This Iran War update may be a bit thin. It is hard for me to keep up daily postings at the level readers expect and deserve, particularly since my schedule is not set up for daily original posts. And given that I am in Asia, I am doing a good deal of defensive preparation which impinges on my working hours. I very much appreciate the information provided by readers to inform the community such as by Ann, Ben Panga, Acacia, AG, and others like Kevin W, Micael T, guurst and Chuck L via e-mail, and sightings from those like raspberry jam who have direct intel. Please do not feel offended if you have provided links and tweets and I neglected to mention your name. It would take time I do not have to be systematic in creating a proper thank you list.
I must go out and I may not return before its scheduled launch time, so the version you see may be rough. I hope to have this post completed by 8:00 AM EDT.
New information keeps pointing to a protracted conflict and real economy crisis. as in not merely a two month further close to complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which would be a catastrophe, but easily four months plus, which will push many countries and economies into a depression and political upheaval.
One indicator of the ever-lengthening duration forecasts comes from the Washington Post (hat tip Larry Johnson). Mind you, this Administration has a very bad case of optimism bias:
The Pentagon is preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, U.S. officials said, as thousands of American soldiers and Marines arrive in the Middle East for what could become a dangerous new phase of the war should President Donald Trump choose to escalate.
If President Donald Trump approves the plans, such an effort would mark a new phase of the war that could be significantly more dangerous to U.S. troops than the first four weeks. . . .
Discussions within the administration over the past month have touched upon the possible seizure of Kharg Island, a key Iranian oil export hub in the Persian Gulf, and raids into other coastal areas near the Strait of Hormuz to find and destroy weapons that can target commercial and military shipping, officials said. One person said that the objectives under consideration would probably take “weeks, not months” to complete. Another put the potential timeline at “a couple of months.”
In his Marine Reserve Commander Asks His Marines… Are Your Family’s Affairs in Order? Johnson also provides an indicator that some expect a ground operation to produce a a lot of body bags:
We’ll return to the kinetic war, but now to real economy matters.
Some, one has to admit even yours truly, took cheer from non-hostile countries like India, Pakistan, Spain, and Thailand reaching agreement with Iran that their vessels could pass the Strait of Hormuz.
If you listen carefully to this new talk by Sal Mercogliano, if he has his facts right, that is not even remotely going to produce even a small amount of non-Iranian oil flow.
Mercogliano says that two Chinese super-tankers were not allowed to transit the Strait of Hormuz despite China having reached an understanding with Iran. Mercogliano says that Iran is tightening up its inspection of vessels and is not allowing cargoes that originated in hostile nations through. As we described yesterday and earlier, Gulf states (ex Oman, which is not a meaningful petrostate) are doubling down on their support for the US/Israel side. That means their energy will not transit the Strait of Hormuz. That translates into Iran’s largesse not producing any relief on the energy front. It is possible they will allow bulk products like urea as a gesture to alleviate a food crisis.
Second, Meracogliano identifies a tiny number of vessels allowed into the Persian Gulf, which is an important step in the right direction. But that is way way way short of normality.
Third, Mercogliano identifies another impediment: carriers that service US trade (and perhaps more) adhere to US sanctions against Iran. That means no sanctions-evading payments of tolls in yuan
Fourth, Mercogliano seems to put undue faith in the idea that the US will ever get a maritime reinsurance scheme up and running.
Nevertheless, there is some progress even if as of now the Gulf States’ oil (ex what Saudi Arabia sends via pipeline to the Red Sea) is under Iran’s lock and key. I am having trouble fathoming this Trump tweet:
Just IN:— Trump reposts Pakistan's foreign minister Ishaq Dar tweet about Iran allowing 20 more Pakistani ships through the Strait of Hormuz. pic.twitter.com/QQMrtJxP8u
— South Asia Index (@SouthAsiaIndex) March 29, 2026
I have not been able to ascertain much about these 20 vessels as of this hour.
Another fresh talk is openly alarmist, which does not make it wrong. Keep in mind that this discussion has a strong libertarian skew, as in it depicts Covid responses as unwarranted, as opposed to poorly conceived and executed. It also invokes the bogus petrodollar thesis.1 However, it makes important observation about how much food production depends on energy and thus certainty of big price increases separate and apart from the effect of reduced fertilizer supplies translating into lower crop yields. They also anticipate “energy lockdowns” and reduced personal mobility. Even though the language is heightened, they aren’t wrong.
Local playback is blocked but you can click below to view Energy Lockdowns are Here, Putin Says “Worse than Covid” on the Redacted channel.
With Glenn Diesen, David Gibbs looks at the consequences of the sure-to-be-less bad-by-comparison 1970s oil shock. He also has the amazing finding from recently released official archives that the Saudis offered the US price relief but the Nixon Administration turned it down. 1 Gibbs is very clear, by contrast, that this Administration did not want a huge energy cost spike (Trump’s earlier obsession with getting oil prices down confirms that).
Gibbs points to use of austerity and squeezes of worker wages as part of the response to the 1970s oil shock, and the greater fragility of the US now due to its economy being heavily financialized and loaded with lots of household debt.
Now to the kinetic discussion. The biggest news is being in “wait and see” mode, per the current BBC live blog headline:
It is astonishing to see Aljazeera experts concede that the US cannot prevail in this war even as Gulf state join the US in doubling down. It also features the cope trope, that Iran is not prevailing militarily but will succeed Vietnam-style, by losing on the battlefield but winning in the end by inflicting more punishment than the US could take.
Iran is winning on the ground. The US is still stuck in World War/Cold War tactics and weaponry, and even worse, heavy relianca on high-priced, fussy, and low volume weapons. They have not even remotely adapted to the tactics and weaponry priorities of a world of ISR, cheap drones, and powerful missiles. Iran in a mere month into the war has made US bases unusable and driven the US out of Iraq. How is that not winning?
More confirmation from Doggo in comments: Key E-3 AWACS Damaged in Iranian Attack on Saudi Air Base from Air and Space Forces. This is a severe loss. As former Royal Navy Commodore Stephen Jermy explained (IIRC, to Daniel Davis), when radars like the US THAADs are destroyed, AWACS are the backup. But they need to fly 24/7.
I came across this talk between Stanislav Krapivnik and Mark Sleboda after the initial launch of the post. Given the caliber of these two experts, I am adding this based on my prejudice in favor of both. I am listening as I clean up and decorate the initial draft. So far, it is an interesting discussion of how shambolically bad the US planning and operations have been.
More confirmation of US incompetence:
A war with Iran was an obvious scenario for CENTCOM and Iran's ballistic missile and OWA UAS capabilities are well-known. The lack of underground command posts and hardened shelters—or even concrete barriers between tents, which were common at bases in Iraq and Afghanistan—at… https://t.co/CZF0h5m2Dx
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) March 29, 2026
Most of what Wilkerson says will be thematically familiar. What I found most striking was his particularly world-weary mien, along with Diesen at points showing uncharacteristic anxiety. Wilkerson’s attire also looked to me like a medic’s scrubs. I doubt this was a costuming choice but it added to the appearance of stress
Nevertheless, Wilkerson does provide some updates, such as confirming a Hezbollah claim, doubted by some readers, that they have succeeded in killing >7 Merkava tanks. He also believes the IDF as exhausted, with one official in close to tears on TV. However, reader raspberry jam say based on conversations with contacts in Israel, that most Israels have not suffered all that much from the war, so the lack of many facing serious costs means support for the war remains high
Hindustan Times updates the apparent US ground operation plans, and perhaps more important, starting at 5:20, covers IRCG claims to have hit US six LCU (landing craft utility vessels), killing a large number of US servicemembers.
Another re-report of that claim:
🇮🇷|The IRGC Navy hit six US Landing Craft Combat Aircraft (LCU) in the port of Al-Shuyukh. According to field reports, three of these vessels sank after the hit, and the rest are burning. pic.twitter.com/RMWGu6JSGU
— Aprajita Nafs Nefes 🦋 Ancient Believer (@aprajitanefes) March 28, 2026
Readers in comments discussed yesterday that Iran is threatening to target US university facilities in the Middle East after the belligerents bombed Tehran’s University of Science and Technology. Iran has now set a date of March 30 for a US apology and a promise that they will keep Israel from a repeat action. As most readers likely recall all too well, the Gaza genocide has included wiping out Palestinian culture by destroying their educational institutions.
