I’ve noticed something interesting. Every time I write about what might be done to stop the Israeli genocide, actions which would require serious fighting, people say “well I understand whey they don’t want to do that because Israel will bomb the hell out of them.”
And that’s true (though not as true when it comes to Iran, which has plenty of effective AD.)
The issue here is that there’s a genocide going on. My estimate for casualties is over half a million, and other people are starting to make the same estimates. For the past two months Israel has basically let no food into Northern Gaza. The number at the end will probably be over a million dead.
So you’re either willing to do what it takes to stop it, or you aren’t. Both Hezbollah and Iran pulled their punches and let Israel set the tempo of engagement, choosing when and where to fight, instead of engaging it when Hamas still had a viable fighting force. Iran had the missile capacity to wreck Israel’s air defense and air bases. Instead they let their proxies fight alone, and that went very badly for them.
With the fall of Syria, well, it’s no longer possible to stop the genocide. Senior Iranian leadership told their juniors they were going to intervene, then didn’t.
At least half a million people are going to die because no one was willing to do what it took to stop it.
It’s unfair this was on Iran and Hezbollah. It’s an amazing indictment of every great power in the world, and the local Arab states that none of them did anything meaningful to stop a genocide and that many helped the genocide along.
As for Iran, they themselves have pointed out that one has to resist America and Israel wherever they attack, because the plan is to end up taking out Iran. Khameini, if he hasn’t already, needs to get his head out of his ass and build nukes. And if Russia and China want to keep Iran as part of their great alliance, they need to take action.
As for Hezbollah, well, they’re cut off from land resupply from Iran. Israel and America will get to them. Playing everything cautiously did not work.
America is falling, there is no question about that. But Empire’s rarely go quiet into the night. The Age of War and Revolution continues.
Daniil Adamov
I think the simplest explanation is that none of the leaderships involved consider what is happening to the Palestinians to be their top priority, as you evidently do. Maybe they care, but less than about their own or their people’s safety. Maybe they don’t give a damn. Either way, the outcome is the same, and I can’t say I am surprised about that much.
Speaking of genocides, the Holocaust wasn’t very important to the Allies during WW2 either, even when reports of it started filtering in. The plight of the Jews was not the top priority for anyone (except perhaps for Hitler, but in a different way), and that was not surprising either.
I respect your attempts to understand the world as it is, but I notice that you frequently seem to write with the assumption that helping the Palestinians is the main objective for everyone opposed or claiming to be opposed to Israel, by default. I am not sure that this is helpful for the stated goal, any more than analysing China’s economic policy with the a priori assumption that it is based on opposition to capitalism.
someofparts
Being able to do something, or not, applies to all of us. Laith Marouf made that point. Any of us in major north American cities could take action against local companies that contribute to the problem. Lockheed is in my town. I should be down there with bolt cutters and jackhammers trashing their runways. I don’t because I don’t have the skills or the connections to pull off such a thing. Taking action would mean being willing to be a martyr, jailed or worse for the rest of my days. I am too cowardly to do that.
All of us have those options and all of us have our reasons for staying in place and being cautious. I watched Syriana again yesterday. It reminded me that we most certainly killed Assad’s oldest son. There is a reason his youngest is safely in Russia. How does anyone stand up to people who can and will murder your family if you resist them?
Wow – this is off topic but I just heard it from Doug Macgregor on Judge Napolitano’s show – Russia has announced that any of their citizens currently in the US should leave the country. I was only kidding about getting out of this city but maybe I should take the matter more seriously. Congratulations on not being a US resident Ian.
Ian Welsh
Oh, it’s clear that stopping the genocide isn’t their top priority, except maybe for the Houthis. But not saving Syria is going to bite Iran and Hezbollah hard and letting Israel win is a mistake.
The problem is “half assing”. If you don’t want to help the Palestinians, don’t, and make peace with the Israelis. Iran’s policies have been very anti-Israel, but it won’t back it up when push comes to shove.
I also think that they stood a good chance of stopping the genocide and defeating Israel, but to do so they had to go “all in.”
