Baku's Treachery and Iranian Non-Response, A Critique
As the dust of the latest military clash between Iran and Israel begins to settle, it is patently obvious that Israel and its allies made a huge miscalculation in the surprised and unlawful attack on Iran. After an initial jolt, Iran responded heroically and delivered devastating blows to Israel, thus effectively shattering Israel's myth of invincibility forever. Indeed, Iran shocked the world by demonstrating its deterrent capability as a missile superpower, conceded to by even the US President Trump who confirmed the devastations wreaked on Israel in the last days of the war; western sources now indicate that Iran used merely 1 percent of its missile arsenal.
Thus, whole a whole set of questions linger as to why Israel was able to conduct acts of sabotage inside Iran and the lessons learned from this fiasco with respect to Iran's rather porous borders and internal security, on the other hand little doubt remains that some of Iran's neighbors did not act exactly according to good neighborly standards and, in fact, aided the foreign invaders. Case in point, there are strong indications that Israeli operatives launched drone attacks on Iran from inside Azerbaijan, thus angering millions of patriotic Iranians.
Yet, in contrast, there has not been any official backlash against Baku for its complicity with Israel's unprovoked war on Iran. At a minimum, Iran should have recalled its ambassador from Baku and summoned the Azeri ambassador and admonished him publicly. Even more forceful measures such as hitting the Israeli suspected bases inside Azerbaijan with the precision missiles were within Iran's UN-based right of self-defense.
Unfortunately, not only none of the above did not happen, worse, Iran's President Pezeshkian attended the ECO conference in Baku and shook hands with the Azeri president, without uttering a word denouncing him for his anti-Iran treachery. This is Iranian diplomacy at its worst, reflecting a weak, ineffective, and one-dimensional president who is unable to conduct himself properly in a time of national crisis. Pezeshkian may have wanted to utilize the ECO conference to shore up support for Iran, but the dire need to stand up to Baku and to draw a line in the sand was more important and he skirted that historic responsibility. A clue to the short-sightedness of Pezeshkian's approach, also shared by the Foreign Minister Araghchi, is that such an unsavory display of weakness toward Azerbaijan, which acted in concert with both Turkey and Israel eyeing Iran's disintegration in the combined hands of US and Israel, is that it invites more mischief by these so-called neighbors with irredentist sinister intentions against Iran. In a word, Pezeshkian should have sent a lower-ranking official to the ECO conference to display his extreme unhappiness with Baku and to have delivered a strong message of protest at the conference.
Henceforth, unless Iran shifts gear toward a more powerful and unforgiving attitude toward Baku, it is a sure bet that Israel will continue to use Baku as its proxy in the region to cause more headache for Iran. This situation is intolerable from the prism of Iran's national security interests and warning shots at the bow of Israel-Azerbaijan ship of conspiracy against Iran are long overdue.