Clarity After Iran Strike, as Israel Tries to Pivot to Nuclear Arc

Two days out from Iran’s seminal strike on Israel and some things are being clarified.

All the early claims of having shot everything down were slowly retracted, with more realistic headlines taking their place as testament to the confusion behind the scenes.

Iranian missiles were able to overcome Israel's multi-layered air defense, writes the magazine "Der Spiegel". The publication notes that this time the missile attack was significantly more successful than the previous one in April, when Israel and its allies still managed to intercept 99 percent of Iranian missiles and drones. "They probably learned from the April attacks and chose ballistic missiles this time," says military expert Fabian Hinz of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Videos like this one are hard to deny—watch the end to see major explosions at the site of whatever was hit:

Alleged to be outside of Nevatim base:

We’ve finally got some BDAs of the hits, though they do present uncertainty as to Iran’s true objectives.

Here’s a news report confirming one of the missiles landed outside the Mossad HQ:

But was it a miss, or a deliberate “message” sent?

There are two camps now: one claiming Iran cannot hit anything, the other that Iran deliberately avoided causing too much damage. There is some evidence for both.

Trump just released an interview where he confirmed—if he can be trusted—that Iran had previously told him in advance they would hit US assets during his term, but intentionally not cause any damage merely as a show of force—listen carefully:

This is quite normal in international relations.

But listen specifically to the last part of the video where Trump himself admits the missiles are “very accurate” but everyone in the media was shocked they missed—why would Iran’s “accurate missiles” miss an easy, fat target like the US base in question?

This gives us insight into Iran’s SOP, and we can thereby infer that Iran may have treated the present Israeli strike in a similar fashion. A hit near the Mossad HQ could merely be a message.

Now we have satellite BDAs of Nevatim base.

One hangar was hit which, in a previous satellite photo, had the tail of what looks like a fighter craft sticking out of it:

However, other hits appeared all over the place.

The area of the base hit was the “transport, tanker, surveillance, and recon” area, reportedly housing the 122nd Nachshon Squadron (EW/signals), not the fighter jet area where the famed F-35s are usually housed.

The area of the struck hangar is at the southeast portion of the image below:

Experts later identified 32 strike points from a wider 3m satellite view:

However, we do not seem to have satellite photos for the other sections in detail yet, nor for the other air bases potentially struck, the Hatzerim and Tel Nof airbases.

What’s most interesting is there was a brief controversy yesterday surrounding some jagged digital clouds apparently being ‘painted’ over Israeli bases, blocking the ability to assess damage. This was dismissed by experts as just ‘clouds’—though strangely this rarely seems to happen in Ukraine—but most strange of all was that both penetrated bases apparently had this cloudy ‘luck’:

As reminder, the US apparently restricts satellite images of Israel, as previously confirmed by NPR—so it’s very difficult to get accurate post-mortem shots:

Personally, I have a theory as to why there appear some accurate hits with others that seem merely ‘random’. From the characteristics of the missiles we saw, there appeared to be many different kinds of missiles fired. For instance, some clearly came down extremely fast, at near hypersonic speeds, as I highlighted last time, while many others appear to come down at fairly middling speeds.

It’s likely that what Iran is doing, is saturating the airspace with a bunch of their lower tier older missiles, ones which do not have much accuracy and are cheap in cost, while there are a lesser number of the more advanced hypersonic ones with better guidance capabilities which are used to ride that saturation “cloud” to the target. Thus, the type of BDA result visible would be a bunch of random hits in a wide dispersion field with a few accurate ones amongst them, courtesy of the main weapon—which could be the Emad or Fattah-2, etc.

As to the question, brought up by many last time, whether Iran truly notified everyone in advance of the strikes, here is Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi:

So, according to him, Iran warned the US after it had launched the missiles.

The truth is, we know for a fact that US and Israel had already expected the strikes as articles literally came out several hours prior, stating that Iran may be gearing up for strikes. This would likely have been known by US/Israel’s satellite surveillance seeing Iran setup the necessary equipment in its base outside of Shiraz—images I have seen.

Thus, knowing an attack was imminent, even if Araghchi’s words are true, Israel and the US would have about 10-15 minutes to make necessary last minute movements, like scrambling F-35s to the sky, etc., as that’s how long the missiles would take to reach Israel. In short, we can confidently say that Israel had at least a decent amount of advance warning. This is a way for Iran to diplomatically save face by being able to say they did not really give anyone warning, since it technically came after the launch, but it was given in practice. Another way this is done is by Iran overtly using known launch sites. If Iran wanted to truly carry out a devastating surprise attack, it would probably preposition launchers in remote areas that US satellites do not have overwatch on. Thus, this is still all part of the theater I spoke of last time, the subtle dance between both sides.

The other interesting thing was that certain contradictions within Iranian ruling elite were brought to the fore by the latest strikes. NY Times initially reported that new president Masoud Pezeshkian was not even informed of the decision to strike:

While in another article they claimed it was the IRGC command itself that pleaded with the Supreme Leader to strike, their pressure ultimately winning out:

A senior aide to Mr. Pezeshkian said in a telephone interview before the missile attack that whatever the president’s private reservations about war with Israel, he would publicly support any decision Mr. Khamenei made — as he did on Tuesday.

Iran’s shift in strategy, officials said, stemmed from a reckoning among its leaders, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

They decided that Iran had miscalculated by not responding to the killing of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in July, and the more recent killing of the top Iranian commander, Gen. Abbas Nilforoushan.

—

Bonus video of IRGC preparing their Operation True Promise 2, with what looks to me like Emad missiles visible:

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But now things get interesting.