Again, a mistake. Kiss their asses or be their enemies. Choose.
A large part of why we live in Hell is that enough of us won’t take the hits to do the right things.
Anonymous
Syria couldn’t be saved. Now that the Assad government has fallen, the Russians and Iranians are putting out facts that show that they did give good counsel over and over again, put up substantial support, and were ready to provide air coverage and additional fighting force necessary to help the SAA defend Aleppo. But the SAA just melted away, almost certainly due to the treachery of the military leadership. Staying meant fighting a foreign war for a completely unreliable ally, something worse than what the USSR had in Afghanistan and neither Russia nor Iran have borders with Syria. Meanwhile both Russia and Iran know that they have targets on their backs and must conserve their strengths and minimize their weaknesses, which include ensuring that their domestic constituency are on side.
Hezbollah’s space for action is even more constrained. They have to work within a country that is economically devastated and full of Western funded NGOs and compradors such as the official head of the Lebanese military. That’s why they opened the Lebanese front on Israeli installations on legally Lebanese ground and kept their actions at a controlled level for as long as possible. Of course they understood that the Israelis could go mad dog, but they need the Israelis and the West to show their true face first to keep the masses on their side. It was also a good thing that they didn’t shoot everything they had for Gaza because they really need out now, and they likely always knew that the Syrian connection was compromised from their Iranian allies.
In existential wars of survival, Russia and Iran has to focus on surviving first. That means knowing when to cut losses. Singlehandedly fighting bloody quagmire wars in far away places is a terrible idea. Fighting to the death for a people whose most vocal, Qatari funded components celebrated the death of Raisi, Nasrallah, and Assadist Syria, is not tenable. It’s all very sad for Palestinians but then how much thought have all the Western “Pro-Palestine” people cheering the fall of Assad (and every other color revolution going back to the break up of the Eastern Bloc) thought about Sudan, the Congo, or the Western sabotage of a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian conflict in March 2022?
Anonymous
Syria couldn’t be saved. Now that the Assad government has fallen, the Russians and Iranians are putting out specific examples that show that they did give good counsel over and over again until the very end, put up substantial support including offers of Russian modern armament and Chinese investments, and were ready to provide air coverage and additional fighting force necessary to help the SAA defend Aleppo. But the SAA just melted away, almost certainly due to the treachery of the military leadership. Assad was checked out and indecisive, evidently hoping for a hail Mary from the GCC to save his government, and evidently stopped even talking to the Iranians or trying to salvage something by talking to the Turks.
Staying meant fighting a foreign war for a completely unreliable ally, something worse than what the USSR had in Afghanistan and neither Russia nor Iran have borders with Syria. Meanwhile both Russia and Iran know that they have targets on their backs and must conserve their strengths and minimize their weaknesses, which include ensuring that their domestic constituency are on side.
Hezbollah’s space for action is even more constrained. They have to work within a country intentionally designed by the Europeans to be dysfunctional and fractured, that is economically devastated, and full of Western funded NGOs and compradors such as the official head of the Lebanese military. That’s why they opened the Lebanese front on Israeli installations on legally Lebanese ground and kept their actions at a controlled level for as long as possible. Of course they understood that the Israelis could go mad dog, but they need the Israelis and the West to show their true face first to keep the masses on their side. It was also a good thing that they didn’t shoot everything they had for Gaza because they really need out now, and they likely always knew that the Syrian connection was compromised from their Iranian allies. So their survival comes before survival of anyone else, because if they die then they all die anyways.
In existential wars of survival, Russia and Iran have to focus on surviving first. That means knowing when to cut losses. Singlehandedly fighting bloody quagmire wars in far away places is a terrible idea. Fighting to the death for a people whose most vocal, Qatari funded components celebrated the death of Raisi, Nasrallah, and Assadist Syria, is not tenable. It’s all very sad for Palestinians but then how much thought have all the Western “Pro-Palestine” people cheering the fall of Assad (and every other color revolution going back to the break up of the Eastern Bloc) thought about Sudan, the Congo, or the Western sabotage of a peaceful resolution to the Ukrainian conflict in March 2022?
