THE Middle East will no longer be as it was before the imposed war of choice on Iran by the duo of America and Israel. The United States used to be the “monitor” of the region, with Israel as its darling “whip”.
The Middle East had been organised to function as the props of the Zionist state. It feeds it. It protects it. The Gulf countries were made to form a multi-layered defence on its behalf, shooting down missiles meant for it while allowing its attacks to pass through.
One thing the world has witnessed is that Israel has often relied heavily on the protection offered by the Arab Gulf countries and American military support in confronting its so-called enemies. Israel has never fought and won any major conflict solely on its own. This is evident in its fights with Hamas in Palestine and Gaza and its long confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon. We have seen how it was checked by the Houthis and how it turned to America for support when it attacked Iran in an unprovoked, surprising and numbing assault in the 12-day war last July.
Israel’s acclaimed “victories” in 1948 and 1967, too, need to be viewed within their wider historical and geopolitical context. They were not simply stories of Israeli military brilliance, as some accounts have portrayed them.
The 1948 conflict was fought between the newly declared State of Israel and neighbouring Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. The war followed the United Nations partition plan and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. Israel emerged from the conflict controlling territory beyond that allocated to it under the UN partition plan. The war also resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, an event Palestinians remember as the Nakba. The West Bank came under Jordanian control, while Egypt administered the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand, the 1967 Six-Day War, fought between June 5 and June 10, 1967, followed escalating regional tensions, military mobilisation and Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Israel launched a pre-emptive air strike against Egypt, destroying much of the Egyptian air force on the ground and subsequently fighting Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
According to the conventional historical account, Israel emerged victorious, capturing the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
In all these wars, however, Israel’s military fortunes were shaped not only by its own capabilities but also by the wider geopolitical environment and the support it enjoyed from powerful Western allies.
What many accounts will not tell you is the extent to which Western political, military and diplomatic support helped Israel survive and consolidate its position. The world then was not the global village it is today. It was an era when World Cup matches could be watched in other parts of the world long after they had been played. News was slow to filter out – if it ever did!
Now, everything is seen and known in real time, thanks, in large part, to social media. The defenders and attackers, on behalf of Israel, are increasingly exposed. Yet gullible and brainwashed nitwits still believe that it is some god that loves blood, assassinations and genocide that helps Israel.
America, Europe and, increasingly, Arab monarchies have played significant roles in Israel’s security architecture. Everyone can see it now.
Unlike last year and early this year, when the United States had erected in Arab countries multiple layers of defence between Iran and Israel, Iran has demonstrated an ability to penetrate or overwhelm parts of that defensive architecture. It is now challenging the American military presence in the Middle East. Israel would now lie low, like a timid dog, for sure.
We saw this last year when Israel attacked Iran, killing some of its top generals. It thought it had finished the Islamic Republic of Iran. But for the next twelve days, it received the pounding of its life that disfigured its face. Instead of relying solely on itself, it turned to America.
Donald Trump frantically had to use other countries to communicate with Iran and urge restraint. Now we know who Israel’s god is. But despite all the demystification, Israel, the tail, will continue to wag the dog – the USA – rather than vice versa.
If not, how do you situate “Operation Epic Fury”, the arrogantly high-falutin name given to America’s February 28 attack on Iran while negotiations were ongoing, killing its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei? The stated objectives included degrading Iran’s military capabilities, its ballistic missile programme and its nuclear infrastructure, as well as changing the Iranian leadership.
In what way is Iran a threat to America? This shows America fighting at the behest of the tail that is wagging it. But America itself has received the beating of its life from Iran – a beating it might not have received had it been China or Russia.
Instead of acknowledging that Iran has challenged it at its own game, it is refusing to give credit where credit is due. This is so because it has always underestimated Iran. Perhaps it still looks at it through the lens of the Shahs, or at the clerics as if they came from the Stone Age!
When Iran used its missiles last year, and some were being shot down over Jordan, it said it was yet to use its newer missiles. America scoffed.
Then Iran stopped using the Western-dominated GPS and increasingly turned to alternative navigation capabilities, including China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS). Named after the Chinese term for the Big Dipper constellation, BeiDou is an independent global satellite navigation network operated by China, providing positioning, navigation and timing services, as well as other communications capabilities.
Coupled with this, and the fact that newer Iranian missiles are capable of manoeuvring and changing trajectories, the combination of such missiles and drones, using different flight paths, has presented a major challenge to American and Israeli missile-defence systems.
Yet America wants the world to believe that Iranian missiles are not Iranian but Chinese or Russian!
Iran has developed indigenous advanced missile systems, including hypersonic weapons. And while the United States is still to develop hypersonic weapons, Iran’s advances demonstrate that technological innovation is no longer the exclusive preserve of the traditional military powers.
And now, instead of stopping Iran, they may have pushed it further beyond the Rubicon, with the country moving closer to the nuclear threshold as it seeks to guarantee its survival.
Trump, desperate to be recorded by Zionism as the “greatest American president who helped Israel”, and arrogant as always, told Iran that if any American soldier was killed by Iranian attacks, the country would pay many times over.
In other words, Iran must sit back and allow its schoolchildren, patients in hospitals, civilians on bridges and soldiers to be massacred because American life is more sacred than Iranian life!
America must learn to live and let others live. And it must shed this kind of ludicrous arrogance.
But it is all fire without heat anyway because, as his nickname, TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), suggests, he has petered out from “Total Surrender” – at the outset, he said the only deal would be Iran’s total surrender – to “Open the Hormuz” Dona, with America scampering away with its tail between its legs. Sad for a man who boasted that Iran must cry “Uncle”!
How the mighty have fallen!
On America’s humiliation by a supposed “third-rate power”, Paul Krugman, in his essay, The Putinisation of the American Military – When Poseurs and Yes-Men Run a War, argued that “Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win.”
He added that Hegseth “literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.”
What we are looking at, unfolding before us, is a change in the world order, in which American hegemony wanes, and other countries rise to global prominence.
It has to be so for our planet to survive.
There will be more peace and mutual respect among nations. No more wars, no more baseless suspicions. The strong will bring up the weak, rather than the extortions, aggressions and oppressions we now see.
Among those that will rise in the Middle East is Iran, forged by fire, strengthened by unwarranted attacks, unyielding in its belief in God, as the new sheriff in town.
Iran has turned isolation into innovation, sanctions into self-reliance and pressure into scientific progress. Yes, it is not perfect. Is there a country that is? No. But it has shown that a large nation under maximum pressure can still educate its people, heal its people and build its own future.
That is a lesson worth studying, not a story worth burying.
To be concluded.
- Dr Gimba, anipr, is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Neptune Prime. His syndicated column, The Arbiter, appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Monday.