Israel has claimed it would initiate a major counter-response before suddenly walking back its threats out of fear:

'Israel is considering striking Iranian assets in Yemen or Syria, instead of striking Iran directly', says a U.S. Official – Politico

Lebanon is not on the list, as it seems.

PS: Today's Isreali Strike on apparent buildings in Beirut, targeting a female Hezbollah MP, with appr. 100 dead civilians was supposedly conducted via Israel's sea-born fleet .... nobody knows why NO air-born F-35 or F-15 or F-16 have been used.

Last night, Iranian assets were allegedly struck in Jableh outside Khmeimim—it’s uncertain if that’s meant to be the ‘response’, or one of them. Fake news reports claimed Israel had struck Russia’s Khmeimim base itself, but geolocations showed that to not be the case.

However, other sources continue to imply that behind the scenes Israel and the US are conspiring for something bigger:

You see, it’s a little confusing because on the surface MSM is painting the Biden administration as being totally spurned by outlaw Israel:

But while that’s true on the surface, other factions inside the deep state appear to be working in close coordination with Israel on all ongoing plans and actions:

Everyone knows there are competing factions within the US government, which is why the State Department had witnessed a surge of resignations this year over the Biden team’s support of Israel. However, Brian Berletic outlined the other likely explanation for these seemingly incoherent discrepancies. On one hand, Biden reiterated he would not support Israeli strikes, which need to be “proportional”, he says:

But on the other, Berletic quotes the 2009 Brookings paper entitled "Which Path to Persia?", which outlines a strategy of “maintaining plausible deniability while, in fact, attacking Iran including its nuclear sites.”

In essence, it’s the same old CIA and intelligence agency tactic.

Now Trump has joined in blaming Iran even for his own close encounters. In this case he’s clearly acting as ventriloquist puppet, with ‘someone’ speaking through his mouth in order to again divert America’s military onto a false target, just like in the wake of 9/11:

In fact, just today investigative journalist Lee Smith unleashed a report describing how the FBI set up the fake Iranian story to divert attention away from the true source behind Trump’s would-be assassins.

It’s obvious that a pro-Zionist faction of the deep state in the US government is working in tandem with Mossad to set Iran up as the fall guy one way or another. Whether they get the Democrats to attack Iran, or they take out Trump and blame it on Iran in order to whip up a military campaign of performative vengeance.

All across social and regime media voices are now calling to cripple Iran’s nuclear program, to the delight of Israel. It’s gotten so perverse that even neocons from the Iraq War are rehashing their same old spiel to an ignorant new generation:

Andre Damon writes:

In 2003, Bret Stephens lied that "Saddam may unveil, to an astonished world, the Arab world’s first nuclear bomb." Today, he says "Iran was within a week or two of being able to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb." Twenty years on, it's the same script.

Even as of this writing, FP released their own call for war:

It quotes the now widespread MSM marching banner that Iran is only a fortnight away from The Bomb:

Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. The country’s breakout time to a bomb is down to one to two weeks. There is no new nuclear deal in the cards. Hamas and Hezbollah are in no position to retaliate. And the Islamic Republic just asked for it. In fact, this may be the last best chance to keep Tehran from the bomb.

What’s obvious is that Israel is pushing all its neocon puppets to make the most out of its ongoing disastrous maelstrom of unprovoked attacks on neighboring countries. Israel will settle for any kind of ‘victory’, which can be defined as whatever buys it civilizational time against its enemies. Taking out Iran’s nuclear program would be ‘worth’ the price of slaughter and their likely soon-to-fail Lebanese campaign.

Well, we can certainly see why Israel would be paranoid—after the latest strikes it’s clear that the combined West’s air defenses stand no chance against a ballistic missile saturation attack of the Iranian variety. The only real question is one of accuracy—but if Iran were to get a nuclear weapon, accuracy wouldn’t much matter. At that point, Israel would be held at the long point of an existential gun for all time.

Israel Lebanon map (CNN screenshot)

As for that new Lebanese campaign, ISW and other sources claim the IDF has made marginal advances into southern Lebanon in a pincer-like motion from Upper Galilee and the northeastern Galilee Panhandle region:

Here’s a clearer and more detailed write up, with exact unit names, positions, etc.

However there have already been reports of big losses for the IDF in ambushes.

It’s not looking good so far, with photos claiming to show knocked out Merkavas and Hezbollah’s claims that dozens of IDF have already been eliminated with hardly any territory captured. At this pace, Israel will understandably need to ‘divert’ again to a big US-led strike campaign against Iran to paste over and memory-hole what may turn out to be another huge failure in Lebanon.

As a last pertinent update, on the heels of Iran’s strikes, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan met with Iran’s president in Doha, Qatar in a symbolic opening of a new chapter of rapprochement:

Something tells me this isn’t the “new Middle East” Netanyahu wants: Just a day after Iran’s missile attack, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister meets with Iran’s president, declaring that Saudi Arabia wants to “permanently close the chapter on our differences.”

On the occasion, Arnaud Bertrand writes:

I found the exact quotes (https://english.news.cn/20241003/9ed1ef8a2572491abca18736bce8f761/c.html…): on top of Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister telling Iran’s president that he wanted to "permanently close the chapter on our differences", he also called Iran's strikes on Israel "retaliatory attacks" (meaning they were justified) and said Saudi Arabia "trusted Iran's wisdom and discernment in managing the situation and contributing to the restoration of calm and peace in the region".

Underscoring the historic meeting, the foreign minister wrote an OpEd for FT, highlighting Saudi Arabia’s commitment to establishing an independent Palestinian state, with its capital in East Jerusalem, and no diplomatic relations with Israel until such time:

So, snubbing Israel while meeting with Iran’s president under the proclamation of “permanently [closing] the chapter on our differences”.

It seems the last remaining silver linings are quickly turning to lead for Israel.

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