Iran’s Israel Strike Reshapes West Asia Forever

May 03, 2024

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On April 13th, Iran, alongside Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s AnsarAllah, executed Operation True Promise, a vast wave of drone, cruise and ballistic missile strikes on the Zionist entity, launched in retaliation to Tel Aviv’s criminal bombing of Tehran’s Damascus embassy less than two weeks earlier, which killed two Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) generals. As a result, history was made, and the world - in particular West Asia - will never be the same again.

Iran’s first ever strike on the entity, following decades of provocations, escalations, assassinations, incendiary threats, and determined lobbying for U.S.-led war against Tehran by Tel Aviv officials, the effort targeted airbases, Israeli Air Force intelligence HQ, and a constellation of air defense systems. The U.S., Britain, and France scrambled jets to help shoot the vast payload down - unsuccessfully - while Jordan controversially permitted Western powers to use its airspace for the purpose. The entity claimed a 99% interception rate.

However, extensive photo and video material shows many missiles hit their targets, and wrought much damage. In the process, Iran demonstrated to Tel Aviv and its Western backers a hitherto unknown ability to circumvent layer upon layer of protective measures, including top tier fighter jets, NATO-supplied air defense systems, and the much-vaunted Iron Dome. One by one, they largely failed in their duty, leading to the astonishing sight of Iranian missiles soaring unmolested over the Knesset.

This righteous scene no doubt sent untold chills scouring around Western and Israeli corridors of power, searching vainly for spines to run up. It also dispatched a palpable message - Tehran could, if it wished, have struck the Zionist legislature, but didn’t do so. For the time being, at least. The floor was now Tel Aviv’s, to decide whether - and how - to retaliate. A response came on April 19, in the form of pre-dawn drone sorties across Iran.

Initially framed by Western media as hugely impactful, in reality a small swarm of Israeli quadcopters attempted to breach Tehran’s air defenses, but ultimately couldn’t. An Iranian spokesperson subsequently referred to the effort as “failed and humiliating.” This characterization surely applies more widely to the pathetic state to which Tel Aviv has been reduced, following Operation True Promise’s seismic success. As we shall see, the Zionist entity now has little time remaining, and no good choices left to make.

‘New Equation’

Despite its astonishing optics, and unprecedented nature, some West Asian observers were disappointed that the attack on Israel wasn’t a decapitation. Such perspectives overlook the Islamic Republic’s longstanding commitment to caution. Devastation of Tehran’s Syrian embassy was without historic parallel, and clearly concerned with eliciting a major escalation, in order to drag the U.S. into total war. A measured, well-advertised show of strength deterred wider response, while signaling a major shift in Iranian policy towards the entity. IRGC commander Hossein Salami has said:

“We have decided to create a New Equation, and that is if from now on the Zionist regime attacks our interests, assets, personalities, and citizens, at any point we will attack against them.”

Those are fighting words, and Operation True Promise plainly demonstrated they can be backed with action. Iran has shown it can strike the entity directly from its own soil, its fleets of missiles and drones capable of traveling thousands of kilometers over both friendly and hostile airspace, separate timezones, and multiple countries. Along the way, Tehran will have gleaned an enormous amount of invaluable intelligence on the defensive capabilities, and vulnerabilities, not only of Israel, but the local Western infrastructure upon which its defenses depend.

Any future Iranian strike would make the most of whatever was learned on April 13th, and the data yield was likely enormous. Since Russia’s “Special Military Operation” began in February 2022, defense cooperation between Moscow and Tehran has reached extraordinary levels - and intensive learning and on-the-go refinement of battle strategy is core Russian military doctrine. As a nameless Ukrainian Army officer bitterly told Politico on April 3, Western weapons systems sent to Kiev “become redundant very quickly because they’re quickly countered by the Russians”:

“For example, we used Storm Shadow and SCALP cruise missiles [supplied by Britain and France] successfully - but just for a short time. The Russians are always studying. They don’t give us a second chance. And they’re successful in this.”