Daniel Davis warns a false flag may be coming:
Federal authorities need to b paying close attention to this woman and her claims of “just having a sense” that something bigger than 9/11 is coming – and she’s already readying blame on the supporting culprits: podcasters who warn against the foolishness of choosing war in the… https://t.co/NtZxuH0JZY
— Daniel Davis Deep Dive (@DanielLDavis1) March 28, 2026
And another not-cheery update:
I don't think people understand the gravity of the situation as the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran.
This is a picture of Tehran. For you uneducated, untraveled, never-served, warhawks licking your chops at the thought of bombing it. It's not some low… pic.twitter.com/BnzB4F3001
— Mohamad Safa (@mhdksafa) March 29, 2026
Stopping for today (save cleaning up the machine-generated transcript below). See you tomorrow!
_____
1 The oil trade was denominated in dollars before the oil shock and the then lower capital surpluses of the Saudis were heavily invested in dollar financial assets. The 1970s negotiations between the US and the oil sheiks were about “dollar recycling” as in how to make sure that the new huge weight of petrostate money that would be heavily invested in the US would not result in them getting additional political influence. The US use of dollar dominance has obviously evolved substantially, but the oil shock and the resulting understandings are widely misrepresented.
2 Amazing detail on how the Nixon Administration rejected Saudi overtures to lower oil prices during the 1970s oil shock (this is from a machine generated transcript; I do plan to clean it up but not by initial launch time):
The first phase was led by Saudi Arabia which on religious grounds objected to the whole idea of a Jewish state in the Middle East and the idea of Zionism and it was ideological in character. And then there was a second phase though after a few months until they quote unquote moderate Arab controversies. I should say so not Arab led by Iran close US ally realized that they could uh make a lot of money from oil price increases. Iran did not have any real interest in the Arab religious group and had business-like relations with Israel….
The Shah had ambitious plans of building up a vast military apparatus which he was rapidly doing and to pay for it through oil revenues. And so this was a very attractive idea to him. And so in his second phase, you had continued oil price increases. I believe was about 400%. Oil prices increased 400% to the United States. United States was had much oil production internally. Europe and Japan were hit even harder around the southern hemisphere or still. So, it was a global event.
What I do want to emphasize is that what has come out more recently out of the archives is not known before is the United States government led by Richard Nixon and Kissinger, encouraged this price increase. They did not oppose it. They encouraged it. They privately told the Shah of Iran, you can raise oil prices as much as you like. United States will not object to it. And we’ll get into the reasons why in a moment.
But again, this is really very surprising because the um oil shock devastated the US economy. As I said, there was extreme damage of the US economy and the US was deeply complicit in it. You might say it was apt to self-destruction by the Nixon administration. The question of course is why. But before I go into why, let me just note that after a few months there was a factional dispute within the Saudi elite. And there was, shall we say, another faction of the Saudi elite sort of seemed to come to the four and wanted to repair the damage they did with the United States and offered privately to work with the United States to lower oil prices.
Amazingly, the United States refused to do this. He did not want prices and he buffed the sovere to the astonishment of the sellers. You know we have letters from Ahmed Zakaya who was the Saudi minister of petroleum who expressed astonishment that the United States was not interested in his offering and um it underscores the fact the United States was committed to raising oil prices and damaging their own country which is what they did. And now the question is why…
Well there are a number of reasons. The I think one was that the United States had been building up the Shah was the guardian of American and western interests in the Gulf. The British had pulled out of the Gulf after 1967 and they uh 68 I believe. The United States was not able to basically assert military forces into the Gulf because of the Vietnam debacle and so we relied upon the Shah to do it for us and so building up his military was functional from that standpoint.
Nixon was very eager to increase American military sales for the benefit of the American military exports exporters. We’ve been hurt very severely by the Vietnam which have tainted American weapon sales. We just lost for so nobody wanted to buy our weapons but the Shaw wanted to buy our weapons and that was a good thing. Furthermore, the Shah had been carefully building up support to the US political and mil and and economic elite for decades.,,
…in addition to that, American companies benefited considerably. The major oil companies, five of which were American-owned, the seven sisters they were called, five of the seven sisters were American oil companies. They benefited from the greasive oil prices and increased their coffers. uh the very powerful Rockefeller family was historically very friendly socially with the Palavi dynasty and um you know there was a whole series of business interests that uh benefited considerably from the economic boom going on in Iran thanks to high oil prices and so I think these considerations both the strategic considerations as well as the you might say more grubby economic considerations uh was what swayed Nixon and Kissinger.
Kissinger by the way himself was very close to the Shah personaly but he was also a a bit of an acolyte of a Rockefeller historically. So I think all of these kinds of connections was what drove US policy even though by any reasonable standard this was a self-destructive policy was following but whatever the cause of the policy um what we now know is the United States encouraged this oil price increase and the results were quite devastating.
But if we draw a parallel to today, there there’s no real why anymore.
There’s no interest for the United States to drive this price up.
Ted Postol’s presentation, linked to on NC the other day, pointed out that Iran possesses enough uranium at 80 percent enrichment to construct 10 to 12 gun-type A-bombs like Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima.
Iran’s potential possession of atomic bombs leads to a possible scenario that’s obvious once one considers it and relevant to US ground forces being introduced onto Iranian territory.
Postol’s presentation of the effects of three such weapons potentially targeting Tel Aviv was instructive, and if one hasn’t viewed it, one should. As Postol points out, gun-type atomic bombs (as opposed to the implosion-type plutonium Fat Man device used on Nagasaki) require no testing. That’s how easy it is to detonate uranium by firing a hollow cylinder ( a ‘bullet’) of highly-enriched uranium into a solid cylinder (the ‘target’) of the same material.
But Postol FAILED again to answer the basic question of HOW the Iranians could deliver such a weapon. Maybe there’ve been developments he knows about that I don’t. But if not, two problems exist with Postol’s scenario of Iran targeting Tel Aviv. One is relatively minor. But the other is NOT and the Iranians couldn’t deliver an A-bomb to Israel as Postol posits without solving this second problem, which is a problem—predetonation or pre-initiation—of real-world nuclear physics to which a solution would require testing, which as far as we know the Iranians haven’t done.
First, the minor problem. Little Boy weighed 4.85 tonnes. Atomic bombs are heavy. And while 4.85 tonnes sits well inside the physical payload range for modern ballistic‑missile warheads, where Russia’s Sarmat is the upper bound at 10 tonnes, no known Iranian ballistic missiles can carry a payload weight above, at most, 2 tonnes, that missile being Iran’s Khorramshahr-4/Kheibar MRBM, which also has the range, at 1,240 miles, to reach Tel Aviv. Still, we don’t know what we don’t know. Possibly, Iran has a ballistic missile squirreled away with more than double the payload capability we’ve seen from them so far.
Second, though, is the major problem and it’s a real-world physics problem. Gun-type atomic devices are highly unstable and subject to the risk of predetonation or pre-initiation, as I say.
How unstable is highly unstable? This unstable: the critical mass for Little Boy was never fully assembled until the moment of detonation—the uranium projectile being fired down the barrel into the target mass—and Captain William Parsons, the Enola Gay’s ordnance officer, only finished arming Little Boy after takeoff because it was feared that just the plane’s take-off might be problematic. So the bomb that left the ground was not in its final armed state and Parsons completed that process at altitude, over the Pacific, before they reached Japan.
The risk of predetonation (or pre initiation) derives from the possibility of spontaneous fission by neutrons from the target material (especially from U 238 impurities) during assembly, as well as by cosmic ray neutrons and neutrons from any trace U 234/U 236 atoms in the material.
See forex–
https://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-1.html
If spontaneous-neutron fission triggered a chain reaction before the projectile and target mass were fully assembled, the result wouldn’t only be premature, but either a fizzle (very low yield), a partial detonation, or a dangerous but less powerful nuclear explosion—and again you’d have no control of where it happened.
So, as the instability of gun-type atomic bombs is such that any mechanical solution to this problem might involve, say, a ballistic missile with a warhead that does mechanical/robotic assembly of the weapons material in flight—and, again, spontaneous‑fission neutrons might be a problem because that mechanism’s electronic components would sit very close to the fissile material (this was the problem with suitcase nukes)—I don’t see how the Iranians could put a gun-style bomb on top of a ballistic missile without testing it to see if this solution would actually work. And all the evidence is they haven’t tested it..
