Talking About Iran

I’ve done partial transcripts from two Youtube shows today. Both shows covered a range of topics but both also came back to the question of Iran. Before I present those transcripts, I’ll simply make one point. It seems to me that, by all accounts, Israel took so much damage that preparing for a second round against Iran will take a long time. A long time. The importance of this is that Iran gets a long time to prepare, too. And that seems to me to be very bad news for USrael. Iran won the first round fairly handily, despite having screwed up in some respects. That, plus the extra time for Iran to prepare, bode ill for round two.

OK. First up we have a Russian/Iranian perspective—Dmitry Orlov with Nima. That’s followed by Danny Davis and Patrick Henningsen. You’ll have to bear with some of the fractured English:

Dmitry Orlov: RUSSIA JUST DROPPED THE HAMMER Warning the West

Nima: Dmitri, what has happened in the aftermath or during the war between Iran and Israel? Somehow you look at the mainstream media trying to smear, trying to somehow manipulate or draw a line between Iran and Russia, and saying that these are huge differences behind the scene. They're talking about it, those sources mostly come from Israel and Europeans and nobody in Iran and Russia. If any unnamed, unknown sources, they're talking to the mainstream media in the west about the situation between Iran and Russia. What are they trying to achieve in your opinion? What is in their mind when it comes to, somehow, they don't want a better they don't want a good relationship between Iran and Russia but, with their attitude, what is the main goal? We know that they tried it with China, as well. They did everything to separate China from Russia. With the case of Iran it's somehow--when you look at the Middle, West Asia, it's connecting Iran to Azerbaijan, Armenia, and central Asia, it's something big, to the southern part of Russia and for Iran is something so much important for the security of Iran. What are they trying to achieve in your opinion?

DO: Oh, well, they're trying to paint their defeat in the Dozen Day War, as I call it, as a victory. They were defeated, and now the results of that war are being worked out by Iran and the rest of SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization]. Everybody has been briefed. Everybody understands what Israel's strengths and weaknesses are, as a result of that conflict. And since Israel is only a proxy for the United States--all the weapons and pretty much the entire military of Israel is slaved to the US military--this tells us the strengths and weak weaknesses of the American military as well. So those lessons are being learned.

The big mistake that Iran made was not equipping itself with missile defense systems. If it had accepted Russia's offers to supply it with air defense systems, it would have been in a much better position. It wouldn't have lost so many lives and it generally would have been able to to neutralize the Israeli attack and block Israel from entering the Iranian airspace in any way. So they basically flubbed that. They thought, "Oh, we could do it ourselves. We have good engineers. We could do something or other." And so what they ended up with was a disjointed system with no early warning capability that was very easy to circumvent and neutralize--which is what Israel did. But their big victory is that they've shown that Israel is just completely defenseless, because their Iron Dome is ineffective against the more modern Iranian missiles and the stock of air defense rockets that Israel has--which are basically just American made--was very easy for Iran to deplete.

Now, this was a demonstration exercise, this Dozen Day War. It was just basically probing from the Iranian side, just probing Israel's defenses and finding out that they don't exist. So, at this point, it is known that Iran can destroy any object on Israeli territory at will. That is a very strong position to be in. Now, once Iran is equipped with adequate air defense systems--probably Russian ones, although China might also lend a hand--Israel will have nothing and Iran will have everything. And so that's the outcome of the war. So what they're trying to do in Western press is portray that as something other than that.

Nima: Yeah, in my opinion, what Russia has learned during the conflict in Ukraine, and Iran is learning by this conflict between Iran and the West, they're seeing that there is no path for negotiation with West. There is no path for some sort of a better relationship with West. And do you believe that those people I know that--in Russia and Iran we have those people who are arguing that they want a better relationship--are these people getting weaker in these two countries or somehow they continuing the same sort of leverage they had before? How is that going to change their position?

