Air raid alarms were wailing over Israeli’s small airspace on Saturday, after Iran launched a few hundred missiles and drone bombers in the direction of Israel two whole countries away (Iraq, Jordan). But already, a fortnight ago,energy market alarm bells began ringing in the fuel and trading capitals as the world reacted to Israel’s April 1st air raid on Iran’s embassy in Syria that killed a top Iranian general. The general and seven other Iranian officials were part of an official Syria-Iran defence collaboration.
Analysts across the world saw the deadly strike on Damascus as a brazenly provocative act by a desperate Israeli regime’s seeking to sustain the threat perceptions of its domestic population as well as to retain its waning support internationally.
In the week following, an already nervous energy supply industry began to suffer market price fluctuations as uncertainty arose about disruptions of oil and gas supplies to energy consumers. The world market price for fossil fuel rose to US$ 98 per barrel of crude petroleum. This is nearly a $20 jump from previous price levels which were already higher than before the Gaza war began last October.
Game-changer
Previously, Israel’s targets had been Iranian proxies such as the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon and Syria and also Palestinian militant forces such as Hamas. Despite hundreds of strikes against Iran’s proxies over recent decades, Israel refrained from any direct attacks on Iranian territory. And Tehran’s similarly indirect reprisals, to date, have always been notably piecemeal, and few in comparison.Thus, the bombing of the Iranian mission compound in Damascus is seen as a game-changing move by Israel in that is a first such attack of Iranian soil (legally, a diplomatic mission premises are the represented country’s territory).
Some analysts see the April 1 Israeli strike that killed high grade Iranian military assets as a “miscalculation” by Jerusalem which had not thought Tehran would react directly against the Jewish state. Other analysts, however,saw the April 1 air strike that took out an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps experts team as an act of deliberate ‘brinkmanship’ to ensure a continued atmosphere of existential peril for Israel.
Calculation
It is surmised that an increasingly politically desperate Likud regime seeks to shore up flagging domestic and international support for its ongoing,devastating, but not-so-successful offensive on Palestinian territories. This calculation assumes that Iran, while certainly militarily retaliating, would not do so on a scale that seriously physically damaged Israel, given that any real existential impact could easily provoke a catastrophic nuclear attack by the Jewish state that would cripple Iran’s current geopolitical stature.
Thus, as soon as the Israeli air force successfully accomplished its April 1 precision strike on the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus (coincidentally the world’s oldest continuously functioning city), the Jewish supremacist Likud regime was trumpeting “Iranianreprisal” warnings to its population. The Likud regime, now beginning to experience domestic impatience at the slow progress of the war against Palestine, badly needed to maintain the fear of an enemy far more dangerous than the “vermin” Palestinians.
Israelis have long been complacent that the occupied Palestinians do not have any ability to overwhelmingly retaliate for whatever the Zionist state did to them – including the ongoing actual genocide. Hence the contempt of the Zionist military forces towards their ‘subject population’.
This seems to have been the geopolitical calculation of the Likud regime currently governing the Jewish exclusive state.
But it is a selfishly opportunistic, short-term, political calculation merely to shore up sympathy for its military enterprise. As virtually all analysis, whether Western power bloc or of the Global South, has by now concluded that Jerusalem’s prolonged offensive is disastrously unsuccessful, in that it has failed to destroy the Hamas movement and is, instead being seen as more ‘genocidal’ than military.
Furthermore, other than its courageous refusal to surrender, Hamas and other armed Palestinian resistance forces have never shown any ability to blunt the Israeli offensive, let alone defeat it. Thus, in terms of long -term strategy to guarantee the dominance of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Likud government only continues to undermine it nation’s future by exposing, more and more, the injustice of the Occupation.
In provoking Iran, an acknowledged regional power, the Likud government is now pushing its limits.
Geography
In the first place the basic geography of the West Asian theatre of war hugely exposes the sheer vulnerability of the Western power bloc’s client colony in oil-rich West Asia. The actual ‘country’ of Israeli is territorially tiny and too small to possess adequate ‘hinterland’ for any form of conventional warfare.