BUT if the US is obliging enough to invade Iranian territory—say, Kharg Island—with ground forces, this is a scenario where the U.S. has obviated Iran’s difficulties in delivering atomic weapons because the US has been, instead, obliging enough to deliver US forces to Iran’s atomic bomb or bombs.
If the Iranians are feeling sufficiently pacifist, they might announce ahead of a U.S. invasion that they’ve installed an atomic weapon or weapons on (say) Kharg Island, then submit film and evidence to the IAEA and invite that body’s inspectors to come in and certify that these are indeed atomic weapons.
Conversely, if they detonate their atomic bomb when US force are directly on top of it, then: –
[1] They’re not attacking another nation and they’ve exploded their bomb in a test on Iranian territory;
[2] Those who died in the bomb blast were a military force of aggressors invading Iranian territory sent by the only nation that does have the dubious historic honor of using nuclear weapons against another country;
[3] As for the Israelis, how can Tel Aviv know with certainty that if Iran possessed this atomic bomb or bombs, it hasn’t used the rest of that 80 percent enriched uranium to build several more bombs that Iran can deliver. Is Tel Aviv feeling lucky? Well, is it?
I have wondered if Iran will boobytrap Kharg.
I think not, though. Russian experience in the Ukraine shows the value of a good meat grinder rather than a disposable barbecue.
Let the US feed troops into Kharg. Where do they go and what do they do there? Nowhere and nothing. So rain missiles on their heads. You attrite US amphibious landing forces and you avoid nuclear opprobrium.
However, I don’t think the US is going to pursue an amphibious landing. Too exposed. Maybe an unconventional one, landing in rubber boats at night, but can that be scaled to 50k troops?
If the US invades Iran at all, I think the US is going to parachute marines etc in, to try to take control of the littoral, and then pursue a landing. We should watch for a new moon first….
Quite where, who knows? I still cannot see any achievable objectives. Maybe opposite Kharg because you can shut the oil transport to Kharg’s terminals off and advance on the oil fields themselves? Or, in the saddest timeline, simply to die, so that the US and Israel have an excuse to (tactical) nuke Iran.
My money is still on the marines having some other purpose. For example, interdicting “shadow” oil that passes Hormuz and insisting it is delivered to the West etc. Or securing the Saudi oil fields from Shia uprising. Or defending the regime in Bahrain from uprising. Or they are there as Ukrainian-style blocking detachments in case any GCC vassals threaten to slip the leash (or Israel threatens to go nuclear!)
Given the US benefits from the closure of Hormuz, intervention in the oil trade seems unlikely. Too much confrontation with China and US SE Asian allies. Propping up the sheikhdoms is plausible but coercing the sheikhdoms to stay the course, not divest US financial assets, seems the most likely.
Also, on another topic, twitter is full of claims that Iran paid towards North Korea’s nuclear programme, observed testing and has full access to the results and production. The problems of delivery may not be of the warhead in use but in shipment from North Korea!
They don’t need to.
Did you see the History Legends video we embedded yesterday?
They can hunt them individually with FPV drones….with the added beenie of being able to record the kill.
I would think that would be preferred.
It is confirmed on the Sleboda/Krapivnik that all the islands discussed as landing sites are in FPV drone range. (50 km). They can be killed by operators on shore.
Simplicius indicates Hezbollah success is in part from using fiber optic drones against Israeli tanks – certainly Iran has them, too. Ranges are up to 100 km.
https://thedefensepost.com/2025/08/19/ukraine-fiber-optic-drone/
… Hezbollah success is in part from using fiber optic drones
[with] … [r]anges … up to 100 km.
I have seen after-battle photographs from the Ukraine showing the impact of multiple fibre-optic drones. The landscape is draped with those lines (reminding me of the famous spaghetti-tree stunt). But how can they have a range of 100 km? At that distance surely the line would sag and tangle on something or break, no matter how light it is. What am I missing?
the fiber feed must be zero or negative tension – easy to do with an arduino by a high school student today.
ive looked, since i 1st heard about fiber optic drons, but couldnt find anything. wouldnt that leave just a tangle of fiber optic threads all over everything?
Correct. There are images out of Ukraine showing precisely that. If you picture spider webs and nests covered in dew, and then you scale things up until they encompass entire wooded areas, you are about right. Not sure if they are using a glass or plastic core cable – in either case, those fibres will be there for a very long time.
The fiber optics are a defense against signal jamming.
There are other ways around that, like jumping transmission bands. Used in other settings, though.
Yves S: They can hunt them individually with FPV drones….with the added beenie of being able to record the kill….I would think that would be preferred.
That’s certainly possible.
And I considered that and that, yes, it might certainly be preferred by the IRGC — be relished by them, since going back to the Iran-Iraq war in which many men at all levels in the IRGC fought when young, they’ve personally experienced enormous sufferings inflicted on their country for which the US has been the ultimate author. To defeat US forces on the battlefield would be the IRGC’s ultimate and sweetest vindication.
But that kind of conventional loss by the US could also have the potential effect of inciting Tel Aviv to go nuclear sooner when they see the presumed ‘greater military power on history’ — yes, help me, as you would say — has lost to Iran, and Israel itself is losing and about to be destroyed. Because Israel going nuclear is where this is going.
So that might be an argument in Tehran for demonstrating that there are three, not two, nuclear armed regimes in this war.
Although equally, of course, someone in Iran will have argued that Tel Aviv might just go even crazier when they see Iran has nuclear weapons and and just throw everything at Iran at that point.
We don’t know. It’s an extraordinarily dangerous time for the human race.
[1] The upper bound on people at risk of famine may be 2 billion as a result of this crisis. That’s the argument in the video with Steven Keen and Michael Hudson that commenter bwilli123 links to below.
[2] There are three nuclear weapons-armed states at war, for each of whom the result is to a greater or lesser extent existential. And that’s the main point I wanted to make by bringing up this scenario.
One might say: the Jackpot is here, it’s just unevenly distributed, to paraphrase W. Gibson. But it may not remain that unevenly distributed for long.
>So that might be an argument in Tehran for demonstrating that there are three, not two, nuclear armed regimes in this war.
Wilkerson and Diesen discussed this yesterday. Wilkerson was pessimistic and asked the questions
1. Would Iran having a nuke likely stop Trump nuking them ?
2. Same for Bibi/Israel?
And answered “no” to both because we are beyond rationality.
—-
Also to Yves comment in the post about Wilkerson’s outfit:
It’s his usual jacket over a Barcelona football shirt. In an earlier video that day (w/Nima) he had the football shirt without the jacket. I’m guessing he decided the football shirt alone was too casual. Why he was in a Barcelona shirt in the first place remains a mystery :)
I was wondering too, unless it was general satisfaction with Barca leading La Liga by 4 points, a close win against Vallecano last week and a huge victory (7:2) against Newcastle before that. But any US American into European Club Soccer is still extraordinary.
Or he only has a Barca outfit but was looking forward to international test games the end of this week.
(I wonder what he´d say about the upcoming World Cup and fans enterting the US and the surveillance state…)
p.s. ICE vs. serious hooligans would be “interesting”. German STASI feared East Germans Nazis and East German hooligans btw…
At the end of the “what’s going on in shipping” video above he makes a case at the end that it would make sense to land troops on friendly Oman territory on the other side of the Strait. Not like it really fixes anything or gets closer to any objectives, but they can probably stay alive longer than if they were on Iranian soil
The Oman will definitely NOT be up for that. They have no desire to take sides. The US can invade the UAE at Ras Al Kaimah and everybody can be happy.
I hope that those US troops are not sent to Kharg Island. Parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf just came out with a statement saying ‘Our men are waiting for American soldiers to set them on fire.’ And the Iranians are inclined to keep their promises.
“on fire” may be literal.
Yes, as Ritter has described repeatedly and graphically, the second Patriot sent to the girl’s school in Minab (a double tap) was deliberately fired with excess fuel so it would incinerate its targets. So the Iranian may indeed be planning a fiery end.
Perhaps someone on X could relay Michaelmas´s 2 questions above to Daniel Davis? Or Larry Wilkerson?
I see no reason why the Iranians should not be using Plutonium core warheads.
Which would be much smaller anyway.
I don´t believe there are any warheads today relating to the insanely heavy Little Boy design from 80 years ago.
Gun-type 1945 was only used because failure was almost ruled out entirely and the first use needed to work.