DO: I'm not sure about Iran, but I'm quite sure that in Russia there isn't really any appreciation for the [claim] that negotiating with the West could produce good results. That message is falling on deaf ears and it's pretty simple. It's like, well, show us a good result. Any good result, anytime. Show us where negotiating with the West has given us what we want. What they see is attempts by the West to turn everything to its advantage and to Russia's disadvantage. And I'm pretty sure that it's the same with Iran. With Iran, it's even more obvious because there was years of negotiating a deal and then Trump decided, in his first term, well, I won't have any of that, and it fell apart. So once he did that, his ability to negotiate further deals with Iran was zeroed out for all time. I don't know if he understands that. I don't know if Trump's handlers understand that, but he has absolutely no ability to negotiate anything with Iran.

*

Russia Advancing in Ukraine: Fastest in 2 Years w/Patrick Henningsen

DD: Final question here. Given everything that you just said here, Iran, we had a show this week with Ted Postol during which he made the very strong case that, thanks to the bombing of the Fordow site and the Natanz and the Isfahan, that Trump did that, we now have become blinded and we no longer have any idea what Iran is doing. If they decide to go to a bomb, there's no way we'll know that. And even according to NBC News yesterday, which we'll talk about in the show this afternoon, they're saying now that evidence said that only one of the three sites was destroyed. The other two were damaged, but they could be reprocessing even in those facilities within a few months. Ted Postol made the argument that if Iran was smart and knew that this attack was coming, they could have moved those centrifuges elsewhere and could immediately start reprocessing. And they already have apparently up over 400 grams of reprocessed material at 60%. And so now they have everything they need to actually weaponize and mount on a missile nuclear weapons, up to 10 of them, perhaps. Would the evolution of what you describe here everywhere else, would that cause Iran to say, "Hey, we're definitely going to be the next in the crosshairs and the only thing we can do is to have a nuclear weapon." How do you see that?

PH: They have every reason, every motivation to. They've been given every signal to acquire a nuclear deterrent. Certainly preemptive, unprovoked attacks by Israel and the United States. You don't need any better reason than that. So, the problem is, in the interim, between them demonstrating that they have a weapon or the United States claiming they're about to test a weapon, there could be total annihilation against Iran by US forces, by Israeli forces.

DD: But in this scenario, we wouldn't know. We wouldn't have any idea until a bomb was presented. And now then we can't do that.

PH: But the US and Israel can act before a bomb is presented at any time, which they've already demonstrated. So that's the paradox of this situation. I personally think it's a very credible deterrent because Iran's already proven that the real important part--which is missile accuracy and the capability to deploy missiles that are able to penetrate all sorts of integrated air defenses--they've already demonstrated their capabilities there. There's no reason to doubt their capabilities there. But the nuclear warhead, the armed nuclear warhead, of course, that's the big question there.

I think a lot of people, including Mearsheimer and others, saying they can't believe Iran didn't get a nuclear weapon a long time ago and that's a huge mistake for them not to have done that. But then Iranians will argue otherwise, saying that they don't believe escalation in terms of nuclear arament is right. It's not halal. They've issued a fatwa against it as well. So there might be a societal aversion to taking that route from maybe an Islamic point of view, or so forth. Who knows? But from a pure geopolitical point of view, it's not even that they have a right to do it. They do have a right, especially now, but it's almost like there's no choice, because it's either get a deterrent or face total annihilation. That's one way to look at it. Certainly the realists are going to make that argument. But personally I think that Israel was two weeks away from really collapse. If the Iranians had kept going for two more weeks the political pressure inside Israel would have just burst. They took a hiding the likes of which they've never seen before. Israel was at its breaking point socially, politically, and militarily. And they begged the US to step in—begged them—and the US bailed out Israel in in that sense. But does Iran want to face off against the United States again, or maybe even a more protracted conflict, or Israel the US deploying nukes preemptively? Definitely the Iranians have to think about that calculus. That's a difficult one.

DD: There's no easy calls on any aspect of this, but the more we keep it ginned up with arms, ammunition, weapons, and doing stuff like what you're describing, like what's happening with this issue in Syria, that ain't going to help it any.