Tag: Middle East

Clown Nose On

Israel appears to be on the verge of openly taking up arms against Russia:

Israel is becoming a “party” to the Ukraine war.

Intelligence Community information indicates Israel is setting-up “Iron Dome-type” missile defenses in and around Kiev and Nikolaev, to fight-off Russian Missiles. Here’s the rub: The systems WILL BE CONTROLLED EXCLUSIVELY BY ISRAEL.

Moreover, Israel will be implementing “mobile radar installations” in support of these missile defenses, and their (very quietly kept) intention is to “gather as much data as possible on Russian missiles because . . . . they expect Iran to have such technology soon, if not already.”

I wouldn’t say I consider the source to be particularly reliable, but things were always bound to reach this point eventually. Clown World revolves around the Tel Aviv – New York – London axis, and so despite the historical ties between the Soviet Union and Israel, Israel was always going to find itself in opposition to Iran’s allies in Russia and China.

Given the Iron Dome’s inability to stop missiles from Gaza, Hezbollah, and Yemen, I very much doubt the Israeli assistance is going to delay the fall of the Kiev regime by so much as a single day. But it would definitely make sense for them to gather as much data on the Russian missile systems as possible before Jerusalem or Tel Aviv are the targets.

One by one, the veils are being removed. It may not be too long now before the gloves start coming off, and the next phase of WWIII begins in earnest.

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Very Bad Business

I’m extremely skeptical, but it is now being reported that Israel actually manufactured the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies that injured more than 7,000 people in Lebanon:

The Israeli secret service didn’t just tamper with the deadly Hezbollah pagers — they made them from scratch, having set up a complex web of shell companies across Europe, it was claimed today. Initially it was suspected that Mossad had managed to intercept and plant tiny bombs in a shipment of the pagers headed for the Iranian-backed terror group in Lebanon after thousands of people were injured and dozens killed.

But now it appears that the Israelis set up front companies across Europe to manufacture the pagers themselves, embedding small amounts of PETN explosive inside, ready to be detonated by a coded message. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions, but 12 current and former defence and intelligence officials told the New York Times that the Israelis were behind it, describing the operation as ‘complex and long’.

First, this strikes me as damage control. People are quite likely concerned that their Apple and Android smartphones can be blown up, and it would make sense that the World Economic Forum types would want to squelch any question of the integrity of the global supply chains as rapidly as possible. I think it’s much more likely that the manufacturing process was infiltrated and the explosives were inserted without the knowledge of more than a few people at the factory. But it could still be as bad as a software attack on an intrinsic vulnerability of lithium-ion batteries, for all we know.

Second, this is arguably more destructive in the long term to the Israeli economy than the whole Boycott Diversify Sanctions movement has been. Even a die-hard Zionist might well want to avoid any Israeli-linked hardware device going forward.

Imagine when they move onto cars…

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Pager Terror Attacks

It is generally accepted that Israel is to blame for a mass terrorist attack that injured more than 2900 people in Lebanon.

Israel carried out a pager bomb attack that left roughly 2,800 people injured and 12 dead in Lebanon and Syria yesterday fearing that Hezbollah was on the cusp of foiling their deadly plot, a new report has claimed.

Pager devices recently introduced by the group to beef up security exploded en masse yesterday, causing chaotic scenes and devastation in Lebanese hospitals. Israel is believed to have orchestrated the attack but has not claimed responsibility. Security sources believe Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, intercepted devices en route to Lebanon months ago and attached explosives to be used when needed to cripple the Iranian proxy group.

Still, questions remain as to why the attack was carried out on Tuesday. One American official told Axios it was ‘a use it or lose it moment’ as Hezbollah were understood to be getting close to uncovering Israeli espionage.

Three US officials told Axios that Israel decided to blow up the pager devices carried by Hezbollah members on Tuesday as they feared the group was close to uncovering their operation.

A security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives had been hidden in the new pagers and had gone ‘undetected’ by Hezbollah for months.

One senior Lebanese security source told the news agency he believes the devices had been modified by Mossad ‘at the production level’ before arriving in Lebanon. ‘The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means,’ the source said.