And if I follow Wilkerson quoting Postol, the fact the world knows about Iran having a bomb would actually make sense for Iran. So no secret WMD necessary.
Have you had time to check Starr?
It´s a pity only a few experts are looking into this.
Some Russians or Indians maybe who might have more Iranian inside info than Americans like Postol…?
Postol has a dozen red flags attached to his persona. And hardly anyone in the US establishment would dare to touch him. That makes it difficult to get certain data.
p.s. Unrelated but since I ran across it looking into the THE BULLETIN (argh), these people. Doing speculative BS instead of keeping their mouth shut and scrutinize properly.
At the brink: How Moscow’s ‘dirty bomb’ disinformation campaign risked a NATO-Russia war in October 2022
By Polina Sinovets
March 12, 2026
I don’t see how your “Gun-type 1945 was only used because failure was almost ruled out entirely” squares with Michaelmas’s “Gun-type atomic devices are highly unstable and subject to the risk of predetonation or pre-initiation”. Can either of you clarify?
Yes, this has always seemed to me to be the basic problem. Iran having fissile material and constructing a Hiroshima-type warhead is not the whole of the story by any means. There’s a tendency to overlook the more mundane things such as delivery. Little Boy was three metres long and 75cm wide, for example. Can you actually put that on top of an any existing missile? Is there any indication that missiles with 4,5 ton weights on have ever been flight-tested by Iran? Indeed, were there ever any cases of missiles being deployed with gun-based nuclear warheads?
Ted Postol told Col.Wilkerson (in above linked video) in an email, that Iran can build a deliverable weapon (or 6) using its existing missile platforms in a room the size of a lab in a few weeks. I presume its been done (Khamenei has given indicators of a fresh perspective from his father’s) and is just awaiting the fatwa or religious ruling to install and announce.
If it’s the Nima video of a few days ago, Postol just said they could do it, without citing sources. I’d really be interested to know if there’s any evidence that Iran has flight-tested a missile with a 4,5 ton dummy warhead and has found the kind of precision with it that Postol talks about.
No.
There has never been any gun-type atomic bombs on top of missiles. ICBMs only became a possibility with the development of thermonuclear and boosted fission weapons in the latter 1950s.
I wanted only to follow the possibility that Postol points out and stress — before you and others did — that his Tel Aviv scenario has a big flaw as he presents it.
And nevertheless that there is a very obvious scenario that obviates the delivery problem and thus the war in the Middle East is NOW already a war between three nuclear-armed regimes, each of which has different aims and for each of which this war is existential.
‘Little Boy’ was the first ‘existence proof’ for (gun-type) atomic weaponry. Small gun-type warheads were built. For example, the [W9 warhead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W9_(nuclear_warhead fired from the [M-65 atomic cannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M65_atomic_cannon was an 850 lb gun-type weapon built with 1950’s machining technology.
I was reminded of the existence of the atomic cannon, and that it was featured in Eisenhower’s inaugural parade, while reading ‘The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age’, Alex Wellerstein.
The Iranians don’t have to solve this problem if they get the plans and specs (or an actual blank device) from someone who already has.
Iran has worked with North Korea over the years to develop missile and nuclear technologies. We don’t know how far that help went. Reports typically state that Khamenei’s fatwa prohibited the development of a nuke. Question is whether it also prohibited the ownership of a nuke provided by a friend. And what do Iran’s current leaders think?
Also, the question remains that, given that Dimona lies only 100 miles from central Israel, and, given that Dimona has exceeded its life expectancy by more than 50%, what would it take to create a significant nuclear release (Chernobyl)? I don’t recall Postol’s having addressed this.
Hmmm… The dreaded ACME DIY Atomic Bomb Kit?
“Amaze and terrify your friends! Remove unsightly landmarks, instantly! Comes with pre-built case and control components. Just add fissile materials! (Sold separately.)”
Stay safe, (glow in the dark effects extra.)
Check out W33, nuclear artillery shell for M110 Howitzer. Mass 110 pounds, 2000 made and none ever self-ignited during their 35 years of service. Blast yield believed to be around 10 kilotons.
Iran could easily put several on a missile, as we now know they have mastered the sub-munition delivery.
Size of critical mass for various materials Wiki list:
(see “values”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass
some formerly classified physics from 1969
(Much is still under wraps especially small size designs not to speak of the thermonuclear devices)
REEVALUATED CRITICAL SPECIFICATIONS OF SOME LOS ALAMOS FAST-NEUTRON SYSTEMS.
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4765098
p.s. As non-physicist I wonder what is so risky about the implosion design that it couldn´t be used without a test today either? It´s not exactly arcane knowledge any more.
Thanks Yves — what you and team have built here is incredible and we are grateful for all the effort you put in day in and out (including the weekends)
This, Yves. Your coverage and the perspective you bring to it are valuable and irreplaceable, just as they were in the early days of the pandemic. Many thanks.
This. You are performing above and beyond, Yves! This is my first stop every morning and there is no source more timely, accurate and reliable than NC. I shudder to think what sort of polluted data-feed I would be stumbling blindly around in without you and the yeoman efforts of the commentariat. 😬
WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE* SALUTE YOU, YVES
🫡 🇺🇸
*sweet Gladiator 🎥 reference
Appropriate musical interlude.
Entry of the Gladiators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8_Mktrcm7o
Stay safe in the Big Easy!
Anecdata from Da Nang:
Suddenly the international community here is talking about the coming tsunami. People who aren’t news-followers are bringing it up in conversation. 3 or 4 times this weekend I heard the same “it feels like the early days of COVID before lockdowns; you know it’s coming but you’re not sure what it’ll be.”
Flights back to Europe are getting cancelled by airlines. Most flights go via the middle east. Rebooking options mean flying to Korea or China then direct to Europe (at 2+ times the usual cost). Oddly, there are few Etihad flights available for immediate travel at very low prices but who wants to fly through a warzone?
Gas remains available as normal if a bit more expensive. Government talks about fuel readiness but nothing in fertilizer, and other inputs.
I bought some solar-powered power banks and fans; without aircon a many modern buildings here will be unlivable when it gets warmer in the next few months.
My Vietnamese friend here in Ireland tells me her family in HCM are very concerned – not for themselves so much (they are pretty well off), but rural relations are already hitting issues with the price of cooking and transport fuel. In much of rural Asia, butane/propane are very important for cooking.
I think the main issue will be transport, not electricity – Vietnam’s electricity is mostly from coal (domestic sources, Indonesia and Australia) along with renewables. Dispatchable electric load is gas supplied, but it’s mostly from domestic wells, not LNG (Vietnam has some significant off-shore reserves). So at worse there would be peak time disruption to electricity and possibly rising prices, but I doubt if it will suffer supply issues. The push for EV scooters in urban areas is now looking a wise policy.
There are plans for huge LNG terminals in Vietnam, mostly due to Japanese support (Japan is the dominant player in the LNG infrastructure market in Asia). I suspect they will think twice or thrice about this now. This may turn into a blessing in disguise for Vietnam. Natural gas is very tempting for fast growth economies due to the relative low capital investment needed and relatively fast roll-out times (this is one reason for the ‘dash for gas’ in the 1990’s in the UK, which has proven to be a disaster long term). But this may result in a rethink. The negative though might be a renewed focus on possible gas reserves in disputed sea areas in the South China Sea. The Viets are not known for backing down easily when their country is at stake.
Thanks PK. You know more about where I live than I do :)
There were also a bunch of agreements signed when the Vietnamese PM visited Russia last week: LNG stuff, building a nuclear power station and other energy deals.
I don’t need to travel much and will be buying a bicycle tomorrow!
Famine and a Great Depression. A 10% decrease in energy means an equivalent fall in GDP of 10%.
An eye opening interview with Michael Hudson & Steve Keen.
(Apologies if already posted)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIypIDWQAQw
Thanks. I look at Institute of David Graeber YouTube channel infrequently so I would not have seen this in a timely manner without your comment.
Yeah. People here should look at this.
What a great video. Thanks for sharing. It really highlights (and I can’t find any fault in the reasoning) that we are gearing up for a very rough ride.
From the closing statement:
Nika: So inflation and deflation at the same time?
Prof Hudson: what’s being inflated is energy prices, what’s being deflated is the rest of the economy that needs to use energy and has to go out of business because it can’t afford it.
