Will Mushrooms Bloom in Haifa?

Underneath the appropriate concern of conventional airborne attacks on Israel by Iran and its progeny lies an anxious appraisal of a potential nuclear attack. That fear is the basic driving force of U.S. policy towards Iran, and the driving force of Israel’s presumed development of their own nuclear weapons development. The prior American administration withdrew from the nuclear arms agreement between the West and Iran but stymied much of Iran’s ongoing efforts with deep economic strangulations that began to bear fruit in civil unrest. Our current administration has resumed giving that Islamic Republic nibbles of the carrot without really requiring any pulling of the cart. Iran’s economy has rebounded, and with a flood of new oil money from China and Russia, civil unrest has subsided.

The theocracy even felt comfortable enough to allow a “moderate” to run for President and to be elected, seemingly signalling gentler intentions. Granted, a large part of that economic windfall permitted by the West has funded huge expansions in conventional weapons by Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis (why do they like names beginning with H?). But Israel and its erratic allies seem content to elaborate the Iron Dome and use the occasional flurry of missile and drone attacks to validate their own new weapons systems.

The Houthis’ effective closure of the Suez Canal remains a useful distraction. The West, primarily America, focuses not on elimination of that threat but retaliation for any effective actions by the Houthis, after the fact. After all, we stopped the Saudis from eliminating that potential threat years ago on humanitarian grounds. Now that potential threat has become real.

Also real is the possibility of overwhelming conventional missile, drone, and artillery attack on northern Israel by Hezbollah from their sanctuary in Lebanon. Iran’s Western-enabled watershed of conventional weapons has flooded southern Lebanon with hundreds of thousands of very sophisticated missiles and drones. Truly mass attacks with these weapons would devastate a large part of Israel, much in the same way that North Korea could attack South Korea with its conventional weapons.

One very old estimate indicated North Korea could bombard Seoul 24 hours a day for 7 days with continuous artillery and missile fire from virtually untouchable underground bunkers. Hezbollah could overcome their defensive site disabilities with a coordinated massive volume attack. Israel’s vaunted human and signals intelligence, augmented by Western satellite surveillance, might well spot such an attack in the offing. They failed to do so October 7th. But would our current administration support the humanitarian cost of a pre-emptive broad-based strike that would effectively raze southern Lebanon and/or eliminate the country’s feeble infrastructure? How would that play in Michigan, and our college campuses?

Attrition by distraction, from multiple directions, will not be effective in obtaining Iran’s two-part goal. Eradicating Israel from the face of the earth is merely the stepping-stone to a return of Persian hegemony over the Middle East and ultimately the Islamic world. The Iranian theocracy views itself as on a mission of their vision of God. Despite their experience in their prior war with Iraq (no longer real to the vast majority of their much younger population), they are adamant in a need for suicidal expenditures of their population’s true believers beyond even that of the Russians. Iran cloaks its desire for nuclear weaponry in a defensive posture towards Israel’s presumed possession and an aggressive posture of enhancing its stature in the world of nations by intrinsic intimidation.

Their real underlying intent may be the kind of wholesale slaughter of an entire people seen repeatedly in the Old Testament by a God angry that the people would not persist in living by his dictates. That God, softened with forgiveness and mercy in the New Testament, was reinvigorated in the required wanton eradication of non-believers beginning in the seventh century. At least in the version of Islam offered by the Iranian theocracy. What could be a better illustration of that new version’s authenticity than a giant, God-like lightening-strike that consumes much of Israel in a maelstrom of fire?
 

© Nik Bednarski, M.D. 2024