Contrasting Views On Wider War

I can’t embed videos in tweets, so you don’t get the full effect, but here’s the text along with my transcription of the subtitled video—it’s a good lead into our topic:

Ania Lewandovska @Anna_AnninaEl

"We still have not revenged in a biblical way…we did not burn Gaza to ashes immediately.

Create a tremendous humanity crisis. Level the entire area.

Do not leave a stone upon stone in Gaza. Gaza needs to turn to Dresden. Annihilate Gaza now!"

- Moshe Feiglin

This is Zionism!

0:09 / 0:38

3:38 AM · Oct 26, 2023

In this portion the speaker decries the “restraint” of the IAF:

Do not leave a stone upon a stone in Gaza!

Gaza needs to turn to Dresden--Yes!--no more hope!

We are still in Oslo (agreements), still knocking on the roof. This night the Air Force still knocks on the roof before it bombed a lame tower in a hospital around Al Shifa hospital instead of flattening all of Gaza!

So all of your 64 mandates (voters), Benjamin Netanyahu, now need to protest in front of your home!

As it happens, yesterday Russia’s President Putin addressed these attitudes while warning of the danger that this war could spread beyond the Middle East:

Putin Warns Gaza War Could Spread Beyond Middle East

On the same day that a Hamas delegation made a rare visit to Moscow to discuss the crisis in Gaza, President Vladimir Putin warned in a speech that the conflict has the potential to spread well beyond the Middle East.

In a Wednesday meeting at the Kremlin, he decried Israel's indiscriminate airstrikes on the Gaza Strip which have left over 7,000 people, mostly civilians and at least half of them women and children, dead. "Our task today, our main task, is to stop the bloodshed and violence," said Putin, as cited from an official transcript.

"Otherwise, further escalation of the crisis is fraught with grave and extremely dangerous and destructive consequences." That's when the Russian president emphasized, "And not only for the Middle East region. It could spill over far beyond the borders of the Middle East."

…

Putin denounced Hamas' Oct.7 attack on southern Israeli communities as terrorism, but also decried Israel's bombing campaign which has left much of Gaza in ruins, as Reuters reports:

Today there are two articles that present contrasting views on the concern that Putin raised. Will Schryver believes that the wider war that threatens is the desired outcome of the Neocons, and has long been played out. Alastair Crooke believes that a wider war could result from the Zhou regime’s panicked over reaction. Excerpts follow. Both views are worth study.

First Will Schryver. The short version is this. Schryver believes that the Neocons recognize their inevitable defeat against Russia in Ukraine. Therefore, they have cooked up a region wide war in the Middle East, where they believe they can inflict a strategic defeat on Russia:

Aces and Eights

Israel is clearly working in concert with the US/NATO in whatever is brewing.

And make no mistake, something big IS brewing.

It is something I have written about for several years now, but consistently believed the Pentagon was not stupid enough to actually attempt.

As I view it, there can be only one primary target that would warrant such a large projection of military power as is underway: Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

And, as I have repeatedly argued over the years, I am convinced making war against Iran is a recipe for unforeseen disaster.

Iran wields much more military capability than is generally understood and appreciated both by western military analysts and the western populace.

There is no doubt the US/NATO/Israel, in tandem, can inflict severe damage against Iranian targets. But I am convinced they cannot do so without also incurring severe damage themselves.

Let's also not forget there is a wildcard in this game: Russia and its strategically imperative bases in Syria.

As I see it, there are two realities at work here that will necessarily come into conflict:

1) The Pentagon is almost certain to regard the Russian bases in Syria as unacceptable threats to their objectives in the region. And therefore they will seek to neutralize them.

2) The Russians will fight to retain their Syrian bases.

Having now been compelled to abandon their designs to use the #MotherOfAllProxyArmies in Ukraine to weaken Russia, the Masters of Empire would no doubt love to "change the narrative" by defeating the Russians in Syria.

Therefore I am increasingly persuaded that any massive US attack against Iranian surrogate forces in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq will almost certainly include a simultaneous attack against the Russian air and naval bases in Syria.

I believe Russian recognition of this likely move by the Americans is why Russian President Vladimir Putin — in China, no less — publicly announced 24/7 patrols of Kinzhal-armed Russian aircraft within range of the eastern half of the Mediterranean and much of the Red and Arabian seas.

The #EmpireAtAllCosts cult must have convinced themselves the Russians are bluffing, or that their capabilities are much weaker than claimed.

I am convinced both ideas are mistaken.

If the US itself is not merely bluffing, then this whole thing could get out of hand really fast.

Alastair Crooke, by contrast, views the American Empire as in overreactive mode, panicking at the consequences of Israel’s intel failure and military defeat (60% of Israeli casualties have been military and police), scrambling for a way to stop the slide into futher disaster. In support of his position Crooke quotes, as I have done, the reporting of DC insiders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei at Axios: they have never seen official DC so worried about escalation. To play devil’s advocate for a moment, the Axios article doesn’t necessarily suggest that there is panicked overreaction—only that there is risk. The Duran guys yesterday cited reports that Zhou’s only worry is that he fears appearing weak. Not demented, just weak. On the other hand, Crooke’s argument citing reports that the American Empire is seeking to rebuild bridges to the region, which we cited last night, is a powerful argument that wider war, if it occurs, was not the plan.