All other neighbouring states have even a small hinterland as well as geographical barriers like mountain ranges, deserts, rivers and other topography. Large geophysical distances provide obstacles that Israel’s small but technologically superior can never hope to overcome.
Hinterlands are those spaces outside urban centres, and far enough from foreign borders and, which possess such topographical features as physical distances, mountain ranges, rivers, forests, deserts that hinder and invading forces.
It is in the hinterland that a country’s threatened population can disperse and such hinterlands provide headquarters and fall-back areas for a country’s military. In short, the hinterland is what provides defensive depth for any viable state, especially any state that operates in military terms to extend its sphere of influence.
That is why all very tiny states rarely bother with conventional military power, choosing to rely on political arrangements with surrounding states to avoid pure subordination or exploitation. Among the many examples are Luxemburg, Bhutan, Sikkim, Andorra.
Since it cannot sustain a longdistance ground assault over any larger country (even Syria), the Israeli Defence Forces’ sole effective recourse is aerial warfare, which has always proven dominant given its technological superiority carefully nurtured by its Western sponsors.
No conventional war between states can succeed for any side unless that state can conduct ground incursions against the enemy state and physically destroy it as a viable organised entity. And the larger the hinterland, the bigger the challenge for ground operations.
Even if Israel unilaterally uses its nuclear arms in an aerial strike against Iran, it can only destroy those targets reached by its missiles which yet leaves thousands of square kilometres of Iranian countryside and lesser urban centres from which Iran can still operate. Iran has 1.6 million square kilometres of territory.
However, Israel has just 22,000 sq. km. Its vaunted ‘Iron Dome’ airspace defence has already been shown to be easily overwhelmed if the enemy can bombard with numerically more missiles than the defensive capacity of the system. The Gazan counter attack against Israeli occupying force on October 7 showed that.
On Saturday, Iran’s counter-attack saw the launch of some 300 ballistic missiles and drone bombers. Even the Iron Dome alone could have eliminated them. Actually the Iron Dome was supplemented by anti-missile fire from US and UK Naval forces. Furthermore, it is believed that many of the Iranian ballistic missiles were old and slow models. The drones are extremely slow aerial vehicles anyway.
Even as Iran launched its missile attack, Israeli defence authorities were reassuring the population that the strike would be effectively neutralised. And it was neutralised within a few hours.
Significantly, Tehran had already signalled to the world that the strike was to be a punitive demonstration rather than and actual damage-intended operation. This enabled the US to publicly warn Israel not to retaliate again.
At the same time, Israel’s covert nuclear arming by its sponsoring Western allies is now proving to be more of an embarrassment rather than a useful strategic weapon.
The only occasion nuclear weapons have been used in warfare was by the United States, at the end of World War 2 and, most significantly, that was against a weakened Japan which did not possess a countervailing nuclear capability to respond. Since then, the US has dared not use nuclear arms for fear of a similar nuclear reprisal. In fact, the nuclear deterrent is what saves the world system from ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD).
Thus, even without Washington’s warning against any powerful aerial attack on Iran, the Likud regime’s hands are tied. Israel dare not risk any overwhelming Iranian bombardment, using thousands of missiles, on its very tiny territory. The Likud government cannot expose its population to any genuinely devastating attack.
Thus, the war situation seems unlikely to get any worse other than the continued genocidal offensive in Gaza.
Outcome
The outcome for the region and the world is more in terms of economic and social impacts.
While the world oil prices have already begun declining from a peak at US$ 98 per barrel on Friday, by yesterday the crude oil price had come down to $89.
But all indication are that energy markets will remain volatile as long as the warlike atmosphere exists in West Asia, the largest single supplier region.
Likewise, the once-flourishing migrant labour market in this oil-rich region is also now on shaky grounds. Even as impoverished Third Worlders will continue to go the Gulf region, there is likely to be also an outward flow by those who have earned and want to depart quicker than in the past. Countries hoping to export more labour now find themselves having to cope with a greater employment challenge.
The imperative is for the world community to end the current geopolitical disaster that West Asia has become.
