The Ayatollah Reappears to Declare Total Islamic Iran Victory Over Satan!

What does winning look like?

I was writing an article titled “The Ayatollah is Still Missing” but he then reappeared the other day and I had to change the title, although the content remains the same. I’m sorry that I haven’t been posting as regularly as I should, I suppose. There was indeed a time that I’d post giant in-depth Soviet lore dumps literally every day and some of my regulars got used to that sort of special treatment. But that was highly unusual and I won’t be exerting myself to the same extent going forward, sorry.

Not for these wages.

Anyway.

The Ayatollah re-emerged to declare victory over Satan.

Trump declared victory too.

So did Bibi and so did Putin too.

This begs the question: who actually won though?

Well, let’s label the recent events “Round 1” and summarize what happened.

The most relevant data points to my mind are the following:

• Iran lost dozens of generals, scientists, and other high value targets

• Their air defenses either didn’t work or were simply turned off (which is worse)

• They failed to inflict any damage on Israel (± 30 dead Israelis, mostly civilians)

• Israel’s air defenses, in contrast, worked relatively well, although they are now low

• The Iranian symbolic supreme leader shamefully went into hiding and radio silence and only re-emerged when the smoke cleared

• Mossad revealed complete and total infiltration of the Iranian government

• Tehran refused to punish Israeli or US aggression

• Tehran’s so-called allies refused to lift a finger to help them

To my mind it is very clear that Iran just got smacked in the face so hard that an eyeball popped out and a couple of teeth came loose. They’re on their feet still, yes, but they’re reeling and swaying. The bell has rung ending the round, but there’s another round coming up soon after the break.

In contrast, no damage was done to the US or to the Israelis.

The inability or unwillingness of the Iranian government to damage their supposed foes will only embolden further aggression. That’s how the world works, to my understanding. The weak are meat and the strong will eat. Over and over again.

And now on to the speculating.

Q: Why did Trump call off the bombing campaign?

I’ve speculated on this and my theory was that he wanted to score some PR points, make some money on insider trading on the stock market and to buy some time by placating Bibi. Trump pulled a similar stunt against Iran before when he made a big show of dropping bombs on Souleimani and then sued for peace, and before that by dropping a bomb on Assad, and then claiming that he wanted nothing more to do with Syria. It’s very Trump-like to do a big PR bombing and to then assume the peace position.

I have no doubt in my mind though that the bombings will resume due to extreme Israeli pressure on the White House.

Q: What will Tehran do now to get back at for and prepare for future aggression from Israel and the US?

Nothing.

They will do nothing.

Israel now has total command of the skies and no longer fears any phantom Iranian retaliation.

If I had to guess, they’re just waiting for America to send over more weapons, mostly missile defenses, by feigning their helplessness and vulnerability. Once they have replenished their stocks, they’re going to restart the bombings.

Q: What does this mean for the geopolitical situation at large?

I recall the top manager of Palantir, Alex Karp, spilling the beans in recent years when he let on that Palantir was part of a Washington project to be able to wage war on three fronts in the near future. Here:

The U.S. military has long prioritized being able to fight two wars simultaneously in different parts of the globe, similar to its efforts in the Pacific and European theaters during World War II.

But Alex Karp, CEO of the data-mining software company Palantir, which is known for its work in defense and intelligence, warned that the U.S. may have to wage war in three different theaters in the future.

He told the New York Times that he thinks the U.S. will “very likely” find itself in a three-front war with China, Russia, and Iran. As a result, he said, the Pentagon should continue developing autonomous weapons at full speed, pointing to big mismatches in how far the U.S. would be willing to go while fighting a war compared with other countries.

“I think we’re in an age when [a] nuclear deterrent is actually less effective, because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he added. “Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.”

Karp continued: “In fact, given that we have parity technologically, but we don’t have parity morally, they have a huge advantage.”

He also said the military is very close to the threshold where “somewhat autonomous drones” that can kill become the most important weapons.

“You already see this in Ukraine,” Karp noted.

Elsewhere in the sprawling Times profile, which also covered his personal life, business practices, and opinions on a range of people and issues, he urged Democrats to show more strength.

“Are we tough enough to scare our adversaries so we don’t go to war? Do the Chinese, Russians, and Persians think we’re strong?” said Karp, who supported President Joe Biden and is now backing VP Kamala Harris in the election. “The president needs to tell them if you cross these lines, this is what we’re going to do, and you have to then enforce it.”

Waging war on three fronts at once would likely require more troops, notwithstanding any increased reliance on drones or other autonomous weapons.

After years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military’s size has dropped, while the Pentagon has turned more attention to the Pacific and a possible conflict with China.

While on a separate train of thought on race, class, and affirmative action, Karp told the Times he is also “pro draft.”

“I think part of the reason we have a massive cleavage in our culture is, at the end of the day, by and large, only people who are middle- and working-class do all the fighting,” he explained.

Representatives for Palantir didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Palantir has come under criticism for supporting Israel during its war with Hamas, and Karp previously has acknowledged some of his employees will keep quitting over that stance.

