Sun Tzu smiles
From the American Thinker Website
June 15, 2025
Peering Through the Fog of War
By Clarice Feldman
In wartime, it’s particularly difficult to ascertain what’s happening. Governments have a natural and healthy instinct to hide from public eyes what is going on, even those fully democratic ones that in peace have some constraints on official censorship. Nevertheless, the fact that so many people around the world have video-capable mobile phones and access to the internet makes it harder to hide what is happening.
All week long I’ve been looking at these videos, reading official IDF reports and statements by leaders of involved countries, and they show that Stacey McCain and Lee Smith, whose takes I link to below, are in full accord with what I’ve seen. The Israelis pulled off the most astonishing, most brilliant offensive in modern military history; the President orchestrated a genius misdirection allowing the Israelis to cap off 20 years preparation for this attack; Iran’s regime is on its back feet from which it will not recover; Israel has saved the world with the assistance of a number of Arab countries and the U.S.; Britain under Keir Starmer has earned the disregard of the western world and was prudently left entirely out of advance knowledge of the attacks. Obama and Biden’s loony foreign policy gave the mullahs an almost two-decade opportunity to build their nuclear capacity, which Israel, with Trump’s assistance, has destroyed. Finally, the war will continue for about a week or two, but I, at least, have no doubt about the outcome -- the end of the Mullahcracy.
Misdirection
Ido Hilbany wrote of the brilliant misdirection campaign Trump orchestrated with Netanyahu, which allowed Israel to get into position if, as was certain, the mullahs would dither in negotiations to end their nuclear enrichment program.
THE ART OF THE MISDIRECT:
I know some people are so broken they will never be able to muster a compliment for Trump, but the level of misdirection and coordination with Israel on this Iran attack was brilliant. Trump used his public platforms to lull Iran into complacency while privately coordinating with Israel. Trump and Netanyahu went so far as to meet privately this week to finalize things while publicly both leaking that Trump was urging restraint.
The problem here for the press corps is that so many of them hate Trump so much, they cannot nuance the cleverness of this. They must either approach it as Trump is a failure who even Israel does not respect or Trump is a liar who lied to everyone to get Iran.
The reality is everyone honest knows Iran has always been the liar, claiming it had no nuclear ambitions even as it plotted a bomb. The Obama/Biden policies helped Iran, which embedded agents within the Biden Administration. And Trump has turned the tables on it all, including probably taking advantage of Iran’s embedded agents to amplify his misdirection.
And now Iran has been set back significantly and the world is safer today.
But scream about Orange Man Bad if you must. The press corps that does not deal with the truth of what happened is just going to further discredit itself. They couldn’t detect Biden’s decline and cannot accept Trump’s calculated misdirection.
It’s amazing what allies can accomplish when they actually act like allies.
He played a straight course between those in his party who wanted the U.S. to militarily intervene and those who said we should have nothing to do with this. He let Steve Witkoff play at allowing the Iranian regime to do its usual dithering while he said on April 11 that they had 60 days to end the enhancement program. Doubtless, they thought they were dealing with the Obama/Biden-type vanishing red line. They weren’t. On the 61st day, Israel struck.
Lee Smith has been a longtime critic of America’s Middle East policies. This week, he thinks Trump finally got it right:
At last, an American president kept his word. He was very clear about it even before his second term started: Iran can’t have a bomb. Trump wanted it to go peacefully, but he warned that if the Iranians didn’t agree to dismantle their program entirely, they’d be bombed. Maybe Israel would do it, maybe the United States, maybe both, but in any case, they’d be bombed. Trump gave them 60 days to decide, and on day 61, Israel unleashed Operation Rising Lion.
Until this morning, when Trump posted on Truth Social to take credit for the raid, there was some confusion about the administration’s involvement. As the operation began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio released a statement claiming that it was solely an Israeli show without any American participation. But even if details about intelligence sharing and other aspects of Israeli-U.S. coordination were hazy, the statement was obviously misleading: The entire operation was keyed to Trump. Without him, the attack wouldn’t have happened as it did, or maybe not at all.
Trump spent two months neutralizing the Iranians without them realizing he was drawing them into the briar patch. Iranian diplomats pride themselves on their negotiating skills. Generations of U.S. diplomats have marveled at the Iranians’ ability to wipe the floor with them: It’s a cultural thing -- ever try to bargain with a carpet merchant in Tehran? And Trump also praised them repeatedly for their talents -- very good negotiators! The Iranians were in their sweet spot and must have imagined they could negotiate until Trump gave in to their demands or left office. But Trump was the trickster. He tied them down for two months, time that he gave to the Israelis to make sure they had everything in order.
Has Operation Rising Lion enhanced America’s peace? If it ends Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, the answer is absolutely yes. When American partners advance U.S. interests, it adds luster to American glory.
