Father No's Best

Iran's performative strikes on Israel were choreographed with the US as an exercise in escalation management. "Israel's" flaccid response represents an American "No!" to a wider regional war.

In Primal Parity, I suggest two patriarchal archetypes the United States could employ as geopolitical models during her waning years of global hegemony. The first is an all-powerful Primal Father who lashes out and slays every challenger. Living purely in the present—a Primal Father has no past or future to consider—he demands total obedience to his commandments. This attitude works well for legitimate holders of great power. But when a decaying nation insists on ruling the world while steadfastly refusing to undertake the disciplined industrial work this mastery requires, an alternative approach is advisable.

Plan B is the “Bon Pere du Famille” (Benevolent Family Father). Under his watch, global friction and ruptures are managed with an eye on mentoring up-and-coming powers. The perhaps idealistic hope is to inculcate into these challengers sound global stewardship principles. Through a keen understanding of past cycles, the Bon Pere du Famille knows his limelight is fading. He endeavours to manage a transition of power with his rivals with an eye towards building a global future where his nation can thrive despite no longer being the most powerful.

The early 20th century US rise to power was facilitated in this way. Great Britain graciously acted as a Bon Pere du Famille during the American transition to global hegemon and has been rewarded with a seat at the right hand of the US. The WW2 US war effort in Europe was led by General Eisenhower, more of an administrator than a warrior. Indeed despite America’s powerful position post-WW2, the US doctrines of containment and then détente during the Cold War were all about geopolitical management. Mayhem, especially after the debacle of Vietnam, was only imposed by the US upon the weak—and primarily consisted of coup d'états and other forms of regime change.

Today as the cancer of financialization devastates the Western body politic—as rust and decay wrought by parasitic finance metastasize through the former industrial heartland—displays of hard power must be ever more strictly limited to weaklings and backward, undeveloped societies. As a great power ages, it must act with more mind than muscle and develop a coach’s sagacity. This is the situation the once great and powerful United States finds herself in today.

One roadblock towards the Bon Pere du Famille archetype is the collective memory of the once great nation. Despite American pragmatism, popular propaganda always portrayed the US as a decisive power. Therefore a declining power’s “street” unconsciously aware of decline, demands as compensation even more fast and forceful action. Just as when men grow old——despite repeated reminders from their body that they are closer to 65—in their mind’s eye they remain 25. In the same way, the popular mind of a great power cannot accept the limitations that diminished power potential brings.

The US has attempted to go Primal Father on Russia for the past 20 years. Believing President Putin to be ruling over a “gas station masquerading as a country” the US aggressively sought domination within Russia’s sphere of influence. In return, the US inability to produce sufficient arms for Ukraine is demonstrating that in fact it is the US who has become a hedge fund masquerading as a country.

Meanwhile, the US is finding the choice between Primal Father or Bon Pere du Famille extremely challenging when it comes to protecting Israel. Managing a coveted Golden Child like the Jewish State does not fit into either paradigm. A Primal Father sends his multitude of sons into exile, lest they try to challenge his monopoly on his harem. With other allies, the US is ready to blow up their critical pipelines at the drop of a hat, if it is seen as beneficial. But with Israel it seems the US must submit, not dominate. At the other end of the spectrum, a Bon Pere du Famille has to treat all his children as equally as possible, lest he spark sibling rivalry. But the US is unable to treat Israel as just another country.

More troubling still for the US, deeply engraved into the Israeli psyche is the idea of a messianic saviour who always has their back. This is the role Israel demands the US play. The messianic saviour concept is best expressed in the Superman comic book character. Salvation does not come from a kindly father figure managing squabbles between peoples. The anointed leader sent down by the Jewish God is meant to bring his tribe triumph, not negotiations: “Thus the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them.” (Esther 9:5 KJV). The role the US has been chosen to play is to swing that sword for Israel.

The messianic exuberance works well against weak enemies, like the Palestinians. But as the Jews so tragically learned in the first century of the first millennium in Rome, compromise and negotiation are the preferred method to use against equal or stronger opponents. The Roman legions smashed the Second Temple in Jerusalem when the Jewish Zealots challenged them. The long awaited messiah failed to come to their rescue.