Western leftists (like me, even though I loath the vast majority of the humanitarian intervention cheering “Western Leftists”) have no right to lecture what countries under decades of siege from Western media, Western sanctions, Western funded terrorists, and Western NGOs, do or don’t do. Focus on what we can do here and stop telling other people to make sacrifices that’s we don’t make ourselves.
Anonymous
We live in Hell because there’s a group of extraordinarily wealthy psychopaths at the top of our system who will do just about anything to maintain their position at the top of the global pecking order.
They can afford to spend trillions to stupify populations around the world with Western myths of civilization and prosperity, cultivate terrorists and “opposition” for decades until an opportunity arises, use assassinations and lawfare against any domestic resistance movements that come up, and flip the entire “liberal democratic” order in the last 14 months on its own population to protect its genocidal MENA pet project.
By all means fight this power to whatever degree we can and are willing to do so. But recognize what we’re fighting and stop thinking that we’re in some kind of Hollywood last stand battle against “evil” where winning the confrontation means everything is good again.
Anonymous
I think Russia and Iran know what they’re dealing with. This will hopefully mean a substantive nuclear deterrence or cutting edge non-nuclear capabilities for Iran in the very near future and no Minsk 3 for Russia. Hopefully it also means Russia and Iran are now extremely weary of backstabbing from US vassals like the GCC, even if they continue to try to have good relations with them.
Keep in mind that Russia didn’t just believe Minsk 2 would resolve the problem in Eastern Ukraine. They also worked extremely effectively in the 8 years in between to ensure that their banking system was ready, that they were food and weapons sovereign, and they built strong ties with the rest of the world so that RoW kept trading with Russia after February 2022. Whereas taking over the Donbas in 2014 would have been militarily easier, Russia would not be ready for the economic and diplomatic fallout then but it was ready in 2022. They can also tell the world and their domestic population that they truly gave peace a chance and the Banderites and NATO forced their hand.
So even deals with the West can be advantageous as long as there’s no complacency or trust in the underlying soundness of the deal. Have plans to use the time bought effectively and what to do when the West inevitably turns on you.
There are definitely things that I hope they’re working on, such as a joint rapid defense force to help governments dealing with Western instigated coups. Russia has this for its near neighbors and put it to good use in Kazakhstan, it should be expanded and internationalized so that what happened in Pakistan and Bangladesh is not constantly repeated. Also the Chinese need to stop fixating so much on the “we trade with everybody” panda bear act. Fund non-Gulf/EU/US media, there are plenty of good journalists and good stories out there, stop letting Al Jeezra or BBC brainwash the Global South into cheering for Uyghur headchoppers in Syria. RT and CGTN sucks right now as they took often take the Western MSM line on anything that’s outside of their immediate concern. Media is never neutral and they need to get over it and tell the counter stories. Build and then franchise social media apps for global South countries so there are viable alternatives to American social media companies and then at the right time, push FAANG out altogether. And damn it, scratch it a couple dozen billion dollars and help out Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and other countries targeted by the US. Unlike Syria, their governments are sound and would be greatly strengthened with just a little bit of help.
Curt Kastens
This ties in with the assassination of the health CEO. This discusses the world at a macro scale to assassination of the CEO at a micro scale. These two issues also tie in with a disccussion between Martin and Panopticon on the 11th of December thread of ClimateandEconomy.com.
If no one is willing to take any risks to stop the world from descending to hell then the decsent will be very rapid. But should it be expected that anyone take unreasonable risks to prevent the world from desceding to hell, especially when other ride for free on the outcome of the risks taken by others? And can any one agree on what is a reasonable and unsreasonable risk? And is one allowed to calculate what other people are likely to do based upon the risk that a person or nation takes?
The reason that more sane people do not try to assassinate people in power is because the action of one person that is not being coordinated with a large number of other people is likely to be a useless gesture.
The reason that large numbers of people do not try to organize for potentially effective, but not legal resistance to the criminal control of the institutions of a nation is because such efforts are more than likely going to be discoverd and destroyed by the criminally controled state institutions before such resistance organizations are grown to a point that they have a chance to dislodge the criminal elements that control the ruling institutions of society.
