Some 50 Israelis have been injured by Iran’s retaliatory, low-tech, missile barrages so far while at least 78 Iranians, including military chiefs and scientists and their whole families have been killed in Israel’s original missile bombardment that began last Friday.
Meanwhile, across the world, people face possible starvation, job losses and higher living costs, as world oil prices climbed following the latest West-supported Israeli aggression.
Sri Lanka has joined much of the world – that is, the Global South – in very promptly calling on Israel and Iran to cease military confrontation and turn to diplomacy. Almost the entire Arab world has outright condemned Israel.
Significantly, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said it was “crucial” for Israel’s allies to work to de-escalate tensions. He told a news briefing in Stockholm that this sudden war “was a unilateral action by Israel.” The European Union (EU) bureaucracy also called for an urgent ‘de-escalation’. But it is notable that, for days before Israel launched its attacks, Western officials had been acknowledging that Israel was clearly preparing to attack Iran but not a single Western Government had taken any action to avert that aggression.
The rest of the world can only take note of this patent duplicity by Western powers which have a long record of unprovoked aggression in various parts of the world. And what about a century, at least, of US unilateral military interventions in its ‘backyard’ of Central America?
Although the Western powers supporting Israel’s many wars are muted in their response, the United Nations (UN) leadership has demanded a halt to the confrontation and condemned Israel’s bombing of nuclear facilities. The International Atomic Energy (IAEA) said nuclear facilities “must never be attacked”.
Toxic radiation
The reasons are obvious: a toxic radiation spill will spread far across countries, regions, continents, affecting people, vegetation, air, water and animal life. As the IAEA statement noted: “Any military action that jeopardises the safety and security of nuclear facilities risks grave consequences for the people of Iran, the region, and beyond”.
In short, in attempting to damage or destroy nuclear facilities, Israel risks large sections of the Earth and the planetary population. US President Donald Trump justified Israel’s rogue action, though US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US had no hand in the strikes. As Donald Trump said in a social media comment, Israel’s targeting of Iranian nuclear facilities was “excellent”. Earlier, Trump was somewhat averse to military action against Iran, in the backdrop of ongoing talks in Rome between the US and Iran. But Trump said he had warned Iran to get its act together or risk an attack by Israel.
Could it be that the US, being the only nation that has twice used the atomic bomb, does not really care for the consequences? It is noteworthy that America’s ally Israel is the only nation that has twice risked such toxic fallout when it bombed Iraq’s nuclear power station and later similarly destroyed Syria’s nuclear station.
All the aircraft used in the continuing waves of Israeli strikes on Friday-Saturday are American-made, while much of the high calibre long range missiles and other munitions are also either American or German-made. The US reportedly supplies up to 70 percent of Israel’s military equipment and munitions, while Germany supplies 20 percent of equipment, especially military electronics.
The whole world has come to realise after decades of Israeli aggression against, literally, all of its neighbouring nations, that these non-stop wars by Tel Aviv are made possible only because of the lavish material and politico-legal support by the Western power bloc.
It is a Western geopolitical sponsorship that began under British colonial control over Palestine in the early 20th century and has continued ever since the European Jewish-exclusive colony of Israel was created in 1948 under the legal umbrella of the, then, tightly West-controlled UN.
Israeli and some Western historians insist that the UN-sponsored setting up of the State of Israel in predominantly Arab-populated Palestinian territory could have been paralleled by the setting up of a state of Palestine if neighbouring Arab countries had accepted the UN model. However, this ‘model’ was wholly biased in favour of the new Israeli State which was given over two-thirds of Palestinian territory (after it was ethnically cleansed of Palestinians by European Jewish militia), while less than a third of the original Palestine was offered to the displaced Palestinian population.
Rising Lion
Analysts expect the Israeli ‘Operation Rising Lion’ aerial bombardment to continue into this week with successive waves of aerial offensives by the Israeli Air Force (IAF), one of the world’s strongest. Israel has the advantage of continuous experience of all-out war over decades, with successive generations of its military personnel frequently involved in combat and its equipment constantly tested and refurbished.
