Israel's rigged game of chicken

Additional reflections on the developing situation

I used to be pretty close with a guy from Teheran back in the day. Easy-going type whose hyperbolic and extroverted approach was a welcome flair in the neighborhood gym where we used to hang out, otherwise a kind of surly and autistic atmosphere. We bonded over our mutual disgust with the ongoing sabre-rattling and WMD propaganda around Iran about 2012 or so — but he was quick to point out that the Islamic Republic’s media was equally untrustworthy. Although if you listened to the tripe coming from CNN and PressTV at the same time, he used to say, you might find a few grains of truth in the interference.

He’d gone AWOL from the Iranian Army during the height of the Iran-Iraq war, escaping to Pakistan and finally making it all the way to Scandinavia. Still always found an excuse to brag about his war wound, which supposedly was an Iraqi 7.62 bullet that grazed him from a very long distance.

So he’d flatter himself, sure, but everyone else equally as well. And even if certain things the guy said were a bit exaggerated, he always meant them on some level, and never as far as I can remember crossed the line into pure bullshit. Whenever someone else did, though, he was really fast at cutting it off. I lost touch with him after my ex somehow managed to insult his wife after they’d had the both of us over for dinner, which I failed to realize until much later.

I don’t know if you can draw any conclusions about Iranian culture from such an exchange, but there seem to be clear commonalities here, coincidental or not.

The Iranians do not sit easy with openly lying to your face. They might bluster, they might turn to hyperbole and exaggeration, and may even flatter you, but they generally mean what they say. And if the historical record is anything to go by, whether or not the current regime is as repressive, abusive and inhumane as the Western media consensus has it, it doesn’t tend to commit itself to baseless promises and will likely follow through on its pledges.

An embattled regime with lots of enemies, and a pariah status anchored in the role of Shia Islam in the greater Middle East, it’s going to seek stability and predictability as predominant goods rather than any sort of maverick opportunism. In Iran’s long game, it can’t rely too much on force or coercion, which means that the regime is less likely to project inconsistency and deception since this would be reflected in kind by the various forces it has to contend with in its own back yard, such as the Kurds, the Sunni militants, the Western-backed student revolts, or Pakistan and Iraq for that matter.

In short, the Iranians will probably call Israel’s bluff. They’re unlikely to back down in the first place, since they can smell the bullshit.

The Iranian regime knows full well that Netanyahu is desperate. Israel is pulling all possible strings to get NATO and the West involved, really revving up its propaganda leverage. I guess nobody missed how the G7 unanimously condemned Iran yesterday, calling it a “source of instability”, just after Israel’s illegal and destabilizing sneak attack in the middle of Iran’s opening itself up to negotiations and concessions.

Reuters.

You can’t make this stuff up. The dishonesty. The proud lies. The recklessness and the despicable lack of shame.

Israel is by all accounts taking a beating right now, with major population centres getting hit to an extent that hasn’t been seen since the foundation of the modern state of Israel. This is likely going to cause a major crisis in public opinion, since the small state, beset by enemies on every side, has been held together over the last fifty years through this illusion of (relative) invulnerability that has now arguably been shattered.

So unless Israel can very quickly manage to expand the war and drag the US (and preferably all of the West) into it, the Netanyahu regime knows very well that it’s good and fucked and that heads will roll in one way or another.

And assuming we were in Netanyahu’s position in this kind of situtation, what would be the optimal cause of action?

Well, you commit yourself to a series of precise false-flag attacks to keep this ball rolling that Trump and the G7 now has gotten started.

The US has already basically broadcast that for Israel to get them involved, they will need to produce actual American casualties at the hands of Iran, such as through an attack on one of their colonial outposts (military bases in the region).

Of course, everyone knows that Iran is not going to intentionally give the US such a pretext in a million years. They’re forced to respond to Israel’s unprovoked sneak attack and obviously have no intention of also provoking a military response from the Americans.

But the otherwise incomprehensible nonsense about murdering Khameini, more or less an open threat from the mouth of Trump himself, and the associated demands for “unconditional surrender”, make perfect sense right here.

This is basically a simple setup that allows Israel to kill Khameini — or just to provide the plausible claim that he has been taken out — which would then open the door for a major false flag attack against a US target that can be sold as a hasty response by the Iranians to the fact of the ayatollah being assassinated. This would then trigger the usual machinery of a military-assisted “regime change” operation while at the same time effectively serving to obscure Israel’s intensified ethnic cleansing of Gaza (and soon enough of the West Bank).

And the prospect of Iranian strikes on US assets is accordingly now being seeded in the major propaganda outlets.

So what could Iran do in this situation? It’s really between a rock and a hard place. It can’t just back down, losing face, and setting itself up for intensified destabilization efforts, targeting internal dissent and US-aligned militia groups. And even if it did back down — say after delivering a sufficiently “measured response” that could be sold as an adequate retaliation, Israel can still attack Iran again, for no apparent reason whatsoever, and will have all of the “international community” behind it. It could even whack (or pretend to take out) Khameini out of the blue, for any number of fabricated reasons, and proceed with false-flag responses pinned to Iran at its leisure.

So Iran is probably just going to have to call this bluff, fingers crossed, hoping shit doesn’t hit the fan.

It’s a hot, early summer night here in Tokyo. And from the looks of it, this is just the beginning of a really long and dark bunch of dog days ahead.