Therefore it is not valid to blame someone who lives in the UKSA for not carrying out an act of vandalism against the military industrial complex of that nation.
The case for Russia, China, and Iran is a bit different though. But not by much. If we are all responsible for taking a little risk to do something, even if it is a very small thing to create a better world, then our children and are parents and our brothers and sisters are also responsible for doing at least a little. Essentially all of the possible courses of action have to be run through a cost risk benifit analysis. But your children and parents and brothers and sisters may not agree as to what a reasonable course of action is under the circumstances. Do you have the right to force them to undertake your prefered course of action?
The same question comes up for national leaders and the risks that a nations population would face if a course of action is followed. If we consider just this question we can not say whether or not Iran has made the right decision to pull thier punches. Because a factor in doing the cost risk benifit analysis is what the costs risks and benifits are today and what they might be at some point in the future. The timing of events is important. It is possible that the Iranians think that their chances will of achieving THEIR goals, what ever they may really (undisclosed) be at some point in the near future.
But I find it funny that the world’s leaders are still acting as if the world has a future.
Oh right and this is where it relates to the discussion in climateandeconomy. Frpm a big picture perspective the world’s history for the past 10,000 years has pretty much been predetermined. I mean by that the part about humans going extinct due to environmental collapse. But the
Curt Kastens
I do not know what happened there my comment posted before I was finished.
I was saying that if humans had been properly indoctrinated to follow the golden and platinum rules the history of the 20th and 21st centuries would have been different.
You readers probably know that the golden rule is to treat others in a way that you would like other to treat you. But you may not know the platinum rule is to treat those that break rule number like they are treating others so that they get a taste of their own medicine. It is the carrot and the stick. The stick being neccessary to enforce the discipline to follow rule number 1.
The implication of this is that we should not be whinning about the extinction of humanity. We should be whinning that humans are not going extinct locked in an embrace of solidarity and harmony that way humans should die out but in a orgy of violence, bad faith and exploitation in a delusional attempt to escape our fates.
Tallifer
Consider also the ongoing genocide against the Ukrainians trapped within the Ukrianian lands occupied by Russia. 🙁
someofparts
My mistake – we killed Assad’s older brother, not his son. I don’t know how long his son has been in Russia, but I assume the original decision to have him there was for his protection.
Daniel Lynch
Ian said “Khameini, if he hasn’t already, needs to get his head out of his ass and build nukes.”
I agree with the sentiment, but since Iran already has hypersonics, nukes may not be necessary, if Iran has something similar to Russia’s Oreshnik & Avangard. Though if Iran is going to rely on non-nuclear hypersonics, then it needs to give a convincing demonstration or three.
The same applies to the Houthi, who are likely on the short list to be genocided and regime changed. So far the Houthi have been shooting puny warheads that cause only minor damage and rarely sink a ship. That’s enough to slow down shipping, but not enough to create deterrence.
Of course it is a question of time until the West develops decent hypersonics, and then the balance of power will once again have to be sorted out.
bruce wilder
Did they stand “a good chance of stopping the genocide and defeating Israel”?
I am always suspicious of such counterfactual “evidence” but even more skeptical when the factual revealed by events goes the other way. Moreover, Hamas never had a viable fighting force.
It was never “on” Iran and its allies alone. It has always been on the United States, which shamefully funds the genocide and which prevents the United Nations and the International Courts from being used to intervene.
The notion that the U.S., enveloped in its own psychodrama of oligarchic corruption amid collapsing empire, is a playground bully that will be catalyzed into reform by a good bop on the nose seems to me to be a serious moral misjudgment. A collapse may well come, as dysfunction mounts. Certainly the American capacity to wreck destruction may diminish, but it has not diminished very much to date. I congratulate Khameini on not wanting to possess atomic weapons — the Russians have more than anyone else and they struggle to keep a majority of the American foreign policy blob convinced that any self-restraint is necessary to avoid nuclear weapon use.