Of course, as we have seen, this demand for crushing victories is not limited to the Jewish hindbrain. In most societies the masses want displays of power while the elites prioritize first and foremost maintaining their privileges and wealth. Winners of life’s lottery prefer the status quo and don’t wish to suffer any great resets themselves. And so one solution leaders choose is a form of sublation where the pragmatic compromises of the Bon Pere du Famille are hidden by donning the flamboyant mask of the Primal Father. This is the strategy President Trump used in Syria in 2017.

Trump’s 2017 Performative Strike in Syria

In the early months of Donald Trump’s first term as President, the ongoing neoconservative adventure in Syria was not going well. After the debacle of Iraq, President Obama refused to directly invade Syria and instead chose to rely on radical Islamist proxies to overthrow the pro-Iranian government in Damascus. This led to a Russian intervention on the side of the internationally recognized Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Hilary Clinton had promised to impose a no-fly-zone over Syria, which would have meant a direct confrontation between the US and Russia. In Syria, Trump preferred to just “take control of the oil” and leave it at that.

In early April of 2017, accusations flew about a chemical warfare attack in Syria. The narrative was that the evil government forces had gassed poor civilians. The truth behind this incident is still not settled: was it really an attack or was it a false flag organized by Western intelligence agencies to force Trump to invade Syria? It’s clear Trump assumed the latter but there is still no definitive answer.

Trump’s foreign policy can be described as a Bon Pere du Famille core hidden by a hyper-flamboyant Primal Father mask. Trump was certainly not eager to get stuck in a Syrian quagmire by falling for neocon tricks, but he did need to put on a performance. And so he decided to warn the Russians in advance and then on April 6th, 2017 Trump bombed some empty corner of an evacuated airbase in order to relieve the pressure the neocons were putting him under:

The U.S. military attacked a Syria-government airfield with 59 Tomahawk missiles on Thursday evening.

The missiles targeted the Shayrat air base near Homs, and were in response to a Tuesday chemical weapons attack. Officially announcing the strike, President Donald Trump said the targeted airfield had launched the chemical attack on a rebel-held area, and he called on other nations to oppose Syria’s embattled leader.

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Additionally, Russian forces were notified in advance of the strike, according to the Pentagon. “U.S. military planners took precautions to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield,” Davis said.

Still, Tillerson said the U.S. “sought no approval from Moscow.”

Thanks to a heads-up from their Russian allies, the Syrians emptied the airbase just before Trump’s pyrotechnic showtime. The next day, just a few hours after the attack:

Syrian warplanes took off from the air base hit by US cruise missiles yesterday to carry out bombing raids on rebel-held areas, in a defiant show of strength.

Just hours after the al-Shayrat airfield was bombed with 59 US Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from warships in the Mediterranean, aircraft struck targets in the eastern Homs countryside, according to a monitoring group.

All’s well that ends well. Even the great war hawk Nikki Haley was pleased with this act of military theatrics:

"The United States took a very measured step last night," Nikki Haley, the US ambassador, told the UN Security Council. "We are prepared to do more, but we hope it will not be necessary."

Trump’s Brief Flirtation with Primal Fatherhood

Two weeks before President Trump’s Senate Impeachment trial was scheduled to start on January 16th 2020, Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. Minutes after Soleimani’s plane landed at Baghdad International Airport, Soleimani’s ground transportation was struck by missiles launched from an American drone, killing the charismatic general and his entourage.

Despite American troops in Iraq being 100% vulnerable to a ballistic missile attack, Iran opted for a performative retaliation. Just as Trump did for the Syrians, Iran warned the US through Iraqi proxies of an imminent ballistic missile attack on the US Al-Asad base west of Baghdad. Repeating the exercise the Syrians undertook in 2017, the Americans emptied the airbase of as many aircraft and personnel as possible. On January 11th, Iran hit the mostly-deserted American airbase with eleven ballistic missiles. The Americans had zero air defense capability on hand and even if they did it is unlikely the Patriot systems are effective against Iranian ballistic missiles.

After the attack the Trump Administration, in a mirror of the information strategy Israel is today following, downplayed the severity of the attack:

US officials also have offered differing accounts of what they see as the motivations behind Iran’s attack. Vice President Mike Pence said last week that the administration believes the strikes “were intended to kill Americans,” and Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he believed that the attacks “were intended to cause structural damage, destroy vehicles and equipment and aircraft, and to kill personnel.”