He told the Times he won’t apologize for what he believes in and whom Palantir supports: “I’m not going to apologize for defending the U.S. government on the border, defending the special ops, bringing the people home. I’m not apologizing for giving our product to Ukraine or Israel or lots of other places.”

I admit that I was writing for three years under the assumption that the US military industrial complex was severely downgraded thanks to de-industrialization policies and partnerships with China and that this meant that they simply wouldn’t be able to wage more than a one-front war, and not a fully fledged one at that.

The success of the NATO war machine in supplying Ukraine and Israel has changed my opinion on this topic and I realize that I had fallen victim to some more copium propaganda that I should have been more careful about accepting unquestioningly. NATO’s MIC is doing just fine and is capable of fulfilling demand for the future wars.

Furthermore, these wars are being fought with almost zero losses incurred by NATO.

Sure, they lose mercenaries and spec ops and have to spend a lot of money. But they aren’t incurring costs that would deter them from continuing to wage war in this way. This is made possible by the fact that their opponents never actually fight back seriously.

So, yes, the United States and its allies can continue to fight wars on several fronts.

They’re still sending over military aid to Ukraine as we speak while they’re preparing to send even more military aid over to Israel as well. Israel, for its part, is bombing Gaza to literal pebble-sized rubble, has destroyed Hezbollah in S. Lebanon, bombs Yemen and Syria before that and also bombs Iran with impunity now.

When the regime change operations against Iran begin in earnest, the US and Israel will be relying on proxies either via the Turks and Azeris or the Pakistanis or the Arabs in Iran. Will it really cost that much money to topple the mullahs via color revolution from within or to bribe the Azeris and Turks into invading or to fund Arab insurgencies? Or the Kurds?

I don’t think so.

America and Israel will simply bomb the Iranian military while providing support for the rebel groups. When they invaded Iraq, they spent all their time hunting down the entire military caste of Iraq and throwing them into gulags. Some of these prisoners were convinced in prison to run the ISIS op next, which then justified the future US bombing of Syria. Convenient.

As for opening a new front against China, well, why not?

Once again, you have all the necessary pieces pre-arranged ahead of time and a non-combatant government ready to play ball with the farce when it begins. I’m no expert on China, but anyone with eyes to see can notice that there are plenty of exiled Chinese business elites in the West happy to work against the current government in Beijing. You’ve got Taiwan. The Muslims in the Western regions. Tibet. Maybe even Russia from the north.

I should think that China would be a much harder nut to crack than Iran though.

Luckily, I think I have a few years to prepare my new blog The Sinoland Chronicles should it come to that.

…

In conclusion, Tehran has been exposed as being impotent and toothless. There is no further obstacle to continued and escalated attacks aimed at their country now. If I had to guess, we are simply waiting for Israel and the US to reload and better position their weapons having gathered data from the previous strikes and return salvos. Trump will declare that he is for peace, but that the Iranian leadership refuses to negotiate, much like he did with Putin, and then we’ll be off for Round 2. Faster if the Israelis choose to force Trump’s hand and ignore his input like they did the first time and to present Trump with a fete accompli whereby Israel demands immediate US help to save it from the Iranian missiles that they themselves provoked.

The entire political caste of America came out in unison and lockstep offering their full-throated support for Israel during Round 1.

America has never been so consolidated around Israel’s foreign policy objectives.

The one lone dissenter on the so-called Right, Thomas Massie, earned himself a full-throated condemnation by Trump and a primary challenge. Yes, there are also some token anti-American Muslims and Mexicans protesting Israel, but they don’t matter one lick in Washington.

The people who claim that Iran won Round 1 are basically making the argument that Tehran’s government remaining in power is a victory in and of itself. This doesn’t make much sense to me as an argument, but OK. If you define terms as you see fit, language can be manipulated to mean anything, really. Yes, Tehran survived. Yippee !

Let me rephrase the question I posed earlier though.

Q: Is Iran weaker now than it was prior to the strikes?

I think that this is self-evidently and visibly apparent. Yes, obviously. Like, what is even the argument against this claim?

And I’d say the same thing about Russia.

Yes, Putin’s gang survives in Moscow.

But is Russia stronger for having lost its Black Sea fleet? After losing 30%? of its strategic nuclear bombers? After using up its Soviet ammo stores willy-nilly? After losing ±100K?? men? After having been invaded several times? After having NATO expand? After losing Armenia? After losing Nordstream II? After decimating its own Wagner army following a full-blown mutiny? After being kicked out of Africa?

And on and on the string of humiliations in recent years go.

The thing about defining “winning” as simply “not losing” is that you’re “winning” every single second that you’re getting punched and kicked and bled dry until that moment where you’re no longer “winning” by “not losing” because your legs have given out, your skull is cracked and your muscles aren’t able to keep your hands up any longer.

I mean, no one defines “winning” in a boxing or UFC fight as the number of seconds that you can endure a one-sided barrage of punches. The episode of The Simpsons where Homer let himself get punched until his opponents collapsed with exhaustion was supposed to be a joke, a funny and absurd situation, not a documentary on a sound fighting strategy.

At this point, there is no actual winning in the cards for the so-called Axis of Resistance. We’re all just waiting to see how much more punishment they can take before they collapse.