The War So Far

A recap of the Iran-Israel conflict

I did not want to write about the conflict as it was ongoing; not that my family and I were particularly traumatized-the Iranian missiles went over us on their way to central Israel and the Israeli interceptors went over us on their way to catch the Iranian missiles, providing a great source of entertainment for the kids. Did you know that when an interceptor hits a ballistic missile outside the atmosphere, it creates a white flash and then an expanding cloud that looks like a smoke ring? Anyway, I didn’t want to mouth off about a dynamic conflict in the absence of information and make a fool of myself.

It’s a kilometer’s drive over bad roads to the nearest shelter, and anyway they’re shooting at targets 30 km past us. Might as well enjoy the show.

Now that the war is over, however, I’d like to summarize my thoughts about Israel’s first strategic military victory since 1967.

The context

The war was the culmination of several decades of proxy struggle between Iran and America over dominance in the Middle East. This involved some direct conflict between America and Iranian proxies, involving the deaths of thousands of American servicemen at the hands of Iranian clients in Lebanon and Iraq. It also involved direct attacks on Iran by American proxies like Saddam’s Iraq, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranians. With the exception of Iraq, however, the wars were mostly fought between Iranian clients like the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah and American clients like Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Houthis hit a Saudi oil storage facility with a missile

The Obama and Biden administrations attempted to reverse this pattern by conciliating Iran via JCPOA, giving Iranian proxies relative freedom of maneuver in Yemen, Mesopotamia and the Levant and direct cash payoffs. They ignored Iranian behavior like detaining American vessels and servicemembers, and pressed Israel to make concessions to Iranian proxies, such as the handover of maritime gas fields to Lebanon.

Over the last 20 years, Israel has claimed that Iran was working towards and getting close to producing a nuclear bomb. I have no way of judging the accuracy of this claim, but whether it’s correct or not, Iran’s progress was stymied by constant Looney Tunes-style mishaps like senior nuclear scientists’ assassinations, centrifuges self destructing as the result of PLC malware and its nuclear archives being stolen and brought to Israel.

The Hasbara office was closed for summer vacation, this was the best the staffers could do on short notice

The most recent round of fighting kicked off with a surprise attack by Iranian proxy Hamas against Israel on October 7th, 2023. It has gone poorly for Iran. Hezbollah was crippled by the Israeli pager attacks, followed by an invasion of its strongholds in Southern Lebanon. The Syrian Assad regime collapsed and was replaced by Sunni Islamism With A Human Face, cutting off Hezbollah’s supply lines. Hamas has suffered massive losses and crippling humiliation, proving absolutely incapable of holding ground or inflicting serious casualties on the IDF. Throughout the process, Israel surgically struck targets inside Iran more or less at will.

The Government of Israel claims that Iran recently accelerated the pace of development and was several weeks from developing functional nuclear weapons. This would allow Iran to provide a nuclear umbrella for its proxies, and expand their freedom of maneuver, crucial in such a trying time. Therefore, Israel launched spoiling attacks, leveraging its massive intelligence penetration of Iran to destroy its air defense network, kill many Iranian senior officers and nuclear scientists and cripple its nuclear infrastructure.

Allegedly, this is pyrophoric uranium burning. Sounds questionable-the uranium was supposed to be 200 meters underground.

It should be emphasized that this operation was done in complete coordination and cooperation with the US, from the initial psychological operations to convince the world that Netanyahu and Trump had had a falling out. The IAF used American-manufactured F-35s to drop American munitions on Iran. The air campaign culminated with American B-2 bombers dropping bunker busters on Iranian underground facilities. Throughout the war, American strategic anti-ballistic missile batteries were used to shoot down Iranian missiles aimed at Israel, depleting something like 20% of American national THAAD munitions stocks. In this, the operation was the polar opposite of Begin’s unilateral 1981 raid on the Osirak reactor, which was very quick and surprised the Americans as much as it did the Iraqis.

The war ended with an American-mediated ceasefire after retaliatory Iranian strikes on American bases in the Middle East, which claimed no casualties due to Iran considerately warning the US and its host nations beforehand. All sides claimed victory.

No war for Israel!

During the conflict, the antisemitic wings of the American alt right and left presented it as one unwitting Americans being herded into war for Israeli interests by the Israeli lobby pulling the strings; it would surely lead to an Iraq-style quagmire, with many American servicemen being killed and crippled at the behest of their scheming Zionist masters. You know the flavor.

Why is it that 90 IQ groypers come up with such better propaganda than 105 IQ hasbarites? The latter get paid, too.

