Iran Retaliates — and Transforms Regional and Global Orders

By Kevin Barrett, for May issue of Crescent International

On April 13, Islamic Iran launched a retaliatory strike against the genocidal zionist regime. Coming almost two weeks after the zionists had bombed Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing eleven people including three senior military commanders, Iran’s delayed retaliation was a historic masterstroke that radically changed the West Asian and global power systems.

The zionist attack on Iran on April 1 had been completely illegal—and tantamount to a declaration of war not just on Iran and Syria, but also on international law and basic decency. It was so outrageous that even the US regime, which normally follows Tel Aviv’s marching orders, had no choice but to deny that it had been informed in advance (and may even have been telling the truth for once). The Washington Postreported: “Senior Pentagon officials were frustrated that Israel did not notify the United States before conducting a strike on an Iranian site in Syria this month, an escalation that they assess increases risks to American forces in the Middle East, US officials said.” That claim may or may not have been truthful, given US officials’ habitual mendacity, but it underscored the fact that the zionist bombing of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Damascus was beyond the pale and had to be publicly denounced, whatever was being said in private.

As in the case of the Trump regime’s dastardly assassination of General Qassem Soleimani on Januuary 3, 2020, Iran had no choice but to forcefully retaliate. The only question was, how and when? Wisely, Tehran decided to take a deep breath and wait till Ramadan was over. Then it delivered a carefully calibrated response, sending Benjamin Netanyahu an Eid fireworks greeting card called “Operation True Promise” consisting of 120 drones, 170 surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, and 30 cruise missiles.

Iran’s strategic imperative was to deliver a bold and stinging slap to the zionists in such a way as to deter future acts of outrageous aggression, while avoiding drawing in the Americans. Netanyahu has been working overtime for decades to try to trick the US into going to war with Iran on Israel’s behalf, and the beleaguered war criminal in Tel Aviv was undoubtedly hoping to use Iran’s inevitable response to the Damascus atrocity as an excuse for escalation that would entrap the Americans in the quicksands of war with Tehran. (Netanyahu risks going straight from the Prime Minister’s office to prison, so he needs to continually escalate his failed genocide campaign to avoid the political and criminal reckoning that peacetime would bring.)

Iran needed to smack down the zionists hard enough to punish and deter them, but not so hard as to allow American domestic political pressure to force The Collective Biden into Netanyahu’s trap. Killing a large number of Israelis and creating lots of visible damage to civilian infrastructure would have served Netanyahu’s purpose. Wisely, Iran chose to let the tension build for 12 days before scaring the living daylights out of Israelis by filling their skies with projectiles, while deliberately minimizing harm to life and limb—and at the same time sending a forceful message that Iran can raze the zionist entity to the ground any time it chooses.

Former UN Weapons Inspector and US military strategic analyst Scott Ritter has written that Iran’s message to Israel was, in a word, “ Checkmate.” Ritter persuasively argues that Iran demonstrated on April 13 that it can penetrate US and Israeli air defenses using swarms of drones paving the way for showers of ballistic missiles. Most are cheap decoys designed to “unlock the door to the Iron Dome” so the real weapons can get through. And get through they did. Iran scored several direct missile hits on two heavily-defended Negev bases, purposely using missiles with either relatively small warheads or no warheads at all.

The goal was to deliver not death and destruction, but a message: Iran now has the ability to level Israel and destroy US ships and bases in the region. Henceforth, no further actions like the murderous Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus will be tolerated. And by implication, Iran will not permit Israel to complete its genocide of Palestine.

Western media initially downplayed or denied Iran’s success. But it wasn’t long before a senior American official admitted to ABC News that five Iranian ballistic missiles hit Nevatim Air Base, damaging equipment and facilities, while four missiles hit the Negev Air base. Those two bases had been the staging areas for Israel’s criminal strike on Damascus.

