That was quite a light show on Saturday night...
As the IAF--with contributions from the US, UK, Jordan and France (which probably took down one drone and then ponced around for the rest of the evening)--scrubbed the sky over Israel
Note: this post is for people who did not follow the Iranian attack on Saturday night minute by minute as I felt compelled to do. I cannot claim new intel. This post came out of my 48 hours helpless to pull away from news outlets, following developments via the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, and the Dan Senor and Ben Shapiro podcasts. In other words, you can file this post under dutiful compilation with color commentary.
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There was a moment, around 5pm central time last Saturday, when I felt as if the bottom of my stomach had dropped out—as when a plane suddenly loses altitude. It was that “are we in free fall?” sensation I had for about a half an hour on the morning of September 11th after Tower 2 went down and the news came in that the Pentagon had been hit as well.
The situation stabilized about an hour later as it began to appear that Al Qaeda had shot its wad so to speak, made its point. I don’t believe the average human thinks about the big picture immediately after a terrorist attack. Vision narrows so the bottom line for me was that everything around me was still standing and everyone I knew was ok.
Besides, I was just not as freaked out by 9/11 as many of my fellow New Yorkers. (One now semi-famous columnist I know crawled into bed with the covers over his head for four days.)
The day did not “change everything,” as I know it did for some. I had lived in New York City for a decade fully expecting a catastrophic terror attack at anytime. Subway rides were cause for rumination about which person backpack wearer was about to release Sarin gas—a la Tokyo, 1995.
Actually, a release of poison gas in New York City’s vast subway system might have created even more havoc than 9/11, but that wouldn’t have satisfied the Islamist compulsion to take down a large phallus symbol in the heart of America’s most powerful city.
I suppose if I was really close reader of Middle East news (and not just during crises) the headlines that started popping up on Saturday night wouldn’t have been so startling: a “massive attack” by Iran? When I read that cruise missiles had been fired from Iraq, the are-we-in-free-fall? sensation came back.
What now? Would Iran release its really big weapon: the hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah-controlled rockets right on Israel’s northern border which could overwhelm Israel’s multi-layered air defense system? But the night went on and Hezbollah was quiet. As many pundits later noted, Hezbollah was the dog that didn’t bark—and that fact has become more significant as the days since the attack go by.
In any case, by about 11pm American time the Israeli government was telling citizens they could come out of the bomb shelters and safe rooms. They promptly went to the outdoor cafes.
Over here in America, I was drinking my morning coffee and turning on my computer to see what God had wrought overnight, only to get a real surprise. It was one of those magical moments, as I know my father felt after the 1967 War. The mystical, joyous, Hand-of-God-hovers-over-Israel feeling washed over me as I read the incredible news that a coalition (and a very thrilling coalition, as it included contributions from Jordan, the Saudis and the UAE) had intercepted a incredible 99 percent of the incoming armed drones, cruise and ballistic missiles. The only human casualty so far reported, is the tragedy of a Bedouin Arab-Israeli girl who is fighting for her life in an Israeli hospital after being hit by shrapnel. The Netavim air base, home to Israel’s fleet of F-35s and apparently a much coveted target, suffered only minor damage.
To prolong the dopamine bath I then watched this clip over and over again in which Israeli fighter jet pilots with decided lilts in their voices (those guys are having fun) shoot down unarmed aerial vehicles (UAVs.)
There were many other reasons to rejoice:
Maybe the world community gets it a little more that Israel is in a fight for its life and that the Gaza response is part of that.
There was a thrilling glimpse of a “New Middle East” formed around a coalition of moderate Arab states versus Iran. According to the Times of Israel via the Wall Street Journal (which is paywalled) Saudi Arabia and the UAE “enabled the use of their airspace and provided radar tracking. In some cases, Arab militaries took an active role in intercepting the threats and ‘supplied their own forces to help’ indicating that Jordan was not the only Arab nation to do so.” (This last clause implies that other Arab nations wanted to keep their participation on the down low, lest they be labeled “collaborators” with the demon Zionist entity which can be a death sentence in the Middle East. Down low, Schmown low, it’s still good news.)
CNN started acting like a real news organization again.
But after an hour or so my euphoria began to wear off as demerits piled up. Here’s some sobering math: This was cheap for the Iranians; they can, and say they will, do it again, but it was very expensive, unsustainably expensive for Israel.
Ynet news calculated the “staggering cost of Israel’s defense against the Iranian attack” based on an interview with Brigadier General Reem Aminoach, a former economic advisor to an IDF chief of staff:
“If we're talking about ballistic missiles that need to be brought down with an Arrow system, cruise missiles that need to be brought down with other missiles, and UAVs, which we actually bring down mainly with airplanes - then add up the costs - $3.5 million for an Arrow missile, $1 million for a David's Sling, such and such costs for airplanes,” he said.
“On an order of magnitude of 4-5 billion shekels [or about 1 billion American dollars]” against an Israeli military budget of about $60 billion.
But the most sickening piece of after-you’ve-devoured-all-the-Christmas-candy realism was remembering that not one minute of Saturday night had to happen. So why did it happen, and who benefited? Ok, so maybe it’s good that Israel got to show off its impressive arsenal (including IAF pilots) but might there have been a cheaper way to do it? How about a Soviet-style air show which might cost just a billion? Did we really need to kill a sweet little Bedou girl and cause everybody else yet another round of agita?
But I suppose you have to expect Dr. Strangelove-level irrational crap, when you’re shackled to the United States, which is becoming the most unreliable ally of all time.
The United States has developed a pattern: Self-important toffs in DC without an ounce of common sense between them and a complete dearth of knowledge about human behavior allows messes like the rise of Bin Laden to develop and then have to scurry around, wasting blood and treasure, in one of our patented over-reaction-reactions.
The quote often attributed to Winston Churchill comes to mind: “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
Yeah, except now we just start out wrong and don’t stop till we’ve engineered a really massive wrong. Obama unfroze zillions of Iranian funds which allowed them to continue ballistic weapon research, and then America spends billions chasing the products of those experiments out of the sky.
Typical. Like 9/11, when we ignored the guy in the cave until he finally did what he’d been promising to do.
Last Saturday night’s attack sooo didn’t have to happen. Trump is correct. It wouldn’t have happened during a Trump administration. And it wouldn’t have happened if Israel hadn’t just played along when they Bidenites wheeled the dotty old man out to make members of Israel’s War Cabinet stand in the corner with “I’m a bad warmonger” sign taped to their behinds.
At the very least, The Iranians clearly felt emboldened by what they perceived as a weak USA under senile and cowardly Biden, the Biden who had engineered the catastrophic exit from Afghanistan and then couldn’t see the virtue in letting Israel “finish the job” in Gaza. They also saw a weakened Israel, one that had been too…(what? we don’t even know yet) to prevent the 10/7 pogrom and to tell Biden to bugger off.
I hear you saying that Israel needs to take the abuse, the finger-wagging, the school-marmery in order to take home those American-made arms: Yes, those planes and defensive systems (especially when they are co-built by Israel as are Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow) are the best in the world, but the Israelis should now go their own way and call the US bluff around access to arms.
Michael Oren once said (at a talk at the Columbia School of Journalism which I attended so I am paraphrasing): “It’s a toss up as to who would be more put out if America discontinued military aid to Israel: the Israelis or the American arms industry.”
Israel is given military aid in the form of chits (credits, vouchers, if you will) which are only redeemable at the company store, American-based, American-owned companies like Lockheed, Raytheon and etc. Anybody who thinks Israel just bleeds the American taxpayer, as I have ranted in previous substacks, is a moron. Israel keeps huge American corporations humming.
And here’s the most depressing note of all: This is a developing story, but, if true, it would explain a lot, like why the Hezbollah dog didn’t bark.
The worst possibility involves evidence coming together that Biden actually negotiated, calibrated, titrated an Iranian attack to allow both countries—Biden especially, election year and all that— to save face. Biden would have been willing to spend a few billion or so for this demo project. (Who’s counting? Whoo hoo!) because a stunning victory would have been enough to show he still has a few cojones, can act like a CINC, stand at the helm, say tough stuff, and glare through his Ray Bans. It would have been a sop to the Israelis and restive Jewish community in the states, on the order of “Isn’t that enough for you? What are you warmongers?”
For the Iranians? Well, they needed to retaliate somehow, but not so harshly to bring in the Israeli Air Force with fight-for-their-life fervor determined this time, to take out the Iranian nuclear infrastructure and maybe a few oil fields too.
So maybe things went a little out of hand on the Iranian side —like maybe there was a lack of coordination around the use of say, ballistic missiles which were then turned to moon dust in the upper atmosphere by delicious high tech like David’s Sling.
This was a bit of a bloody nose for the Iranians, but face it, their cities, nukes, or oil fields were not hit. If they spin this right — with plenty of martial music and clips with mushroom clouds — aired on state tv they can even look a bit like bad asses.
The tragedy is that, as in Gaza, we’re back in the Forever War mode so beloved by Obama and the Obama II Biden administration. They love the Forever War model because nobody wins (that would be so politically incorrect, evoking the idea of meritocracies and such) and nobody loses. Everybody just hunkers down waiting for American largess.
In other words, “why didn’t we hear from Hezbollah?” was not just an aside; it was an important question and the answer may unlock the whole sorry episode.