Israel vs Iran: The targets no one is talking about, Part 2
First a brutal Arab Sunni dictator, then a ruthless Arab Shi'a tyrant, followed by a brutal Iranian Shi'a dictator. Diverse, yes, but they had one aim, to destroy Israel with the ultimate weapon, and a common ideology, Islam.
While George W Bush's January 2002 "Axis of Evil" phrase can be said to have been foreshadowed by Ronald Reagan's 1983 description of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire", its true precursor, not that either man would have known it, is George Orwell's concept of a "combination of several Fascisms" in his 1943 essay, Looking Back on the Spanish War:
…Against that …world in which black may be white tomorrow, …there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it… The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist, (My emphasis).
Neither George Orwell, nor Ronald Reagan, pre-emptively neutered their own dramatic image. That, though, is exactly what George W Bush did on 17 September 2001, less than a week after nineteen Muslims, in the highest Islamic deed, killed 3,000 Americans in a single terrorist onslaught on the United States. Bush declared, "Islam is peace," in a speech that would be right up there alongside the very best of da'wah:
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war.
3,000 innocent citizens are slaughtered on his watch, and he humiliates himself, his nation, his armed forces and the victims by almost immediately standing before all the world and saying "Islam just did a beautiful thing," for this is what over a billion Muslims heard him say. He made them very, very proud of what they had accomplished on 9/11 and convinced them beyond all doubt that America was ripe for the taking. This bizarre, pathetic capitulation by an American President in 2002, and the chilling capitulation by another American President in 2024, warning Israel against striking Iran's nuclear facilities after the latter regime attacked the Jewish state with 181 ballistic missiles, are victory milestones in the long propaganda war of KGB ideological subversion, on the one hand, and Muslim da'wah, on the other. Through hasbara, Israel has ideologically subverted herself.
George W Bush's Axis of Evil extended over Iran, Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Ba'athist Arab socialism) and North Korea. Russia at the time was basking in the brief chaotic interregnum between Communism and Gangsterism. The Axis of Evil has since metamorphosed into Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. The Joker in the pack, both now and in 2002, has been Islam, centre-stage but written out of the script by Bush, and global but shoehorned into a state, in the one-dimensional paradigm of geopolitics, international relations and conflict studies. In other words, academics, think tanks, policy-makers and strategic planners for whom Axis of Evil means Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are woefully out of their depth on several counts:
- The characterisation of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as a whole
- Understanding the dynamic between them
- The characterisation of Islam, and hence
- The characterisation of Iran
- Understanding the relationship between Shi'a and Sunni
- The characterisation of Islamic terrorist groups
- The characterisation of Muslims, and hence
- Understanding the dynamics of jihad
- Understanding where the Palestinians fit into all of this
Everyone seems to fear a "wider regional war", but what does that mean for Israel? Some talk of World War III, with little plausible scenario development, again hamstrung by the constraints of the above paradigm. In Part 2 of this essay, I shall tease out the prevailing thinking that leads to misconceiving that regional war, resulting in a second critical target for Israel remaining off everyone's radar. I am not saying that the current war will become regional, nor do I wish for it. I am only saying such a regional war needs to be properly planned for now, and that of the new targets that will come into play, I am suggesting the most important one. The reader will notice that I do not address the Sunni states and how they fit into the current Middle East juncture. This is because I want to remain close to the current war and the specifics of targets in that war. The dynamic of the Sunni states must not be seen as diminished.
In the late 1970s, France, the country that had just hosted Rohullah Khomeini as a refugee for five months, sold Iraq a nuclear reactor. Saddam Hussein had announced in a newspaper article that he intended bombing Israel. With the facility still under construction in Baghdad, the Israeli Air Force bombed and destroyed the reactor in June 1981.
Over 2004-5, Israel became aware that North Korea was building a nuclear reactor in Syria. Israeli analysts concluded that the reactor could be for no other purpose than to produce a bomb and that such a bomb could be for one purpose only. In September 2007, the Israeli Air Force carried out an airstrike that destroyed Bashar al-Assad's nuclear reactor.
Iran has had an open and internationally-inspected nuclear research programme since the 1950s, and had ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970. After the Islamic takeover of the country in 1979, overt international cooperation ceased and the nuclear programme went dark. In 2002, Iran's secret nuclear weapons programme was exposed, setting off a decades long cat-and-mouse game with international bodies and agencies of pursuing ever higher enrichment of fissile material, while dissimulating that its nuclear activities were for peaceful purposes only. Since taking power, the Iranian regime has been extremely explicit about its intention to obliterate Israel. Russia provided Iran with its first nuclear power plant at Bushehr, operational since 2011.
