By StewartM
(This is an elevated post by commenter StewartM.)
Author: Ian Welsh Page 6 of 390
Any time Iran wants, they can over-saturate Israeli missile defenses, turn off the power and destroy the military bases. That was proven this week.
Israel’s ground forces are incompetent and cowardly. They had grave trouble fighting Hamas. Hezbollah whipped them back in 2006 when they dared attack on the ground. Hezbollah’s troops are seasoned war vetrans, and extremely motivated.
What Israel has is airpower, good intelligence, and the USA.
And nukes.
Airpower’s nice, but it doesn’t win wars. And if all your airbases are destroyed or under constant attack, a lot of it goes away. Neighbouring countries have said they won’t base Israeli airplanes.
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The reason that Israel spends most of its time assassinating leaders and mass-murdering civilians is that it knows it can’t actually win on the ground. It can “clear” areas of Gaza, but it can’t hold them, and Hamas has only a shadow of Hezbollah’s strength.
Without nukes, in a conventional war, Hezbollah might win against Israel: by which I mean that invade and conquer the country. It too has tons of missiles and has been holding back. If Iran went all-in, Israel’s defeat in a conventional war would be certain.
The two things stopping this from happening are America and that Israel has nukes and everyone thinks they’ll use them.
The time of elite Israeli ground forces is gone. It was gone by 1990 or so.
And military technology has changed. In the old days if you didn’t have an air force, that was it: but drones and new missile tech has changed that.
These aren’t your grandfather’s Israelis, and these aren’t your grandfather’s Muslims.
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One theme of this blog, for the last four years or so, has been the end of the unilateral, American, order.
Let’s review:
The US & NATO poured support into Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are losing the war. This is clear now, and anyone denying it is either lying, stupid or a complete captive of propaganda.
The West can’t produce enough weapons or ammo. There have been massive drawdowns of stocks and production is not enough to replace it, nor is production ramping up either enough, or quickly enough, to deal with the issue.
Russia, however, was able to ramp up weapons and ammunition production fast. At the start of the war, and for far too long afterwards there were cries that the Russians would run out of missiles, shells and so on. No such thing. Their allies came thru, plus they massively increased their production.
China’s ahead in most scientific fields and has the larger industrial base. Ever since the industrial revolution, the most powerful countries have been those with the most production capacity, which is not the same thing as GDP or Economy.
China and Russia are closer together than ever. With China as Russia’s ally, sanctions can’t work. With Russia as China’s ally, China has a guaranteed, land-based supply of food and resources.
China’s ship construction capacity is more than the entire West’s, including Japan and South Korea. America doesn’t even figure in, they have almost no ability to build ships, the ships they build often aren’t combat-worthy, and they take two or three times longer to build and are far more expensive.
BRICS continues to expand, the percentage of trade conducted in US dollars continues to decline and BRICS is prioritizing a payment system which bypasses the West. Bottom line, the West now produces less than it needs from other nations, but dollar privilege has allowed us to get away with it. This era is passing.
Much of the third world would rather do business with China or even Russia. Multiple African nations have kicked the US and France out. China offers cheaper goods, cheaper infrastructure and loans are usually cheaper. Plus outside of Asia they mostly don’t interfere in other nations politics. Russian mercs are brutal, but they are preferable to Western garrisons, which are ineffective at putting down unrest and dangerous to their hosts.
China doesn’t want to use US goods in their supply chain. They’ll sell us stuff, sure, why not—till a war starts at which point our entire economy will seize up. But the Huawei and chip sanctions taught them that relying on US goods was a knife at their throat, and Chinese companies have spent the six years doing everything they can to reduce and end that vulnerability.
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Concluding Remarks
None of this was particularly necessary, but we made a series of decisions which lead here. We constantly aggravated Russia. They wanted to be Western, to join NATO and maybe even the EU eventually, but we treated them as enemies. With them as allies, China would be in a far weaker position.
We deliberately sent China our industry, thinking it didn’t matter where it was and that we (or rather our elites) would make more money that way.
We abused the payments system and dollar privilege thru incessant sanctions warfare, then made a grab for Russia overseas reserves. Everyone’s scared.
Where we still had technological superiority, we tried to use it as an economic weapon. That has backfired badly, but everyone worries it will be used against them.
No one except a few core allies trusts the US (and they shouldn’t, either). No one except the Anglosphere, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Europeans enjoyed the era of US or, for that matter, Western supremacy, and they’ll be happy to see it go.
As the saying goes, you see the same people on the way down as you did on your way up. We brutalized a lot of people over the last five centuries. Don’t be surprised if they get a few kicks in on our way down.
Just eyeballing it, but it seems that more missiles are getting thru than are intercepted.
Videos show dozens of missiles flying over Tel Aviv, with some of them landing. The Israeli military says the missiles were fired by Iran and that a “large number” had been intercepted. pic.twitter.com/NUYX5bOa29
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 1, 2024
Iran has said this is punishment for the Israeli assassinations. It has also said that it will defend Lebanon. And, as Nate pointed out, the missile attack is widespread:
Seems Israel isn’t going to have everything its own way.
Meanwhile the US has sent thousands of troops to Israel to “defend.” The US has been an active participant, for a while, as have been Germany, Britain and others, but this is a step beyond.
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Let’s make this really simple. If you’re trying to stop a genocide, you’re a hero. If you’re enabling a genocide, you’re a villain. Hezbollah and Iran have been trying to put pressure on Israel to stop their mass murder, and most of the West, with a few honorable exceptions like Ireland, have been helping them.