We can this in German business with the Russian cheap gas cut off and the increase in prices for them, no? Now we are just going to get a worldwide version of that.
For example, the factory that makes cheap plastic dollar tree trinkets will shut down because it no longer makes sense to spend that much on inputs for them. Thus those workers are out of jobs. Rinse and repeat for 20% of oil inputs across the whole economy and you get a lot of people out of work and now longer able to spend money in the economy.
We’ve just been playing it here at home on Sunday morning (I’m taking it easy owing to catching a cold) and I seem to have scared the pants off Ms. .Tom. She asked if there is any hope. I replied using understandings from NC that even if by magic Washington surrendered and Tel Aviv disappeared there’s no way to get the lost Gulf traffic back up and running in time to avoid the calamity. But that doesn’t matter because Washington and Tel Aviv will keep fighting as Alon Mizrahi explained and featured in Yves’ feature yesterday. So it may be years.
Global depression and famine with all the attendant social upheaval.
Thanks for the link! Definitely a must-watch. Keen stresses the direct relationship between energy and the economy, which is totally ignored by neo-classical economists.
(Apologies if already posted)
This is an excellent interview of people with excellent priors.
I have a tangential musing, adjacent to the AI discussions of late.
There is a human urge, to be first with important news, which has been exploited by social media for money, and which shows up even here. With AI generating industrial levels of bs, it’s become a problem, in that debunking bs takes time and energy, and amounts to giving assignments.
But we come to NC for timely and important news, and much is provided by the commentariat. One way of handling the veracity issue is through priors – as Yves says above, ‘I am adding this based on my prejudice in favor of both.’ Another is by journalistic standards of ‘extraordinary evidence’ being fulfilled by confirmation from another source, tho we’ve seen instances of much poisonous fruit from a single rotten tree.
For myself, something reposted is not a problem, as events can change the context and provide a different perspective on a set of facts. Yves has, at times, noted when a link had been previously included; sometimes to offset an implicit claim of new, most particularly when included in the body of that post [‘2) Not reading the post: Evidently reacting only to the headline of a post, or not reading through to the end.’]
All this to say, bwilli123, for myself, no apology necessary, and thank you. There are fine minds here, which may be better able to parse this problem. And a closing quote which has guided me at times but is not always true, from Ike:
What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.
Yves says up front that “This Iran War update may be a bit thin.” While Yves might think it’s “thin”, it’s actually one of the meatiest summaries out there and I appreciate it greatly! And Yves has provided these terrific summaries of the state of play every day, which I find amazing and incredibly useful and informative.
This is the first thing I read every day. I use these summaries as a tool to try to warn the people around me as to what is coming— so many are high on hopium. So many thanks to Yves for providing an incredible service to NC readers.
In particular, the international nature of both sources and commentariat enables us to live in a free state of information. In the US, the political system and surrounding media cloud have rendered a bound State.
I agree so much I just made a donation in addition to my monthly!
Amen to that!!! Just wrote a check myself to support this site.
Honestly, it’s Either that or get a pair of Lambert’s famous yellow waders and wade through the ocean of BS myself.
Ummm, hell no.
“a bit thin” is a major understatement when compared with what I saw on NBC Nightly News on Thursday (I think it was..). The first half of the show was ENTIRELY focused on the 2 month old missing mother of Savannah Guthrie story. I FF’d through 15 minutes to get the Iran War and airport TSA woes coverage, which was given a total of 3 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eaJoFcuaCDM
Here’s a nice example of the transparency from Trump that we value! He lets slip (probably classified info) that the USS Ford got peppered with waves of Iranian drones. It seems almost completely certain that it got hit by Iran and the ‘laundry fire’ story is being used as a cover.
This has been debunked. A longer clip shows Trump speaking in character as the Venezuelans at the time of the carrier’s role in Maduro’s kidnap.
Does anyone know why USS Ford is in Split Croatia, Why not Sicily or Naples where US Navy has a presence?
Is Split a great “liberty port”?
I had to check to see where the port of Split even is. Croatia it turns out. Something is going on there as that port has been visited by a coupla of US aircraft carriers so perhaps the US Navy wants to eventually turn it into a place that they can set up a base.
Future home of the 5th Fleet!!!
sarc.
The way ‘things’ are going right now, not snark, but a “strategic redeployment.”
Also, Split is up the Adriatic aways. Wouldn’t that present defense difficulties? All that potentially hostile coastline to the East etc. In a similar vein, is Split close enough to the Ukraine to allow US aircraft carrier planes to sortie from there to there?
Perhaps I’m giving the US military too much credit for Machiavellian cunning.
Stay safe.
They saw the Iranian drones and said “We’re going to split now” and left at full speed.
Chapeau!
Everybody gets to tour Diocletian’s retirement palace? My entirely speculative assumption is that while Italy has fairly active journalists, and maybe has more locals who speak English, Croatia (while fully integrated into the EU and NATO) has perhaps a less active information environment. If something happened on that ship that you did not want to be reported immediately, but hoped to buffer and delay and spin in your own way, Split could be a better choice.
Is there a longer clip that shows fuller context?
I wanted to share a few things I’ve picked up from Oil industry analysts I have been deep diving on. All the analysts agree if the strait remains closed, it’s the worst oil crisis we will have ever seen:
1. The average transit for ships out of the gulf is 45 days, so supply is still arriving at destinations and we now are building up an “air pocket behind it” they expect the paper market and the physical market prices will start converging when this air pocket makes land fall.
2. The market as a whole was oversupplied going into the crisis and slight downward pressure on the price was expected 2026 before this happened. That has explained some of the complacency if this “wrapped up quickly”
3. Because inventories were higher than average and we saw backwardation in the futures market (ie oil is high in the current month but lower coming months — 110 in May but 70 in July) industry players would and did welcome a brief spike as it allows them to sell a barrel of oil for 110 today and buy the same barrel back in the futures market in a month or two for a lot less (and make a profit now)
4. Mid distillates (jet fuel, diesel, etc) prices are rising faster and higher in prices than Brent Cruse because the producers ramped down the refineries early on to lower levels (like 50%) so they can keep flows consistent even when crude is in short supply when the air pocket hits. This is another contributing factor to Asian jet fuels going to 200/barrel so quickly
5. They said the spread between WTI (light sweet crude) and Brent (heavy crude) could grow from its current gap to $50-$100 a barrel. I haven’t heard the casual mechanism from the analysts but it support the “naphtha heart attack” reasoning we read about here.
6. The demand loss at the peek of COVID (during all lockdowns and work from home time) was ~20 million globally. We now need to achieve that same level of demand depression using prices (and government caps if necessary). However, they wouldn’t be shocked to see 220+ prices in the month 4-6 months if the straight remains closed
7. We are looking at a ~8 million barrel a day deficit in the absolute best case after rerouting supply through alt pipelines and assuming strategic reserves can flow at 3 million per day (which they haven’t) and it could be as high as 20 million per day loss.
8. There have been 400 million from strategic reserves promised over the next 3 months. Out of a total of 1.2 billion. It will take roughly a year to burn through all of it (if they release more) at the pace they can disperse them.
9. Expect the pain to be unevenly distributed in the sense that richer countries will get oil (and we’ll pay 10 per gallon for gas) and poorer nations will be in a catastrophic shortages as they won’t be able to bid at the prices seen.
That’s good detail. Makes a lot of sense.
I think the Iranians (and the west, to a degree) understand that it takes time for this noose to really tighten and squeeze the life out of the world economy. Of course, it will take a correspondingly long time to LOOSEN that noose, as well.
Also, an economically sanctioned country, such as Iran, might be better prepared for a worldwide economic downturn than their sanctioning opponents such as the USA.
Iran is unlikely to be persuaded to benevolently hold their punches because global economic damage will result.
Many of the citizens of the world will correctly blame the USA and Israel for their misery.
And reality show star Trump can’t ask to do the scene over again.
I’m really curious how the WTI-Brent spread could get so big. It’s a different oil, light sweet vs heavy sour, I know that much. Does anyone have any ideas how or why it would happen that way?
My understanding is that Brent is no longer “real” oil for practical purposes, but just on paper (due to lack of production), while WTI is still “real.”
Refineries need a blend of crude feedstock if they are going to refine oil into the whole spectrum of products demanded by modern economies. How their output is distributed across that spectrum is a function of the refinery design, within a broad range, and the blend of feedstock. They cannot run on purely light oil (they might be able to run on just heavy crude but it would require a specific set up to crack it into all the lighter products required and it would be much less efficient).