Here’s the gist of Crooke’s take:

Escalations Cannot Be Stopped – The White House Is Rattled; Escalations Might All Fuse Into ‘One’

In the first half of the article Crooke cites two warring views:

• Tom Friedman is concerned that Israeli over the top warring on civilians will destroy the whole system of alliances that the US has built up over decades, as the world reacts with revulsion. This would threaten Western global domination.

• Israel maintains that their existential necessity, situated in the Middle East, is precisely to react with disproportionate force. In other words, to convince the rest of the Middle East that Israel knows no limits.

Crooke then proceeds—in part:

Israel under the Netanyahu government has been moving closer and closer to an eschatological founding of Israel on the (Biblical) ‘Land of Israel’ – a move that expunges Palestine totally.

…

Tom Friedman in his NYT reflections may fear that just as NATO’s impaired performance in Ukraine has ruptured ‘the NATO myth’, so too the 7 October Israeli military and intelligence collapse and what happens in its wake in Gaza ‘might explode the entire pro-American alliance structure’ in the Middle East.

The confluence of two such humiliations might break the spine of western primacy. This seems to be the gist to Friedman’s analysis. (He likely is correct).

Hamas has succeeded in smashing the Israel deterrence paradigm: They were not afraid, the IDF proved far from invincible, and the Arab street mobilised as never before (confounding western cynics who laugh at the very notion of there being an ‘Arab Street’).

Crooke argues that Hamas’ smashing of the Israeli paradigm, the idea that Israeli has the backs of all Jews, is the key that is leading to the American Empire’s overreaction, and which threatens the wider war that Putin has warned against:

This is what worries the White House Team. They are deeply unconfident that an Israeli invasion of Gaza will put ‘Humpty’ together again. Rather, they fear that events may go badly for the IDF, and further, that the images relayed across the Middle East of Israel using overwhelming force in a civilian urban setting will revolt the Islamic sphere.

In spite of western scepticism, there are signs that this insurrection in the Arab sphere is different, and resembles more the 1916 Arab Revolt that overthrew the Ottoman Empire. It is taking on a distinct ‘edge’ as both Shi’a and Sunni religious authorities state the duty of Muslims to stand with Palestinians. In other words, as the Israeli polity becomes plainly ‘Prophetical’, so the Islamic mood is turning eschatological, in its turn.

That the White House should be floating kites about ‘moderate’ Arab leaders pressing ‘moderate’ Palestinians to form an Israeli-friendly government in Gaza that would displace Hamas and impose security and order shows just how severed is the West from reality. Recall that Mahmoud Abbas, General Sisi and the King of Jordan (some of the region’s most pliable leaders) pointedly refused even to meet with Biden after the latter’s Israel trip.

The anger across the region is real and threatens ‘moderate’ Arab leaders, whose room for manoeuvre is now circumscribed.

So hotspots are proliferating, as are attacks on U.S. deployments around the region. Some in Washington claim to perceive an Iranian hand, and are hoping to expand a window for war with Iran.

The panicked White House is over-reacting – sending huge convoys (100s) of heavy-lift cargo planes loaded with bombs, missiles and air defences (THAAD and Patriot) to Israel but also to the Gulf, Jordan and Cyprus. Special Forces and 2,000 marines are being deployed too. Plus two aircraft carriers and their attendant vessels.

The U.S. thus is sending a veritable full-scale war Armada. This can only escalate tensions – and provoke counter-moves: Russia now is deploying on Black Sea patrol, MiG-31 aircraft equipped with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles (that can reach the U.S. carrier force off Cyprus), and China reportedly has dispatched naval vessels to the area. China, Russia, Iran and Gulf States are engaged in a frenzy of diplomacy to contain the conflict, even were Hizbullah to enter deeper into the conflict.

…

Be that (the invasion) as it may, the reality is that Hamas’ Qassam Brigades have shattered both the internal and external paradigms of Israel. Depending on the outcome of the war in Gaza/Israel, the Brigades may yet land a further contusion on the body-politic that “triggers a global conflagration – and explodes the entire pro-American alliance structure that the U.S. has built” (in Tom Friedman’s words).

Should Israel enter Gaza (and Israel may decide it has no choice but to launch a ground operation, given the domestic political dynamics and public sentiment), it is likely that Hizbullah will incrementally be drawn further in, leaving the U.S. with the binary option of seeing Israel defeated, or launching a major war in which all the hotspots become fused ‘as one’.

In a sense, the Israeli-Islamic conflict now may only be resolved in this kinetic way. All efforts since 1947 have seen the divide only deepen. The reality of the necessity of war is permeating widely the consciousness of the Arabic and Islamic world.