If there’s a next time too, Iran’s missile and drone fleet is likely to be considerably more sustained, playing out over several days, weeks, or even months - wave after wave, burst after burst. Estimates suggest around 300 separate projectiles fired at the entity during Operation True Promise. Tel Aviv’s largely unsuccessful attempts to repel the blitz alone cost $1.08 - 1.35 billion, according to an Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) general.

“One Arrow missile used to intercept an Iranian ballistic missile costs $3.5 million, while the cost of one David Sling missile is $1 million, in addition to the sorties of aircraft that participated in intercepting the Iranian drones,” they told local media. Meanwhile, an Israeli think tank researcher calculates the costs “were enormous”, comparable to what Israel spent during the entire 1973 Arab/Israeli war, which lasted almost three weeks.

Those sums were splurged on missile interceptors, missiles, jet fuel, and other military equipment and infrastructure. It is uncertain how much Iran spent on the Operation, but it is undoubtedly a great many orders of magnitude less. Some sources have suggested $30 million, which could well be accurate. This massive cost discrepancy is a very, very grave issue for the entity, as the U.S. can attest, given its embarrassing experiences attempting - and completely failing - to end AnsarAllah’s anti-genocide blockade of the Red Sea.

Almost immediately, Politico reported that the Pentagon was aghast that it was squandering missiles costing millions to shoot down $2,000 AnsarAllah drones. “That quickly becomes a problem because the most benefit, even if we do shoot down their incoming missiles and drones, is in their favor,” a CIA officer lamented. “We…need to start looking at systems that can defeat these that are more in line with the costs they are expending to attack us.”

**An AnsarAllah freedom fighter holds a sign declaring, “Oi, Zionist! My sea is your grave!”**

‘Israel Goes Under’

There is no sign publicly yet of Washington having rectified this concern. This may account for why US officials at the start of April extended to AnsarAllah a sweeping offer of total surrender in return for ending the Red Sea blockade, which was rejected. But in the event of a subsequent Iranian strike on Tel Aviv, Tehran’s Shahed drones will not be used to deter shipping, but tie up, smoke out, and exhaust the entity’s air defenses.

This tactic was used to significant effect on April 13th, as it has been by Russia since its airstrikes on critical Ukrainian infrastructure began in late 2022. Now, Kiev is on the verge of being de-electrified, which will cause a battlefield and population displacement, with potentially devastating knock-on effects on neighboring countries, and states trying to keep Kiev’s lights on. It seems safe to say neither Israel nor its Western allies could sustain a serious defense to a protracted assault by Tehran, economically or materially.

That conclusion is supported by an April 22nd Wall Street Journal report, which revealed the Biden administration was shocked at the scale of Iran’s barrage. It “matched worst-case scenarios” envisaged by US intelligence and the Pentagon. An unnamed senior official despaired, “this was on the high end…of what we were anticipating.” White House Situation Room attendees on the day allegedly feared Israel and its allies would not be able to repel the assault. And they couldn’t.

On top of a mass crime against humanity amounting to a 21st century Holocaust, the entity’s genocide in Gaza has been utterly destructive to its own economy. A Financial Times investigation of November 6th 2023 documented how the assault has ravaged personal finances, job markets, businesses, industries, and the Israeli government itself. “Thousands” of companies were teetering on the brink of collapse, with entire sectors plunged into an unprecedented crisis. One in three businesses had either shuttered or were operating at 20 percent capacity.

One can imagine how much worse things have gotten in the six months since, and Israel isn’t yet embroiled in an all-out war. An extended period of mass strikes from Iran, AnsarAllah and Hezbollah could completely paralyse the entity economically, render entire areas of the entity uninhabitable - or, at least, uninhabited - destroy infrastructure, and much more. Among the sites in Tehran’s crosshairs could well be the Dimona nuclear power plant, which would unleash deadly chaos on a grand scale.

Resultantly, the Zionist entity’s “Samson Option”, under which it is committed to launch a mass nuclear strike if its existence is threatened, should no longer be taken very seriously. Israeli military theorist Martin van Creveld once boasted, “we have the capability to take the world down with us, and I can assure you that will happen before Israel goes under.” But Tehran’s hypersonic missile capabilities are in every way an effective counter-deterrent. They could even deliver a nuclear, or chemical/biological payload of their own.