In reality, no Americans were killed or wounded. America ended the war with total proxy dominance over the Middle East. It combat tested its top of the line offensive and defensive weapons systems. Foreign sales of the F-35 and THAAD have generated over $100 billion in revenue so far; given their performance in this war, I could not imagine any country with the option choosing the Russian and Chinese alternatives. This means potentially trillions of dollars in sales.

I would love to be a THAAD salesman right now

Beyond that, America gained something that’s difficult to price in dollars. Ballistic missile defense is worth more than money-it’s a matter of national existence. There is no substitute for live fire testing in these matters; the most technologically advanced weapons systems often turn out to be duds, and the most intricate war games often turn out to be fake, ginned up by senior officers and a military industrial complex focused on profits at the expense of national interests. Garbage destroyers or tanks can lose battles; garbage missile defense can cause hundreds of millions of dead civilians and national collapse. For American leadership, the knowledge that America can defend against ballistic missile attacks means freedom of geopolitical maneuver against near-peer competitors.

Why do they keep doing this?

Iran didn’t need to do any of this. It could have just played nicely, pretended to be cool and reaped the benefits, quietly building nukes at its leisure. So why did it kick this whole thing off, and why did it keep escalating from one disaster to another?

The joke goes that a Middle Eastern gentleman, trying to take his mid-day nap, is kept awake by loud children outside. He leans out his window and yells, “why are you kids playing here when they’re giving away free figs at the souk?” The kids run off. He lies back down, closes his eyes, then jumps up: “why am I lying here when they’re giving away free figs at the souk?” and runs off.

Iran lives in a narrative about Israelis being a bunch of cowardly refugees who are one atrocity away from scurrying back to Poland. This is not a narrative invented by Iran; it was substantially the same narrative followed by the Arab countries which invaded Israel in 1948 and has remained much the same since. The continuing failure of Israelis to flee to Vilna or Pinsk is handwaved away-”next time!”

In large part, this narrative is projection. Desert nomads will always run away to fight another day rather than dying in place. In 2014, several thousand Islamic State fighters with small arms, Hi Lux pickups and Whatsapp atrocity videos chased two Iraqi Army Shia divisions out of Mosul. The Iraqis had Abrams tanks, Blackhawk helicopters, artillery and generally superior American equipment and training; they left millions of civilians and thousands of their unfortunate comrades to the mercy of ISIS. The Iranian settled population submitted to rule by one non-Persian dynasty after another for many centuries. Even the proud and warlike Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia all submitted to foreign rule, serving their kaffir masters faithfully. The mindset of the majority of Israelis, who would ultimately rather die than to live under Muslim rule again, is completely unimaginable to our enemies. They can not comprehend why, after October 7th and the ballistic missile attacks on Tel Aviv, we are not fighting over boat tickets to Brooklyn.

Since this war was immediately retconned by the Iranian regime as a glorious victory, with the true scope of Zionist defeat being hidden and falsified (“perhaps hundreds of thousands of Zionists are dead, and Israeli censorship won’t admit it!”), I don’t expect this narrative to change. Iran will likely lay low over the next several years, but it will not change its underlying assumptions and strategic goals vis Israel.

Parenthetically, I doubt the war will result in regime change in Iran. America has tried to push for regime change on and off for decades, but the Iranian opposition is generally fake and gay, and the Iranian regime is quite efficient at suppressing potential competitors. Had the Israeli air campaign gone on for another month, Israel could have killed most of the Iranian generals except for those working for it, and asked the survivors to launch a coup d’etat. Oh, well, history is full of missed opportunities.

If the Iranian regime survives, it will dedicate its efforts to uncovering Israeli HUMINT networks and SIGINT exploits, and rebuilding its missile and nuclear production capacity, incorporating lessons learned during this war. This means that the next time, Israel’s job will be more difficult.

On the upside, this is the youngest that Iran will ever be. Collapsing fertility rates mean that the median age will be pushing 40 in 2032. Iran is already a gerontocracy, and it’s difficult to imagine the average middle aged Iranian enthusiastically sacrificing his one child and middling quality of life to establish regional hegemony and defend Palestinian Arabs.

America and Israel

In retrospect, this war may prove to be the high point of US-Israeli relations. If Clinton was hailed as the first black president, Trump may be described as the first Jewish one. The funniest part in the Art of the Deal is Trump’s breakdown of a typical 80s workweek; something like 70% of the people he deals with are Jewish. Bibi, in turn, is the most Americanized Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir (Bennett was prime minister for two weeks, so doesn’t really count).