If you remove one weight of crude from the market, either by price or absolutely (remaining supplies all locked into long-term contracts), its price dominates the prices of the other weights. All crude prices may rise because of the unmet demand for refined products but a gap will open up between the crude specification is short supply and the ones in unusable excess.
Basically, light WTI in a world with inDeqyare heavier crude supply, you cannot give it away! If nobody is taking enough of it because they only need it in a ratio with heavier crudes, eventually the storage at Cushing will fill up and, like in the pandemic, they will pay you to take it away!
There are two reasons as I understand it:
1. Either oil is the input to a refinery, and out the other end pops out let’s say 10 other things (jet fuel, diesel, gas, naphtha, etc…) in different ratios. All of these go into some story of storage/staging before being sold. If you use “light crude” you get more light stuff than if you use “heavy crude”. Diesel is an example of a heavy output, naphtha is a light one. So with the closure of the strait you lose 25% of oil. The thing is, it’s mostly heavy (Brent). So if you try to replace it with light stuff, you need run the risk of filling up all your storage trying to make the same amount of diesel. Which would shut your refinery down. So you can’t use WTI (light stuff) for some applications and thus the price of a barrel doesn’t get bid up as high as the heavy stuff that just disappeared overnight.
2. WTI is in the US primarily. Analysts are explaining this crisis as a bomb whose shockwaves are spreading out from Hormuz. It will take time for that wave to hit WTI in the same way as it will to hit Brent which is geographically closer to where the bomb is going off.
I believe a big part of it is the cost of physical arbitrage. Easy to buy financial contracts, but to take advantage of the spread, you need to buy the contracts and move the oil at expiration.
Suppose one buys WTI at the lower price and sells Brent at the higher price for the same contract month. The delivery point for WTI is in OK; so, you’d take delivery there, but then you’d have to deliver it to the Shetlands where the Brent contract delivery point is.
How is “conventional wisdom” handling the big mess that the USA and ISR have handed the world? Not surprisingly, it’s saying that the only way of dealing with the mess is to double down. Washington Week, a once-proud PBS institution now run by The Atlantic, had a panel of the most conventional of “wisdom” dispensers: moderator Jeffrey Goldberg, arch-Neocon editor of The Atlantic, David Ignatius of the WaPo and CIA, the dynamic marital duo of the NYT’s Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, and some Atlantic flunkee spouting military nonsense.
Watch as much as you can stand. It’s terrifying to think that most of DC would listen to this crap and nod their heads in approval.
I haven’t watched Washington Week in years. Thanks for the update.
Of course Russiagate not to mention other landmarks along the road including Iraq and Bush v Gore brought many of us to the web that once saw the national press as an alternate force.
To be sure our mid 20th perception of the MSM as respectable and honest was itself in many ways a delusion since the owners of the national newspapers were onboard with the Cold War and the many lies that supported it. Still, the level of discourse then was far above now.
Many times here we’ve talked about the movie Network and the 70s perception that the fourth estate was about to be trivialized following the disaster of Vietnam. Nevertheless who could have predicted our current Bizarro World?
Washington Week in Review has always been a purveyor of ‘conventional wisdom”. That means a heaping helping of convention, with very little wisdom.
I just listened to the whole thing. They condescend about Trump the way Schumer does. “He’s not doing it right”. The part that blew me away was they said, “we don’t need help from other countries, we can open the straight with our navy and the marines we’re sending. Of course we might miss a mine, but our littoral ships and destroyers with air support will get the job done”. Then it moves on without challenge. It’s delusional as far as I can tell.
The Nixon policy to let oil prices rip makes sense when you piece it together with the broader context, actually. American living standards, by some metrics, peaked in 1973 if you look at Real Median Hourly Wages.
Matt Stoller has also written how deindustrialization was a deliberate policy to build up American allies on the periphery like Germany and Japan to act as a bulwark against the commies. It also provided for a great propaganda talking point, “Look at these successful capitalist countries! See, this is the way! No need for revolution, you peasants!”
Oil price hikes are a great way to redistribute wealth upward into the hands of our favorite oligarchs, both domestic and foreign!
As Michael Parenti said…the only real war is the class war!
Based on some research I did 20 years ago, I’m familiar with this interview given by the Saudi oil minister back in 2001 in The Observer, where he said the following about the 1970s price hike:
Unfortunately, I could only find this Larouche-linked piece that contains this passage among other tidbits.
Returning to FrameTheGlobeNews (FTGN) and their estimate of tripling of North American LNG capacity 2024-29 as a result of terminal construction centred on US Gulf Coast: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NLqo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/36864bd1-2c35-4cac-80ad-c1f25f0622a4_1870x1440.png
LNG facility construction is proceeding apace in Louisiana, Texas, Mexico and British Columbia. Worth noting that Louisiana governor Jeff Landry and Texas governor Gregg Abbott both Republicans. So there’s a Gulf Coast red-state lobby emerging likely to displace political influence of blue-state West Coast lobby. Big change.
Also worth noting that, by my rough calculation, stock prices of LNG facility investors Cheniere Energy, NextDecade Corp, Shell and Woodside Energy have spiked by average of about 25% since start of Iran War Feb 28. They’ve probably locked in long-term investors fearful of Persian Gulf oil market volatility.
In other words, Trump/Vance cool with high oil prices late 2020s just like Nixon in early 1970s. If there’s collateral damage to US economy, then too bad.
This was actually pretty common knowledge back when I was in grad school in the 1980s, at least among leftists. But one of the best-known discussions of this was published in the journal Foreign Policy in 1976. I can’t find a clean link, but here is the JSTOR entry:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1148022
It was listed as one of the top censored stories of 1976 by Project Censored:
https://www.projectcensored.org/4-why-oil-prices-go-up/
David Gibbs discusses this here:
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/oil-and-the-energy-crisis-of-the-1970s-a-reanalysis
Gibbs discussion provides some useful historical background for today, in that it covers some of the reasons why our Middle East policy has been “complicated” over the years.
According to Aaron Good’s American Exception the US not only allowed but engineered the oil price shock. I don’t have my copy at hand, but if I recall correctly he states that this is the dominant position of historians of that era. He also has some nice quotes about the Bilderberg conference in Stockholm before the shock, that just so happened to cover what to do in case of an oil price shock.
Good’s view is that the purpose was to transfer money from the European and Japanese economies to the US economy through OPEC that in turn invested the money in US financial institutions. Furthermore he uses the sustained durability of the cover story – against the dominant view of historians of the era – to demonstrate the US propaganda apparatus.
I really respect Good and his work. Do you know remember if this was in his book or the podcast with the same name (or both)?
All done! If you arrived before the time of this comment, please refresh this page and re-skim, since there are some consequential late additions
A time-saving cludge I use on videos is to open them in Youtube, pause the video, turn on captions, and then arrow-forward several times a second. I have studied speed-reading, where the small words are glossed over and meaning gathered from context, so the loss rate may not meet your needs. But you can play back the video if something catches your attention. (ie at 52:15 of Krapivnik/Sleboda on ‘the Biden policy of firing ballistic missiles into Russia and we might already have had nuclear armgageddon by now.’)
My approach is the opposite. For most videos, I can run them at 1.25 or 1.5x and multitask. Can’t read dense text or compose but can do a lotta other stuff at the same time.
If I am in a hurry and think I need to digest the whole vid, I generate a transcript.
Agree. Have never been able to do audiobooks bc something in me rebels at being caught up in someone else’s narrative for long stretches, have been very slow to admit podcasts to my news sources for the same reason. But speeding up videos works for discussion/reporting. 1.25 or 1.5x are just fine.
You apologized for this report and it was one of your most considered and lucid, Yves. Thank you. Recommended you to a pile of people this week as likely the best daily news summary available anywhere.
Thank you!
As Permanent Sceptic says above, Yves’ reports and links are the first and only thing I read during the day, having time for little else. I am forever grateful for her tireless efforts, as well as others at NC.
Many of my coworkers are alarmed or outraged, but my sense is that, thanks to the failure of US mass media to be little more than Trump stenographers, most of the American public have no recognition of what is coming. Second bwilli123’s link to davidgraeber.institute’s hosting Michael Hudson and Steve Keen. As Dr. Hudson points out, the global ramifications of Trump’s war of choice make it WW3 by definition.