Israel has been watching these developments closely and put multiple layers of clandestine measures in place to delay Iran's nuclear programme, all the while preparing for the day when she will have no choice but to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. That day has come.
Talk is now of "not if, but when" Israel will destroy Iran's nuclear facilities. With each step in the regional quest for a nuclear bomb with which to destroy Isreal, from Iraq to Syria to Iran, the offending country's measures to evade detection have become increasingly sophisticated. The first "bad actor" was a brutal Arab Sunni dictator, the second a ruthless Arab Shi'a tyrant, and the third was a brutal Iranian Shi'a dictator. Their diversity notwithstanding, they all had a single aim, to destroy Israel with the ultimate weapon, and a common ideology, Islam. After the destruction of the one's nuclear facilities, the baton passed to the next one. Who will be the next to try should not be difficult to work out.
Notable also is the jihad interface with the Axis of Evil. France, that in the 1970s proudly committed itself to 'Eurabia', provided Ba'athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein with the wherewithal to unleash Armageddon on Israel, thereby serving as Arab Muslim conduit through to the only valued piece of the 20th-century, its destructive capability. Saddam, in his own crude way, made ostentatious displays of being a great Muslim leader, his designs on Israel being one of the surest ways of remaining in power. North Korea built Syria's nuclear reactor, while Russia built Iran's. This string of secret Islamic Middle Eastern nuclear reactors is a decentralised Axis of Evil project that dovetails very nicely with the Islamic imperative to kill all Jews.
All of this begs the question of who will be next after Iran to pursue a nuclear weapon in order to destroy Israel. I put forward Turkey as the most likely candidate. Turkey, that has made several failed attempts to get into the nuclear club since the 1960s, today plays both sides in the Russo-Ukraine War. Russia is not complaining, because it needs an ally inside NATO, but more importantly, it is building Turkey a nuclear power plant at Akkuyu on the Anatolian coast across from Northern Cyprus (the reason, I speculate, for seizing this part of the island in the first place). Erdoğan's neo-Ottoman ambitions, hospitality to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, ambivalence towards NATO, jihad against the EU, undermining of Israel's Eastern Mediterranean gas fields and generally erratic, destabilising behaviour in the region, makes him a highly-plausible candidate as the next Muslim leader to pursue a nuclear weapon in order to destroy Israel.
The nuclear reactors at Akkuyu, the first of which is scheduled to go online in 2024/5, may not immediately pose a threat if the war between Israel and Iran is contained to the current belligerents, but should hostilities become regional and draw in Turkey, this nuclear facility might well become a necessary target for Israel. One should hope that Israeli plans for attacking the Akkuyu facility have already been prepared. It does not escape notice that neither Prime Minister Menachem Begin, nor Ehud Olmert, concerned themselves what the world might think, nor did they inform the United States beforehand, when they respectively bombed the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear facilities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been worried about Israel's diplomatic standing to the point of paralysis, as Iran sped ever closer to "break-out". It seems that the spell is finally broken.
While it makes sense to conceptualise the Axis of Evil as comprising the nation-states of Russia, China and North Korea, it is a misconception to see the fourth member of that axis as the nation-state of Iran. Iran's leaders conceive of themselves as the vanguard of the Muslim ummah in pursuit of Islamic world domination. It has been far more aggressively pro-active in spreading jihad through the world in the form of its "Islamic Revolution", seeking, first of all, to usurp Islamic pre-eminence from Sunni Saudi Arabia.
To this end, Iran exploits the Arab ambivalence towards the Palestinians, especially the latter-day Saudi rejection of them, by making Jerusalem the focus of its propaganda against the Sunni, hence "Al-Quds Day" and the IRGC-Quds Force. The clergy conceive of Iran not as a nation-state, but as a global jurisdiction, hence its presumption in issuing a death sentence on British novelist Salman Rushdie, and Muslims the world over swearing to carry out the sentence. Rushdie, the Palestinians, and the slogan "Death to Israel" all offer Iran a fast track to hegemony over the ummah, the fastest track, of course, being possession of a nuclear weapon with which to annihilate Israel.
Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, etc., are not Iran's proxies; they are integral to its jihad project and as much its state apparatus as the Baseej or the Ministry of Finance. Any Muslim leader who aspires to leadership of the ummah has to be seen to have a reach that extends as if international borders do not exist. Hassan al-Banna was such a leader (actually called the Supreme Guide), as was Rohullah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In the wings waits an increasingly feeble Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, not quite sure how to go about it.