But a growing belief emerged among administration officials last week that Iran had deliberately missed areas populated by Americans. Multiple administration officials told CNN that Iran could have directed its missiles to areas populated by Americans, but intentionally did not. And those officials said Iran may have chosen to send a message rather than take action significant enough to provoke a substantial US military response, a possible signal the Trump administration was looking for a rationale to calm the tensions.

Iraq did receive a warning that the strike was coming and was able to take “necessary precautions,” according to a statement from Iraq’s Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi. A US defense official said that Iraq, in turn, warned the United States.

However, Pentagon officials have said they received no such warnings from the Iraqis but that the US was able to detect the attack in enough time to alert US forces on the ground.

Iran’s UN ambassador said last Friday that the Iraqi bases housing US troops had been primarily selected to demonstrate target accuracy, not to kill Americans, disputing public claims made by top Trump administration officials.

“We said before we took our military action that we would choose the timing and the place, and we chose the place where the attack against Soleimani was initiated,” Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day” last Friday when asked about Pence’s comments. “And we do not consider a high number of casualties as an instrumental element in our calculations.”

On the surface this seems like a very good deal for Trump, at least on the international scene. The price he paid for killing a brilliantly effective Iranian general was a few American soldiers suffering headaches. But a story in the Wall Street Journal following the attack points out that Trump was engaging in appeasement of his domestic enemies:

Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said.

Trump’s tough Primal Father act only served to reveal to his domestic enemies his vulnerability to “lawfare” (warfare waged by spurious legal cases.) The anti-Trump establishment had brought marginal charges against him and in return Trump rewarded them with pro-war concessions. Trump is today facing a phalanx of lawfare court cases designed to gum up the works of his presidential campaign. And coincidently, he recently relented on his opposition to Ukrainian financial aid. Perhaps a charge or two against him will soon be dropped?

Root of the Problem

America’s schizophrenic foreign policy features Trump trying to make peace with Russia and North Korea while at other times the Democrats have been more friendly towards China and Iran. This partisan geopolitical push-and-pull has resulted in these four military powers banding together as a primal horde to destroy US hegemony. Their strategy is to lure the US, with its pathetic lack of military industrial capability, into grinding wars of attrition in many theatres. There are already four distinct fronts at varying levels of intensity: Ukraine, Middle East, Korean Peninsula and Taiwan / South China Sea. In Africa the domino effect is finally seeing the light of day as nation after nation in the Sahel region boots out Western militaries in favour of Russian forces. And in the Caribbean, Russia and China are making inroads in what is supposed to be America’s private lake.

Winning wars eventually boils down to which side possesses greater economic prowess. America and the West are getting humiliated in Ukraine, where the promise of victory had been based on the fetish value of supposedly superior Western weaponry. In the event, simple, cheap, sometimes even dumb, but highly plentiful Russian bombs are proving to be gamechangers.

So not only does the global father-figure have to manage what is beyond any doubt Global War 6, but the US also has to regulate the repeated outbursts of its entitled Golden Child Israel. For more than a decade Israel has been attacking Iranian assets in Syria with impunity.

After handing Iraq to Iran on a silver platter, the US had a problem. Previously Saddam Hussein had acted as a bulwark against direct Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon. But once President Bush II got the brilliant idea to put Iran’s Shia allies in power in Baghdad, Israel had a problem. Iran could funnel arms through Iraq to Syria and Lebanon to assist these nations in recapturing territory occupied by Israel. The West’s solution was to fund and arm the Sunni majority in Syria to overthrow their minority government. The West turned Syria into a battlefield by instigating a civil war.

Russia and Iran stepped in and said no, saving the Al-Assad regime in Syria. Today the US still occupies oil and gas fields in Syria, and Israel regularly bombs her airports. Russia has shown an ambivalent attitude towards these attacks and has not supplied Syria with the highest quality air defense systems.

Israel’s fears of Iran are not unfounded. The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei published a book in 2015 where he proposed a strategy of tying Israel down into a grinding insurgency. The ultimate goal was a far-fetched idea of turning back the hands of time and returning Palestine to its pre-WW2 Arab majority:

According to several other “interpretations” of this book—which are consistent in their views and are definitely consistent with the above rendition of the Grand Ayatollah’s website—his strategic plan is to wage a “low intensity” war over an extensive period of time, which would be calculated to tire the Israelis out and induce many of them with dual citizenship to move to the safer American mainland. Likewise, this grinding struggle would ultimately become too pricey for the U.S.A. and lead to “Israel fatigue” thereby compelling America to diminish—if not terminate— its financial and other support of Israel.

