The USA appears to be preparing for a “retaliation” to the drone attack on the US base in Syria that will assure escalation in the Middle East:
The U.S. claims that an Iraqi resistance group, allegedly supported by Iran, is responsible for the strike. There are several such groups allied with Iran in Syria and Iraq. Which one of them did this? Does the U.S. know this at all?
Iran denies any involvement in the attack.
The attack is certainly an escalation over previous ones. President Biden has said that he will respond to it.
The question in then to where to respond (Syria, Iraq, Iran) and to what grade. Most likely the U.S. will escalate from its previous bombing of this or that Iraq resistance group. Should the U.S. attack any state related institutions or position, the situation will escalate further. The resistance camp would then try even harder to damage more U.S. assets. Since the U.S. assassination of General Quassam Suleimani its overall aim is to remove the U.S. from the Middle East.
The U.S. immediate response to the hit was the activation of long range tanker planes:
At least 6 U.S. Air Force KC-135 Aerial-Refueling Tankers, most from March Air Reserve Base in Southern California, are heading Northeast across the United States and preparing to Transit the Atlantic towards the U.K. and Europe. I wonder what kind of Aircraft they are Refueling?
Aerial-refueling tankers are used to keep fighter jets in the air for several hours. The reasons to keep jets in the air may not necessarily be to attack someone, but to prevent them from being destroyed by an attack on ones own airports.
The U.S. has plenty of bases in the Middle East which house a lot of expensive jets. If the U.S. suspects that those bases will come under attack it will need lots of air-tanker capability to save the jets currently stationed on them.
One could conclude from this that the U.S. will attack a target so important that it has to prepare for an all out response attack on its own Middle East bases. There are several other possibilities but this seems to be the most likely conclusion.
War On The Middle East, MOA, 29 January 2024
What will be will be. What is of more interest to me is the question of who is behind this gradual enmeshing of the US military in the Middle East. The most obvious answer is Israel and the US neocons, and the green flag on October 7th tends to support that idea, but they’ve been trying to get the USA to go to war with Iran for the last 20 years, so how is it that they have finally achieved some success in this regard after so many recent setbacks? Could they not have managed to kill three (3!) US soldiers at pretty much any point over the last two decades?
My assumption, and it is only that, an assumption, is that this is an aspect of the Sino-Russian geostrategy of implementing a death by a thousand cuts to gradually weaken and bleed out the imperial US military.
