@tomfriedman & Bret Stephens offer 'The New York Times Point of View' on the Iranian- what to name it 'reprisal', 'comeuppance', 'justice' ?
Political Observer edits the chatter!
Thomas Friedman offers this:
It would be easy to be dazzled by the way Israeli, American and other allied militaries shot down virtually every Iranian drone, cruise missile and ballistic missile launched at Israel on Saturday and conclude that Iran had made its point — retaliating for Israel’s allegedly killing a top Iranian commander operating against Israel from Syria — and now we can call it a day.
That would be a dangerous misreading of what just happened and a huge geopolitical mistake by the West and the world at large.
There now needs to be a massive, sustained, global initiative to isolate Iran — not only to deter it from trying such an adventure again but also to give reason to Israel not to automatically retaliate militarily. That would be a grievous error, too. Iran has a regional network, and Israel needs a regional alliance, along with the U.S., to deter it over the long run.
So there must be major diplomatic and economic consequences for Iran, with countries like China finally stepping up: When Tehran fired all those drones and missiles, it could not know that virtually all of them would be intercepted. Some were shot down over Jerusalem. A missile could have hit al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest shrines. (You can see pictures online of Iranian rockets being intercepted in the skies right over the mosque.) Another could have hit the Israeli Parliament or a high-rise apartment house, causing massive casualties.
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No one should think Iran is just a paper tiger. Tehran can still unleash thousands of shorter-range rockets against Israel through Hezbollah — and because some of these rockets have precision guidance, they could do significant damage to Israel’s infrastructure. Iran has bigger missiles in its arsenal, as well.
Still, what happened Saturday is ultimately a significant boost for what I call the Inclusion Network in the Middle East (more open, connected countries like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel and the NATO allies) and a real setback for the Resistance Network (the closed and autocratic systems represented by Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq) and Russia. The sound within Iran and the Resistance Network on Sunday morning is that sound you hear from your car’s GPS after a wrong turn: “Recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/opinion/israel-iran-attack.html
Mr. Friedman is writer given to Zionist Apologetics/Propaganda, and the manufacture of puerile Catch-Phrases: ‘The Inclusion Network’ & ‘The Resistance Network’ a reductivist pastiche of actual thought!
Bret Stephens offers this:
After several days during which Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei repeatedly vowed that “the evil Zionist regime” would be punished for its April 1 attack on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus that killed seven Iranian military advisers, including three top commanders, the Islamic Republic struck. More than 300 drones and missiles launched from Iranian soil took aim at Israel on Saturday. Nearly all of them were intercepted, mainly by Israeli or American defenses, with a report of just one Israeli casualty, a girl from a Bedouin community wounded by shrapnel.
Will that be the end of it?
It’s no secret that Israel and Iran have fought a shadow war for decades. The weekend attack is notable for two reasons: its directness and its ineffectuality. Iranian military commanders undoubtedly understood that most of their slow-moving drones, about 170 in all, would be shot down before reaching their targets. They were a diversion. Those commanders were probably more surprised that their 30 cruise missiles and 120 ballistic missiles also did negligible damage.
That should drive home a clear lesson to Iran’s leaders: They are no technological match for the Jewish state, especially when the United States is lending a hand. If Israel decides to respond to the attack with direct strikes on Iran — perhaps against oil installations, nuclear sites or military infrastructure — it isn’t likely to miss its targets.
The reader/viewer might look to an actual expert Scott Ritter, being interviewed by George Galloway, that explores the questions raised by the Iranian attack on Israel?
Mr Stephens is a notorious Zionist partisan/apologist. Ritter an expert in Warfare. Stephens is a New York Times opinion writer. Expertise vs. Opinion?
The final two paragraphs of The Stephens Melodrama. The Neo-Conservative wallows in war mongering brio, without the actual experience of battle, that Ernst Jünger’s ‘Storm of Steele’ offers the reader!
Nor is it to say that Israel doesn’t deserve President Biden’s full support if it chooses to retaliate for Saturday’s attack. The Ayatollah Khamenei surely noted the friction between Israel and the West over Gaza when he ordered the strike; daylight between Israel and the United States is often an invitation to mischief by the common enemies of both. The president has political reasons to avoid another full-scale regional war in an election year. But the best way to avert such a war is to leave Tehran with no illusions that it could separate Israel from the United States by starting one.
The key decisions of the past half-century that have driven the Middle East to the place it is in today have a common origin: Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979, which brought to power a theocratic despotism intent on sowing fanaticism, brutalizing its own people, destroying Israel and causing misery across the region for the sake of its ideological aims. Saturday’s missile attack is the latest example of a long and ugly record. But as Israelis decide how to react, they would serve their interests best by recalling the useful adage that revenge is a dish best served cold.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/opinion/israel-iran-netanyahu-biden.html
Political Observer