The nation-state is a despised but unavoidable encumbrance that each Amir al-Mu'minin, Commander of the Faithful, must deal with in his own way. It is also a seductive distraction that has led many a Muslim leader away from the straight path towards world domination, hence the Al-Qaida and ISIS hatred of Arab national leaders. The millions of Muslims who have invaded the West under various guises over recent decades do not regard your country, your property, your women or your children as yours. It is all theirs and they are entitled to take it. The same pre-mediaeval plunder conception permeates them all, and is of a piece with what the Palestinians did when they invaded Israel on 7 October 2023. This is why those experts who approach the Middle East by way of geopolitics, international relations and conflict resolution are worse than just ineffective; they are dangerous.
Muslims insist that the entire planet belongs to them. Russian ideologues maintain that "the Motherland has no borders." China still smites from its "century of humiliation", and actively hacks away at the territory of all its neighbours, both on land and at sea, in pursuit of its irredentist dreams. The Axis of Evil, therefore, is more a constellation of totalitarian rivals inherently incapable of alliances with anyone, including among themselves, precisely because they are totalitarian, each of them must have it all. They may make common cause for expediency, but such "eternal friendships" can only ever be unstable and short-lived, such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or to be more contemporary, the distinct limits that have appeared in the China-Russia “no limits” partnership signed just before the 954-day, three-day Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Axis of Evil is a fragile arrangement, perhaps more dangerous for dividing our attention between its poles. The defender of civilisation who knows this will be able to pick them off one by one, but must not flatter himself or herself to think that they can play such people off against one another, for that is exactly what they do themselves, and know very well how to exploit such attempts. Recall, for example, Israel's folly in imagining that she could play off Fatah against Hamas and Hamas against Palestinian Islamic jihad. The same holds for attempts to play off China against Russia.
While each member of the Axis of Evil is in it to advance its own nation-based hegemony, that hegemony, in the case of Iran, is of a different order to the hegemony of the others. It helps to see Iran as at the overlap between two kinds of Axis of Evil: one between rival nation-states combining under tension; and the other between two rival ummahs, Shi'a and Sunni, over which its seeks overall hegemony. This means that Israel cannot deal with Iran without, at the same time, dealing with Islam, as I argued in Part 1. George Orwell's warning of the dangers that these interplays pose to civilisation bears repeating:
…Against that …world in which black may be white tomorrow, …there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it… The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist, (My emphasis).
Simply put, to support Israel is to support civilisation.
Picture credits:
Joyce Battle and William Burr (editors), released under (generic) Creative Commons license as indicated in the caption. - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iraq-nuclear-vault/2021-06-07/osirak-israels-strike-iraqs-nuclear-reactor-40-years-later, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106706176
Unknown author - Video released by USA federal government, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3938007
Nanking2012 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21905875
Screenshot from "Operation Orchard: The Explosive Raid on Syria's Nuclear Facility", YouTube, 7 September 2024, https://youtu.be/Qwtp3d-Q_jk
Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67990552
M Tracy Hunter - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33660493
Akkuyu Nükleer A.Ş. (VOA) - Voice of America, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68210535
Comments:
On 6 October 2024 at 20:26, Jalal Tagreeb wrote:
Hi Anjuli,
Thank you for these nice articles. They are very informative. I have a different opinion regarding the action that Israel should take against Iran as a response to the Iranian attack on Israel. I think the best response that Israel can take is to:
1. Completely and thoroughly defeat and destroy Hezbollah. Re-occupy south Lebanon to erase Hezbollah's claimed liberation achievement in 2000 and fake victory in 2006. This is a big humiliation that Iran cannot afford. I think Israel is more than half the way to do that, it just needs to complete it.
2. Capture the Sinwar brothers and free the hostages. Yahya Sinwar must be neutralised (better captured alive and imprisoned in Israel perhaps in a very deep underground cell to be a victim of his own method). He has been on a long run and it is "bedtime" for him in Israel. He is not a challenge, it is just a matter of time.
These are the two decisive victory conditions for Israel in my opinion and the best way to respond to Iran.
'For years, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly claimed that "Israel is weaker than a spider's web" '
Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/09/24/nasrallah-is-trapped-by-his-own-false-propaganda/
But the spider has caught him in her web ... and wrapped him tight! Did he use the Quranic verse in the wrong context? It has already been explained to him, so, no need for him to re-explain it in his next speech ... no more yelling on TV! That is much better.
Kind regards,
Jalal.
On 6 October 2024 at 21:01, Anjuli Pandavar wrote:
The biggest weakness in the essay is that I do not discuss all the complications associated with destroying a functioning nuclear reactor.