Victory of the Binaries

Calibration or Maximization?

One more day, so far, to the point in time of my writing on Saturday morning (California time) of October 12, of there NOT being an Israeli attack directly on Iran.

This is so, even as Israel destroys and threatens Iranian interests in Lebanon and Syria, even as the UN itself comes under attack from Israel in southern Lebanon (the UN having already suffered the loss of hundreds of its aid workers massacred by Israel), and amidst a shocking blanket cowardice on the part of the international community, shirking from the necessity of doing something meaningful to intervene to stop the genocides in Gaza, the West Bank and the Lebanon.

Israel, if it proceeds to attack Iran, can either stage a massive, existential attack or a calibrated attack.

In as much as anything can be described as the implementation of “pressure” on Israel it is likely that the US would prefer a calibrated escalation any time between now and the US presidential election (although there are plenty of neocons inside and outside of the Administration who would like to see an existential attack).

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar as also pleading with Washington to try to exercise some restraint on Israel. In particular, they appear to be concerned about talk of Israeli strikes on Iranian oil facilities. Restraint on Israel would be in their interests, given that SA and the UAE and Iran (and Russia and China, let us not forget) are all members of the BRICS. One might expect that a crisis of oil prices would benefit Iran itself (once it had recovered from the attack), as well as Saudi Arabia, and Russia, while inflicting great damage on the global economy, including China’s.

It continues to appear that Iran is not contemplating a pre-emptive strike. This would seem to have been the likely outcome from Iran president Pezeshkian’s meeting with Putin this week at the East Asia Economic Summit.

Russia is exercising caution, especially in advance of the BRICS summit in Kazan on October 20th where it needs solid support from the Global South for measures to establish a BRICS economy and initiate the ultimate fall of the dollar.

Talk of Russia and Iran only now conferring on the supply of Russian support and weapons to Iran is ridiculous: any such aid would have been and, I am sure, has already long been established in Iran.

Elements of the Iranian elite are also cautious. All appear to have agreed to sit still until Israel “retaliates” against Iran for its October 1st ballistic missile strikes on Israel. Iran has threatened that it will retaliate much more strongly againat the retaliation, but my expectation is that this would still be a calibrated response.

But if Israel’s retaliation takes the form of an all-out war, then of course Iran, assuming it still can, will respond in like manner.

The central problem here is that all parties seem, in public at least, to be passively waiting to see if Israel, under maniacal leadership whose legitimacy resides in the most extremist elements of Israeli society (much like Ukraine, by the way), will choose either an all-out war or a more limited escalation towards it.

The mere fact of their waiting (I am referring to Tehran and Washington primarily) seems to suggest they have already presumed that the unpredictable (Netanyahu) is in fact predictable, and the predictable response will be a calibrated escalation.

The principals are handing to Israel the luxury of deciding for the world whether it will continue to exist.

How do they think they know that Isrsel will act in a measured fashion? We don’t know. My own view, expressed here several times, is that the extent of threat to Iran is such that a responsible and accountable political and military leadership in Iran must take pre-emptive action together with its ally, Russia, not just to preserve the best of its own fighting equipment, but also to cripple a regime, Tel Aviv, that is engaged in the barborous murder of hundreds of thousands of wretched civilians in a campaign which will continue on until there is some final brake on Israel’s capacity for horror.

But I concede that the worry may be that Tel Aviv, if it becomes the target once again of an effective and more massive Iranian strike, will respond with nuclear force (even though there will likely be blowback of fire and radiation on Israel itself and on the entire region). But if Israel does that, then it will do it at any point that it knows it is losing. Better, as I argue, to strike pre-emptively, even with Washington support as well as Russian, since the interests of the world are genuinely at stake and Israel, through its attacks on the UN and its equal disdain for the ICJ and ICC, is attacking the world.

Heroic Death or Capitulation?

Things are not going too well for Zelenskiy. Early in September, Reuters reported that the US was contemplating sending ASM-1588 JASSM missiles with an extended range of 926 kilometers, sufficient to threaten any of 50 Russian administrative regions. In view of continuing Washington unwillingness to greenlight the use for Ukraine (I wont say “by” Ukraine) of Western long-range missiles on targets in Russia, this no longer seems very likely or very threatening.