Stenographers aside, I think this is closer to an existential crisis for much of the world due to decades of propaganda even from the peace minded.
Corporate America should be going ballistic, but they aren’t because they know less than ever.
“most of the American public have no recognition of what is coming”
My professional colleagues do not talk about the War in West Asia. I think they believe that by ignoring it, it will go away. This is of a piece with their rationalization of why their savior of the day lost to Trump v2.0 – Americans are bigots who could not imagine her as president. When I ask if they ever actually listened to her, crickets. For all his blather, the current occupant made sense in his own way, however much he didn’t mean it or was just plain lying. His opponent was all word salad all the time.
Locals outside of the institution (word choice intentional) are all-in on “We will and must win to prevent Iran from bombing New York.” I suppose this is the FOX News take. The abject Orientalism of their view of Iran is something to behold (regarding Orientalism, the Edward Said quibblers are mostly just that and the locals have never heard the term).
The criticism was that Said failed to place orientalism in a material frame, replacing structural analysis with the cultural products of same. There’s something to that (Stuart Hall might split the difference, insisting that culture is a product and needs to be seen as not just capitalist off-gassing). The chapter on Said in Aijaz Ahmad’s Theory is fantastic. Definitely DOES go way deeper. Said is a super-useful referent, way in to such thinking, though, very accessible.
Seems that to a remarkable degree the NYT governs the elite American mind. Reality is news that’s not “fit to print.”
Of course Cronkite used to say that he constructed his nightly newscast from the front page of the NYT but back then the Times was a real newspaper (when I lived in NY I loved it).
The Reagan right-turn saw a real attempt to accommodate what the editors obviously saw as a changing tide. Suddenly conspicuous consumption was the common denominator, with a weekend marriages section, a metro section about NYC elites. . . NPR made a similar rightward turn at the time. Not sure the Times was ever terribly progressive, though, though from nine or ten I was reading it with my dad on the porch on Sundays. . . I remember him grumbling about their unfairness toward Lindsay. In college, I had a friend who used to pick it up and say, ¨Let’s see, what does the CIA want me to think this morning?” Some of the trial balloon pieces, as in the run-up to this war, still very much have such a character.
On. The. Money. Former field NPR field producer here from the early ’80’s. We still edited 1/4″ open reel full coat tape w/razor blades, if that gives context. The ironic staff nickname for HQ became “National Petroleum Radio.”
Although I did arts related productions, the vibe from DC just kept ratcheting right until folks like me moved on.
I liked the run down of events, (extensive enough for me) and will, probably revisit it a bit later.
I do wonder if there will be a framing change in which we treat the war the way we do a “natural disaster”. By that I mean the minutiae of the causes and fault lines matters less than your preparedness for living through it. And the content you want most becomes guides on how to collapse your previous standard of living without becoming miserable.
Eventually the amount of petroleum extracted and refined will begin to diminish as the energy costs paid in petroleum for extracting the petroleum start to match the energy value in the petroleum [ignoring other reasons for extracting petroleum from a particular source with certain mixes of cracking products or by-products]. By suddenly staunching the flow of a significant percentage of petroleum, Iran inadvertently created multiple experiments of sorts that might be studied to obtain lessons for the future.
Though the shock’s onset was precipitous, I believe the ongoing outcomes clearly indicate that the world is completely unready for the coming declines in the amount of petroleum energy that will be available. The range of impacts to countries differently situated to deal with diminishing petroleum and petroleum products — different in their reserves, and mixture of sources — portray a time series of sorts showing the extent of impacts across the various levels of petroleum readiness. This is complicated by the many other products whose flows were also suddenly diminished, but broadens the ‘experiments’ to include the impacts of varying levels of food shortages, or suffer shortages, or helium shortages for example.
Iran has given the world an opportunity to see just how difficult, painful, and complex “degrowth” will be unless our societies, our civilizations are greatly modified, and soon. The systems of trade are perhaps most exposed as tragically ill conceived.
For those interested, ShoeOnHead gives her own Iran war report-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBZ6-Uzlwt4 (34:46 mins)
It seems that god botherers will kill us all so that they can be saved by Jesus Christ.
She is America’s Greatest Influencer. And she is a true leftist. Yet the Democrats would never throw her name around (and throw money at her). She is too independent-minded.
15:20: Behold, the Fruits of Martin Luther
16:20: Ted Cruz, Catholics as Parasites
—with a good description of why the Catholics and the Orthodox don’t bother with this Israel stuff, theologically.
—good Jesus joke.
17:35: “Sand New Jersey”
22:00: Her advice as Cassandra to J.D. Vance…
All in all, well done. Also, she knows her production values, and she is a good film maker.
On the E3 AWACs, having trouble getting hard maintenance requirements on these very, very old frames, but readiness rated at 56%, which sounds surprisingly high (exaggerated) for such ancient airframes and electronics. If we assume maintenance rates of around 16 hours per flight hour (such as for an F-16), you have an availability rate of about 3% – and the US only has (had) 16 E-3s. Fly them continuously, and these rates drop, and the question of spare parts (absent canibalization) arises as many of small supply network machine shops for these parts no longer exist.*
Given the battlespace dimensions are 2000-3000 miles with access only around the perimeter, 8 hour flight limits, the loss of 3 is critical; however, even as they will be replaced, there are not enough to fill in for the lost ground radars leaving massive monitoring holes, which is (per politics) Israel-focused.
Side note on lack of US preparedness – Russia learned to add drone protection to its radars due to US attacks. But the US learned nada.
I was looking at buying one of these machine shops a year ago (owner died), but could not convince the head machinist to remain – he took a job at Vanbenberg instead and the shop surplused – got a few nice pieces at a great discount. Its now a marijuana warehouse farm.
If I was a crewman abroad one of those AWACs or air refueling tankers, as soon as the plane landed I would be heading away from it fast. It is now obvious that the Iranians are actively hunting them down with Russian and Chinese help. In the air they likely have fighter protection and are out of range of Iranian aerial weaponry. But as soon as thy are on the ground and are being refueled and maintained, then it is open season. Not good news for the ground crews obviously and if I were them, I would have a truck on standby ready for a quick getaway.
One other thing. Both types of aircraft as you say are being flown into the ground. You have to wonder if at the end of this war whether many of them will be condemned as no longer being flight worthy enough to make the trip back to the US and they won’t be just scrapped for spare parts in this theater.
Iran has been flooded with ManPads from Russia (which shot down the F18 recently), but also has loitering munitions that wait for a plane to fly by and then activate. No idea if they have played a role yet, but they are waiting (from Stanislav with Sleboda). In a few weeks when the US is out of standoff munitions, attrition of its airforce will accelerate rapidly (and that is when I expect the S400s will begin operating in flash mode) – note, the attrition is real due to the maintenance requirements and age of platforms and lack of spare parts.
You’re saying these very complex costly planes, which take years to plan and build under very tight specifications, are now dependent on mom n pop machine shops which not only have no oversight but are disappearing?? Good grief. With all the extra slush in military budgets, the spare parts business was not worth propping up?
Just order what you need from China! There are too many easier ways for smrt Muricans to make munny than building real things that have tolerances.
It appears that much of supply chain of the MIC was neglected in the decades of trade liberalization and outsourcing.
I suspect that after 1991, few among US strategic planners imagined that US would ever need to face off against a peer or near peer competitor, much less find itself confounded by a smaller power with asymmetric capabilities.
Or, to echo the Commander in Chief, who could have known?
Remember the rules of neoliberalism?
1. Because markets
2. Go die.
They apply to machine shops.
Star wars is where the money is! MIC needs to eat!
So happy to know we are getting our money’s worth with all these trillions spent over the years. fers…
I am having trouble fathoming this Trump tweet [about Pakistan tankers being let though]
1. It’s nothing special for Pakistan, seems like the same that Thailand, Malaysia, India etc have already agreed: tankers stuck in the Gulf can exit gradually?
2. Trump reposting it to hype up the mythical Pakistan mediated peace negotiations? With added hope of oil markets being dumb enough to see it as a “Strait is opening” headline?
As Yves said previously, these are all full tankers leaving the Gulf and I’ve yet to see any tankers entering. The crews are running out of food and water, and Iran is letting them leave gradually. It’s good realpolitik without actually changing the situation.
Would be interested to know the Gulf port of origin.
