In his wonderful history of Western warfare, Hanson describes the explanations the Zulu warriors gave for them being ripped apart by British artillery; when the shells exploded they released little British soldiers who tore into their ranks. Perhaps we should not be too condescending, given the lack of scientific knowledge of the Zulus at the time their explanation is no more silly than ancient Greeks (and more modern Westerners) talking about planets and stars stuck in rotating crystal spheres; the Zulus were trying to make sense of something they had never seen, and there was even an attempt at rational deduction that did not invoke magic, gods, demons or other spirits.

Less excuse can be made about part of what an Iranian cleric, Mostafa Karami, said on Iranian TV this past weekend:

Considering the Zionists’ history of subjugating genies, they carry out many of their missions through this means, and demons are their secret army.

No wonder the Israelis have so comprehensively fucked over the command, intelligence and counter-intelligence systems of Hezbollah and their Iranian masters, between the pager attacks on thousands of Hezbollah operatives to killing its leader, Nasrallah, in an airstrike on one of his underground bunkers in Beirut.

The question is whether Iran’s nuclear program is next? Former Trump advisor and one of the two men driving the Abraham Accords, Jared Kushner, seemed to hint at this the other day:

Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong. There is no going back for Israel. They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance.

All of their enemies are on the back foot and the USA leadership is a vacuum of senility and electioneering while the EU is focused on Ukraine. There’s also this:

Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an interview with CNN Turkey said that Iran’s secret services had created a special unit to combat Mossad operating in Iran. However, turns out the head of this unit was himself a Mossad agent, along with 20 other agents, who were responsible for multiple intelligence operations in Iran including stealing nuclear docs and assassinating several Iranian nuclear scientists before allegedly fleeing to Israel.

I’ve posted before that Israel and Iran are in a Cold War, that Iran is steadily approaching a nuclear weapon threshold which they could cross at any moment, and that since they’ve already committed a casus belli with their massive missile and drone attack on Israel it was finally time for Israel to engage in “decisive shock battle” with Iran. Even when I wrote that back in May I felt it was not quite the right timing:

Israel already has enough on its plate. First, it has to focus on wiping out Hamas in Gaza (which this article, Israel Has Chosen The Least Bad Of Bad Alternatives, contrasts with America’s use of atomic bombs to avoid invading Japan). Second is the looming threat of Hezbollah to its north in Lebanon, a foe larger and better armed than Hamas: the common estimate is that Hezbollah has some 150,000 missiles, many of which come from Iran.

But now those battles do not seem quite as pressing, with both Hezbollah and Hamas reeling backwards under the Israeli assault, with the former – seen as the greater threat – losing a lot of those missiles and launchers as well as the men needed to fire them. But equally important is the consideration that Iran’s strategy had been winning up until now, as the WSJ noted:

The clerical elite learned early that they could inflict pain on their adversaries with a measure of impunity if they hid behind their proxies. Their record of achievement is extraordinary…Through all of this mischief, Iran’s territory remained immune from retaliation as its embattled adversaries kept insisting that they could not expand the conflict.

Israel cannot allow the return of that status quo. Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett commented on the Iranian attack at the time:

Israel’s strategic mistake for the past 30 years was to play along this strategy… We always fought the Octopus’ arms, but hardly exacted a price from its Iranian head….This should change now: Hezbollah or Hamas shoots a rocket at Israel? Tehran pays a price.

If he’s thinking that way you can bet many other Israeli leaders including current PM Netanyahu are also, as he hinted the other day in a fiery speech to the UN:

I have a message for the tyrants of Tehran: If you strike us, we will strike you. There is no place—there is no place in Iran—that the long arm of Israel cannot reach.

Is it risky? Very! Especially when it’s unlikely that the Biden-Harris administration would back them.

But leaving Iran’s nuclear weapons programme untouched would enable it to form a protective shelter allowing Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed Jihadist groups to re-group and re-build, so that Iran can wage its proxy wars against Israel with even greater confidence, causing death by a thousand strokes.

Israel fits all of the features of the Western societies described in Carnage and Culture and it should therefore apply the traditional Western military solution, this time to Iran. Seeking decisive shock battle with the Iranian military (and only the military) seems to increasingly be the less risky option.