The younger generations of Americans on the right and left are far less pro-Israel. In large part, this is due to the spread of third worldist ideology and narratives in American media and academia. The Wretched of the Earth are to be worshipped for their very wretchedness, and Israel’s entire existence depends on not being wretched (Bat Yam and its franchises notwithstanding.) It’s possible that the next American administration will be run by people like J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller, and it’s possible that they will reform the American political landscape to such a degree that it will no longer resemble the post-FDR swamp, but it’s more likely that by 2032 the country will be led by AOC and Nick Fuentes, with Biden’s reanimated head in a jar occupying an important advisory role. Needless to say, we won’t have freedom of maneuver in such an environment, unless we spend the interim years working very hard to create energy and manufacturing independence, and the ability to keep our major weapons systems operational and fed without American support.

Israeli politics

I am already seeing active attempts on behalf of our leftist elites to reframe the spectacular performance of the Israeli air force, SOF and intelligence services as signifying the political merit of the social segment to which their leadership largely belongs. “This is a triumph for the meritocratic Israel which is a democracy and a country of all its citizens, unlike the racist and brown third world theocracy which Bibi represents!”

It’s true that communal median IQ distribution, the dysfunctional nature of the Israeli primary education system, religious culture and the good old boy system combine to ensure that these organizations are heavily staffed by secular Ashkenazim and those Mizrahim who have assimilated into their values. The inference that several operational successes against Hezbollah and Iran by institutions staffed by these people give them and their worldview the Mandate of Heaven is wrong; prior to this war, they’d spent decades without any real victories, gradually turning the military into a jobs and pensions creation scheme. The current war began with a disaster due to this behavior, and also to the left’s unashamed use of its dominance of key military units as a political lever, threatening to shut down the exact same units-the air force, intelligence and special operations-unless they got their way legislatively.

While the war has demonstrated that, when push comes to shove, our secular leftists generally still prioritize their physical survival and life in the Land of Israel over their progressive values, it has not provided them with a comprehensive alternative set of values. It’s possible that the experience of being pounded with ballistic missiles will cause many of them to reevaluate hummus secularism as a worldview and find it wanting. The natural tendency, however, will be to use Israeli battlefield successes as justification for continued societal rot and vampiric governmental policies. “Of course we need more pride parades-don’t you know how many pilots and intelligence officers are gay? And look what they did for us against Iran!” “Of course we can’t lower taxes and let people have land-how else will we pay for F-35s and ballistic missile interceptors? Didn’t you see what happened in this war?”

The temptation will be to return to the pre-war norm of the conventional and community defense forces being stripped of capacity in order to sustain a “small and smart” army and gain a peace dividend, which is of course how we got here in the first place. It can’t be forgotten that Iran, whatever its strengths and weaknesses are, is 1500 kilometers away from us. Egypt and Syria are on our border, and millions of hostile Arabs are within it. Recent history shows that, in a fight that starts in your living room, technological sophistication and elite troops are less important than grit and determination. Which brings me to…

Gaza

Yep, Gaza is still going on. For the time being, we’re stuck in an equilibrium. It’s obvious to everyone that the Gazans suck, that there are many of them and that nothing short of an indefinite brutal military occupation can keep them from trying to kill Jews (I guess that we could also surrender to them and move to Poland, but see above, and also within a decade they would follow us there, fleeing from their own squalor and dysfunction.) The reasonable solution to minimize bloodshed and misery would be to move them somewhere a decent distance away from Israel’s borders, preferably with seriously challenging terrain or a body of water separating us. Unfortunately, nobody wants the Gazans, our American patrons have so far mostly been resistant to the idea of expelling them, and Israeli leftist elites have recovered from the initial shock of seeing their family and friends raped and slaughtered and are now back to seeing the Arabs as their proxies in class warfare against the hateful rightoids.

Fortunately, the IDF is now run by somewhat saner people than before October 7th, so they are doing what they can to make Gaza uninhabitable and encourage the Gazans to take initiative and resettle themselves elsewhere. The aid continues to flow, ensuring that Gazans do not starve. Some of that aid makes its way into the pockets of Egyptian troops and police so that they look the other way as Gazans join their dear relatives in the Nile river valley. What did you think Al Masri meant-vibes? Papers? Essays?

Wow, this looks like the Warsaw Ghetto, truly the Zionists have gone from being the victims of Nazi crimes to perpetrating the same crimes

In the absence of a catalyst, this process will take another decade. Hopefully, Trump uses some carrots and sticks to convince America’s Muslim allies to add the Gazan biomass to their own. If Bibi can sell this to him, he will truly end up being remembered as our greatest Prime Minister.