Hezbollah earlier this year ordered thousands of pagers to conduct communications after leader Hassan Nasrallah declared smartphones would be more susceptible to cyber attacks by Israeli forces. As many as 5,000 devices are believed to have affected, though not all went off on Tuesday, according to the Lebanese source. The source claimed Hezbollah ordered the pagers from a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo, but executives there said the devices were actually manufactured and sold under licence by BAC Consulting in Budapest, Hungary.

Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, later said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. The pagers appeared to receive a coded error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate and beep for some 10 seconds. When the user pressed the pager’s button to cancel the alert, the explosives were detonated – a design that would ensure the pager was being held by the user at the time of the blast to inflict maximum damage.

The months-long operation by Mossad and the IDF represents an unprecedented security breach for Hezbollah, which vowed to exact revenge on Israel and continue its support for ally Hamas amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

First, this was obviously an own goal by Israel, which doesn’t seem to grasp that it is already considered to be a genocidal terrorist state by most of the world now due to the Gazacaust. The obvious probability of collateral damage, the trivial amount of military damage that could potentially be inflicted, and the indifference to civilian casualties make it a clear and obvious act of terrorism. There is no way this is going to improve the diplomatic crisis that Israel presently faces.

Second, there are three major implications in the Unintended Consequences department. One, who in their right minds is going to buy any Israeli technological product now or in the future? For all my opposition to anti-boycott laws and policies in the USA, I don’t follow the BDS movement and I’ve never had any issue with Israeli products in the past, but there is no chance I will ever buy or utilize any Israeli product that is capable of containing explosives in the future, and I very much doubt I am alone in this.

Two, Hezbollah’s leadership already wanted its fighters to stop using mobile phones. This mass attack on pagers has underlined the wisdom of the leadership’s position and will further reduce the likelihood that Hezbollah’s fighters will violate operational security.

And three, this should put a nail in the coffin of transhumanism. Only morons are going to put a chip in their hand, or in their head, in the knowledge that there is a genuine possibility that someone will have the ability to make it explode? It may even have a negative effect on device and smart phone sales over time, particularly if it is ever repeated.

These attacks were moderately successful. But they strike me as very ill-conceived and essentially non-military in conception. They are the sort of thing that Smart Boys in intelligence always concoct because they think it would be cool and clever, not the kind of operation that is conducive to actually winning wars.

UPDATE: Israel doubled down on its exploding device attacks:

Thousands of walkie talkies used by Hezbollah fighters have detonated across Lebanon, killing nine and wounding hundreds of people including mourners at a funeral, witnesses and security sources have reported. The second wave of carnage comes a day after thousands of exploding pagers used by the group left almost 3,000 people injured and a dozen dead, including civilians and children. Lebanese media has also reported that home solar energy systems have blown up in several areas of Beirut. The latest explosions this afternoon have hit the country’s south and the capital Beirut, where dramatic time-lapse video shows multiple plumes of smoke rising above the skyline in different locations almost simultaneously.

This really doesn’t bode well for devices such as the iPhone that don’t permit users to change their own batteries. How can you trust that there isn’t an ounce or two of high-explosive attached to your battery if it’s in a sealed-off department?

It’s certainly an object lesson in “build your own communications equipment” for everyone around the world.

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Douhet Wept

There’s an amount of discussion of the potential ramifications for the Middle East of the Yemeni missile that was used to strike the Gezer power plant from 1,265 miles away.

The Israeli air defense failed to intercept the Yemeni missile primarily because it is capable of changing its course suddenly – Israeli Channel 12. The US Navy failed to intercept the missile in the Red Sea as well. Great possibility that this was hypersonic.

Yemen confirmed that they used a hypersonic ballistic missile in the attack on Tel Aviv Yemeni Armed Forces says it hit an Israeli military target in Yaffa (Tel Aviv) with a new hypersonic ballistic missile that traveled 2,040 kilometers. This is the first time that an Iranian-made hypersonic missile has been used in an attack on Israel.

