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The conventional wisdom of the media and think-tanks agreed its line around the time the two-hundredth drone was shot down: Iran's assault on Israel was a flop.
A record number of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles were launched by the mullahs against the Zionist Entity: For the flight from Persia, a drone takes nine hours, a cruise two hours, and a ballistic missile about twelve minutes. Not a single drone or cruise missile made it to Israeli soil. A few of the ballistics penetrated the country's air space, lighting up the sky over the Temple Mount yet killing not a single Jew. An unlucky seven-year-old girl in a Bedouin encampment in the desert was injured by shrapnel, but for Tehran that's one lousy return on investment. For purposes of comparison, the usual West Bank bloodletting racked up a higher body count: a fourteen-year-old Israeli shepherd was found shot in the head yesterday.
Meanwhile, after six months in geopolitical Coventry, Israel is once again flush with allies:
(April 14, 2024 / JNS) The United States, United Kingdom and Jordan downed many of the over 300 projectiles launched at Israel by Iran overnight Sunday, while France also played a role in defending the Jewish state against the unprecedented attack.
The Jordanians were mostly concerned to protect their own territory from carelessly targeted incoming, the French are said to have confined their efforts to patrolling the airspace and giving a friendly head's up, and the British dispatched jets from the RAF base at Akrotiri to take out Iranian drones over Syria and Iraq. Whether any of these efforts were militarily necessary to Israel's defence, they're not likely to be politically popular on their respective home fronts. Yet all were eager to be perceived as in on the operation, and their participation is being hailed as the emergence of a new Israeli-Sunni-western regional security force:
So rather than weaken Israel, Iran's attack has ended up convening an extraordinary military alliance — with Arabs, Israelis, Americans and British acting as one to neutralise the assault.
The Tehran regime is many things but it is not stupid. It has seeded its proxies - Hamas, Hizb'allah and Houthis - all over the map, and it showed greater strategic clarity over Iraq than the boobs in Washington did: America toppled Saddam, but the mullahs got the spoils. If Iran had lobbed what they threw at Israel at the average EU member, its cities would be in flames and its mortuaries full. It is not credible that the mullahs would not be fully aware that the Iron Dome would hold. So that's an awful lot of matériel to blow on a minimal bang for the buck.
When the Iranians use their cut-outs, they know how to kill Jews: General Zahedi, the Quds Force commander assassinated by the IDF earlier this month, is said to have been the man behind the October 7th operation - which certainly would seem to be beyond the capabilities of the average Hamas honcho. By comparison with the visceral depravity of autumn's parachutists and flatbed riders, last night's assault had the air of the performative and bloodless. For his part, the squinting mumbling stiff being passed off as "Leader of the Free World" could do no more than recycle his summer-stock slab of ham from his pre-Ukraine shtick. For Khamenei as for Putin, a single word:
Don't.
And Khamenei, like Putin, did.
But ineffectually.
IDF warplanes killed Zahedi in the Iranian Embassy compound in Damascus, which is an act of war - notwithstanding Israel's artful argument that their particular target was a non-consular building within a consular complex. Still, it could hardly not have provoked a response from Tehran. As the lefties at The Guardian argue:
The war had come out of the shadows — and this was Netanyahu's doing. He must have known how furious would be the reaction in Tehran. Tellingly, he did not inform his US ally in advance, probably because the Biden administration would have tried to veto the operation. The Damascus embassy attack looks like a premeditated escalation designed to fortify Netanyahu's domestic political position, silence criticism from the blind-sided Americans and deflect international pressure to halt arms supplies to Israel.
And it has worked.
Indeed. After forty-five years of loosing its lethal proxies on Jews all over the world, Iran decided to act as a sovereign state and for the first time openly sic its official armed forces on Israel.
But without killing anyone ...and after giving the Sunni Arab states a seventy-two-hours advance warning. And, having offered up its most expensive baubles for Anglo-Franco-American-Jordanian target practice, Tehran has now assured the United Nations that it's had its fun and there will be no further strikes. As Daniel Greenfield concludes:
This is not the actual Iranian attack.
This is the 'attack' prearranged for show between Iran and the Biden administration through backchannels.
[UPDATE: If you're wondering what Joe Biden's emphatic "Don't" works out to when fleshed out just a little, well:
Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Ankara that any action it took had to be "within certain limits."
In other words, "Don't" equals "Do - up to a point". Good to know.]
Or as John Kirby, Washington's National Security press spokesperson cum "Rear-Admiral", crowed:
Truly a successful night, due to a lot of skill, a lot of professionalism and a lot of coordination across the board.
You say "prearranged", he says "coordinated". Stranger things have happened: see the Nordstream pipeline, the Washington-Wuhan Pandemics R Us partnership, etc. And, if you're committed to the region's fetid "stability", last night certainly hits the sweet spot: Iran is permitted to go ballistic, nobody dies, thus discouraging any meaningful Israeli response ...and the three western powers that gave us the modern Middle East get to saddle up and show that the old order still prevails.
To be sure, forcing the Sunni Arab states to choose between Persia's Shia supremacists and the Jews can be clarifying. But the sense of managed weirdness about last night should not disguise where we're headed on this. Washington's strategic thinking is as backward and befuddled as its nominal leader, while Tehran is patient and forward-looking: a Rubicon was crossed last night, and they would not have done that if they did not feel that it served their purpose and advanced their interests. Israel's suddenly re-enthused "allies" seek to tie its hands; Saturday night, Iran's were loosened.
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Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human rights activist. Among his books is "The Undocumented Mark Steyn: Don't Say You Weren't Warned". (Buy it at a 49% discount by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at a 67% discount by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR)