This is Netanyahu’s war, stupid
A national daily commented editorially yesterday that apropos of the United States’ war on Iran, the Modi government should “take a more emphatic stand against the war and work with other powers to de-escalate the conflict. India should also strongly oppose U.S. attempts to bring the war to its backyard.”
Such counselling is overdue. Signs are multiplying that New Delhi is a captive of the narrative of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish lobby who control US President Donald Trump. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s untimely visit to Israel ten days ago has brought about a manifestly pro-Israeli tilt in India’s regional policy in West Asia. This is hugely consequential.
Trump and Netanyahu are aiming at a total destruction of Iran to make it a submissive vassal state. Trump insists that he will have a say about choosing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s successor, implying that the decapitation strategy will continue until a pliable figure appears in Tehran. Such a strategy fits into Netanyahu’s longstanding agenda to remove Iran from the geopolitical chessboard as the main obstacle to his Zionist agenda of Greater Israel. Trump is vulnerable to Israeli blackmail over the Epstein file. But how are these to be conflated with India”s interests?
Alas, Delhi has a tunnel vision. Shashi Tharoor, the chairman of the parliament’s standing committee of on foreign affairs, tailors his vision to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The BJP president of the state unit in Kerala Rajeev Chandrasekhar is indignant about the opposition parties’ “shameless politics” of pandering to political Islam by “condemning only US-Israel for attacking Iran…”
However, the ground beneath the feet of the ruling elites in Delhi is shaky. Bloomberg reported on February 27 (before the war began) that Indonesian lawmakers, provoked by Modi’s patently pro-Israeli remarks while in Israel, sought to put on hold an order for 105,000 trucks with two of India’s top manufacturers — per a disclosure by Minister Ferry Juliantono in an interview with a local TV station.
The spectre of disruption of oil supplies haunts the Indian government. Brent has crossed $83 bpd and may cross the $100 bpd mark. Trump no longer cares about high oil prices.
But Trump continues to navigate India’s energy security. This is also the message from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s social media announcement of a 30-day waiver that allows India to return to Russia to buy oil. But there’s a flip side to it. The strategic implications are that the US can also put the waiver on hold. It is unclear whether Delhi sought such a waiver — or, got the Jewish lobby in DC to intervene — but either way, the whole situation is humiliating.
Meanwhile, sensitive questions have been raised about the Moudge-class Iranian frigate that was returning from Visakhapatnam after participation in a multilateral naval event by a US nuclear-powered attack submarine lurking nearby. Did the Americans take advantage of the intelligence sharing bilaterally between the Indian and American sides? 87 Iranian sailors lost their lives.
India is cast in a false position as the very next day, Sri Lanka showed exemplary moral courage and asserted its strategic autonomy to respond to a distress call from a second Iranian ship with over 200 sailors on board, and allowed it to dock at Trincomalee Harbour. The optics are not good.
However, the mother of all mysteries is why the government lapsed into such a deafening silence over the heinous assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28 in a pre-meditated, meticulously planned Israeli air strike. Simply put, Delhi didn’t want to publicly condemn Israel.
In a reluctant course correction subsequently, full six days later, the government deputed the Foreign Secretary to sign the condolence book at the Iranian embassy. But the damage has been done. The big question is, what has Tehran done to earn the wrath of the BJP government?
On the other hand, Modi rushed to commiserate with certain Gulf countries by personally telephoning his counterparts to condemn Iran for retaliatory strikes, which had caused some human casualties and physical damage. Perhaps, it was a diplomatic ploy designed to draw Arabs into the orbit of the US-Israeli axis. On the contrary, mum is the word over the killing of over 150 Iranian girl students in a US air strike, which the UN called “a grave violation of humanitarian law”.
All these aberrations taken together, a perception has grown that Modi government has been completely brainwashed by Netanyahu.
In reality, though, the US could be facing the most humiliating military defeat in its modern history. Khorramshahr-4 hit sensitive installations in Tel Aviv on the sixth day of the war. The entire US ecosystem built over decades at the bases in the Gulf region, especially UAE, costing trillions of dollars have been decimated, dealing a mortal blow to the US Central Command’s war capability. The naval base in Bahrain, home to US Naval Forces Central Command, has been destroyed.
This war may effectively mark the end of the US’ sprawling military presence in West Asia that gave the US the wherewithal to pursue interventionist wars and conflicts. In yet another insightful Substack piece titled Iran Blinds US With Unprecedented Campaign of Strikes on Region’s Strategic Radars , Simplicius assesses that “an avalanche of new satellite intel has revealed shocking region-wide damage that Iran has done to US’s most priceless assets, which—it would seem—could only have come by way of major Chinese and Russian help.”
When asked by the NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas in a video interview yesterday about the prospect of a US ground invasion, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said bluntly, “No, we are waiting for them, we are confident that we can confront them, and that would be a big disaster for them.” Araghchi closed the door on diplomacy with the Trump administration.
Trump suffered a setback when he called the top Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq, Bafel Talabani and Masoud Barzani, and personally offered “extensive US air cover” and other forms of support if only for Kurdish groups attacked Iran. He pleaded, per a Washington Post report, “Kurds must choose a side in this battle — either with America and Israel or with Iran.” Barzani later reportedly called Araghchi to assure him Kurds wouldn’t intervene!
WaPo commented: “Iranian and Iraqi Kurds are in a difficult situation. The US has backed Kurds in Iraq and Syria, but… Iraq’s Kurds have reached an uneasy modus vivendi with Iran, based on the sides not backing attacks on the other… There were premature reports in Israeli and American media about the start of an Iranian Kurdish offensive last night [Sunday] that were later taken down.”
In the final analysis, the national mood in America will determine the timeline of the war. There are rumblings within Republican Party that Trump’s focus ought to be on the economy with an eye on mid- terms in November. The majority of Americans oppose the war. The Democrats are bullish and quietly spreading word that Trump is manoeuvring to distract attention away from Epstein scandal. They have nicknamed it as “Netanyahu’s war”.
All is not lost for Modi government to beat a retreat. Netanyahu was instrumental to navigate Haifa Port deal; he is probably controlling the strings of Epstein scandal; or, he is fixated on the geopolitical construct that control of Iran will uproot Chinese influence regionally. But none of it is good enough to conflate Israeli/ Jewish interests with Netanyahu’s or his own personal interests with India’s.
Of course, ultimately, the fault lies not even with Netanyahu but almost entirely with the BJP in its quest to establish ideological affinity on the international plane for Hindutva pivoting on ethnocentrism. The paradox is, this was also what drew Savarkar once to the Nazi ideology.
Delhi should return to a priori history and the knowledge that comes from the power of reasoning based on self-evident truths to work with like-minded countries to try to de-escalate this senseless war. At any rate, India should applaud Sri Lanka’s pushback against the US attempts to widen the war to the South Asian region. Certainly, this is Netanyahu’s war, stupid – not ours.