Iran Meets Clausewitz Via Israel, Part 2

Jihadi branch of Autocracy, Inc. bunker-busted out of nuke club

Regional ally does the heavy lifting, global hegemon serves the final dose to jihadi supreme miscalculator.

“War is a mere continuation of politics by other means…war only the instrument, not vice versa. No other possibility exists, then, than to subordinate the military point of view to the political….When whole communities go to war . . . the reason always lies in some political situation, and the occasion is always due to some political object. War, therefore, is an act of policy….“The closer . . . political probabilities drive war toward the absolute, the more the belligerent states are involved and drawn into its vortex.”

“The best form of defense is attack. “The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.” — Carl von Clausewitz

Previously we saw how the Iranian theocracy’s antipathy to Israel makes no geostrategic sense without embedding it in the regime’s Shia jihadi concept of itself. Last night’s bunker busting of Iran’s Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan uranium enrichment facilities will doubtless transform the regime’s geopolitical concept of itself.

We all woke up to a new Middle East in which the Arab Sunni states first silently applauded Israel, and now the US, doing to the non-Arab expansionist Persians what they can’t. The politically orphaned useful idiots of the secular left will delusionally avert their eyes from this reality. So now we’ll look at how and why they are so willfully blind and deaf to a Middle Eastern reality in which religion, not nation, drive political conflict:

• How and why secular western media and academics are resolutely blind and deaf to the genocidal jihadi nature of the regime and

• How this blindness and deafness is the result of Autocracy, Inc.’s (Russia/China/Iran/North Korea/Venezuela/Cuba) asymmetric hybrid disinformation warfare.

• Autocracy Inc.’s members are ideologically diverse but share interests and enemies: busting sanctions, kleptocracy and democratic accountability and open societies.

“Russia plays a special role in the autocratic network, both as the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship and as the country now most aggressively seeking to upend the status quo. The invasion was planned in that spirit. Putin hoped not only to acquire territory, but also to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer hold….This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order,” said Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, soon after the war began. “The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.”

Warren Buffett’s aphorism about poker illuminates how a Russia-led Autocracy, Inc. snookered western liberals:

“If you’re in a poker game and don’t know who the patsy is, you’re it.”

Western liberals’ useful idiocy slowed the learning curve to reveal the true nature of Autocracy, Inc.:

“But if Putin had underestimated the unity of the democratic world, the democracies also underestimated the scale of the challenge. Like democracy activists in Venezuela or Belarus, they slowly learned that they were not merely fighting Russia in Ukraine.They were fighting Autocracy, Inc.” Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideas would spread to autocratic states. Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.” — Applebaum, page 26

“Karen Dawisha, author of one of the first books to describe Putin’s political project…observed that many mistakenly described Russia in the 1990s as “an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice.” The real story of that decade was very different: “From the beginning, Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.” — Applebaum, pages 27–28.

The Middle Eastern Muslim iteration of Autocracy, Inc. shows how secular westerners get everything exactly backwards by viewing Israeli concessions as the key to de-jihadifying the Muslim world instead of vice versa. The Arab signatories to the Abraham Accords know this:

“terrorists coming out of Europe because of the lack of decision making trying to be politically correct or assuming that they know the Middle East and they know Islam and they know the others far better than we do. And I’m sorry but that’s pure ignorance.”

How western useful idiot media self-censor and peddle jihadi lies

Western media continue to inject artificial and fraudulent moral symmetry into this war with headlines like:

• Nuclear talks set for Sunday in Oman cancelled

• Missile hits apartments in Israel’s Bat Yam, 35 missing

• Apparent Israeli strike hits South Pars gas field

• Israel warns residents near Iranian weapons facilities to evacuate

What the headline writers ignore is the gulf between the two combatants’ intentions:

• Israel takes out Iranian leaders while they sleep with precise surgical strikes that leave the apartments above and below untouched.

• Iran’s missile warfare strategy is like that of a failed venture capitalist: spray and pray, with these jihadis stressing the pray part.

Former AP reporter (2006–11) Matti Friedman explains in on the ground detail how BBC, CNN, AP and the NY Times agreed to be censored by Hamas and uncritically swallow its casualty figures after the AP Gazan reporter’s life was threatened after he reported Hamas terrorists (rebranded as “militants”) fought in civilian clothes and were counted as civilian deaths:

This is how fake news is disseminated. | Grant de Graf 🇮🇱
This is how fake news is disseminated. #standagainsthate #combatantisemitismwww.linkedin.com

“He reveals when and how Hamas censorship shapes Gaza coverage, inflating casualty numbers and hiding militants as civilians.
“As far as I know, I was the first staffer to erase information, because we were threatened by Hamas (this happened at the end of 2008). There was a really excellent “Palestinian” reporter in Gaza, who submitted a crucial detail in a story, that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and were being counted as such in the death toll…an important thing to know. That went out in an The Associated Press story, the reporter called Matti a few hours later as he was sitting in the AP bureau in Jerusalem writing the story (it was clear that someone had spoken to him) and told him to take the detail out of the story…”