Waiting for Godot

The big question remains: will Israel strike Iran and, if not, why not?

Of course in an important sense Israel is already striking at Iran in continuing its offensive on what we can loosely call Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon and striking at Hezbollah leaders in southern Beirut at the cost of thousands of civilian lives.

In doing so it seeks to strike terror in the hearts of the Lebanese. If that is the intent the result is probably to the contrary.

Furthermore, Alastair Crooke’s assessment today is that Israeli’s domination of what is reportable from the battlefield and what is sayable in Western mainstream media manages to disguise the fragility of its so-called advances into Lebanon and the scale of its losses in confrontations with Hezbollah.

Crooke, whom I regard as one of the best available sources, believes that Hezbollah has reconstituted its leadership and that 90% of its fighting potential remains intact. Dropping over 100 13 ton guided bombs on the pretext of wanting to kill top leaders of Hezbollah, Israel is more likely to intensify regional hatred of Israel and feed a thirst for vengeance that could create a tidal wave of Arab resolution that could yet sweep away the bought-out regimes of Jordan and Egypt and inject some moral integrity into Turkey’s.

Crooke also calls attention to some of the practical challenges to be resolved before Israel can attack Iran: the spread of its nuclear energy facilities over very different sites, the depth to which some of these are embedded, the fallout from higher energy prices, the problems of getting together sufficient numbers of planes that can fly 1300 miles, carry and drop 13 ton bombs before being bought down by Russian air-defense systems, and sufficient numbers of fighter jets to accompany them, and sufficient numbers of re-fueling craft to keep them in the air.

Israel can do none of this without US preparedness to go openly to war against Iran. On the eve of a presidential election and facing considerable doubts in the Pentagon about US capacity to do this or to fight a multi-front war (already losing in Ukraine) and, doubtless, about the sanity, patriotism (to the US that is), morality and competence of the State Department leadership, the White House is cautious, to put it mildly.

Is Netanyahu sufficiently maniacal to go it alone? He is existentially wedded to the Zionist project for a greater Israel at the expense of the interests and lives four to five million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention larger populations in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iran. He lives inside an extreme ideology and theology. There is no cruelty of which he is not capable.

So yes he may try to go it alone in the belief he can still seduce the US into following him. He may find that the US will not follow and his end may come far sooner than anyone expected