Iran’s last war was with Iraq decades ago (and none before that in modern times). Not having any Superpower benefactor, this great West Asian nation cannot fight off Israel. This reality is the living proof of who is the more dangerous aggressor State and who is not.
Analysts speculate that Israel was likely using its F-15 jets to carry the heavier long range missiles needed to penetrate the largely underground Iranian nuclear production facilities. Some Iranian facilities are so deep underground inside mountain ranges that heavy ‘bunker-buster’ 2,300-kilo munitions may have been deployed.
These same devastating munitions are also being used against the densely populated, urban civilian townships of the Gaza Strip in these past 16 months of Israel’s genocidal war. America tops up Tel Aviv’s stock of these GBU-28 (Guided Bomb Unit-28) laser-guided bombs.
Produced by the Watervliet Arsenal, New York, this bomb is super-accurate and can smash its way through 50 metres of earth or five metres of solid concrete. A remote operator illuminates a target with a laser beam ‘designator’ and the bomb guides itself to the spot of laser light reflected from the target. When the GBU-28 hits the ground, a short-delay time fuse is activated which triggers detonation when it has penetrated deep enough to completely destroy the target.
However, analysts believe that much of Iran’s nuclear fuel production is done much deeper underground and could survive such explosives.
The IAF’s new, fifth generation, ‘stealth’ aircraft, the supersonic F-35 Lightning, are also likely to have been used for its ability to evade enemy radar detection, speed deeply into enemy territory and return rapidly before interception. None of these planes are long-distance aircraft and are likely to have been refuelled mid-air to and from Iran by Israel’s US-made KC-707 tanker planes.
Since Israel does not adjoin Iran, the bomber waves are likely over-flying Syrian and Iraqi airspace while attacking Iran. Syria, incidentally, is now on good terms with the West after the ouster of the Assad regime.
In targeting nuclear facilities, Israel and backing Western powers are literally playing with nuclear fire. For the EU, like for the rest of the world, there is the immediate worry about rising oil prices and its consequent economic discomfort. But the entirety of West Asia, the neighbouring Mediterranean on the one side and Central and South Asia on the other, must also worry about toxic nuclear fallout. The effects of Strontium-90 last for thousands of years.
It is fortunate that Iran has responsibly buried its nuclear production very deep underground, quite unlike all the atomic power stations dotting the Earth’s surface including Israel’s Dimona ‘research centre’. Yet it is Iran, which has fought only one war in a century, that is being branded by some as the “danger”.
Israel is openly justifying its attack on Iran as a ‘pre-emptive’ strike. To pre-empt what? To prevent Tehran from becoming even remotely close in military punch as Tel Aviv. It is the classic behaviour of the current dominator attempting to perpetuate its dominance. In this case, it is a proxy colonial outpost asserting its local dominance on behalf of its colonial masters, the West. China and all other non-Western powers are lining up against this rogue geopolitics.
The Global South is qualitatively more than the old bipolarity of First World vs Third World and NATO vs Warsaw Pact+Non-Aligned Movement. The strengthening of new forms of hybrid post-colonial capitalism inside the Third World has created a 21st Century non-colonial multipolarity which has already begun counter balancing the NATO-EU-G7 bloc.
The Global South bloc has replaced the old 3W+NAM camp with a formidable combination of semi-unified economic and geopolitical strength. The slowly growing networks connecting China and BRICS with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, ASEAN and the African Union are not merely the under-developed “Third World”. There is a growing multi-polarity that is reducing the West from global dominance to a hemispherical one.
Such crude two-dimensional Western colonial-style aggression we now see in West Asia only further unifies opposing forces in multidi-mensional complexities that the old Euro-colonial mindset finds difficult to grasp. But how much more death and destruction must we experience before these positive geopolitical shifts come to bear?
