Epic Fury Turned Epic Debacle

Regime Change takes the back seat

Operation Epic Fury would be almost a month old, when these words go into print. The operation started with the most startling decapitation strike ever recorded in recent human history. The coup attempt by a foreign government or governments was complete on the count that precise information was made available to them , as to when and where to hit.

Accounts of the air strike talk of an operation window of 15 minutes or so, when the IDF and USAF jets were intimated that the key assured target for the regime decapitation and consequent regime change, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was just round the corner at his home-cum-office with his key commanders to be hit precisely.

Going forward the next few weeks might see the end of the Iranian resistance to the IDF plans or the other way round, when the ground operations might commence. However, as for the damage done to the US economy by the President, not even the ghosts of Kindleberger or Keynes can correct the structural contradictions created in an excess of over-confidence

The operation was designed in a manner that as soon as the news of Khamenei death spread, which in a city did not need smart phones, rather word of mouth, it would be all over. In all probability, the people of Tehran and other major cities must have known by noon that the Supreme Leader was no more and the system was actually on autopilot.

Despite a silence among the Nezam figures and no reaction from the USA and Israel, it was understood that something big had happened. That was precisely the time which Trump gave to the disgruntled Iranians to make the move; regime change!

The plan of action for the men on the ground, necessary for any coup to succeed, was likely the second step. However, that second step never materialized. What materialized was the reaction of the people holding the Nezam dear to their hearts and the so-called silent majority of disgruntled Iranians was nowhere to be seen; taking control of the streets, the way their parents did in the final days leading to the Islamic Revolution in February 1979, when they neutralized a US-backed government’s curfew orders on 11 February 1979. 

War correspondents familiar with the happenings on 9 April 2003 in Iraq can vouch that as soon as the man on the street sensed that Saddam had vanished into the crowd and the Baath Party too had called it a day, they without fear took to streets holding pictures of divine religious figures as well as a prominent religious figure linked with the Sadr movement in Iraq. Precisely nothing of that sort happened.

As things stand for the Iranian leadership, and the US and Israeli civil and military leadership, regime change is the thing of the past. The reasons being that the so-called advantage the intervening powers might have had, like in the 1953 coup against Mossadeq, was not there. Instead of the people opposed to the Supreme Leader filling the streets, the streets were filled up by those people who were concerned about his well-being. Once the morning after his passing away was confirmed, the same crowd opted to sit in a sort of vigil to what they might have foreseen, to safeguard the system they held close to their heart.

Fast forward to what has been accrued by the powers which started the offensive. As we observe the gradual capitulation of the Muslim world to the Abraham Accords had been going on, when the incumbent US President was first elected. He initiated events, where most of the Persian Gulf states opted to be part of the Accord and consequently they gave access to the Jewish state as well as the USA to their economies and societies.

It may be pointed out that many of the states, having not much to offer in terms of knowledge economy and human resource, offered themselves as a secondary hub of world financial markets; as happened in the case of Bahrain and UAE; and a few cultivated themselves as safe military cantonments for the USA, practically planning from those days in the 1980s, for the wars, not knowing that they would be caught in the crossfire.
The Udaid airbase, the US fleet HQ in Bahrain and the other installations related to electronic warfare, are in fact part of the paradigm, where the Gulf states allowed the space for the market economy linked to the capitalist world, and the Pentagon allowed setting up of the basis of the security umbrella. 

In the backdrop of these developments, it has been only Saudi Arabia, which apparently stayed away from the Abraham Accord and Turkey, which had similar reasons to be tight-lipped in the context of the Accord. It has been Iran which led a resistance crescent which was not sold on the idea of the Abraham Accord, which was nothing but a complete surrender to the Zionist entity in the eyes of the resistance leadership.

Now imagine the scene, when there is supposed to be utter confusion in the Iranian capital; the regime as per the intelligence estimates is about to fall. However, what follows is to the contrary. Barrages of drones and warheads of multiple configurations start raining down on either the Israeli mainland and also to the infrastructure erected by the USA in these gulf states with a simulated scenario that Iran or for that matter any entity opposed to the Abraham accords will fall into the lap like a ripe apple. 

Regretfully for the USA and Israel, that did not happen. The mixed barrage of drones and warheads in their initial waves damaged much of the electronic warfare equipment in place in these Sheikhdoms and apart from that damaged much of the ‘serene’ and ‘secure’ profile of these states. The desperate acts of securing investments by the UAE government a few weeks into the conflict speaks more than any other entity’s statement and assessment. The flight of capital was caused singularly on the count that the image these sheikdoms created for themselves painstakingly for decades and to secure the same aligned with any rising and ascending power, the most recent case the Israeli state on the back of the Abraham Accords, was gone in one direct hit from a much cheaper Iranian drone or warhead.

Practically the asymmetrical warfare tactics developed by the renowned IRGC commander ‘Sardar Mohammad Ali Jafari’ were put to action and display in this conflict. The swarms of warheads like a swarm of bees deconstructed the whole paradigm in the matter of days.

With the serenity of the Gulf gone for any investment, the closure and management of the policed Strait of Hormuz by the IRGC and the collection of toll by an entity which has been painstakingly designated as a ‘terrorist organization’ by the USA, the EU and anyone following the US dictates covertly or overtly, is nothing short of a nightmare for the USA, and it is here that one can conclude that the epic fury has in fact changed into an epic debacle.

For the students of economics, the acceptability of a currency as a bill of exchange determines its importance. Given the fact that all the oil which passes through the IRGC safety net, the dues are paid in Chinese Yen; is nothing short of a death knell for the dollar.

Given that there are endless sorties of KC-135, F-35, F-15 planes and an assortment of military hardware is in the skies of Iran and Middle East, the cost accrued and the inflating internal deficit financing for the US fiscal budget can be well imagined. That situation was faced last time after the Iraq war, which precipitated an anti-war vote, which was instrumental in the ascent of Obama on the US political scene, not to ignore the MAGA slogan of Trump himself, which seems to have misfired terribly. 

Even if the reformists in Iran come to the rescue of the western capitalist system on the back of their obsession with JCPOA, the garden of Eden, created by the capitalist world in the Gulf, is unlikely to be revived to the same glory.

Going forward the next few weeks might see the end of the Iranian resistance to the IDF plans or the other way round, when the ground operations might commence. However, as for the damage done to the US economy by the President, not even the ghosts of Kindleberger or Keynes can correct the structural contradictions created in an excess of over-confidence.