Israel has transformed the Middle East with a brilliant campaign against the Khamenei regime.

Victor Davis Hanson sees this. He writes (we quote his article almost in full):

Iran apparently had not adjusted to its new 2025 status—or maybe it had. Most of its bought terrorists are currently either destroyed or anemic.

There is no more ascendant Iranian “Shia crescent” in the Middle East. Russia is no longer a Middle East power, patron, and protector.

The Assad dynasty imploded, flipping Syria from an Iranian proxy into a likely Iranian enemy. Hezbollah, once supposedly the most fearsome of all the Iranian terrorist tentacles, was humiliated and neutered by a series of surreal Israeli operations.

Hamas has been reduced to a subterranean terrorist remnant.

The Houthis’ tit-for-tat encounters with Israel and the U.S. are systematically turning their Yemeni enclave into an impotent dump. At its present rate, the Houthis will likely soon launch their last rocket at Israel or the Red Sea in a country without fuel, electricity, and ports.

Iran itself, last year in a disastrous air war with Israel, lost its air defenses and is now more or less impotent and defenseless against Israeli air incursions. Its oil income has been slashed by 70-80 percent by the renewed Trump sanctions and ‘maximum pressure’ campaign. Israel can destroy all of its oil industry if it wishes and, apparently, send operatives inside Iran itself as it pleases.

Most of the Arab Sunni world is now losing its accustomed fear of Iran. While the weary pan-Islamic solidarity boilerplate of the Middle East remains the same, privately, most Arab nations rely on the U.S. or even Israel to deter Iran—and predicate their own foreign policy on the degree to which they do just that.

With the end of the Biden administration and Obama a distant memory, Iran lost all hope that it could bluster, bluff, and negotiate itself out of sanctions and embargoes—and into nuclear weapons. There are no more John Kerrys or Antony Blinkens in charge, eager to meet Iranian demands. Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber” Iran Deal is ancient history.

Israel had done more than all of America’s Middle East wars or all of NATO’s global presence to end Iran’s claims on power and the ability to project its brand of terror and fear throughout the Middle East.

So why did a neutered Iran still sound like the fiery Iran of old, when it once terrorized the Middle East and sent its assassination teams worldwide, with its nearly weekly loud threats to wipe out the one-bomb “Zionist entity”?

What was Iran thinking in refusing to negotiate seriously with the Trump administration to disband its nuclear weapons program and “normalize” its role in the Middle East?

Apparently, given its disastrous last two years, Iran still felt its last-gasp claim both internally and externally on power was on spec to stall and delay by negotiating its way to a dozen nuclear weapons, or, barring that, a deterrent consisting of huge stockpiles of conventional guided missiles.

Such a mini-nuclear arsenal, or fleets of long-range, conventional rockets, would, in Iran’s eyes, still frighten Israel, leverage Europe and the West, and eventually recharge its terrorist legions.

To achieve that unlikely deterrent, the theocracy thought it could draw out Trump’s negotiations endlessly with a series of its trademark feints, falsities, and even threats until it had enriched enough weapons-grade uranium to deter Israel, or created a massive missile force that could overcome the Israeli Iron Dome.

Tehran naively assumed that Trump’s own MAGA base forbade him from starting or even reacting to “forever wars.” Thereby, the Iranians may have believed that Trump’s willingness to deal was a signal that he was restrained domestically or naive enough to put up with their trademark dissimulation. And thus, they wished to believe that Trump would either harness Israel or keep distant from it should Israel preempt to end the Iranian nuclear option.

But Trump had always been clear that Iran could never obtain a nuclear weapon, if deliberately unclear about how that ultimatum would actually be enforced.

Moreover, Iran had always failed to grasp that Trump is not a neo-isolationist but rather a Jacksonian. He certainly does not believe in endless wars or, for that matter, any large, preemptive military action, especially on the ground in the Middle East. He loathes nation-building, and would likely never send a single platoon into Iran.

But all that said, the prior fates of the arch Iranian terrorist general Qasem Soleimani, ISIS kingpin Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, or the Russian Wagner group in Syria might have reminded Iran that Trump will use force to restore or enhance deterrence and ensure U.S. interests.