There’s already lots of talk about Trump’s deception campaign, and in the days and weeks to come, we’ll have more insight into which statements were real and which were faked and which journalists were used, without them knowing it, to print fake news to ensure the operation’s success. One Tablet colleague says it’s the most impressive operational feint since the Normandy invasion. [snip] It’s now clear that the insanely dense communications environment -- including foreign actors like the Iranians themselves, anti-Bibi Israeli journalists, the Gulf states, and the Europeans -- served the purpose of the deception campaign. But most significant was the domestic component. Did the Iranians believe reports that the pro-Israel camp was losing influence with Trump and that the “restraintists” were on the rise? Did Iran lobbyist Trita Parsi tell officials in Tehran that his colleagues from the Quincy Institute and other Koch-funded policy experts who were working in the administration had it in the bag? Don’t worry about the neocons -- my guys are steering things in a good way. It seems that, like the Iranians, the Koch network got caught in its own echo chamber.
The Brilliant Israeli Military Campaign
Stacy McCain described what I saw: a brilliant military campaign by Israel. He compared what we saw to Michael Corleone’s elimination of rival Mafia heads.
Can you imagine the kind of long-term surveillance and planning that went into this operation? Like, figuring out where the Iranian air force leaders would meet in an emergency, mapping out the location of that bunker, giving them some kind of signal of an impending attack, then watching them scurry to their bunker and -- WHAM! -- you took out the leadership at the outset of the campaign, so “that there was nobody to give the order” for the Iranian counter-attack. Meanwhile, you’ve got Mossad spies sneaking around all over Iran, ready to play their part in wrecking the enemy’s air defenses, so that the Israeli Air Force can fly in without danger of getting shot down.
One standard deviation -- it’s a lethal advantage.
He detailed some of the campaign:
As it became clear Israel was about to attack, the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ air force convened in a bunker to coordinate the response.
But Israel knew that emergency protocol, and the location of the bunker. They destroyed it, killing the overall commander and the heads of the drone and air defense forces. “The fact that there was nobody to give the order neutralized an immediate Iranian response,” an Israeli official said.
They were among the more than two dozen Iranian commanders targeted in a sprawling attack on Iran’s military command-and-control. The heads of the IRGC, the Iranian military, and Iran’s emergency military headquarters were all eliminated in the opening salvo.
Another key target was Iran’s air defense systems and radars. Israeli intelligence mapped their locations, and most were hit by the Israeli Air Force in the opening strike. That gave the IDF virtually unchallenged freedom of operation in Iran’s skies.
Meanwhile on the ground, Israel’s Mossad spy agency was conducting a series of covert sabotage operations deep inside Iran to take out air defenses and ballistic missile launchers...
In central Iran, Mossad commando units had positioned guided weapons systems in open areas near Iranian surface-to-air missile launchers.
In another area inside Iran, Mossad covertly deployed weapon systems and sophisticated technologies hidden in vehicles. When the Israeli attack began, these weapons were launched and destroyed Iranian air defense targets.
Iran Stood Alone
It helps that Iran really has no friends that matter.
The coordination went deeper, though. While it is unlikely that Arab nations in the region knew the time and scope of Israeli attacks, they were all prepared to help Israel beat back any Iranian counterstrike, and they did. While many of them are making noises about how unhappy they are regarding the Israeli attacks on Iran, they are also helping Israel defend itself against retaliation.
So far, around 100 Iranian drones have been launched against Israel, and none have hit anything important.
If your knowledge of the Middle East comes from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, or one of many loony U.S. universities, you may be astonished to realize how hated Iran’s regime is.
“Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates allowed Israel to use their airspace and/or defended Israel against Iranian drone attacks last night. That also suggests Russia was likely OK with the Israeli strike and China at least knew about it.” Apparently, left in the dark was onetime ally Great Britain.
One of the architects of Obama’s disastrous policy on Iran reared his head, Ben Rhodes. The Great Iowahawk (David Burge) shot it off:
@Iowahawkblog
“No matter how absurd and lunatic the White House inner circle is right now, it will never top assigning a failed creative writing grad student and campaign van drivers [sic] -- to concoct a strategy of appeasing Iran with a billion dollar airdrop of $100 bills.”
Iowahawk did, however, find some joy in this because some of this money went to Hezb’allah and was used by them to buy pagers which the Israelis had tricked out to blow up their private parts.
By week’s end, numbers of Europeans who share a never-ending delusion that the Middle East is just like us marched, drove, and flew to Egypt expecting to be allowed to breach the border into Gaza to stand with Hamas. They were beaten up by Egyptian police and civilians and tossed out bodily, left in shock and tears. You must see this video of one of them on his knees to a group of Egyptians enforcing the border with Gaza as they roll their eyes at his stupid entreaty that all Islamic believers should stick together.
Israel now so completely controls the skies over Iran that, reportedly, it is refueling over Tehran. The IRGC is so weakened that its officers are not reporting and are being threatened with treason for not showing up. Elon Musk has activated Starlink over Iran so that civilians can more easily transmit outside the country after what’s left of the government shut down internet access. I’ve seen videos of Iranians dancing in the streets, apparently no longer fearful of recriminations. Finally, there are reports of private airplanes ferrying out what’s left of the regime elsewhere, perhaps to Russia, where they can play backgammon with Assad, who also fled there from Syria earlier.
Related Topics: Israel, Iran, Trump, Middle East, Military
