IRANIAN FLYING TIGERS IN THE DONBASS?

 

The Flying Tigers in US popular culture.

In Ukraine, a slow escalation of means and participants is taking place, according to Al Jazeera (see below).

Maybe, one day, we'll see, in the Donbass, Iranian volunteers fighting alongside the Russians, equipped with donated matériel, like the Flying Tigers were doing in China of old, at the time of World War 2. They were American soldiers fighting in China against the Japanese, in an unofficial manner, as civilian volunteers some time before Pearl Harbor and the start of the Pacific War. Strangely enough, later on, the Chinese used the same trick on the Americans themselves in Korea, reversing what was becoming a hopeless situation for the North Koreans.

The idea of Iranians soldiers volunteering to fight in Ukraine for Russia, as simple citizens, with their equipment donated to them by Teheran, is far from an impossible scenario, especially if the war is to last a lot longer, especially if the Russians seems on the verge of losing. In such an event, China will prefer to delegate the task to Iran, already under US sanctions and with a big axe to grind against Uncle Sam, than to have to do it by itself.

That kind of option would have many advantages for China. It would permit Beijing to keep polishing its useful image of being a pacemaker and it would also prevent the inevitable sanctions that would come its way if it was directly involved in the conflict. It would also give the masters of the new Forbidden City the possibility of claiming to be an impartial arbiter in all matters pertaining to international relations. After having already established peaceful relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, China could then hope to be able to broker peace between the Russians and their Ukrainians brethren and so facilitate the creation of a future pan Russian federation, between Great-Russians, Little-Russians and White-Russians.

The injection of (let's pick a number) around 100 000 Iranians 'volunteers', with all their equipment, weapons, and materiel (including tanks, artillery pieces, planes, drones, etc.), could make quite a difference in the current fighting. Just think of the reversal of fortune that was created by the appearance of tens of thousands of Chinese volunteers when the US Army, acting under the aegis of the UN, got close, very close, to the Chinese border, in the northernmost part of North Korea.

In fact, the American soldiers had become way too close to the territory of the Chinese motherland, much to close for Beijing to countenance the idea of a possible US-dominated peninsula right alongside its very border. So, what could have been a clear American victory was eventually transformed into a draw, with a huge red wave toward the south, followed by a last-ditch effort by the US to stop it, and the eventual establishment of a cease-fire line just a bit north of the metropolis of Seoul, creating the present border between the countries of North Korea and South Korea.

Those entities, it must be said, were erected upon the ashes of World War II. The Japanese colony of Chosen was dismantled at the conclusion of World War 2, then it was briefly replaced by Soviet-controlled northern Korea and US-controlled southern Korea, two polities that lasted from 1945 to 1950, before the start of the Korean War.

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https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/12/analysis-ukraine-rolls-back-6-months-of-russian-gains-in-5-weeks

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PLUS:  @charles.millar3 (Twitter)