When Trump began negotiating with Iran for an end to its nuclear program, he warned the theocracy that it had 60 days to renounce nuclear weapon acquisitions. He apparently had picked such a two-month window, given that any time beyond that date might have ensured Iran would have developed a few nuclear weapons, a reality he knew was untenable for Israel and the U.S.

Iran arrogantly gambled that Trump was bluffing and would stay in endless Iranian bartering while pressuring Israel to stand down so as not to derail his peace efforts. But anyone who knew Benjamin Netanyahu or Trump would know that staying the deadline was impossible, and Iran would likely be hit right after the two-month warning expired.

And so, the regime was hit—swiftly and decisively.

Did Iran think its new Russian and Chinese allies would intervene on its behalf or threaten Israel to stand down? But Russia is bogged down in Ukraine in a new Stalingrad that may have cost it 1 million dead and wounded, with no end in sight. Its military has been weakened. It has no desire to enter any additional foreign conflict. If anything, Putin may soon wish Trump to find him a way out of his own self-created quagmire.

Anyway, an Israeli-Iranian conflict and the subsequent unrest and uncertainty in the Persian Gulf, as far as Vladimir Putin was concerned, would only raise the price of oil and further help feed his tiring Russian war machine.

China is currently trying to avoid a catastrophic trade war with the U.S. It has no desire to prevent the U.S. from aiding Israel. Unlike Russia, China wants no conflict of any kind in the Persian Gulf. It once bought 80-90 percent of Iranian oil, and the Middle East supplies about 50 percent of Beijing’s current oil needs.

So, what was Iran’s backup strategy of resistance if its nuclear infrastructure came under attack before it obtained a bomb? Apparently, it had none.

And in some sense, that is a silly question, given the theocracy has no reason to exist if it is not an exporter of Shiite Persian-sponsored terrorism aimed at isolating Israel, bullying the Sunni Arab world, and scaring the West. Indeed, the regime always believed it would dissolve without terrorist satellites, a nuclear threat, and oil money. Yet what we are beginning to witness after nearly half a century is a terrorist regime with no terrorists, a would-be nuclear bully with no nuclear weapons, and a conventional threat that will soon not be threatening.

Israel has been invaded from Gaza by Hamas, the terrorist organization that governs the strip.

The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has announced: “We are at war.”

Up-to-date news can be found here:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/2023-10-07/live-updates-762053

Is the money for the invasion coming from the Iranian regime? “President” Biden recently made billions available to the mullahs who are notoriously funders of terrorism.   

Is it possible that the planning and preparation for this massive attack was not known to Israel’s legendary intelligence service, the “best in the world” Mossad? Seems so!

Israel strikes back. Gaza City in flames.

In a DebkaFile report on the unlikely yet apparently thriving Saudi-Israeli co-operation in the face of the Iranian threat, a clue may be found as to just who is directing operations againt Iran’s nuclear program, and most probably sent it the Stuxnet worm:

Riyadh has signaled its intention for the secret Saudi-Israeli meetings on Iran taking place for more than a year to continue after the changing of the guard at the Mossad… This was one of the first messages Tamir Pardo found on his desk as head of Israel’s external spy agency when he took over from Meir Dagan this week. The Saudis were clearly not put off by any possible awkwardness from the WikiLeaks disclosure that they had been pressing the US to attack Iran’s nuclear sites before it developed a weapon.

The meetings between Saudi General Intelligence Director Prince Muqrin bin Abdaziz and Meir Dagan, most of which were held in the Jordanian capital Amman, dealt extensively with clandestine cooperation between the two agencies and plans for attacking Iran. Arab and Western sources reported that they reached agreement in the course of the year for Israeli fighter-bombers to transit Saudi air space on their way to bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Saudis were even willing to build a new landing strip in the desert with refueling facilities for the use of the warplanes en route to their mission.

Western intelligence experts on Saudi Arabia found special significance in the publication by the Saudi Arab News site of Monday, Nov. 29 of a long report on Meir Dagan and his retirement after eight years as head of Israel’s external espionage agency. The Saudi official media never, ever report on Israeli military or intelligence affairs. …

Still more out of character was the tone of the Arab News report [which admiringly describes] the outgoing Mossad chief … as … “widely seen as responsible for a wave of covert actions including the sabotage of Iranian nuclear projects.”

