Slaughter the Enemy: The Blood-Soaked Path to a Permanent Peace

"Israelis live life between the sirens,” an Israeli friend told me the other day. In essence, today's Israeli subsists rather than lives. Part of living is planning, and part of planning is certainty. In a generation accustomed to “mowing the lawn," there no certainty can exist.

When I wrote "Beware the Fordo Euphoria" last June, I didn't want to be right (though as a political analyst and consultant I get paid for being right).

As a Jew who loves Israel, I very much wanted to be wrong. I very much wanted to believe the Trumpian hyperbole that we "obliterated Iran's nuclear program," and that “we won the war.” But I knew better. I wanted, like many, to believe that the 12 Day War was the big punch into the bully's face that would finally cause him to change his ways.

But, alas, I knew better. When all was said and done, the 12 Day War was just Israel's macro version of "mowing the lawn." I knew we'd have to go back, and less than 9 months later here we are. 

Winning equals permanency; Israelis have sadly become addicted to the ephemeral. They’ve been sold on the false and defeatist notion that “peace” or “quiet” has a short statute of limitations. How do we Jews and Israelis break this vicious cycle and psychological impasse?

What does it take to wake ourselves up to the realization that we have, under the tutelage of faux right-wing governments, normalized the abnormal-- the notion that it's perfectly reasonable for an entire generation of Israeli children (now adults) to run to a bomb shelter every week for the rest of their lives (and in times of intense conflict, up to 10 times in one day)?

What is the successful alternative to mowing the lawn? What does it look like to scorch the lawn and pour cement on it so that you never have to mow it again? In short it looks like an Israeli government (the likes of which we have not had since Menachem Begin) that prioritizes strategic success over tactical advantages.

At minimum it requires a government that has at least some sort of coherent long-term strategy.  Israelis have been deprived of such a government for many decades. They have been deprived by both the Right and the Left.

The political beast has divided them along religious and ideologically political lines, but the policies Israel needs falls under neither paradigm. What Israelis need are leaders who play chess; instead, they have been cursed with leaders who play checkers.

The end result of this perpetual strategic failure-- from the time the mercenary Shas party made their Faustian bargain with Rabin and Peres to pass the Oslo Accords, to the time Sharon and Netanyahu supported the expulsion of Jews from Gaza, to the failures that preceded October 7 -- is the unnecessary deaths of over 6,000 Jews and the unnecessary maiming of tens of thousands more. Not to mention an entire generation of PTSD.

At the heart of this strategic failure lies a systemic attitudinal failure -- one that is not just endemic to Israel, but to all of Western Civilization in this generation. That is, plainly speaking, that we Westerners have forgotten how to slaughter the enemy. The enemy, on the contrary, has never forgotten how to slaughter us.

If he were to have but 20% of our power and intelligence, he would have slaughtered us a long time ago. No doubt, the failed military psychology of the West has had a lot to do with Vietnam; every time the United States is about to embark on a new war footing, no matter how righteous, a knee-jerk choir arises to loudly sing the chorus: " this will be another Vietnam."

Vietnam (and to a lesser extent Iraq) is emblematic of 3 things that adversely inform today's Western military psychology: 1) killing too many of our enemy; 2) losing too many of our own soldiers; 3) not objectively achieving political and military goals despite 1 and 2.

But Iran wasn't Vietnam (or Iraq) last year, and it shouldn't be thought of as Vietnam (or Iraq) this year. With a different mindset, we could have and should have finished the job last year. With a different mindset we MUST finish the job this year! Iran is a rare case in which the vast majority of the population of a country to be invaded sides with the invaders (U.S. and Israel) and not with the defenders (the oppressive Islamic regime in Iran).

As long as Israel appropriately leverages this strategic and demographic advantage, this war can easily be won within a year, culminating in the much earned and desired freedom of the Iranian people.

But properly leveraging this strategy requires being politically incorrect, nay almost “brutal.” It requires killing tens of thousands of the enemy prior to unleashing the masses, lest the masses be mowed down again in the same per diem Holocaust manner in which they were slaughtered in January.

Our predecessors in the Greatest Generation would easily have no problem with this concept. Indeed, they killed millions of the enemy, not just tens of thousands. In the process they also killed tens of thousands of complete and relative innocents as well. 

