Matein Khalid
Operation Midnight Hammer was a spectacular military success though it will take 60 years more for the top secret CIA files on Trump’s rendezvous with history at Fordo to be declassified even though I hope Centcom and the Pentagon generals will release their BDA (Battle Damage Assessments) in the next two weeks to reinforce their claim that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear assets beneath the mountain in Fordo have been “totally obliterated”.
125 American military aircraft in the skies above the Persian desert near Qum, the citadel of the Ayatollahs, have now changed the destiny of Iran and the Middle East forever? These aircrafts included the B-2 stealth bombers, F-22/F-35 fighter jets and 30 air refueling tankers. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance planes that roamed over Iran’s most sensitive airspace but the regime was unable to launch even a single ground to air missile at the USAF aerial armada.
In Texas slang that George W. Bush would have grasped, this was not a knife fight but a hightech duck shoot. We can only hope that a secular, democratic, liberal Iran that makes peace with all its neighbours emerges from the collapse of the mullah regime but after 46 long years since the fall of the Shah’s Peacock Throne, the unknown unknowns at this stage are far too great to make any definitive conclusions.
I doubt if the mullahs will mine the Straits of Hormuz since that would mean immediate devastating retaliation from Centcom’s assets in the Gulf. In any case, the embattled Iranian regime is desperate for cash, imports all its food via container shipping via the Straits and is in no position to alienate its only major client – China. The PRC lifts 1.7 million barrels a day (MBD) of Iranian crude exports from Kharg Island and Tehran has recently built up its floating inventory to above 8-MBD off Singapore in order to ensure that exports to the port refineries of the Shandong Peninsula are not interrupted.
The Iranian regime also needs the support of Gulf Arab oil exporters now that Putin has done squat to help it survive and Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir has nominated President Trump for a Nobel Peace prize after a White House lunch that included a halal goat cheese gateau and a Turkey burger (waddi-waddi chaati wala, Amriki murga Sirji), delicacies somewhat unknown in dhabas of Toba Tek Singh.
Brent is at 76 and gold is flat at 3355, so the financial markets have discounted Trump’s escalation, which even I had predicted in a post last week after I heard that squadrons of air refueling tankers were moving to the Gulf as were aircraft carriers like the USS Chester Nimitz, the USS Carl Vinson and USS Gerald Ford. That meant only one thing to me, Trump had already made the biggest strategic decision of his life. So how come the Iranian air defense was pathetic to non-existent when the open source intel data points all suggested that a massive US strike was imminent this weekend? The conclusion is obvious. The Israelis have gutted Iran’s air defenses and missile launch capabilities after literally months of bombing since last October.
The regime’s top generals in the Pasdaran, Basij or Missile Force can no longer command or control an armed response for the simple reason that they are all now dead, killed by the IDF. For the sake of the Middle East and its own people, let us all hope that the mullah regime now choses peace rather than the tragedy that Trump has promised if Tehran does not take the path of unconditional surrender. What a pity, what a world!
Also published on Medium.
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