Of course, a victory narrative was too valuable to be foregone. Yet nonetheless, unexplained events matter.
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On Saturday, an Israeli force of some 100 aircraft attacked Iran from a stand-off position in Iraq, some 70 kilometres outside the Iranian border.
A Wall Street Journal author, Walter Russell Meade, Distinguished Fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote: “Israeli warplanes didn’t only cripple Iran’s air-defence systems and inflict painful blows on its missile-producing facilities. They also sent a message that Israel knows where Tehran’s strategic vulnerabilities are, and it can destroy them any time it wants”.
Russell Mead adduces from this reading his key point: “Military forces that have access to American military technology and intelligence-gathering capabilities can wipe the floor with militaries that rely on Moscow … American technology is the gold standard in the world of defence – even more so for a country such as Israel that has significant intelligence and technological capabilities”.
The western ‘war of imagined, created reality’ thus reaches out beyond Ukraine – to arrive in Iran.
The Narrative – U.S. tech and its Intel as ‘invincible – must be maintained. To heck with the facts. There is too much at stake to forsake it for truthfulness.
A more sober and experienced observer however, notes after four days examination, that, succinctly put:
“The IAF strikes seem to have produced minimal results; it appears however that covert operatives within Iran achieved several [inconsequential] drone hits. The Israelis launched a lot of missiles [some 56] – all from maximum stand-off distance. Iran put up a LOT of air defence missiles. There are no firm reports, nor video evidence (so far) of big ballistic missile strikes on any significant Iranian targets. The Iranians say they intercepted most of the attacking missiles, but admit some got through”.
As usual, the ‘imaginary war narrative’ being broadcast is completely detached from that which can be observed from ground imagery. Russell Meade effectively was demanding the pretence that ‘we not notice’ that Israel’s attack failed – that it did not cripple air defences, nor did it devastate any significant target.
Yet, as Professor Brian Klaas writes, “the world doesn’t work as we pretend [or imagine] it does. Too often, we are led to believe it is a structured, ordered system defined by clear rules and patterns. This is the meme at the crux of the Rules Order narrative. The economy, apparently, runs on supply-and-demand curves. Politics is a science. Even human beliefs can be charted, plotted, graphed – and by using the right regression and enough data, understand even the most baffling elements of the human condition”. It is a stripped-down, storybook version of reality
Though some scholars in the 19th century believed there were laws governing human behaviour, social science was swiftly disabused of the notion that a straightforward social ‘physics’ was possible according to physical iron laws.
The most common approach today, reflecting a return to data-led modelling in political ‘science’ in the western sphere, is to use empirical data from the past to tease out ordered patterns that point to stable relationships between causes and effects.
Typically, the philosophy of dialectical materialism is viewed in some capitals as the acme of an objective scientific approach to politics and human sociology – its practitioners esteemed as ‘scientists’. By smoothing over near-infinite complexity, linear syntheses make our non-linear world appear to follow the comforting progression of a single ordered line. This is a conjuring trick. And to complete it successfully, ‘scientists’ need to purge whatever is unexpected or unexplained.
The claimed objectivity to this methodology however, essentially lies with a cultural attribute derived from the linear and teleological understanding found in Judeo-Christian traditions.
It is this belief in a ‘scientific’ and linear understanding of cyclical history which imparts the strong sense of purpose to political analysis. Professor Dingxin Zhao notes how, in contrast to other metaphysical structures, it allows believers to create a more committed zeitgeist, compelling individuals within that community to act in alignment to the anticipated teleological outcome.
It is not hard to see this teleological premise as the underpinning to today’s obsession with creating imaginary ‘victory narratives’. Professor Dingxin Zhao warns that those making linear predictions about the tide of human events according to mechanistic material ‘science’, can easily be convinced that they alone possess the correct beliefs and are aligned with the right path of analysis. And that ‘others’ simply are on the “wrong side” (such as in states that have ‘mistakenly’ come to rely on Russian military technology, rather than on America’s ‘gold standard’).
Within this dominant, hubristic paradigm of social science, our world is treated as one that can be understood, controlled and bent to our whims. It can’t.
In his bestselling book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), James Gleick “observes that 20th-century science will be remembered for three things: relativity, quantum mechanics (QM), and chaos. These theories are distinctive because they shift our understanding of classical physics toward a more complex, mysterious and unpredictable world”, Erik van Aken writes.
Chaos theory emerged in the 1960s and in the following decades mathematical physicists recognised its insights for our understanding of real-world dynamical systems.
These key shifts have made little impact on the western paradigm of thinking however, which still is viewed by most westerners as a machine where each action, like the fall of a domino, inevitably triggers a predictable effect.
“Yet if we are in a world of unpredictability – in which nearly everything influences everything else, the word ‘cause’ begins to lose its meaning. No matter how seemingly unrelated or remote, each event converges, contributing to a complex web or matrix of causality”.
Bertrand Russell, in his On the Notion of Cause (1912-13), asserted two significant conclusions: First, that our conventional notion of causality is not grounded in physics; and second, if notions like ‘cause’ must be reducible to physics, we should eliminate our use of simplistic use of the word ‘cause’ all together.
So how can we make sense of social change when consequential shifts often arise from chaos? Whilst we search for order and patterns, we perhaps spend less time focused on an obvious but consequential truth:
Unexpected, unexplained events matter. In other words, they have a quality and meaning.
One such event seemingly happened last Saturday, when it appears that the Israeli strike on Iran suffered an unexpected ‘major hitch’ rather early in the SEAD operation (Suppressing Enemy Air Defences) to suppress and destroy Iran’s air defences. Apparently the first wave of attack was intended as the first step – once Iranian airspace had been secured – to pave the way for the subsequent F-35 strike package armed with conventional bombs.
The unexpected event – ‘Israeli media reported that an “unknown air defence system” was used to shoot down targets over Tehran province’. Reportedly, the Israeli operation was scrubbed soon after, and the victory narrative – later to be taken up by the WSJ (among many others) – was loudly proclaimed.
Of course, a victory narrative was too valuable to be foregone. Yet nonetheless, unexplained events matter.
If Israeli (or U.S.) aircraft cannot penetrate secured Iranian airspace – in whole or in part (and no Israel aircraft entered Iranian airspace on Saturday) – the entire paradigm for a U.S. or an Israeli kinetic military attack collapses: Iran has an overwhelming deeply-buried conventional missile arsenal by which to respond.
Similarly, Netanyahu’s ‘Great Victory’ paradigm implodes too – as leading Israeli intelligence commentator Ronen Bergman writes:
“A senior Israeli security official put it this way: ‘Success through failure’. Israel went to war in Gaza to achieve two goals, the release of the hostages and the dismantling of Hamas’ capabilities (not to mention its destruction in absolute and divine victory). After it failed to achieve either of these goals, another goal was added on the northern front – to return the residents safely to their homes. And it is not clear how we will achieve that goal either. Some believe that the southern front can be closed through a victory on the northern front – and now, we are sure that – if only we land a victorious blow on Iran – then it will lead to the closure of the front in the north; and this will close the front in the south, too”.
Iran says it intends to hit Israel a painful blow for last Saturday’s strike. And Israel says that it will try again to strike Iran.
How does Israel continue in this manner? Well, says the senior security official: “Perhaps the answer is “because everything is normalised. What seems to us impossible – that there is no way it will happen – suddenly happens … And everyone gets used to it, [and used] to the lack of strategy. Lack of strategy turns from a bug into a feature … Then no big deal, We’ll try something else””.
