Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
So the geniuses in the white house have begin to suspect that maybe, just maybe, as journalist Mark Ames noted on X, after weeks of CIA-targeted bombings from Ukraine into Russia, maybe those nefarious Russkies are assisting Iran in targeting U.S. bases in the Gulf. I’ve got news for these Beltway Einsteins: China’s helping Iran too. And probably North Korea. In fact, every member of the multipolar alliance is likely doing their part: the mental opacity afflicting Washington does not afflict them. They know very well who is trying to destroy them. So they take countermeasures. That’s called sanity.
How did white house mega-brains conclude China and Russia may be feeding Iran targeting data? Welp, Iran struck very sensitive targets with unusual precision (which, in fact, it has done and will continue to do throughout this war, but its success rate can no longer be ignored). For instance, per the New York Times, several Blackhawk helicopters were at least damaged when Iran blasted a Jordanian air base. The hangar housing the helicopters was hit, as was the anti-drone surveillance system. According to Ames on X July 19, “Iran’s missile and drone capacity has been massively underestimated…And the IRI is still holding back.” This is something white house gasbags should have assumed when bloviating about destroying the Persian nation, but as Ames observed, the last U.S. attack on Iran occurred about 13 weeks ago, when Tehran shocked the world with its military puissance, and Trump’s attention span isn’t that long. So he probably forgot.
Not learning obvious lessons is clearly a problem for this white house. Iran already beat the U.S. once. So what did Trump do? He struck again. And now he threatens a wider war, which is clearly suicide, as it means curtains for U.S. vassals like the Gulf Arab governments, and could easily plunge the world into economic depression. Trump threatened this wider attack on July 15, so by July 20, the headline in the Washington Post was, surprise! “U.S. teeters on all-out war with Iran after more troops are killed.”
WaPo only cited three, possibly four, U.S. soldiers killed, but other, non-Pentagon sources estimate more. As military expert Will Schryver put it on X July 20, “the dilemma remains: withdraw and relinquish West Asia to the Iran/Russia/China bloc, or continue to fight and relinquish the entire empire.” This followed news that the U.S. had retreated its aerial refueling tankers to Israel. According to an Iranian source speaking to Fars News Agency July 19, Iran’s July 17 strikes on U.S. bases in Qatar, Saudia Arabia and Jordan “resulted in the destruction or damage of a number of American aerial refueling tankers,” so the U.S. military “in a clear retreat, transferred several of the surviving aerial refueling tankers to Ben Gurion airport [incidentally painting a big red bullseye on that facility].” That’s called fleeing. Not a good sign for the Trump regime, which relies on pugilism to mold diplomacy. Iran expert Trita Parsi tweeted July 20 that the Trump white house uses “a strategy centered on military action shaping the landscape of diplomacy, rather than a strategy in which the final outcome is determined through PEACEFUL diplomacy. Either the commitment is to diplomacy within the MOU, or it is to actions (military and non-military) outside of the MOU. It can’t be both. I suspect we will not see any SERIOUS diplomacy until this question has been settled. Unfortunately, we are not there yet.”
And even more unfortunately, by the time we get there, we may have fought (and lost) an all-out war, resulting in lots of corpses, American and Iranian. I say lost, because as some observers have noted, all Iran has to do not to lose is to survive. Iran will doubtless do that. The U.S. cannot win: a ground invasion is suicide; ditto sending naval assets too close to the Persian coast; U.S. military bases in the region are indefensible and have already been torched. So all Trump can do is bomb. While he bombs, Hormuz is closed, the world economy tanks, and U.S. assets in the Middle East get wiped off the map. In other words, a war on Iran will make Trump the biggest loser; and we all know how he feels about losers. The only conclusion is he just doesn’t know what he’s freaking doing. And that’s alarming.
Meanwhile, it looks like U.S. proxies, vassals and attack dogs in the region are prepared to go down with the Empire. For, as threatened, Ansar Allah has vowed a maritime blockade in the Red Sea against the Saudis. The problem is that on July 13, Saudi Arabia hit Sana’a International Airport, striking “the runway to prevent an Iranian Mahan Air flight carrying a Houthi delegation and patients back from Tehran from landing,” per Drop Site News July 20. On July 16, Ansarallah said those strikes on Sana’a would be answered, that it would retaliate by blocking Saudi access to Bab al-Mandab, thus rendering the Red Sea off-limits for the Saudis. And ta da! That appears to have happened. So if no oil transits the Red Sea, under normal circumstances that would mean seven percent of world oil shipments would be bottled up. But because of the Hormuz closure, oil was re-routed through the Red Sea, so that percentage is higher. Twenty percent of the world’s oil cannot now transit Hormuz. Add this Red Sea blockage and it will be at least 27 percent. So a fiasco just got worse.
On July 20, the Intercept’s Nick Turse reported that CentCom “withheld information about Americans killed and injured from the public” in this latest Iran War. “The surge in deaths and injuries raises the official U.S. casualty count to at least 446…since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8. The first official told the Intercept that recent attacks had wounded ‘far more’ personnel than are reflected in the Pentagon’s current casualty count.” Reportedly, “dozens” were injured.
Turse reports that the Pentagon’s “official tally was also previously adjusted downward by 15 casualties without explanation.” He notes that according to the New York Times on July 20, “the Pentagon withheld information on ‘dozens of U.S. military injuries in the Iran War.’” The article also covers the “significant” damage inflicted on U.S. bases by Iran the previous week, and that “Iran had learned how to defeat U.S. air defense systems by overwhelming them using a mix of ballistic missiles and drones.” Meanwhile, Trump mendaciously claims the Iranian military has been annihilated. There is reason to suspect that the CIA, unlike the pentagon, is not on-board with this whole idiotic Iran war project and that therefore white house lies will be exposed, sooner rather than later.
So in all likelihood Trump’s latest Iran adventure will end like the last one – namely a total bust for the U.S. As we all know, a definition of insanity is repeating something ad nauseam and expecting a different result each time. This is not just Trump’s problem. Pretty much every U.S. president since the World War II fire-bombing of Dresden has sought to bomb his way to martial victory. All – post WWII – have failed. From the flattening of North Korea, to the two million murdered in Vietnam and on through this imbecilic Iran War, U. S. presidents have bombed promiscuously, killed loads of civilians, and then, despite obvious defeat, marched into the sunset as if nothing untoward or unexpected happened. Failure is never admitted. The white house is either silent or it lies, and millions of foreign corpses bear witness to its futile, pointless homicidal mania. This is what’s going on with Iran, and this is how it will end. “The “peace president” is up to his neck in innocent blood. And so is everyone who voted for him.