We are at or very near the point at which the world is at greatest risk of being plunged into the cataclysm of global war because the global hegemon is losing primacy. That primacy will be lost with or without a global conflagration. I do not blame the weak for not chancing a general war in which they would certainly lose a great deal.
Anonymous
First they came for the Palestinians
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Palestinian
Then they came for the Syrians
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Syrian
Then they came for the Lebanese
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Lebanese
Then they came for the Iranians
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Iranian
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Ian Welsh
Hamas tied down much of the Israeli army for months, and areas had to be re-cleared multiple times. They had a viable force.
Lot of people are sure everything is hopeless and there’s no point in really fighting.
someofparts
There has been a robust discussion about this at NC. Someone in comments provided this link to a long conversation with Alastair Crooke at the Chris Hedges substack.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152871296
It is the best explanation of events I have encountered so far.
Confusing times like this remind me of the inestimable value of people who have the moral and intellectual stature that Hedges brings to the table.
Feral Finster
TL:DR The rulers of the Arab states crave American carrot and fear American stick.
They like their western bank accounts, their trophy properties in western jurisdictions, their western weapons and shiny western toys.
The Houthi leaders have none of these things, and consequently, the Houthis are the only ones who stood up for Gaza. Even South Africa dares not cut off relations with Israel, lest they get American stick.
Emma
Hamas fights because they saw death either ways. And because of how Israel “fights” and “bargains”, the Palestinians in Gaza and possibly West Bank will now likely have to live has heavily surveilled slaves being processed for deportation to anywhere else.
Anybody with any other options and responsibility to its own people will do everything they can to avoid those consequences. And they’re not just worried about Israel and its nukes but bringing in the US.
Even if they think the likelihood of success through the low escalation process is low, its worth pursuing up to a point. And there’s always the chance that Israel or its backers might self destruct and save them the carnage.
It’s our job in the West to do what we can to help this self destruction along, rather than counsel them in paths that are likely to invite great destruction on them. Iran and Hezbollah will have to make their own choices and hopefully they’ll be wiser than the Assad clique.
Ian Welsh
Everyone knows why no one should go all out to stop genocide. Why everyone should look after themselves first. No one can think forward to what that means for them and their descendants.
You live in hell, and hell is what you deserve.
LOL
Carborundum
None of the potential opposition players, alone or in concert, have the conventional military capability to take Israel down. That’s just a military reality – particularly if the US supply chain remains open.
The IDF may have rotated a lot of forces through Gaza, but at no point have they not been able to down tools and pivot on short notice to face a conventional military force massing on their border while containing the Gaza rubble-pile. They’ve redeployed multi-brigade-sized forces from Gaza to Northern Command on at least two occasions within 48 hours during this conflict; they could absolutely do it at much larger scale should they need to.
The hard reality is that even prior to the recent maulings, the forces opposing the IDF had a lot less conventional military capacity than the Twitterati agit-prop crowd would like everyone to believe. Even on the strategic front, things are a lot more constrained than people want to realize. My view, the first indication Western intelligence has that the Iranians are going beyond their breakout capability to actually assembling a nuclear weapon will see attack plans put in motion to destroy that capability. Iran is just not in the same situation as the other historical powers that have progressed past breakout – they aren’t useful counters to other regional powers and they don’t hold anything at sufficient threat to make the costs of hitting them too high to bear.
Beyond the already engaged military combatants, I think a lot of the reason no one intervenes in any meaningful way has to do with living in a post-truth era. Even in the Western democracies one would historically expect to be more responsive to opinion, a sizeable fraction of the population looks at indications of genocide / mass war crimes and pulls a Big Lebowski (i.e., “…that’s just like uh, your opinion, man”). In the absence of broad-scale opposition, risk averse politicians and bureaucrats are able to do what they do best – message out of both sides of both major gas emitting orifices without actually doing anything. I’ll note again that defenestrating the gatekeepers turns out to have some pretty real downsides.
elkern
I can’t blame Iran for not going all-out to protect Palestinians, for several reasons.
