The Yahya Sinwar Trap
Western mainstream media are anxious to sell the notion that Yahya Sinwar, assassinated within the past day by Israel in southern Gaza was the architect of October 7 2023, responsible, they say, for the killings of over 1,000 Israelis and the taking of over 200 hostages. The idea that October 7 was simply one more cry for the liberation of a people abused and suppressed by Israel since the inception of the apartheid state gets no press today and never does. Nor the fact that some 50% of those killedon October 7 were killed by Israelis applying the Hannibal doctrine, that the most horrific of crimes attributed to the Hamas have been proven to be Israeli propaganda fabrications, and that most of the hostages are dying as a result of Israeli bombings and Israeli neglect.
This is the Yahya Sinwar trap, the selling of the idea to an apparently credulous public that monsters come out of nowhere, unbidden, to disturb the sleep of the oh-so-innocent, the so-deserving West (did we not all deserve Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk - are not these the paragons of human blessedness?), heirs to the perpetrators of the greatest genocides - as of Native Americans by White invaders, of Inca and Aztec indigenous by the conquistadores, or African and Amazonian slaves to the rubber lust of Belgium’s King Leopold, or the holocaust by German Nazis of the Jews and millions more. There is no room in this idea for centuries of despoliation, mass murder, enslavement, because it is unthinkable that the West, now having basked itself for a few years in the self-annointed goodness of me-too feminism,same sex marriage and LGBT orthodoxy, could ever have been responsible or might still be responsible for anything really bad that might give cause to monsters to monsterize.
The past, in this telling, has no consequences, leaves no traces. Ukrainian neo-Nazis just spring up from nowhere, from a non-history; US troops in Germany are just visiting tourists; don’t dare say the post-war occupation of the defeated of Germany and Japan never actually ended.
As the world waits for Israel to strike Iran, determined as Israel appears to be to lure a not-so-unwilling imperial hegemon into the fray of a regional war - possibly World War 3, possibly the end of the human species - the slaying of Yahya Sinwar somehow escapes notice as the start of Israel’s strike, in the same breath as reports of US strikes by B2 stealth Spirit bombers of five underground weapons storage sites in Yemen announce US readiness to join Israel in its campaign of regional slaughter.
This generation of B2, at a cost of $2 billion per plane (there are 19 operational) can deliver conventional and nuclear warheads, and can fly without re-fuelling for distances up to 6,000 nautical miles - certainly enough to get a fellow from Missouri to Tehran. Their huge payload allows for the dropping of GBU-57 MOP “bunker busters,” - GPS-guided 30,000 pound bombs that can strike targets up to 200 feet below ground before exploding. That these weapons are used against the Yemenis but not the Russisans nor, yet, Iran, may signal US deference to a nuclear Russia and a potentially nuclear Iran.
The message is a warning to Tehran to back away. Even if Tehran had truly conducted a nuclear test a few days ago, as some believe, it would still be a year away from actually having warheads it could actually fit on missiles. We don’t know for sure what is the state of Iranian air-defense, and there is just a chance that whatever it is it could still take down a B2 missile. Russia’s caution in dealing with Pezeshkian, a man it has every reason to distrust, may have fatally slowed the transition of Russian S-400s to Iran, but Iran probably does have other Russian weapons and these might include either S-300s or the equivalents, at least, of Russian TOR and Panzir missile defense systems which, even if they lack the protection offered by more comprehsive systems can provide effective defense of vulnerable facilities.
In Ukraine, Zelenskiy’s intransigence is read by some as a last heroic gesture ahead of decapitation and by others as a further indication of his determination to keep sending his people to the slaughter just so long as they don’t slaughter him, first. Russian victories on the battleground suggest that Ukraine and the West will, in the end have to accept Russian terms, only neither Western submission, nor a Russian victory is likely ahead of the November 5 US presidential election. Trump will bring a close to the Ukraine war and concentrate his attention on China; and while Harris will likely maintain a front of pro-Ukrainian obstinacy, that obstinacy will be supported with less money, and Harris’ own foreign policy advisers will try to find routes for her to take towards a more multi-polar universe. In that Universe, China will be first among equals.
But be cheerful, cheerful like Jared Kushner (for whom, to be honest, cheerfulness is not really a thing); courtesy of Israel’s Likud Party, there will be great real-estate opportunities along the Mediterranean from which to admire Death’s mushroom clouds, though quite possibly at uncomfortably close quarters.