neighbours. I suppose that leading politicos™, journos™, and experts™ in Israel as well as across a vast swath of the West are loath to do so, for virtually the entire foundation of the State of Israel is based on that kind of exceptionalism.

Moreover, it is quite likely that any such normalisation of Israel might require of them to forego their nuclear capabilities at some point; that might occur sooner—if Iran for instance strikes at Israel’s Dimona nuclear site—or later, for the lunatics in Mr. Netanyahoo’s gov’t cannot be trusted (see the ‘Samsom Option’ for more on this).

The main consequence for the West will be something else: since 1945, there grew up a cottage industry of vast proportions that considers everything related to the Second World War in moralising, if not outright moralistic, terms. This development was turbo-charged since the end of the Cold War.

The winding down of Israeli exceptionalism, then, signifies the advent of a fundamental re-consideration of the history of the 20th century, which will, in all likelihood, shake Western societies to their core. Consideration of this, however, requires their own postings, hence we shall move on now.

In the final analysis of this momentous point in time, we may summarise as follows:

• By joining Israel, the US has tied its fate to that of Mr. Netanyahoo and everything he stands for. We now also know for a fact that, whatever influence the Israel Lobby enjoyed in the US, it’s de facto over: the US can survive the end of Netanyahoo’s gov’t or even the end of Israel; the latter cannot survive even a small winding down of US support.

• If the US pulls back now, it’ll be seen, in Mao’s post-Vietnam terminology, as a ‘paper tiger’, this time wrapped in moral depravity (Pride™) and self-inflicted stupidity (‘Diversity is Our Strength’).

• Most other Western gov’ts will do the master’s bidding, and with the conflict in the Middle East escalating, fewer Western gov’ts will (be able to) do so—out of concern for both popular dissent (not that relevant) and their own hopes of survival.

The main fall-out beyond the immediate, however, appears to be Mr. Trump’s reputation (if any): who’s going to trust him in the future, or the US for that matter?

This will become terrible for esp. Israel, for it’s obvious for everyone who has more than one working brain cell that Israel can’t defend itself; if Mr. Trump waits two weeks before he orders more bombs to be dropped (which is possible), he’s even less cognitively able to discharge the duties of the presidency than Joe Biden. Basically, the other side(s) have the upper hand, Mr. Netanyahoo is basically holding Mr. Trump in a chokehold, and there’s no good way out. Oh, lest I forget, other than the rule of holes (stop digging), there’s nothing the US can do.

This weekend, then, marks the moment when the US morphed from a somewhat ambivalent world power to a rabid dog yapping for attention.

Whatever happened behind the closed doors of the White House—was Mr. Trump convinced by the Neocons or did someone blackmail/buy him him—appears irrelevant.

No more soft power, then; from now on, the exceptionalism of the US may linger on, zombie-like, but whatever words emanate from Washington, they’ll be just that: words that no-one cares much, if any, about. The one determining factor is: will the US drop bombs.

This signifies something extraordinary: the US is actually even weaker than many have presumed; I’m unsure if this is good or bad, but it’s certainly obvious: Mr. Trump is a wimp and a weakling, there’s no two ways about that.

Does ‘Int’l Law’ Still Exist? What About the UN?

The third main aspect of importance is the massive wrecking ball Mr. Trump just used against whatever remains of so-called ‘international law’.

While chit-chat by talking heads and analysts persists, they every so often speak of ‘war’. That term, though, infers a clear-cut legal stance, mostly defined as the absence of ‘peace’.

Strictly speaking, WW1 was certainly the last war that ended with a peace treaty; the same is unclear about WW2—and no armed conflict between two or more states ever since was, strictly speaking, a war in the once-commonly accepted sense of the term.

The United Nations had one duty: prevent war after WW2, and that it did—mainly by making use of the alternative reality of war™, which isn’t the same as the legally enshrined notion of war, hence the UN is a resounding success.

The same applies to other, related ideas, such as peace, which has morphed into peace™, or a host of other such terms.

Interestingly, the UN Security Council is a perfect reflection of this kind of reality™: no-one in his or her right mind would understand how the UK and France are permanent, veto-bearing powers but India is not (there’s no need for the EU to be there as a force in its own right: the EU isn’t a state, and since the UN is an intergovernmental organisation, the EU cannot be there, that is, unless we’re moving back into reality™, then it’s perfectly reasonable and sane to claim this).

The UN has failed, by and large, to prevent armed conflict; the Secretariat is largely detached from the General Assembly (here’s looking at you, Israel: you’re pretty much alone, except for the US and perhaps Vanuatu), and there’s little sympathy left.

I suspect that Israel, the US gov’t, the UN, and a good deal of the int’l order will go very soon; I’m not sure about the rank-ordering here, but I suspect that the closure of the Straits of Hormuz will contribute to this.

There’s nothing substantial coming from the UN in terms of, say, calls for a ceasefire; nothing is coming out of Israel—do they know what ‘the plan’ is? To say nothing about Mr. Trump who seems ‘winging it’, much to the misfortune of the rest of the world.

So, these are my two cents: what about yours, dear readers?