Is Israel preparing for another strike on Iran without waiting for an Iranian response to the strikes of Oct. 25-26? IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi told Israeli air force pilots last night that if Iran “makes the mistake and launches another barrage of missiles at Israel, we will once again know how to reach Iran,” reported the Times of Israel. Should Iran again attack, Halevi warned, Israel would “reach Iran, with capabilities that we did not even use this time, and hit extremely hard both the capabilities and the places that we spared this time.” He said the reason Israel held back when it struck Iranian missile factories and other sites on Saturday was because “we may be required to do it again.”
“We didn’t finish this event, we are right in the middle of it,” he added, clearly implying that Israel might not wait for an Iranian retaliation before striking again.
There is, not surprisingly, mirror image thinking in Iran. “In the coming days, you will see more crushing blows awaiting the Zionist regime and new measures and initiatives to take it by surprise,” IRGC’s Deputy Commander for Coordination Affairs Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naghdi said yesterday, reported Iran’s Mehr News. He added that the Israelis “will face bigger defeats.”
Back in Washington, neocon warmongers and pro-Ukraine advocates Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet, who “served 30 years as an Army intelligence officer,” and Mark Toth, who “writes on national security and foreign policy,” issued an open call for Israel to finish off Iran.
They begin, in a column published in The Hill, by reporting that Israel’s recent strike against Iran was only “strategic messaging:” they knocked out important components of “Iran’s air-defense network and associated radars, military bases, drone facilities and solid-fuel manufacturing plants for ballistic missiles… Early-warning radar sites along the Iranian border, as well as in Syria and Iraq, together with S-300/400 air-defense systems protecting military bases throughout Iran, were destroyed—providing air avenues of approach for follow-on attacks.”
And then with a sigh of regret: “Missing were strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, oil production facilities, critical infrastructure and the Iranian leadership.” However, this was a “demonstration of Israeli capability with the option to exploit vulnerabilities later—after the American election on Nov. 5… Israel needs a sustained air campaign to set conditions for the defeat of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Otherwise, this becomes another `forever war’ established on the Biden watch. Left unchecked, Iran will simply find a new proxy to continue its war against Israel… Israel’s nightmare ends when the Islamic Republic of Iran is defeated, not through some sort of de-escalation fairy tale the White House is attempting to conjure…
“Friday’s airstrikes were likely just a beginning. Israel is setting conditions for that possibility by isolating the Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s mullahs from the Iranian Army and the Iranian people. The first step was to defeat Iran’s integrated air-defense network. Israel is one step closer to removing the head from the Iranian hydra.”
And here is their proposal for Iran: “In the shadows, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi—the son of the last Shah of Iran—is prepared to lead a transitional Iranian government after a 45-year absence. While not a perfect course of action, it is better than the current alternative.”
