Things Are Moving Fast

 

by Saul Sadka

This thread from a month ago aged well, and faster than I imagined. The end game is here.

Hamas' Al Aksa flood didn’t flood Israel. Instead, it has been swept away by Israel's rising tide, dooming its Hezbollah allies and quenching the Ring of Fire that Iran spent 30 years building around Israel, crippling its own economy in the process.

Iran was playing chess, but Hamas didn’t understand the game and didn’t realize it was just a pawn.

I wrote that thread a month ago because I realized almost nobody had any idea what the real game was.

People needed to know that Hamas and Hezbollah did not exist to "liberate Palestine." They were nowhere near powerful enough to do that. Their purpose was to protect the otherwise defenseless Iranian regime and its nuclear program from Israeli attack.

Iranian air defense is two generations out of date and has been shown to be farcical in Ukraine. Their air force was designed in the 1960s and hasn’t been properly maintained since the 1970s. So to protect themselves, they disfigured the Middle East, from Yemen to Syria, setting up terror armies as proxies.

The plan was to have them sit on Israel’s borders and menace the country, offering an occasional show of force, but never enough to provide a casus belli that would invite a knockout blow from Israel. They were simply there to ensure that Israel wouldn’t dare attack Iran.

If Israel did, Hamas' Nukhba force and Hezbollah’s Radwan squads would breach the border en masse, with thousands of rockets raining down on Israel every hour. The price for Israel would have been to high, and Israel's preparations for such a counterattack would give Iran warning of Israel's intentions.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and the rest were all meant to be a deterrent, keeping Israel at a standoff distance. But Hamas didn’t get the memo—or they did and ignored it.

Hamas is no longer a threat (though tragically, they still hold around 50 living hostages and the bodies of 50 Israelis). They are now boxed in by an IDF buffer zone staffed by around 10,000 troops. From a strategic point of view, Israel can live with this in perpetuity. Hamas was unable even to punish Israel for killing Deif. They’re just a mafia rabble at this point.

They are no longer part of a ring of anything; instead, they are encircled and prevented from acting. The battlefield they shaped for 20 years has been dismantled, and the IDF has built a battlefield to its own liking. The tables are totally and permanently flipped.

Likewise, in the most overwhelming series of blows dealt by an army since Israel decimated the air forces of three enemies on the ground in 1967, Hezbollah has been reduced in two weeks from the most powerful non-state actor in the world to a leaderless (literally) decimated militia, scrambling through scrub to impotently fire off a rocket or two into the sea.

Hezbollah was forced into this war by Hamas. Hamas has killed them all and left Iran exposed.

The goals of Al Aqsa Flood were threefold: split Israel against itself, get the Jews to flee, and isolate Israel.

Could the result be more ironic? It is Iran’s Ring of Fire that has been split and then devoured piece by piece by Israel. It is the Gazans and Lebanese being forced to flee. Instead of Israel being isolated, it is Iran that now stands alone, its only real ally, Russia, too busy to help them.

All of this chaos could not have been possible without the disfigurement of Western security and diplomatic bureaucracies by the ascendance of the cadre of postmodern apparatchiks to positions of high power. As became obvious to all during the debate, Biden—a genuine Zionist—was not setting policy, a sack of snakes was vying to control his teleprompter.

What did these people, as a collective, want? They wanted America out of the Middle East and sought a balance of power between Iran and Israel—stability and quiet through mutual deterrence.

Maintaining Iran’s Ring of Fire, then, was (or rather, was) an integral part of Western foreign policy. (The fact that over a million have died in the proxy wars that ensued and disfigured the region, with tens of millions made refugees, is just a small price to pay for the amoral goons who allowed this.)

Other Western actors may be more malign: They read the history of the 1930s and saw that appeasing lunatics with imperial fantasies nearly destroyed the world. Perhaps, they thought, trying the same strategy again would destroy Israel—the not-so-secret fever dream of the hard left, some of whom have infiltrated to the highest levels.

In truth, it is the dreams of these enemies inside the West, even at the heart of the State Department—who, for example, knew Israel would have defeated Hamas by capturing Rafah and tried to stop them with every trick they had—that Israel has now buried in that fiery pit in Beirut.

They were the real enemy. Their entire worldview is now in tatters. America can pull out of the Middle East, but Israel isn’t going to bleed to be a pawn on a chessboard for the benefit of isolationists or to cover for Marxist accelerationists.

Incidentally, this is why the Houthis still exist and still harass shipping. The vast amount of U.S. naval power surrounding them and their donkey and speedboat military could incapacitate them in a single night.

The Houthis are part of the balance of power that certain agents want to maintain to try and limit Israel’s freedom of action, to box Israel in, to limit it to actions that U.S. bureaucrats see as beneficial to their own geopolitical outlooks.

Israel has broken the box. The game is now up for that worldview. Israel isn’t going to sacrifice itself on the whims of American realist strategists.

A large part of this is the mantra that wars "can’t be won," that "ideas can’t be defeated." Well, actually, as a wise man once said, "Yes. We. Can."

This is why the global left is gnashing their teeth today: Their dream of upturning the Western world—Israel first—is over for the rest of their lifetimes.

But Iran has one final pawn on the board: its nuclear program. If it can just get that pawn to the other side of the board, it becomes a queen, and Iran can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Its regime will be as secure as North Korea, and its millenarian dreams of a global caliphate forged via global war will be entirely feasible.

And Israel has freedom of action, no longer deterred by the Ring of Fire. Indeed, Israel has its own Ring of Fire around Iran now. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Bahrain, and the UAE are Israeli allies, as are (tacitly) Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the Kurdish militias of Iraq and Syria.

And not only around them—Israel has allies deep inside Iran that the Iranians cannot root out, acting with impunity. They killed Haniyeh in his bed and probably killed Iran's president, Raisi, in his helicopter "accident" on the way back from a long-planned diplomatic meeting with Israel's ally, Azerbaijan.

So, all the layers have been stripped away. Iran is defenseless, and Iran knows it. And they know that everyone knows they are defenseless. The risk that they try to make a bomb has never been greater.

Netanyahu has built his career by warning of the Iranian nuclear threat, if he fails on his, his life is a failure.

Until this year, he could point to America and blame them for his inability to act. While the likelihood of an Iranian nuclear breakout shot up with the death of Nasrallah and the dismemberment of their main proxy, simultaneously, the risks to Israel of preempting a nuclear Iran have vastly fallen, as has the ability of anyone to influence Israel against such an act.

Israel has cornered the Iranian bear. Perhaps it didn’t want to, but now that it has, it needs to finish it—and take its nukes.

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