Will Tehran Avoid the Trap of a Pawn on a Chessboard?

From the moment Israeli missiles destroyed the Iranian consulate in Syria on April 1, in flagrant violation of international law, the international community was speculating over the reprisals the Islamic Republic vowed to take. It was only 12 days later – after the United States and other Western countries had refused to condemn the bombing – that the counter-attack was launched. And at least 72 hours before that, Tehran had given advance notice to several countries in the region, which was made known to the U.S. and Israel, in order to reduce the number of causalities. The counter-attack was overall restrained, given the amount of force Iran could have used.

Nonetheless, it was immediately hyped up in the transatlantic mainstream media as an “unprovoked” operation aimed at annihilating Israel. In fact, most media never even mentioned the trigger for it, namely the destruction of the Iranian consulate. One of the reasons for portraying Israel as the poor “victim” of an “unwarranted attack” is obviously to deflect attention from the genocide the Netanyahu government is knowingly carrying out in Gaza.

U.S. President Biden reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Washington would not support any Israeli counter-attack against Iran, but reaffirmed “America’s ironclad commitment to the security of Israel”. The Pentagon had already ordered aircraft and ballistic missile defense systems to deploy to the region a week before, in anticipation of an expansion of the conflict. How and when an Israeli government in a wild flight forward will respond, in a tit for tat pattern, remains to be seen.

Some military experts have pointed out that the counter-attack demonstrated that Iran can, in fact, successfully penetrate the vaunted Iron Dome “shield” over Israel, even though the U.S. Central Command, and British and French armed forces joined Israel’s defenses to repel it. According to these experts, Tehran used drones to activate the Israeli radar systems; cruise missiles to identify the position of Israeli launchers (by forcing Israel to fire on them); and ballistic missiles to, in fact, hit several sites, including two air bases in the Negev Desert, and Israeli air defense sites.

This led former International Atomic Energy Agency Inspector Scott Ritter to comment on his Substack site: “Despite having employed an extensive integrated anti-missile defense system comprised of the so-called ‘Iron Dome’ system, U.S.-made Patriot missile batteries, and the Arrow and David’s Sling missile interceptors, along with U.S., British, and Israeli aircraft, and U.S. and French shipborne anti-missile defenses, well over a dozen Iranian missiles struck heavily-protected Israeli airfields and air defense installations.”

Scott Ritter’s piece is called The Missiles of April, a take on the title of Barbara Tuchman’s famous study of World War One, The Guns of August. The foolish, inexorable slide into world war in August 1914 had begun more than two decades earlier, and was, just as today, denied by the ruling elites as having been “their intention”.