No doubt this has some ominous implications for the prospective Israel-Iran war. But of far more concern to Americans should be the fact that the military force that just drove the US Navy from the Red Sea has just demonstrated the capacity to hit a target from long range. Which means that both Iran and Yemen, to say nothing of China and Russia, almost certainly possess the ability to sink the US Navy’s carriers at will from longer range than the carriers’ own air assets can reach.

We are rapidly entering the post-airpower age, which has considerable implications for the applicability of seapower. A considerable amount of strategic rethinking is now in order.

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Israel Invades the West Bank

Apparently the Gazacaust wasn’t enough, so the IDF has entered the West Bank in force now.

Having failed to eradicate Hamas in Gaza, Israel on August 28 began a war on the West Bank, dubbed ‘Operation Summer Camps’.

This Israeli assault on West Bank areas is the largest since 2002, with thousands of Israeli soldiers, supported by helicopters and drones, invading northern West Bank cities, particularly targeting the refugee camps of Jenin, Tubas, and Tulkarem.

I don’t know how much longer the US media is going to be able to pretend this isn’t a long-planned ethnic cleansing. I suppose the Israeli government figures they’ve gotten as much as they can out of the “helpless victims” routine and so it’s time to switch to mask off mode.

But this primarily strikes me as an escalation meant to encourage Iranian action before the Palestinians can further attrit the IDF and its US supplier.

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A Dying Outpost

Things are not looking good for Israel, which is reaping the bitter harvest of completely ignoring the sage advice of one of its greatest sons. Though respected by militaries throughout the world, especially the U.S. Marines, the great Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has been utterly ignored by the generals of the IDF and the Likud politicians as they wage precisely the sort of Goliath vs David war that he has observed tends to enervate a military.

Meanwhile, Simplicius contrasts the difference between Russia’s war on NATO and Israel’s war on Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen, and concludes that very different results are likely.

Analysis continues to be churned out heralding the end of the Israeli economy:

The economic indicators speak of nothing less than an economic catastrophe. Over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt, tourism has stopped, Israel’s credit rating was lowered, Israeli bonds are sold at the prices of almost “junk bonds” levels, and the foreign investments that have already dropped by 60% in the first quarter of 2023 (as a result of the policies of Israel’s far-right government before October 7) show no prospects of recovery. The majority of the money invested in Israeli investment funds was diverted to investments abroad because Israelis do not want their own pension funds and insurance funds or their own savings to be tied to the fate of the State of Israel. This has caused a surprising stability in the Israeli stock market because funds invested in foreign stocks and bonds generated profit in foreign currency, which was multiplied by the rise in the exchange rate between foreign currencies and the Israeli Shekel. But then Intel scuttled a $25 billion investment plan in Israel, the biggest BDS victory ever.

It’s difficult to guess the future without going overboard with recency bias, but as the article above states, many figures have now proclaimed that the age of Zionism itself has come to an end, and a slow outflow from Israel, a kind of anti-Aliyah, will continue to take place until Israel itself falls apart and dissolves.

I’ve professed before that I can see Israel’s end resembling that of former Rhodesia. I’ve stated before that Netanyahu and Zelensky are two birds of a feather with the same desperate goals: they need to drag the US into a wider global war to save their regimes and their country. But what they don’t know is: they are doomed whether that happens or not. That’s because the US does not have the power to win a wider war against either adversary, and both Ukraine and Israel would be doomed to their fates, with US merely sacrificing itself in the process as well.

There’s good chance that by 2050-2075 Israel goes the way of Rhodesia, or at least won’t exist in its current form.

I wouldn’t give it that long, since Israel is a Clown World outpost that cannot survive support from the USA and its European puppet states, and the USA is unlikely to survive in its current form more than another decade or so. 2033 is rapidly approaching, but the USD will likely be dethroned before that, with the inevitable debt chickens coming home to roost hard.

What the war in Ukraine has revealed is that the entire basis for the Israeli military superiority necessary for its survival in a hostile environment was built on a false foundation of quality over quantity. That concept works in the small-scale series of battles in which Israel engaged during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 through 1983, and it works in the foreign adventurism in which the US has engaged for most of its military history, but it doesn’t work in real war.

Real war is existential and attritional. Doctrine doesn’t matter, elan doesn’t matter, technological advantage doesn’t matter. Four things are relevant: industrial capacity, numbers, societal morale, and leadership. And in both the Middle East conflict and the European one, Israel and the USA are severely deficient in all four aspects.

Which is why any serious observer is bound to conclude that both conflicts – which of course are different fronts of the same war – are going to end in defeat for the Clown World side. And that is why Ukraine, Israel, and the USA should all be attempting to negotiate surrenders to their respective adversaries on the best terms they can still obtain. But who surrenders when they are constantly assuring everyone that they are winning and victory is imminent in just two more weeks?

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Technology Changes War

And when it changes, those who struggle to adapt will suffer. Col Macgregor reports that an attempt to infiltrate Yemen resulted in a complete disaster courtesy of Russian satellite technology.

Andrew Napolitano: Colonel was there recently some military activity by the Houthies which resulted in about 70 deaths of IDF and some American contractors about which you can tell us?

Col. Douglas Macgregor: Well, I can tell you only what I found through open source material. I haven’t seen anything classified but I am reliably told that roughly 70 Israeli Special Forces along with some number of Americans, the total number was 70. How many were American mercenaries that joined in this operation, I don’t know what the exact breakdown was, but it was obviously mostly Israeli. They infiltrated successfully into Yemen, but they were tracked from the moment they infiltrated by overhead satellites, presumably Russian, and the Russians provided this information to the Iranians who immediately telegraphed it to the Houthis. Whatever you say about the Houthis, they’re tough hombres on the battlefield. They set up an ambush and they killed all of them, and there is footage of the dead. I haven’t had a chance to examine it carefully, clearly most of it’s Israeli, but there are some indisputably some American mercenaries, there may be some Brits mixed into it who are also employees of the same contract firm now. This is something very important for everybody listening to understand: persistent surveillance today changes everything in warfare. It not only enables precision strike on a scale that has never been the case in the past, it makes it impossible for forces to infiltrate into regions without being discovered.

We can’t know yet if this report is true or not. But there are four reasons it is credible:

  1. Yemen successfully denied the Red Sea to the US Navy earlier this year.
  2. The US Navy wants to put its four aircraft carriers in the Middle East in position to support Israeli efforts in the region, but is endangered by Yemeni land-to-sea strike abilities.
  3. Taking out the coastal missile batteries using air strikes has failed.
  4. An infantry infiltration was the only remaining option for eliminating Yemeni land-to-sea capabilities.

So, the fact that the IDF and some US special forces are reported to have attempted the obvious solution to the problem makes sense. However, I fail to see how this puts Israel on the ropes in any way; the denial of the Red Sea was already an accomplished fact and despite decades of claims to the contrary, Iran is observably not in any particular hurry to start a full-scale war with Israel.

Speaking of technology and war, I highly recommend Martin van Creveld’s work on the matter. It’s an excellent and informative book.

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Iran Has Allies Too

“We will always stand by Iran and will resolutely respond to any threat to our ally Iran…We warn the mercenaries of global imperialism, namely Israel, not to make mistakes”.
– Kim Jong Un, North Korea

One of the strangest things about WWIII to date is the apparent inability of Clown World to grasp that it cannot simply segregate its wars. And the fact that it tries to warn Russia’s allies not to help Russia, and Iran’s allies not to help Iran, even as its slave-states help Ukraine, is even stranger.

What is the threat? Are they going to sanction North Korea, which doesn’t trade with Clown World anyhow? The Clown Worlders just don’t seem to realize that Russia called their bluff and now the whole world knows that their economic power is a mirage.

China is now just openly mocking the UK by offering to send troops to maintain the peace there. The world is changing fast, but not all of the players seem to be aware of that.

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More Rumors of War

The neocons are hoping that after more than 20 years of agitating for it, they’re finally going to get the war between Iran and the USA they’ve been seeking. This appears to be the culmination of Michael Ledeen’s “Faster, Please”. But be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

The US and Israel are continuing preparations for a major attack by Iran in retaliation for the assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, Axios reported on Saturday, citing sources. The assault is anticipated to begin on Monday.