Clearly Iran hit exactly what it wanted to hit with precisely the missiles it selected. The others were cheap decoys. By raining down ballistic missiles on two of the most protected sites in “Israel,” as the zionists helplessly cowered in their bunkers, Iran showed the zionists they have no place to hide. Anything and everything in “Israel” can be destroyed any time Iran chooses.

Iran’s April 13 counterattack, like the Palestinian Resistance’s Operation al-Aqsa Storm of October 7, will go down in military history as a classic showpiece of asymmetrical warfare. The zionist entity spent over a billion dollars on its unsuccessful defense efforts, while Iran spent a small fraction of that on its successful retaliatory strike.

Though Iran’s deliberate avoidance of inflicting mass casualties allowed the zionists and their controlled western media a face-saving way out, by spuriously claiming that they had stopped most of the Iranian (decoy) missiles, all serious military analysts now know that the Iron Dome has effectively been renamed the Iron Sieve.

The zionists’ weak response on April 19 consisted of sending a couple of cheap drones to the general vicinity of Isfahan where the IRGC easily shot them down. That act of conspicuous non-retaliation was a tacit admission that Israel’s plan to drag the US into all-out war is not ready for prime time. Indeed, the zionists are said to have been dissuaded by the US regime from mounting a more serious attack, according to a Wall Street Journal report picked up by international media.

According to Ritter, Iran’s defeat of combined US-Israeli air defenses has global implications. Not only have the enormous and ever-expanding missile arsenals of Iran and Hizbullah checkmated the zionists’ regional nuclear monopoly, but by implication the at-least-equally-advanced missiles of Russia and China should have no problem defeating US air defenses. The US empire, with its flotilla of sitting ducks and its 800 now-hyper-vulnerable bases occupying dozens of countries, is about as impregnable as the Maginot Line.

Among the “fog of war”, unconfirmed reports about the April exchanges between Iran and “Israel,” one stands out: Pepe Escobar’s claim that Netanyahu responded to Iran’s April 13 strike by launching a nuclear-armed F-35 towards Iran with the intention of setting off a high-altitude nuclear airburst whose EMP pulse was intended to fry Iran’s electrical grid. According to Escobar, the Russian Air Force shot down the F-35 as it was leaving Jordanian airspace.

Escobar’s story, which he says is supported by two independent, reliable high-level sources in two different Asian governments, seems improbable for various reasons, including the unlikelihood of Russia being able to shoot down planes in air space nominally controlled by the Americans. But it isn’t inconceivable that the Americans might cooperate with the Russians in such an operation. Both nations share an interest in preventing Netanyahu from dragging them into nuclear World War 3.

Whether or not Escobar’s report is correct, it is obvious that the imploding zionist entity is lashing out in desperation with the apparent aim of taking the world down with it. The zionist genocide of Gaza, increasingly desperate attacks on its neighbors, and ever-crazier words and actions signify that the writing is on the wall: The zionist mad dog is about to keel over, and the only remaining question is how to avoid getting bitten before giving it a decent, relatively nonviolent burial.

The zionists made an existential mistake last October by gambling that they could complete the genocide of Palestine under US protection. Their time-tested m.o., “seize ever-increasing power over the US and force America to do Israel’s dirty work,” has passed its expiration date, because the US empire is no longer what it once was—in large part due to the damage Israel has inflicted on it.

Netanyahu’s minions are currently threatening the Biden regime: “Support our genocide, or else!” In this case, “or else” implies zionist power to remove team Biden, whether by assassination (a zionist specialty) or by using financial and media power to throw the election to Trump (or whoever promises to take orders from Tel Aviv).

But as April 13 demonstrated, the US no longer has the power to protect Israel, or even its own bases and ships. And Israel has even less power to protect itself. So, it doesn’t really matter who’s in the Oval Office. Even less does it matter that the zionists can force Congress to pass bills against such expressions as “river to the sea.” The zionist entity, like US global hegemony, is doomed. And though the Entity itself is thrashing out madly and genocidally in its death throes, it remains to be seen whether the managers of the US empire will follow suit and allow or instigate a planetary “nuclear Masada.”