But what’s clear now is that if there’s a real war, it isn’t going to be one-sided. In the past the Israelis would bomb the shit out of their enemies, and be almost entirely safe. No longer. Israel’s not a large country, and Iran has plenty of missiles.
The main thing I’d want to see now (though I doubt it will happen) is for Russia to put Iran under their nuclear window: announce that use of nukes against Iran will be considered use of nukes against Russia.
This conflict, which threatens to become general war, is far from over.
Edit: initial reports of Mossad HQ being taken out appear to have been wrong. My apologies.
Alright, enough of the doom and gloom. Stumbled across a study on the impact of changing a four lane road in a retail area down to two lanes plus bike lanes. This sort of change is usually resisted by local businesses, who are scared of losing customers, but someone did a study:
I would have liked to see a study showing what happened to businesses nearby for comparison, but this study is still suggestive. And it’s not just that business was up, it’s that people who walk and cycle spend more:
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Which is to say, if you want to make more business you want more non-drivers and less drivers.
Besides, to point out the obvious, most drivers are going somewhere else. Most people who are walking or cycling live nearby, and people taking public transit have chosen to come to your area specifically.
Cities built for cars are inefficient, ugly and increase pollution massively. Cities built for pedestrians, cyclists and rapid transit are far, far more pleasant, as well as healthier and better for the environment. Part of the problem is the same as trains v.s. roads. When you add in all the costs, trains are cheaper and more efficient, but railroads are expected to pay all their own costs, while road users aren’t.
The other problem is that there are powerful pro-road and car lobbies. It’s well documented that the old streetcar systems in America were dismantled largely because GM engaged in a massive political influence campaign to have them dismantled.
In any case, mass use of cars is something else that will be going away over the next fifty years as civilization collapse and climate change hit, and hit hard. We aren’t going to be able to afford such nonsense. There will still be cars, for sure, but the idea that every family should have one will end.
And like many of the things that are going to go away, this will be good for us, it’s just that like any bad-for-you addiction the ideal is to slowly titrate off, not cold-turkey.
Those cities and states which get ahead of this and make changes now and over the next decade or two will be far better off than those who pretend it will never happen.
Nasrallah is dead, assassinated by the Israelis. There have been significant bombings in Beiruit, and escalation between Hezbollah and Israel are clear.
First, let’s state the obvious. Israel’s intelligence has seriously comprised Hezbollah, much more than they ever did to Hamas. I suspect this is a result of not taking Hamas particularly seriously and the differing nature of Lebanon and Gaza. Gaza, by all accounts, was a fairly tight knit community, united in their opposition to Israel. Lebanon is not, it’s a sectarian state with a great deal of internal divisions.
There was a lot of anger in Iran and Hezbollah that Hamas did not forewarn them of October 7th, but it’s clear they were right not to. If they had, Israel would very likely have found out, and this is especially true if Hezbollah had been told.
As for the assassination, it’s much less important than people make out: decapitation strategies don’t significantly degrade strong ideological organizations like Hezbollah. The real question is how much knowledge Israel has of the actual military infrastructure. Nasrallah was a well loved leader, but he was a very cautious man and much less interested in fighting Israel than many make out. The new leadership, and given Israel’s success at assassination, it is almost all new, will be far more willing to fight.
Intelligence, airpower and its alliances with American and other Western nations are Israel’s strengths, and they are not small matters.
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That said, those who are panicking, often hysterically, are premature. Hezbollah defeated Israel militarily in 2006, and before that when it won a guerilla war against Israel’s occupation and forced them out. They are much stronger now than they were then. They have more missiles, more men, who are well seasoned fighters, and they have dug in to a far greater degree than Hamas ever could.
Israeli intelligence and the airforce are impressive, but the actual ground forces Israel have are weak: not in equipment, but in morale and competence. To accomplish Israel’s goal of pushing Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon they will have to go in on the ground, and when they do I very much doubt their ability to win.
Unlike Hamas, Hezbollah’s supply lines cannot be cut: the posturing about Beiruit’s airport is ludicrous, the supplies come in by land and there is no possibility of interdicting most of them.
If Hezbollah does need reinforcements, they will have them, from Iraq’s militias and from Iranian “volunteers.” Manpower will not be an issue, though Hezbollah is unlikely to ask for many men at first, since they are not trained to operate in the Hezbollah manner.
Nasrallah was a cautious man, and Hezbollah has been holding back. Their missile force can output far more and better missiles than they have been using in the past, and the end of the old leadership almost certainly means the gloves will come off.
Further, Hezbollah has done great damage to Israel already. The reason Israel is turning to Lebanon is that Hezbollah has displaced hundreds of thousand of settlers, causing an internal refugee problem, and combined with Yemen’s naval blockade, has massively damaged the Israeli economy. And this is with them holding back, because they did not want a general war.
But the only way to truly defeat Israel is to defeat their military, and the best way to do that is for them to attack into Lebanon. Hezbollah, hopefully, will ramp up its attacks to force Israel to do just that, if it isn’t intending to already (which they almost certainly are), and if it is already intending to, to make it happen sooner.
The war, then, is still in its early stages. Do not fall to doom and gloom (if you support the resistance), nor optimism (if you’re pro-genocide). Wait, and see. The real battles, which will determine the outcome of the war, have not yet happened.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.
I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.
But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.
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In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.
This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!
The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.