Western sources found a connection between this comment and the attack 24 hours earlier in the heart of Tehran on two senior Iranian nuclear scientists, killing Prof. Majid Shahriari on the spot and leaving Prof. Feredoun Abbassi-Davani critically injured. …

Pardo’s job is termed “at the heart of Israel’s secret war against Iran.”…

The WikiLeaks disclosure, which also showed the Obama administration rejecting the Gulf Arab rulers’ demand for military action against Iran, may even have spurred the Saudis to insist on carrying on with their backdoor meetings with Israel so as to underline their abiding conviction that Iran’s nuclear program must be wiped out.

And we understand that Meir Dagan did not bow to King Abdullah. In a manner of speaking, the obeisance is being paid the other way about.

Roger L. Simon, who has written detective fiction, raises some puzzling points about the murder mystery in Dubai (see our post below Murder mystery in Dubai, February 19, 2010). He assumes that Israel is behind whatever happened.

The first notable clue is those “eleven” agents. Why send eleven for an assassination when two or three would do? Why not just knock the Hamas man off with a bombing or cell phone some place? It would be far less risky. And the Israelis clearly had remarkably precise advanced knowledge of al-Mabhouh’s itinerary. The Hamas leader had only left Damascus that morning, supposedly, according to some reports, en route to China via Dubai. And yet the Mossad had a minimum of eleven people in place, waiting for him. No wonder Hamas was so shocked that, when they learned of his “murder” on January 19, they immediately announced terminal cancer had over taken their leader. Hamas itself must have had something closer to a heart attack. To have this much warning of al-Mabhouh’s itinerary, the Israelis must have permeated them pretty thoroughly. The embarrassment alone, not to mention the internal finger-pointing and suspicion, must have been extreme. (From the Gulf News of Feb 19: An additional suspect arrested in Syria is believed to be a senior Hamas fighter.)

Meanwhile, there are false-flags on false-flags. The once revered Mossad chief Meir Dagan is under attack in Israel. How could he have been so sloppy as to allow his agents to be videoed by hotel security cameras or to have used the passports of “normal” Israelis as cover? But perhaps all that was deliberate and the agents videoed were disguised and the “normal” Israelis part of the plot themselves. Then what? Not even John le Carré in his prime could have designed a plot so intricate. Dagan is George Smiley in the flesh.

Nevertheless, the Israelis still must have had some motive for employing so many agents for a hit. After checking into a blacked out room at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel that day, al-Mabhouh went missing for four hours – and this may provide some clues. A meeting with an Iranian official has been reported and denied, also some Palestinian group. In any case, he was doing something and there was information to be gleaned from this man, most probably key information regarding Hamas and its allies (Iran, Syria, etc.) that certainly accounts in part for the elaborate assassination. In a world rapidly becoming nuclear one can only speculate what that information is, but we can be sure it’s not particularly appetizing. It’s also worth considering what al -Mabhouh wanted to obtain from the Chinese. The Mossad was out for al-Mabhouh’s knowledge even more than the revenge that is commonly reported. (al-Mabhouh was responsible for the killing of two Israeli soldiers, but that was years ago and the Hamas leader has been in Israeli custody since and released.)

The information grabbing intent also accounts for the multiple agents with varied expertise – from photography to “exotic” drugs. It may also account for the differing initial reports of the cause of death, which range from electrocution to suffocation. The time of death, always difficult to ascertain, is also in question. How long were the agents with al-Mabhouh and did they get what they wanted? Was his death untimely or – and here’s a wild speculation – is he dead at all? Do we have DNA of the body? Nothing so far from the Dubai police. All we know is this, again from Gulf News:

“Dubai police has [sic] denied that it had intended to bury the body of Mahmoud Al Mabhouh, a Hamas leader in Dubai. The police also added in a press release that they held the body of the deceased for one week to finish the investigation procedures, and then handed it over to Al Mabhouh’s son who came to the UAE after the death of his father.”

Habeas corpus anyone?

As of Feb 19, no photos of al-Mahbouh’s corpse in any form turn up on Google images. Perhaps there are videos, but none that identify the body in anything near a definitive way. Yes, I know this is strange, but it is remotely possible that al-Mahbouh was kidnapped. Dubai is, after all, a port, providing a means for escape. The Dubai police are promising that we will know all soon, but they have been promising that for a while now.