But we Westerners have gotten so soft over the last few decades that it almost seems we value the lives of our enemies as much as we value those of our own soldiers. No country can win a permanent peace with such an attitude.

Without attitudinal change and a new world view, we will continue to win impressive battles with new and innovative tactics that make “feel-good” headlines (ie. the pagers), while continuing to lose this war of civilizations that has been thrust upon us by our Islamist enemies.

But what is the right strategy? In my prior piece I laid out a broad framework (the employment of which, according to political chatter, is seriously being considered, especially as it pertains to partnering with Iraqi and Iranian Kurdish forces).

In this piece I will be more granular in my approach as it pertains to items #5 and 6 of my prior piece on this subject. The current popular hyper-optimistic assessment of the prospective popular Iranian mass uprising relies on a false security of numbers.

Too many foolishly assume that once the 80 million Iranians who despise their government take to the streets that they will easily be able to overwhelm and if necessary kill the “only” 2 million Iranians who are loyal to the Islamist regime.

What these optimists fail to understand is that if Leonidas and his Spartan 300 could kill 20,000 armed Persians, then 2 million armed Iranians can easily kill 80 million unarmed Iranians. This is not just theory; we recently and painfully viewed a practical application of this reality.

After President Trump flippantly tweeted to the good masses in Iran to “Take to the streets….We have your back!,” they did just that, resulting in their violent demise to the tune of approximately 40,000 individuals dead and perhaps an additional 100,000 wounded. We cannot set up the Iranian people to fail again; the ground has to be well laid before the next march of the masses.

The first new caveat to the plan I laid out last year is that under no circumstances shall the unarmed Iranian masses be unleashed until A) masses of regime loyalists are slaughtered, and B) there are enough trained Persian nationalists who, along with Kurdish help, can lead the masses in a final, successful charge against the remaining regime loyalists.

Putting the carriage before the horse led to devastation in January, and will lead to devastation again. Order is paramount. So what is the first step in this order? The first step was implied above but will now be plainly stated: the 13 neighborhoods in Iran known for overwhelming housing regime loyalists must be relatively to completely obliterated.

Yes, some innocents will perish as well, but the innocent/ enemy ratio will still be much better than anything the U.S. military achieved in Mosul and Fallujah. These 13 neighborhoods are as follows: City Center, Jamkaran and Pardisan District in Qoms; Boroujerdi, Mahallati, Tehranpars, Darband, Zafaraniyeh, Tajrish and Narmark in Teheran; Eidgah, Paein Khiaban and Noghan in Mashhad.

The next step in conjunction with steps 5 and 6 of my prior piece (ie. liberation of Lorestan under Kurdish forces) would be to leverage the colossal strategic errors made by Iran recently in its attacks against both Azerbaijan and the Arab Gulf States.

The U.S. special forces should work with the Azerbaijani army to conquer the Iranian Caspian coast from Azerbaijan's border with Iran to just north of Teheran.

U.S. drones should patrol all major highways from Tehran to the newly conquered buffer zone to allow thousands of prospective Persian fighters and their families to make it safely to Azerbaijan where they will be trained.

A similar development will occur in the plurality Arabic-speaking southern provinces of Iran whereby U.S. special forces shall work with Saudi, Kuwait and Emirates troops to invade Iran and conquer these provinces and thereupon set up training camps for any interested fighters in the southern third of Iran.

After three months of training in the Kurdish regions (as described in the prior piece), Azerbaijan and the Arabic-speaking provinces, an army of at least 100,00 anti-regime Iranians will strategically insert themselves in key cities and take over all relevant utilities, food storage facilities, key intersections and government buildings.

At that point, and only at this point, shall the mass revolution be announced. The Persian people and other anti-regime elements shall take over every grocery store and water source and ensure that only anti-regime Iranians gain access to food and water.

The newly trained Iranian army with the help of U.S. drones will target every Basij and IRGC checkpoint in the country and wipe them out. Any known member of Basij and IRGC (who survived the bombings described earlier) shall be hunted down and summarily executed. The city-by -city liberation of Iran should take approximately 6 to 9 months.

At its culmination, Shah Reza Pahlavi shall be instituted as leader of a provisional transitional government for 6 years with popular elections to take place in approximately 5 to 6 years (Pahlavi will not be allowed to run in said election). With these measures in place, a new Middle East and a permanent peace (no more lawn-mowing) should take root, the likes of which could have never been imagined just 5 years ago.