Khamenei’s goal is not to drive all Jews out of Palestine. He proposes “only” sending back to Europe/US those immigrants (and descendants) who arrived in Palestine during the post WW2 refugee floods. The Iranian’s rather ambitious goal is to reset the demographic clock back to the 1930’s where Jews indeed had a place in Palestine, but only as a minority, with their culture and religion protected while living under the rule of Islam. Interestingly this Iranian plan is not so different from some of the maximalist anti-immigration positions held by activists in the US, who dream of restoring the American demographic percentages of the 1950’s.

In defense of this position, some Muslim activists are quick to point out that while Jews were being oppressed in Europe for centuries, they lived protected and in peace in Muslim countries. The Holocaust was European-on-Jew violence and had nothing to do with Islam.

But due to the general weakness of the Muslim world in the 20th century, when it came time for Europe to finally resolve its Jewish Question, the answer was to agree with the Zionists and ship as many Jews as possible off to Palestine. Britain is often wrongly blamed for this move. In fact, Britain fought an insurgency against Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine in the aftermath of the Second World War. Britain had no desire to see a Jewish homeland spring up on their colonial lands. Despite any number of British military victories over Jewish insurgents, in a mirror of today’s struggle against Hamas, to defeat the British, the Jewish terrorists needed to only survive. Eventually, thanks in large part to Josef Stalin, Israel won a diplomatic victory in the UN which launched the Jewish State on its current trajectory. In a twist of history, today Israel finds herself in a similar position Britain occupied post WW2.

Threading the Needle

In early April, Israel killed 14 Iranians in their consulate building in Damascus. Among the dead were several high ranking military officers, no doubt tasked to fan the flames of insurgency against Israel with their proxies in the region. As the dust settled and the bodies were buried, Iran faced a difficult choice on how to respond. As is so often the case, they looked back on recent precedents; Syria in 2017 and Iraq in 2020, and decided a demonstrative attack on Israel would achieve two goals: restore deterrence while not triggering a potentially disastrous regional war.

A small sample of Iran’s ballistic missile collection

According to multiple Western sources—through third parties—Iran negotiated with the US on the nature and targets of their upcoming theatrical strikes. The goal was for the US to step in and stop any escalations by saying “no” when Israel demanded to respond to Iran’s simulated attack.

Iran sought to establish deterrence against further Israeli strikes on Iranian assets in Syria by demonstrating to the world that she can inflict heavy damage to the Jewish State’s military infrastructure. Seeking to project the simulacra of a Primal Father, Iran and the US carefully authored the script in a display of Bon Pere du Famille wisdom.

Having just joined the BRICS trading alliance, Iran is happy with the current trajectory of world events and does not seek a devastating regional war. Iran designed its attack in such a way as to allow Israel and the West to save enough face to not be tempted to climb the escalation ladder even higher with reprisals. Iran flooded Israel’s air defense system with plenty of cheap drones that are relatively easy to shoot down. These drone swarms do serve a purpose as they also tend to overload air defense systems.

From the US point of view, in Global War 6, Israel is strategically meaningless. What little the West gains by having access to Israel is more than negated by the loss the US suffers in their relations with the vast number of other Middle Eastern states. But the West has a deep and irrational emotional attachment to Israel and so grand strategy gets tossed to the wayside.

After consulting with the US, Iran decided to attack three targets: two airbases—Nevatim and Ramon—in southern Israel. from where the aircraft that destroyed the consulate were based. In addition, a top-secret intelligence-spy base of Jabal al-Sheikh, located in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in the north near Lebanon, from where the consulate attack was planned, was also targeted.

Israel and the West managed to shoot down many drones. It is less clear how many cruise and ballistic missiles got through. There are several reports (and videos) that show several ballistic missiles raining down on the Israeli airbases. Sources claim that the Iranians displayed their missiles’ accuracy by hitting the center of the base commander’s swimming pool. Given its top secret nature, there are no damage reports on the intelligence headquarters in the Golan. Low-flying cruise missiles were used for this target.