According to two unnamed US officials, Gen. Michael Kurilla, the head of US Central Command, has arrived in the region for a preplanned visit that is likely to focus on efforts to mobilize the same broad international and regional coalition that defended Israel from a previous major Iranian attack in April.

Tensions in the Middle East have reached the boiling point in recent days, after Iran accused Israel of killing Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a bombing in Tehran. While Israel has neither confirmed nor denied orchestrating the hit, it did admit to eliminating Hezbollah leader Fouad Shukr in Beirut, who it said was responsible for an attack on a soccer field in the Golan Heights that killed 12 minors.

With the Iran promising to retaliate, the Israeli military has been put on high alert, and the US – its main ally – has increased its presence in the region.

Axios sources suggested that Iran’s attack will follow the same playbook as in April, when Tehran launched a retaliatory strike on Israel in response to what it claimed was West Jerusalem’s bombing of its consulate in Syria. That assault involved hundreds of drones and missiles, but Israeli officials insisted the damage was minimal.

At the same time, officials told the outlet that the upcoming strike could be more massive and involve Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, adding that they do not know whether Iran and Hezbollah will conduct coordinated or separate strikes. They also said they believe Tehran and Hezbollah are now finalizing their plans, which must be approved at the highest political level.

The neocons wanted a war with Russia in Ukraine too, and while it has produced the expected quantities of dead Slavs, the results haven’t otherwise gone the way the Clown Worlders were anticipating. Given that Russia is now openly supporting Iran, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if things take an unexpected turn.

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Neocons are Back

And they’re rolling the dice. Now that the neocon faction that controls Harris has succeeded in pushing aside the Six Bidens and gaining control of the US military, it appears that the second front of WWIII is about to kick off in earnest. Michael Hudson comments on what looks like joint US-Israeli preparations for war with Hezbollah and Iran:

You say Israel, but it’s actually Israel in the United States. And all this has happened right after Netanyahu came to Congress and met in Washington with the Democratic Party leaders and then with Trump. So I think it’s really the policy of the neocons. They’ve worked hand in hand. And I’ve known these people for over 50 years…

So I think that the neocons in Washington believe that war is going to be inevitable. America is fighting for control of the Near East because the Near East controls the oil. And American foreign policy has been based on control of food supplies from American farms and control of the oil trade, because if you can control the oil trade, you can turn off people’s electricity, their heating, and their power. And power use for workers is the root of productivity.

And the way that the military thinks—and again, I’ve worked with them for years—is the timing, that, are we in a better position now than we will be next year or not. And I think the American military realizes that Russia and China and the other Eurasian countries are getting together. The American ability to fight militarily is going down. And to the military, that means if we don’t have war now and wait till next year in the future, we’ll be less and less and less able to win.

Well, the reality is they’re going to lose wherever they go, unless there’s atomic war and the chessboard is thrown over. And I think their feeling is the Americans are doing everything they can, from Ukraine to Israel to Iran, to try to stir up a retaliation so that they can then say, ah, we’re under attack, we’re purely defending ourselves, and once you tell your population and your voters this is a war for defense, as the Nazis know, you can always get a—as Goebbels said, you can always get a population on your side if you say it’s for defense.

So I’m very worried that the neocons are going to say there will never be a better or at least a less worse time to go to war in the Near East than right now. That seems to be what is leading the trigger, and even the military has said every way that they’ve gamed out the military sequence there, America loses. They’re not going to lose as bad now as they will in the future. And this is very dangerous, given the whole mindset that they have, and the mindset that they have to control the Near East, or else the rest of the world will not be neoliberalized.

That’s been my assumption as well. Next year is not going to be any easier. Five years from now is not going to be any easier. Time is on the side of the sovereign nations, so Clown World has to act now if it is going to act at all. I was hoping that Trump would come in to preside over a soft collapse, but that option appears to have pretty much disappeared with the assassination and the JD Vance selection.

It will be interesting to see how Russia and China react to this. Very interesting indeed. Because if the US military is sufficiently committed on this front, it won’t have much ability to interfere in Europe or in Asia.

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