Yves here. Simon Watkins is a hard-core neocon, so his posts need to be taken with an ample dose of salt. Nevertheless, he raises an option for Israel in attacking Iran that I have not seen mentioned before, that of operating out of Azerbaijan. I hope I can get Conor to opine. As you can see from the map below, Israel could fly into Azerbaijan through Turkiye and Armenian or Georgian airspace. Watkins reduces his credibility by (without naming them) by claiming that their is a flight path to Azerbaijan through NATO airspace, when neither Georgia or Armenia are members (both are in the half-pregnant friends of NATO status; Armenia is an Associate Member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and has an Permanent Mission to NATO; Georgia like Ukraine has been invited to join NATO and Russia fought a war to prevent Georgia’s NATO entry).
A separate reason to question this piece is it depicts Iran as receiving Russian assistance with a nuclear program. Scott Ritter, who knows a thing or two about nuclear programs, opined today on Judge Napolitano that it would now take Iran only 2 to 3 days
So would either state accommodate Israel, and risk some sort of retaliation by Russia (which needless to say does not have to be military)? And what about Turkiye? Erdogan has been all hat, no cattle in terms of fiercely criticizing Israel’s genocide but doing virtually nada to stop it (its import and export ban did not extend to what really could have hurt, trans-shipped gas). His citizens are very upset with his inaction. Could he afford to allow Israel to overfly Turkiye to pre-position an attack on Iran from Azerbaijan?
And I to implement this scheme assume Israel would have to move a fair bit of kit over too, which would be visible to Iran and to Russia. Could Israel realistically set up the needed logistics support and comms out of a base presumably not set up for US/NATO use? Reader sanity checks encouraged.
By Simon Watkins, a former senior FX trader and salesman, financial journalist, and best-selling author. He was Head of Forex Institutional Sales and Trading for Credit Lyonnais, and later Director of Forex at Bank of Montreal. He was then Head of Weekly Publications and Chief Writer for Business Monitor International, Head of Fuel Oil Products for Platts, and Global Managing Editor of Research for Renaissance Capital in Moscow. Originally published at OilPrice.com