Nevertheless, the fact that Iran got at least several ballistic missiles through the combined air defenses of Israel, the US, the UK, Jordan and France, under the very best conditions (72 hours warning combined with targeting information) means that in any conventional escalation, Iran will be able to wipe out most of Israel’s air force. Under sustained attack by Iran, Israel and the West will run out of air defense missiles. And just as is happening in Ukraine, Israel will then be vulnerable to Iran’s huge arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles along with its drones. This is not to mention the tens of thousands of weapons Hezbollah possesses just north of Israel. In recent days, Hezbollah has been hitting Israel with rockets and drones while the Iron Dome seems to be on vacation.

The “No” of the Father

After the Iranian attack, acting as a Bon Pere du Famille, President Biden tried to discourage Israel from retaliating. He encouraged the Jewish State to “take the win” by claiming a 99% shootdown rate and to move forward.

Despite the exhibition game (or friendly match) vibes, this missile attack was a slap in the face to the West. Estimates put the West’s air defence bill at $1.1 billion. This can be seen as a sort of “blood money” since the Israeli attack in the Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus killed 14 Iranians. No Israelis are known to have died from Iran’s retaliatory strike.

One major step towards civilization is the diverting blood feuds and endless rounds of vengeance towards a public court system. The international level does not have any such functioning system of justice, since the UN Security Council is hopelessly useless. But Iran negotiating its strike with the US and avoiding civilian casualties, is a small step away from the anarchy of Primal Fathers and towards a managed international system.

Obviously altruism played no part in any of this. President Biden is facing a tough re-election campaign and one of his major priorities is to keep the price of fuel down. What’s obvious is that if the ragtag Houthis can close the Bab al-Mandab Strait and access into the Red Sea then Iran can slam shut the Strait of Hormuz and access into the Persian Gulf, through which nearly 30% of global seaborne oil trade passes. Higher energy prices would of course bring smiles to the faces of those running Russia’s war machine and Trump’s presidential campaign.

Foreign adversaries are cynical enough to know that it makes no difference who the actual American president is beyond which sales pitches he or she may deploy. But Iran does have a motive to work towards a Biden re-election, seeing it as revenge for Trump’s assassination of their beloved General Soleimani. And so Iran is willing to make a few concessions to help Biden’s campaign effort.

Nevertheless, on the level of grand strategy, the primal horde have a strong interest in turning Israel into a black hole of the West’s remaining stocks of weapons. Given the emotional attachment to the Jewish State, in the event of a war with Iran, the West will rush to supply Israel with missiles--assuming any of Israel's ports manage to survive a hailstorm of Iranian and Hezbollah missile strikes, This of course will leave South Korea and Taiwan undefended. China's not stupid. A few weeks into any Iran-Israel War, North Korea will attack the South and not long after, China will invade Taiwan. It's lights out for Western hegemony at that point.

So letting Iran’s orchestrated pyrotechnic show over Israel be the last word on the subject is in the West’s interest. Given that Israel is (and Iran is probably) a nuclear power adds impetus to Biden enforcing his “No.” Biden will be supported by wealthy and powerful Americans living in New York City, Los Angeles or Silicone Valley, who don’t want their charmed lives to come to an end in a nuclear holocaust if things spiral out of control.

This morning there has been a small attack on an Iranian army base near the city of Isfahan. Iranian sources claim to have shot down three quadcopter drones with no explosions occurring on the ground. US media is inflating the scale and impact of the attack while most interestingly, Israel has NOT claimed public responsibility for the attack and has instructed its embassies to remain quiet on the subject. There is speculation that the US—itself or through proxies in Azerbaijan—carried out this demonstrative attack to cock block a more serious Israeli counterstrike. The miniscule scale of this “attack” while inciting knowing smirks, will not present Iran with any justification to respond militarily. So far the only Iranian retaliation is from their meme artists mocking the attack:

In the meantime, Hezbollah is increasing the severity of its attacks on Northern Lebanon. Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system seems recently to be on holiday. A large-scale attack towards Beirut or Gaza seems to be a strong possibility in the coming day. If so a major war will be avoided and execution of the smouldering low-intensity conflict between Iran and Israel will be handed back to Iran’s proxies in the region.