Moving on from the damning silence of the CEASEFIRE NOW peace n’ love mobs when Iran attacked Israel with missiles and drones Saturday night, let’s look at What It All Means.
We find ourselves in a period, like the 1930s, when tyranny seems to be on the march, and just like back then, voices can be heard expressing awed admiration for the Great Leaders’ strategic skills. Geniuses Putin, Xi, and Khamenei are plotting out subtle long-range plans, you see, which elected leaders whose time in office is limited can never hope to best. If this line of thinking were correct, the Greater German Reich and Fascist Italy would rule most of Europe to this day, while the Soviet Union would stand triumphant over the rest of the Continent, splitting Asia with the Empire of Japan. So let’s throw a few historically well-grounded peanut shells at the pundits from our seats up here in the outer darkness.
The mighty Islamic Republic of Long White Beards and Turbans has a problem, you see, in that its super-sophisticated, super-devious chess moves have long been obvious to anyone who is not a halfwit, which the neighboring oil sheikhs certainly are not. And now, Khamenei’s missile and drone swarm has not only failed, it has ripped away the flimsy deniability of his Houthi-Schmouthis and Hezbollah-Schmezbollahs. Pity poor Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s UN Ambassador, who was left in the unenviable position of pleading self-defense for this massive air raid. I’m surprised Deputy U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood didn’t silently hold up one of those notorious pictures of blindfolded, captive American diplomats from the Long White Beards and Turbans’ sack of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, a key moment of the so-called Islamic Revolution, when Iravani was complaining about the Jews’ chutzpah in attacking the Iranian Embassy compound in Damascus, for which the air raid on Israel was supposedly retaliation.
You see, dear reader, whatever jackals’ howls you have been hearing from the Free-Free-Palestines; despite my loathing for Netanyahu and his gang of would-be fascists; and despite the catastrophic failure of the Israeli military and intelligence services six months ago, there is NO WAY IN HELL the Israelis are looking for military adventures to go on at this moment, when they are still bogged down in Gaza. It may not have been front-page news in the so-called Free World over the past several months, but Iran’s Hezbollah marionette in Lebanon opened up a second front in Israel’s north right after October 7. The strike on Iran’s “consulate” was meant to and did take out top terrorist generals in Iran’s “Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” which is to say, men who were actively engaged in the war against Israel, a war they have actually been waging for many years.
Which left the Turban-in-Chief in a bind. In bloodless international relations terms, he felt compelled to “restore Iran’s deterrent capacity,” or in English, to hurt the Israelis so badly they would not dare ever confront the “Islamic Republic” directly again. Trouble is, Israel has had the very same need to “restore its deterrent capacity” since October 7. If Israel gives in to international pressure and withdraws from Gaza, leaving Hamas decimated but strong enough to re-establish its rule over Gaza, the Islamist-Nazi group will rebuild its strength until it is able to repeat the October 7 slaughter and worse, as it has repeatedly declared it intends to. Israel would then have shown itself a “paper tiger,” in Mao Tse-Tung’s infamous phraseology, one incapable of defeating even a shitty little terrorist gang. And then the real jackals would close in for the kill.
So, can’t Israel and Iran just both pretend that their “deterrent capacity” is full up, and call off the war? Nope, because this is where the International Relations blatherskite really breaks down. To illustrate why, consider the way Lyndon Johnson’s administration viewed its wartime enemy, Communist North Vietnam. The mindset that took hold was the work of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a holdover from Saint Jack Kennedy’s gang of “the best and the brightest.” Having cut his teeth analyzing reams of “data” on America’s “strategic bombing” of Japan during World War II, McNamara believed in the power of data and numbers to win wars, no less strongly than today’s techno-creeps believe that this power will conquer the world for them.
In November 1964, according to a report that former CIA official Harold P. Ford prepared for his agency in 1996, a “working group” split between the State Department and the National Security Council recommended that the United States undertake “a moderate, graduated course of bombing” North Vietnam. State Department official Walt W. Rostow wrote to McNamara arguing, in Ford’s summation, “that the central purpose of bombing [North Vietnam] should be the sending of a signal to Hanoi that the United States was ready and able to meet any level of escalation the North Vietnamese might mount in response to these airstrikes.” Emphasis added: America was using B-52 bombers to “send signals,” based on the concept that if you analyzed the data and dropped some bombs, but not too many bombs, you could send a “graduated” signal.
Had these people never heard of the telegraph or the telephone?
Grand High Poo-Bah Ali Khamenei has just made the same mistake, in my view: thinking that if he bombed Israel, but not too much, he could send a carefully graduated signal to those mad dogs in Jerusalem not to mess with him. So as the air raid on the Jewish state concluded, Iravani and his minions has this to say on Elon Musk’s zombie Nazified Twitter:
Rostow and McNamara himself would have approved of this reasoning. But their “strategy” cost one million Vietnamese lives and 58,000 American dead, and America lost the Vietnam War. And their disciple the Grand Poo-Bah of All the Persians has also just made a fatal mistake based on erroneous assumptions. Where McNamara & Co. believed in their statistics and their analysis, Khamenei believes in the twisted view he has of Israel, America, and democratic societies in general. Like other totalitarian dictators, he fundamentally thinks that democracy is weak, contemptible, and decadent, and that it will crumble in the face of righteous rage.
As for the calls from President Biden for Israel to “exercise restraint” and not “retaliate” against Iran, here is a case where the strategic interests of America and Israel really do diverge. America wants a quiet Middle East that produces a regular supply of oil, while the mad dogs in Jerusalem want their population not to be incinerated by the “Islamic bomb” Iran is frantically working to perfect. So here we sit, up in the outer darkness, watching another bloody debacle unfold before our eyes. Know this, gentle reader: “quiet” will not soon return.
Emanuel Goldstein 