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richardstevenhack's avatar

Response to GeoPolitiQ's "Israel humiliated as Iran foils Israeli attacks"

"and save Netanyahu face. "

Well, it won't do that. This was a very "lame" attack, much like the one Israel did last April. I predicted that Israel would have to "go big or go home" after the last Iranian attack, but for some reason - assuming that the Israeli retaliation actually has ended - Israel decided it couldn't do "big".

We've all known that for Israel to attack Iran without using Jericho missiles requires massive planning and effort to get its jets that far in sufficient numbers with refueling to actually do any significant damage to Iran. Apparently this has now been proven - twice.

I expected that Israel would use either a missile strike - with or without nuclear warheads - on Iranian nuclear sites and oil facilities. Attacking air defenses and missile building sites is a pointless attack for two reasons: 1) Without the ability to overwhelm the air defenses - which requires a large-scale attack by cruise missiles - the attack will fail, and 2) if you can't hit the missile launch sites, hitting the production plants is not going to help immediately in the event of a conflict.

Secondly, the entire thrust of the Israeli and US campaign against Iran is over its nuclear energy facilities. Without its nuclear energy production, weapons production of any kind - nuclear or missile - would be severely restricted. Not to mention the entire so-called "justification" is Iran's alleged (and non-existent) "nuclear weapons program." So not hitting that target out of the gate is just stupid from the US and Israeli viewpoint.

Also if you want to provoke Iran to start a war - as both the US and Israel want - not hitting such facilities as the nuclear energy and oil facilities isn't going to be much of a motivator.

So why Israel did not use its missiles or submarines to attack Iran, and why it picked such lame targets as some radars and missile production plants (if they even were missile production plants) is a mystery to me. It makes no rational sense. This implies that someone or something constrained Israel from its proper military response. Whether that was the US or Russia or Israel's own fear of the Iranian response - without the US to bail it out, so far - or simply the constraints on Israel's military capability in some unknown aspect is not clear to me.

The other possibility is that this attack was a "cover" for a more covert Israeli attack to be executed later. As some have suggested, Israel may be planning more assassinations or other provocations against Iran closer to home - similar to the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate in Syria in March. This would provide Israel with the ability to further provoke Iran to justify a US intervention against Iran while minimizing the difficulty of directly attacking Iran on its own.

The issue for Israel is always how to get the US to do the heavy lifting against Iran while enabling Israel to escape the brunt of Iran's long-range missile capability (as well as Hezbollah's) so that Israel can mostly escape intact and continue the genocide of the Palestinians.

Whether Netanyahu and his team have the smarts to accomplish that goal is unclear, even with US neocon support for it. Both the neocons and Netanyahu may have miscalculated by starting the Lebanon war too soon while the Iran war and US involvement in that war is still hanging fire.

What the neocons and Israel can do to rectify that is also unclear. Whether this current state of affairs will derail the entire neocon and Israeli project is also unclear.

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Esborogardius Antoniopolus's avatar

I think the failure of Israel attack can probably have a very simples explanation:

Mid-flight the F-35 got radar locked and it was decided to abort the attack and send the missiles anyway.

The US and Israel have put all their air coins on the supposed advantage of stealth aircraft supressing air-defenses before the main attack. If stealth is not working anymore as it should, they could not continue their original attack plan.

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