The plan to attack Iran, force regime change in Teheran, decapitate and disarm Iranian forces, and partition the country into ethnic autonomies is nothing new.  

In August 1941 British and empire forces (Indian, Australian) acted in coordination with Soviet forces to occupy the country, ostensibly to prevent the Shah of Iran from allowing German forces to seize Iranian oilfields and attack the land corridor from the Persian Gulf northwards across the country and into the Soviet Union through which US Lend-Lease aid for the war effort was being transported. At the time, with British air superiority in the south and Soviet air superiority in the north, the regime in Teheran had no choice but to capitulate.

By November 1943, when Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met together in Teheran (left image below), Stalin already knew the British were aiming to monopolize Iranian oil supplies for themselves, and with the Americans were “creat[ing] a real threat to the interests of our country if we do not take timely countermeasures.”  – Page 71. Stalin’s reaction was first to test Iran’s parliamentary leadership for signing an oil concession agreement. When the Iranians rejected that, Stalin ordered a Red Army-backed secession movement for an independent Azeri statelet based in Tabriz. He abandoned this scheme at the end of March 1946.

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Source: Dances with Bears

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A recent anti-Soviet history of the episode claims Stalin retreated because he was afraid of direct conflict with the US, which was then planning atom bomb attacks on the Soviet Union. Also, Stalin “underestimated his Iranian opponents who ultimately left him out in the cold”.

Between 1982 and 1988 the collective Soviet leadership faced a similar problem from the hostile regime in Teheran led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; he called the Kremlin the “lesser Satan” after the “Great Satan” (US) and “Little Satan” (Israel). Khomeini implemented his hyperbole by threatening the Soviet Islamic republics, as well as the Red Army in Afghanistan. The Politburo retaliated by arming Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein sufficiently well to preserve his regime from being toppled by Khomeini’s counter-invasion; this followed after the failure of  Soviet efforts to dissuade Hussein from starting his war against Iran, and then to maintain  neutrality between the two sides.

This week the evidence is mounting of a US plan to attack Iran, using Israeli forces in the air and on the ground, plus German, British, and other NATO logistic assets. The public cause of war has been repeated by President Donald Trump (right image above) – to destroy Iran’s nuclear enrichment, weaponization, and ballistic missile capabilities.

“Look, Iran should have signed sign the deal,” Trump said on Monday at the G7 summit conference in Canada. ”Something’s going to happen…[Question: President, do you want to see regime change in Iran?] I want to see no nuclear weapon in Iran and we’re well on our way to making sure that happens….”

Operationally, however, repeated missions by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) since last Friday (June 13) have failed to do this. US and Russian sources have been reporting that only US B-2 and B-52 bombers, currently based in Qatar  and Diego Garcia and armed with GBU-57A/B MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator) bombs can achieve this result.

Such an operation, in combination with other IAF raids on Iranian defences, missile stocks and firing platforms, requires intensive and coordinated US, Israeli and allied intelligence, plus a large fleet of aerial refuelling tankers based in Cyprus and other close-in staging points.

This operation, US and Russian sources believe, is the reason Trump abruptly cancelled his G7 meetings and returned to the White House Situation Room.

“As soon as I leave here, we’re going to be doing something. But I have to leave here.”

Censorship, deception operations, and propaganda screens make it difficult to judge how much time, weapons stocks, and effective air defences the Israeli and Iranian forces have on the fourth day of the war. In this US-produced video summary, the conclusion (watch below) is that the IAF has failed to achieve air superiority over Iran, except for the west border regions; and that therefore the risk to a US bombing operation over central Iran continues to be much higher than has been revealed in public.

The film also claims that if Iran can protract its drone and missile barrages for several more days,  accelerating the tempo and adding new types of weapons, it will exhaust Israel’s air defence missile stocks and its inventory of air and ground attack weapons.

“It seems that Iran can sustain the missile salvos for a longer period than Israel can maintain operational and non-depleted missile defence systems…time appears to be on the Iranian side despite the constant strikes deep inside the country conducted by in-situ covert sabotage drones and missiles.”   Min 12:45

If this is accurate, Trump is under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hurry up; and Russian President Vladimir Putin knows it.

“The United States still needs some time”, Boris Rozhin reports for the Russian military blog Colonel Cassad in Moscow, “to gather in the theatre all the required ships, tankers and bombers…And so there has been talk of ‘another chance’, ‘send Witkoff’, etc. But then Iran will again be offered to abandon its nuclear program and missiles which Iran cannot accept. At the same time, if it was only about nuclear weapons, Iran was always ready to refuse them in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. But this isn’t about nuclear weapons – it is the desire to change the regime in Teheran.”  — June 17, 06:41.

“If Israel could have handled Iran itself, the launch of this scenario would not be required. But it is required primarily for Israel, because it was not possible to crush Iran quickly. Iran began to recover from the strikes and reorganize under a long-term war, which is like death for Israel… There is every reason to believe that in a fairly short time Israel will face a shortage of high-precision weapons. The forecast – they will be able to maintain the pace of blows for several tens of days, but not more than a hundred. Further, everything will depend on the political will of the Iranian leadership and the degree of its control over the population. At the cost of supertension and disproportionately high losses, Iran can still win. But it will be very difficult.”   — June 17, 12:21.

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June 16, 6:30 pm ET, June 17,  1:30 am Moscow time (Source)

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