The current phase of the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel exploded upon the international scene on October 7, when Hamas carried out a deadly surprise attacks that killed 1,300 Israelis, including more than 220 soldiers.
The Israeli response—the mobilization of some 360,000 troops who subsequently laid siege to the Gaza Strip, home to some 2.1 million Palestinians—has generated the ire of much of the world, especially in the face of sustained aerial bombardment that has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, more than half of them children, and unleashing a humanitarian crisis among the survivors, many of whom have been displaced from homes destroyed by the Israeli actions.
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Here’s what Scott Ritter, military analyst and former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, told Sputnik:”There are reports that Israeli citizens who are serving with Ukrainian armed forces are leaving Ukraine and heading back to Israel, I have no independent way of verifying such reports.
However, if these Israelis have a reserve duty obligation and are considered to be of potential when it comes to combatant duties, then it is very likely that they would be seeking to return to Israel, especially at this time of a general mobilization in Israel.
This is a very difficult time for Israel and one would expect that all available manpower will be drawn upon. The interesting thing is it comes at the time of the collapse of the Ukrainian combat cohesiveness on the line of contact with Russia, where Russia has taken advantage of gaps in Ukrainian manpower to push forward aggressively in an offensive manner.
And it would seem that Ukraine is not in a position to release any manpower, even if they are Israelis heading back to Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas attack.”
The suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel has prompted supporters of Hamas, including Hezbollah and Iran, to threaten military intervention against Israel, raising the specter of a wider regional conflict.
This, in turn, has resulted in American policymakers, like Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, to weigh in on the issue.
“Here’s my message. If Hezbollah, which is a proxy of Iran, launches a massive attack on Israel, I would consider that a threat to the—to the State of Israel, existential in nature. I will introduce a resolution in the United States Senate to allow military action by the United States in conjunction with Israel to knock Iran out of the oil business. Iran, if you escalate this war, we’re coming for you.”
Lindsey Graham’s rhetoric is inflammatory in nature, but when viewed in the context of modern-day reality, is empty. One of the strategic goals of the United States is government change in Iran.
During the Trump administration, the US military and the CIA were tasked with developing covert action plans designed to sow dissent within the Iranian government and, in the process, delegitimize it in the eyes of the Iranian public.
While these plans never reached fruition under Trump, they were fully executed by the Biden administration. The tragic death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022 was used by the CIA as a catalyst around which to unleash a massive pre-planned program of domestic political unrest designed to weaken and, ultimately, overthrow the Iranian government.
For decades, the CIA had fostered relationships with a variety of Iranian opposition groups, including the Kurdish, Azeri, Baluchi, and Arab ethnic minorities, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), and various monarchist organizations, to create a powder keg of political dissent capable of being ignited upon demand.
The death of Mahsa Amini (which, contrary to the CIA-driven propaganda, was from natural causes) was seized upon by the CIA as the trigger for unleashing this weaponized opposition.
In the weeks and months that followed, Iran was subjected to massive domestic political unrest and violence which the US tried to leverage into regime-change potential akin to what was done on the Maidan in Kiev, Ukraine, in February 2014.
This effort failed, and Iran emerged from the violence stronger and more unified than ever behind the very government the US tried to overthrow.
With covert regime change off the table, the only option available to the Biden administration in dealing with Iran along the lines threatened by Senator Graham is war.
The United States has assiduously avoided direct large-scale military conflict with Iran for the simple fact that to prevail in such a conflict, the United States would have to dedicate military power sufficient to the task at a time when the finite resources of the US military were being allocated to Europe and the Pacific.
Even if the US were to reallocate the forces necessary to prevail in a general war with Iran, it would take months to assemble the force needed.
This picture taken on October 18, 2023 from kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel shows smoke billowing across the border during bombardment in the Gaza Strip. – Sputnik International, 1920, 18.10.2023
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Generating combat power is one thing. Deploying it in a manner that is logistically sustainable is another. The US was able to deploy some 750,000 troops into the Middle East in 1990-1991 only because it had access to friendly ports and airfields in the region where troops and military material could be offloaded in uncontested fashion.
Any general war between Iran and the US would inevitably result in Iran challenging any major US military deployment, which means the airfields and ports that would normally be used to support such a deployment would be under constant Iranian attack.
As a result, the US would need to execute a forced entry option into Iran, seizing a major Iranian port city, such as Chah Bahar or Bandar Abbass.
This would require a major amphibious effort where the ships containing the landing force would have to run a gauntlet of Iranian missiles that would cripple or destroy the landing force before it got within striking distance of Iran.
In short, the US cannot physically defeat Iran using conventional military power without undergoing a massive mobilization of resources that would be politically unsustainable.
This leaves the option of an air campaign. Israel has long advocated for a military strike using air power against Iran. One of the major problems facing Israel is the physical distance between Israel and Iran, which would necessitate the kind of large-scale air-to-air refueling support that only the United States possesses.
Israel and the US have carried out joint military training involving the air-to-air refueling of Israeli strike aircraft by US refueling aircraft as part of a training exercise known as “Juniper Oak,” conducted in January 2023. This training also included US bombers and ground forces.
The problem facing the US, however, is that Iran is a huge country which is not conducive to the delivery of a knock-out blow, even if delivered by the combined resources of Israel and the United States.
Lindsey Graham’s threat to “knock Iran out of the oil business” may sound good to the opponents of Iran, but it is simply empty rhetoric. If the US and/or Israel were to target Iranian oil infrastructure, Iran would unleash a retaliation which would cripple the oil production infrastructure of the entire Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Such an action would throw the US and global economies into chaos.
Moreover, Iran would retain sufficient strike capacity to devastate US military bases in the region and Israeli cities alike. In short, there is no military option available to either Israel or the United States, individually or working in tandem, that can defeat Iran.
In a recent interview, CBS News’ reporter Scott Pelley asked President Biden if the wars in Israel and Ukraine were “more than the United States can take on at the same time.”
“We’re the United States of America for God’s sake,” Biden responded, with his trademark bellicosity, “the most powerful nation in the history—not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense. We have the capacity to do this and we have an obligation to. We are the essential nation, to paraphrase the former secretary of state. And,” he concluded, trying his best to muster the steely-eyed stare of a man who means business, “if we don’t, who does?”
The answer, it seems, is no one.
By Scott Ritter
Published by Sputnik Globe
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com