In the meantime, the Ramstein meeting of NATO principals has been cancelled. This was ostensibly because President Biden felt he had to stay in Washington to help provide aid to Americans impacted by Hurricane Milton. But this does not explain why he could not have sent Secretary of State Tony Blinken in his place.

A more plausible reason for the Ramstein cancellation is that the Biden Administration has abandoned its belief in the likelihood of a Ukrainian victory. On the eve of an election it cannot allow itself to be seen throwing taxpayer money to Ukraine when its ability to respond effectively to natural disasters at home is in extreme doubt.

Furthermore, any declaration of more US aid and support for Ukraine is meaningless, right now, when it is not at all clear who is going to be winning the election and given that the aid and support would not arrive in Ukraine until long after the election.

Europe’s willingness to rush to take the baton from Biden and convert Project Ukraine into a European crusade for neoliberal capitalism seems also to be weak. NATO is unable to fast-track Ukrainian membership; and the EU will likely not want to do so in terms of EU membership.

The best that Europe can do, given that the prospect of fast-tracking Ukrainian membership of the EU is slim, is for European leaders to further chatter about how they and/or the G7 can “legally” steal Russian assets in Europe so they can give them to Ukraine, for Macron to promise French soldiers for anti-Russian war games in Romania, for Ursula von der Leyen to tell lies about Hungary which is blocking the gift of fresh European aid to Ukraine, for UK Prime Minister Starmer to lay on an ostentatious welcome to Zelenskiy even while British armories are bare and in the midst of growing European disdain for Zelenskiy as he travels around Europe, begging bowl in hand.

Zelenskiy is not, therefore, going to visit his troops in Kursk any day soon, where they are being slaughtered by a Russian counteroffensive that yesterday moved ten kilometers eastwards, pressing Ukrainian positions up against Sudja and killing thousands there and along the border. Kursk was Zelenskiy’s last major bit of showmanship to distract Ukrainian and NATO attention from the speed of Russian advances almost everywhere else along the combat lines. It is failing miserably.

Yet Zelenskiy has not lifted his ban on negotiations with the Putin government of Russia. He is sticking to his ridiculous “peace” and “victory” plans whose fantastic goals are the complete withdrawal of Russia to 1991 borders and for Russia to pay reparations to Ukraine.

All Western theatrical performance to the contrary, along the lines of Starmer’s silly welcome in London, is bankrupt.

Zelenskiy, if he is not an outright tool of Western intelligence, has never failed to act as though he is, while simultaneously demonstrating subservience to the Banderite crazies of Kiev whom the West manipulated into staging a coup in 2014 against a democratically elected President.

On the back of oligarch money and a performance as clown Zelenskiy came to power in 2018 on a “peace” ticket, in effect opening Ukraine’s agricultural wealth to Western finance, demanding entry to NATO, begging for nuclear weapons, and wholeheartedly provoking a Russian invasion by escalating Ukrainian aggression against the repubics of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Within a few weeks of Russia’s SMO he was at the negotiation table, and a draft agreement had been reached before Zelenskiy was suckered into abandoning the agreement in favor of a Western promise of weapons and a war to the last Ukrainian. And this war he has fought to non-stop failure.

Zelenskiy’s much touted second “peace conference” appears to have been abandoned - nobody wants to host it or have anything much to do with it, since Zelenskiy’s thinking has barely evolved since the first.

There is growing clamor from both Washington and Europe (including, now, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Schulz) for some kind of “frozen” conflict agreement, which Zelenskiy himself has rejected, and Russia will not accede to.

Russia wants a solution to the problem, not a palliative.

It is not impossible that the US might, under Trump or even Harris, finally seek direct negotiation with Moscow, without Ukraine, just as it negotiated directly with the Taliban without the puppet regime in Kabul, just as it negotiated directly with the North Vietnamese without the South.

This will not be quick, and in the meantime there is every chance that Russia will reach all of the Dnieper, putting stress on the cities of Odessa, Zapporizhzhia, Dnipro and Kiev itself. Indeed, there is a chance that as Russian forces boot Ukrainian out of Kursk they will continue southwards to Sumy and then to Kiev, while further east they continue south from Vovchansk to Kharkiv.

Russian recent bombing of Ukrainian ships entering Odessa, possibly equipped with Russian missiles transported to Ukraine from Romania, are a signal not only that Ukraine’s much-touted “defeat” of Russia’s Black Sea fleet was always a myth, but that Odessa and the remainder of Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline are very much still among the counters on the gaming table.