A Middle Eastern saying goes this way: Those whom God intends to destroy he first renders them mad. If the news that was apparently leaked a few days ago were true, God must have slated not one but two candidates for destruction. This is because the Israelis are not the only ones to ask for it this time; the Azerbaijanis were reported to have joined their madness and have asked for their own destruction.
The story is to the effect that Azerbaijan -- a country that is neighboring Iran -- may allow Israel to use its territory as a base from where to launch an air attack on Iran's nuclear installations. Well, let me tell you something, my friend, nothing could make the Iranian leaders and their military planners happier than this. The attempt will return Israel to the lines of the 1948 UN Mandate and will hand the oil fields of Azerbaijan to Iran. And all this will happen in less than a month.
For Israel to go through with that plan, it will need to transfer between 100 and 150 warplanes to Azerbaijan before the start of the operation. There is no way this can happen without the Iranians detecting it. But even if they did not, they will know the Israelis are there the moment that the first bomb will have hit them. And if they did detect the Israeli buildup in Azerbaijan -- which they will certainly do -- they will not reveal it for a good reason. Let me tell you why by giving a historical example.
When the Egyptians decided to take the Israelis out of the Sinai in 1973, their preoccupation was more Israel's tanks than its air force because only tanks allow an army of occupation to hold territory. Thus, if the Egyptians were going to take the Sinai back, they would have to cross the canal, destroy the Israeli tanks holding it, transfer their own tanks there and make sure that Israel's remaining tank force is destroyed. The problem was that the Israelis had the bulk of their tanks hidden inside fortified bunkers both in the Sinai and in Israel itself. Instead of using their own air force to destroy those bunkers and also engage the Israelis in the air, the Egyptians used a ruse to spare their air force from having to go after the bunkers, and thus be free to fully engage the Israelis in the air.
To do this, they used a double agent to inform the Israelis they were going to attack several hours before they had planned to. The Israelis got their tanks out of their bunkers early; and this gave the Egyptians the opportunity to do a good deal of turkey shoot, which is how they decimated a good part of the Israeli tank force. But wait till you see how they accomplished this exactly.
In the meantime, the Egyptians had managed to shoot down at least one third of Israel's air force which compelled the latter to stop their air attacks. The result has been what history has already recorded. It is that the Israeli commander in chief, Moshe Dayan went berserk while the prime minister, Golda Meyer had readied the poison with which to commit suicide. Lucky for them, the Americans came to the rescue by intervening directly in the war even though President Sadat had said that the Egyptians had no intention to advance to Tel Aviv.
Back to Azerbaijan. There are no fortified bunkers in that country that can house and protect an air force large enough to attack Iran and return to refuel in safety, reequip with bombs and repeat the mission sortie after sortie after sortie. For this reason, the Iranians will let the Israelis transfer all the warplanes they will want to transfer to Azerbaijan then attack to destroy as many of them as possible while they are still on the ground. But if some of the planes will have taken to the air – which they will -- and if the Israelis will have planned to attack Iran both from Azerbaijan and from Israel itself, the Iranians will be ready for them here as well. To see how they will do this, we only need to study what they do now and what they must have learned from history.
What the Iranians do now is rely on their ability to design and manufacture their own weapons. They have learned from the war with Saddam that firepower counts for a great deal; thus, they give the weapons they make massive firepower and they produce them in massive quantities. To be convinced of this, you only need to look at the number of speed boats, rockets and mines they make and deploy on occasions.
The Iranians also learned from the 1973 war that while high tech weapons are better in some situations, low tech weapons can do a better job in other situations. For example, people were saying that neither Egypt's air force nor its giant guns will be able to destroy the Bar Lev line along the Suez Canal because the line was made of reinforced concrete that was flanked by mounds of sand. Because the latter has the property of absorbing and diffusing the energy of exploding bombs and incoming shells, it would be like shooting at the ocean to crack it open. Frankly, the people who said this were correct and the Egyptians knew it too. For this reason, they did not bomb the sand; they used pumps and the water from the Canal to wash it down; it was as simple as that. This done, they blew away the concrete walls as easily as a bulldozer takes down a sand castle. It was bye bye Bar Lev before the sun had risen on that fateful morning.
Another lesson that the Iranians must have learned about the 1973 war is that the Egyptians did not use their tanks initially to engage the Israeli tanks. They wanted to conserve them for use to hold the territory after they had taken back the Sinai. Thus, they parachuted thousands of foot soldiers behind enemy lines carrying the shoulder-fired wire-guided missiles they had produced in massive quantities. The brave young soldiers who went on this mission stood up and intercepted the top-of-the-line Israeli tanks, and they took them out like turkeys.
The question to ask now is this: What could the Iranians have done to prepare themselves for an Israeli or an American air attack on their nuclear installation? Well, how about thousands upon thousands of drones equipped with radar and a television camera piloted by remote control from the ground. This would not be an ordinary drone designed to spy on people or to shoot at them; it would be a rocket propelled, extremely fast drone designed to engage an incoming warplane, spot it with its radar and shoot a rocket in its direction. If it misses, the pilot on the ground will rely on the television camera to try and collide with the incoming plane. If the latter still manages to avoid the drone, the two will engage in a dogfight. Being rocket propelled, the drone will have the advantage of speed and will most likely get the plane before the plane gets it. And if this drone does not do it, there will be another and another and another following behind it.
An operation like this can lap the entire Israeli air force for breakfast. It can also pose a serious challenge to the American warplanes stationed in the Gulf, be they on aircraft carriers or on land. And if this will prove to be insufficient, the Iranians would unveil their next surprise. They would deploy their piloted, rocket propelled suicide planes to go after enemy warplanes at three or four times the speed of sound, go after their warships and go after everything else considered being a valuable asset.
When Israel will be left without an air force, the Syrians will move to destroy the Israeli tanks and take back the Western half of the Golan they did not take the last time around. The Lebanese will occupy Northern Israel to hand it later to the Palestinians. The latter will take back the Negev and join the two parts of their country. And the Jews will be left with the Tel Aviv region as per the UN Mandate of 1948. Justice will have been done like President Ahmadinejad of Iran said he wants to see it done.
As to Azerbaijan, it will become just another Shia province of Iran, a country that will now enjoy having almost as much petroleum reserves as Saudi Arabia and considerably more natural gas.
It will also have nuclear energy; and all this will have transpired because the mad had become delirious and had destroyed themselves by their own stupidity.