Above photo: Iran struck Israel early on 14 June with barrages of missiles, following a massive onslaught that targeted the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and military facilities and killed several top generals. AFP.
Mark Sleboda is summarizing his view of the current episode in the war on Iran (slightly edited for clarity):
What the Hell Just Happened in the Middle East You May Ask?
My take –
The US/Israel realized:
- that their regime change plans were not coming to fruition,
- that the Iranian govt had more support and stronger foundations than they had believed,
- that Israeli air defense was collapsing/exhausted and
- that an attrition war of long range strike was going to go badly for Israel.
- And Trump began to get freaked out over the rising price of oil with the Iranian threat of closing the strait of Hormuz.
So they wrapped it up, declared victory, and demanded a ceasefire.
Iran agreed because they too have been badly shaken through Israeli covert warfare and their own air defense all but collapsed.
The can will only be kicked down the road, and both sides will start rebuilding, and making preparations and plans for the next round, the next war. This was only a skirmish at the end of the day …
Iran, for surviving, maintaining a civilian nuclear enrichment program, and for the fact that it was the US/Israel that pushed for the “ceasefire”, comes out slightly ahead on points.
The biggest loser – the collapse of the NNPT and international law.
Israel is already thinking about restarting the war.
But in the long term Sleboda’s last point is the most important one. The Non-Nuclear Proliferation Treaty has kept a cap on the number of countries with nuclear weapons. The attack on Iran’s civilian nuclear installation, and the lack of a serious IAEA’s reaction to it, proves that the NNTP fails to provide the security it once had promised.
No only Iran will take conclusions from that.
Iran’s parliament has, for good reasons, decided to stop all cooperation with the IAEA.
It seems to have support for this from Russia:
“IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi could have provided a more precise report,” [Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov said. “He is now insisting that Iran grant the agency immediate access to its nuclear facilities to verify the whereabouts of enriched materials and assess the situation on the ground. But where are the assurances that this information won’t be leaked? I see no such safeguards.”
Lavrov also pointed to broader concerns about the neutrality of international institutions. “This ties into what I mentioned earlier: the West is exerting serious influence over the secretariats of international organizations. In some cases, it’s as though they have been effectively privatized,” he remarked.
The West is demolishing the international order that had, for the last 80 years, provided some ‘rules of the road’ in global behavior. The U.S. is preventing the World Trade Organization from doing its job. The agreements that limited nuclear weapons were done away with one by one. The recent conflict blew up the NNPT and further diminished the UN Charter.
The consequences go far beyond the Middle East. They makes the world less peaceful.