‘Whoever Moves’

The Zionist entity’s Iranian drubbing is further exacerbated by its attempt to crush Hamas being an absolute disaster, in every conceivable way. The fiasco’s consequences are and will remain wide-ranging and grave, to the extent of fatal. This may account for Netanyahu’s flailing bid to draw Tehran into all-out war. After all, the scale of Israeli Occupation Forces’ defeat is such that in an absolutely scathing op-ed for Haaretz on April 11th, Zionist “journalist” Chaim Levinson lamented:

“We’ve lost. Truth must be told…It’s unpleasant to say, but we may not be able to safety [sic] return to Israel’s northern border…No cabinet minister will restore our sense of personal security. Every Iranian threat will make us tremble. Our international standing was dealt a beating. Our leadership’s weakness was revealed to the outside. For years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an airforce, and that’s on the condition it’s awakened in time.”

Even the Western media, which since the genocide began has been at best silent and at worst complicit - and much more active in the latter sphere than the former - has acknowledged Tel Aviv’s battlefield cataclysm. The Economist, a nakedly Zionist publication that has whitewashed, diminished, or outright justified every conceivable crime committed by the IOF, has condemned the Forces’ “military and moral failures”, and how “its generals botched the strategy, and discipline among troops has broken down”:

“[Israel is] accused of two catastrophic failures. First, it has not achieved its military objectives in Gaza. Second, it has acted immorally and broken the laws of war. The implications for both the IDF and Israel are profound…Hamas fighters are still ambushing Israeli forces throughout Gaza and the group is reasserting itself in areas the IDF has left…Accusations that Israel has broken the laws of war are plausible.”

The Economist went on to slam a “lack of enforcement” of already virtually non-existent “rules of engagement” under which the IOF operate. A quoted “veteran reserve officer” said commanders could arbitrarily “decide that whoever moves in his sector is a terrorist or that buildings should be destroyed.” A sapper in another unit admitted, “the only limit to the number of buildings we blew up was the time we had inside Gaza”:

“Soldiers have filmed themselves vandalising Palestinian property and, in some cases, put those videos online. On February 20 the IDF’s chief of staff published a public letter to all soldiers warning them to use force only where necessary, ‘to distinguish between a terrorist and who is not, not to take anything which isn’t ours - a souvenir or weaponry - and not to film vengeance videos.’ Four months into the war, this was too little, too late.”

That The Economist printed such things at all reflects how far the Zionist entity has fallen since October 7th. Now, it is a global pariah, viscerally loathed by the overwhelming majority of the world’s citizenry. Its once-vaunted military is not feared by adversaries, and their ability to unilaterally strike Muslim countries with total impunity, and no comebacks, is over. Tel Aviv’s claim to “defense” and security primacy, upon which much of its exports were successfully marketed for decades, has been amply demonstrated to be bogus.

Meanwhile, the entity has suffered population collapse, with concomitant mass brain drain and workforce freefall as settlers flee or get conscripted. Demand for mental health services has reached all-time highs, as the trauma of perpetrating genocide, and living under the daily threat of attack as Palestinians have since 1948, ravages soldiers and civilians alike. But scores of psychiatrists have relocated elsewhere due to stressful workloads, and likely won’t return. Such are the foundational flaws of a settler colonial state.

For many, these developments may be little consolation, coming as they do off the back of thousands of murdered and mutilated Palestinian children. Yet, they are unambiguous indicators that the Zionist entity is on the brink of extinction, which wasn’t the case before Hamas breached Gaza’s concentration camp walls on October 7th 2023. Palestine is now closer to being free than at any point since Israel’s creation. And there is no going back to “normal”.

Time is now and forever on the side of the indefatigable, undefeated Resistance - so too justice, and virtue. We should never forget the immortal, galvanising words of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, slain in cold blood by a targeted IOF airstrike on December 6th 2023:

“If I must die, let it bring hope.”