Iran Is The Only Adult In The Room
As Israel and its allies pursue all out destruction in Europe, The Middle East, and North Africa, Iran alone acts with maturity.
An artist's impression of Shahed-136 drones swarming an airport. (Khamenei.ir)
Following the latest gob of petulant saber-rattling from Israel this week in its so-called “retaliation” to strikes by Iran last weekend, it is becoming increasingly clear that the leadership of the Western powers has entered a state of degenerative immaturity and self-imposed ignorance of conditions as they stand today. They have hidden themselves away behind the ideological Iron Curtain, depending entirely on a policy of force-over-distance, refined to perfection by the United States during the brutal genocide of Korea and through every subsequent invasion and occupation enacted since, to ensure that the interests of the empire remain intact without more than a few thousand boots ever touching the ground.
The West, as embodied by its most rabid attack dogs, is obsessed with its own aspirations despite the clear weaknesses they have selectively inbred within themselves. Israel, driven solely by generational goals to conquer the entirety of the ancient Middle East (and thereby the bountiful resources that have sustained humanity since the beginning of civilization) offers a prime example of the new misalignment, being Trumpian in the need to have the final word and firing off a pitiful response to a justified retaliation from Tehran for violations of international law by Israel to begin with.
For it must not be forgotten that this is where this latest bout of chest-puffing began, with the targeted assassination of Iranian officers in an official Iranian consulate on legally protected Iranian land in Damascus. Israel, striking out at the sole regional power it is allowed to, and hiding under the protections offered by the US and European taxpayer, enacted a declaration of war and invited the retaliatory response from the defending nation. And it must be recognized what the response to this act was: a grandiose display which, while impressive in scale and immensely costly to Western arms stores, was truly a precision strike of limited means on two Israeli military installations directly involved in the initial attacks against the Iranian embassy.
Unlike its regional counterpart, Iran did not target civilian areas in its attack. Nor did it launch its drones and missiles unannounced and without opportunity to prepare - again as the attacks of Israel often are. Instead, Tehran, recognizing the changing dynamics on the ground, acted carefully and within the bounds of international law in terms of self-defence and recognition of target legality; only striking military targets which enabled the attacks on Iran and doing so in a reserved fashion which intentionally limited the opportunities for civilian casualties.
Washington recognizes this but more so recognizes itself in the Israeli project; the fight consuming the Middle East having been the desire of Western powers since at least the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) officially partitioned the Ottoman Empire between France and the United Kingdom and the US-executed coup of Syria’s first democratically elected, post-colonization president Shukri al-Quwatli in 1949.
In fact, the first forays of the United States and its fledgling CIA in Syria – directly tied to US-Arab oil interests in the region – can be traced to the regional contexts and issues we find there today; the dissolution of relations between Damascus and Washington, as well as the coup of President Quwatli, arising due to the Nakba of Palestine and the West-led United Nations approval of the Partition Plan for Palestine (1947) ostracization of the newly independent Syria.
Similarly as well, the central dispute for the United States was not the suffering of the people, their independence, freedom, and democratic potential, but the potential failure of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline from Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) oilfields in the south to Mediterranean ports into Europe; a pristine mirror to the Iraq-Jordan Oil Pipeline project being pursued between these countries (and Egypt) to overcome similar opposition to Israeli actions by King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein and the Jordanian people today (and which would empower oil contracts with Western companies in Iraq such as Shell, Exxon, Occidental Petroleum, BP, ENI, and TotalEnergies).
The United States and allies have become so used to imposing their interests on others through brute force that they have become capable of only that, forgoing any attempts at diplomacy which are not pre-designed to meet their demands. It is, therefore, no surprise that while the Biden Administration continues to pander to reactionary elements within his own party, sending billions of dollars in arms to the region while preaching peace from the pulpit, Iran is pursuing a path of considered force-matching and de-escalation learned over decades of increasing aggression from its regional partners.
Whereas Iran has heretofore played by the same internationally permissible rules of the Cold War, arming proxies and providing economic/political support in regional conflicts, it has now found itself on a higher-stage as the West strikes at it directly through its own proxy-governments. So far, Tehran has shown itself to be a responsible power, acting in clear self-defense against attacks of Western allies using United States weapons with a measure of restraint and political consciousness that exposes the antagonistic policies of its counterparts.
While Israel demands the last word, creating a secondary obfuscation of “retaliation” against reactions from Iran, the arrogant petulance of the Western project in the Middle East is made painfully clear. From their perspective, there is no premise of self-defense against their own aggressions, no idea of justified retaliation except in their own interests; if the empire kills a foreign official on their own soil, it is the cost of business and that cost will be subsidized. Imagine if Iran had struck the Israeli embassy in Amman, assassinating someone such as Aluf Rafi Milo and his staff, would Israel act so carefully? Based on the inability to accept a light, primarily economic hit from a righteously infuriated neighbor, I think we can guess not.
Photo: Khamenei.ir, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