First is simple fear of the death and destruction that would rain down on Iran. Israel wouldn’t hesitate to use nukes, and the US may well follow suit. Millions of Iranians would die from direct and delayed effects of such an attack (the lucky ones would die quickly); millions more would die from indirect effects (starvation, dehydration, sepsis, cholera, and so on). No responsible leader could risk that, even to save millions of people elsewhere. And Yes, Iranian leaders *must* value Iranian lives more highly than others.
And even if one values all human lives equally, the math doesn’t add up. IMO, Israel is more interested in Ethnic Cleansing – kicking the Palestinians out – than actually trying to kill all Palestinians. They’d even be glad to leave a million or two around for cheap labor; OTOH, they are obviously willing to kill a million or two to “encourage” others to leave (or accept second-class “citizenship” in Israel). A full-scale nuclear attack on Iran could easily kill 5-10 times as many people in total.
Also, if Iran agrees with most of here on this thread that the USA is a Power in decline, it makes sense to wait and let us go further downhill before openly challenging us. It is safer – and all-around better – to wait until we fall apart [some more]. Perhaps more importantly, Israel’s recent brutality has alienated enough [young and/or liberal?] Americans; the Lobby will still control relevant aspects of US Foreign Policy for a while, but that will become ever more tenuous and expensive. They are now forced to depend on the loyalty of the US right wing. which will work until it doesn’t (at some point, US Christian Nationalism will boil over into overt anti-[Jewish]-Semitism).
Bottom line: yeah, it sucks, but Iran (and others) can’t afford to protect Palestinians… yet.
Poul
Is the issue a question of beliefs?
What should make President el-Sisi of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan run the risks of war? Both are men who disappear their domestic enemies and are no better than Assad. What should motivate them? They made hate Netanyahu but they will not intervene.
Israel’s leaders have strong beliefs. Ditto the Neo-cons, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. Here leaders are willing to risk war and suffer defeat.
Erdogan is willing to risk it all against the Kurds but not Israel. Iran’s leaders too are lacking in that department.
Forecasting Intelligence
Ian,
Its well known fact that privately all Arab governments hate Palestinians, even the late Assad dictator, was the same.
Nothing has changed. Egypt had such a awful time trying to police Gaza that it would rather they all starve to death than allow Palestinians into Egypt.
As for the “Arab street”, my personal view is that it is largely performative if genuinely felt. For Muslims globally, Palestine is a identity issue, something you should and must care about – or at least pretend to in some cases – but that’s about it.
If Muslims really cared about the alleged genocide of Palestinians in Israel why is there silence against the Chinese treatment of Muslims in western Asia. Its all performative and certainly no-one in positions in power cares.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/21/why-arab-states-wont-support-palestinians-qa-00142277
“Despite public support for Palestinian rights, in truth nearly every Arab state has long viewed the Palestinians with “fear and loathing,” Crocker says. This is especially true of Egypt, which will continue to refuse to admit Palestinians from across the border, he says.”
“Tall al-Za‘tar, the big Palestinian refugee camp in East Beirut, was besieged by Lebanese forces and reduced to rubble in the early days of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. And just three years after the Shatila massacre, in 1985, something started called the “War of the Camps.” That was Lebanese Shia, backed by Syria and Iran, laying siege to the Shatila and Bourj el-Barajneh camps for almost three years with untold numbers of dead and wounded among the Palestinians. And the irony there of course is when you fast forward to today and the supposed Iranian support for Hamas and the Palestinian cause generally — well, not so much. It is a marriage of convenience. ”
“As you go around the region almost all [the Arab governments] were united on one point, which was that the Palestinians were a threat, a foreign population that should be weakened if not exterminated.
In Syria, you had the orchestration of a campaign against the PLO, and in Jordan, and the same in Egypt. It is noteworthy there is no Palestinian population in Egypt. Going back to the days of [former Egyptian leader] Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptians saw the threat. Again, the Palestinians contributed to their isolation through some spectacular acts like the assassination of a Jordanian prime minister in front of the Sheraton hotel in broad daylight in Cairo by two Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PLPF] gunmen, one of whom stooped down to drink the assassinated prime minister’s blood.”
Enough said really.