No, I read this as Pakistan gets tankers both ways but only 2 a day. So one in, one out on average?
In any event if they can’t carry the fuel of Gulf states, they are presumably foodstuffs and other bulk cargoes.
Thailand was basically begging Iran for plastic pellets, so that might be what we take
If Iran was smart, they should negotiate to let in ships – after a close inspection – to supply those stranded ships with water, food and other necessities. The Red Crescent could even charter a few of these ships. And maybe when those ships go back out, they can take surplus crewmen with them as well.
>No, I read this as Pakistan gets tankers both ways but only 2 a day. So one in, one out on average?
I’d be interested to know why you read it that way (only if you have time obviously)? I didn’t, but I’m coming from a position of ignorance.
I wonder how many Pakistani tankers are stuck in the Gulf? Presumably getting those out first would be the priority?
Although it’s definitely unclear; there doesn’t seem to be any other information on this as MSM etc are just quoting Dar’s original tweet:
“I am pleased to share a great news that the Government of Iran has agreed to allow 20 more ships under the Pakistani flag to pass through the Strait of Hormuz; two ships will cross the Strait daily”.
—-
>In any event if they can’t carry the fuel of Gulf states
They seem to be letting Gulf-laden pre-existing stuck ships out:
1. tanker trackers reports a Saudi-laden ship headed for Pakistan emerged from the Strait. Unclear if it took the toll-booth or main path.
@TankerTrackers
15h
Today’s satellite imagery actually revealed a third southbound tanker we were able to identify on behalf of clients. She was laden with Saudi crude and her AIS was briefly offline at the time. Heading to Pakistan.
2. Lloyds mentions that Pakistan bound tanker P.Aliki got through which seems to be Ras Tanura laden
Because:
1. There would be no reason to agree on a daily level if Pakistan were merely allowed to get its vessels now stuck in the Gulf out. It would not be formulated this way.
2. Even though the total # of ships stuck is large, it is hard to determine their status:
3. I am surprised that they are letting a Saudi oil carrier out, but the ship is loaded and Pakistan regularly (along with Sri Lanka and India) shows up close to the top of the list of countries really suffering due to fuel shortages.
4. As indicated, the benefit of merely letting ship in the Gulf leave is limited.
5. The Iran parliament, IIRC next week, is getting draft legislation re the tolling procedures. Once that has passed, we should have a better idea of how Iran intends to handle the tolling and access procedures.
Thank you!
If you want to know what the Trump regime will do, pick the flashiest and stupidest alternative.
Flashy because Trump is a showman, stupidest because Trump does not give a shit and he is visibly declining both physically and mentally.
It’s going to get real interesting on the Home front as his incompetence and rage continue to go unchecked.
“Interesting” would be when he is at the “a horse, a horse” portion of the program. He set his life upon a cast of the die, let’s see how much he finds out about the ending.
Agree. Trump runs his presidency essentially by press release. As everyone who’s worked in corporate settings knows, press releases are hopium and BS rolled into one, the truth be damned. While Iran and Russia want treaties and long-standing commitments with details galore, Trump just needs a press release or PR moment to tout his win and then move on to the next odd subject floating in his mind. The Gaza ceasefire was a PR moment where only stage 1 was ever accomplished and the rest is just [bleep] to be swept under the rug.
Except that Trump’s idea of a press release is a post on Truth Social.
I wonder to what extent it would be possible for “pressure from below” on Congress to have some effect in terms of restraining DJT. Perhaps such a pressure campaign would be ineffective, though if so that would be further illuminating in terms of the degree to which our Republic still has much in the way of a “representative” character to it.
—
I suppose that I should start saving egg cartons; it seems plausible that plastic growers’ supplies like starter trays and inserts may become pricey if not unavailable (I’m already re-using these to the point of destruction, but the people to whom I distribute tend to toss their empties after planting. I’m something of a hoarder — it has always seemed kind of terrible to me that we so casually discard low-entropy materials after their primary purpose is fulfilled. Airtight plastic containers, for example — what wonderful things for storing dry foods, and we throw them away by the billions.)
Congress is normally resistant to pressure from little people, to be sure. However, we do have a little knot of creatures in the Senate who are not getting named, scorned, and shamed for what they are doing now to let a crazy man run wild. Imagine if we had an actual free mass media; there would be features on ‘who are these people, what are their names, and why are they so cowardly’. Right now people don’t even realize who is standing between us and a sane government, they just receive a steady stream of ‘Trump says this, Trump does that’.
Re Lawrence Wilkerson’s attire: He’s wearing an FC Barcelona shirt. He was wearing the same shirt on another podcast without the blazer. Has to be intentional with Spain being one of the few (the only?) Euros to buck the US/Trump.
Thanks for clearing that up.
And Larry “The Shirt” Johnson* is travelling, so Wilkerson is making up for Johnson “dressing like a funeral director”.
As serious as the subject matter is, the banter between the Larrys can be silly.
*- Daniel Davis uses this caption for Johnson when he’s a guest.
Funny because everyone in Madrid, the capital, hates Barça. They also don’t like being called Castellaños by the Catalonians, they consider themselves Spanish, punto.
He should wear Real kit but perhaps not something Mr Wilkerson would think about.
The “natural” thing for any football/soccer aficionado would be to be a fan of Real Madrid. Not that there aren’t a lot of Barça followers over there. Damnit!
Forgive my temporary third class hooliganism!
Kaptain Kaos — I smell nukes abroad, and no election at home. I need a smaller nose.
I was cronying at our local No Kings yesterday, and met with looks of derision when I mentioned trying to lay by food-stuffs like beans, rice, flour, durables like high capacity/output water filters, etc. Covid redux.
I was amazed more than a few see the tsunami, and seemed to be resolute in their abject equanimity:
Que Sera, Sera. Will that calm hold when TSHTF, and we Jackpot?
I live in a relatively isolated affluent ‘north’ area, with a terrible growing climate. A ten percent reduction in oil will hit us, but not at all like it will hit the turd* world. There will be a lot of suffering. As to the atmospheric radiation, I have no answers, other than it is a closed loop.
Humans are fomenting a broad array of bible-like prophetic realities on the ground.
For, is it written?
Or, in the age of markets, ‘capitalism’, and the neocon Friedman/Austrians:
Choices, and consequences?
*paraphrasing DJT
“Will that calm hold when TSHTF, and we Jackpot?”
That may well depend on the ability of those who Jackpot to be all Zen when someone sticks a gun in their face to relieve them of their bounty?
Russia is providing Iran intelligence to target U.S. forces, officials say
The targeting information has included the locations of American warships and aircraft in the Middle East, the officials said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/06/russia-iran-intelligence-us-targets/
I thought I’d heard that before, but wondered if there had been some development since. Note the date.
And China apparently provided Iran with its replacement for GPS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfs22XrhdqM
“How China’s BeiDou System Just Made Iran’s Missiles Unjammable — A Threat the Pentagon Can’t Counter Right now, Iran’s missile systems appear to be shifting away from U.S.-controlled GPS toward China’s BeiDou satellite network — a move that changes everything. Not gradually. Strategically. In this video, Money & Empires breaks down how BeiDou’s encrypted signals and multi-satellite architecture could make Iranian missiles far more resistant to jamming, why this undermines decades of U.S. electronic warfare dominance, and how this shift reflects a deeper realignment of global power — almost frame for frame.”
This startle-ing report from 2 years ago from The War Zone documents surveillance drone flights that have been occurring over military assets in the Western hemisphere.
https://www.twz.com/air/mysterious-drones-swarmed-langley-afb-for-weeks
I found this report after following the tweet posted in Yves’s writing, following this sentence:
“More confirmation of US incompetence:”
I went waaaaay down this rabbit hole at the time.
Short version: I’m fairly sure it was an op tangential to the UFO hoax, the post 2017 version of which was itself an op by Palantir/Anduril types and counterparts within mil-gov to (possibly among other things) persuade the US military to take drones seriously and stop wasting money on expensive white elephants.
The current situation of Iranian drones beating expensive exquisite US boats and planes suggests the lesson was not learnt fast enough.
There were a series of these drone events over US bases, and later in the UK and Europe. Often (but not always) they appeared at geopolitically relevant times. The final big one was the New Jersey drone hullabaloo in the weeks between DJT2 election victory and anointment.
The overall purpose was to illustrate: we have no way to stop these drones flying over and we should do something about it.
This is all conjecture and I have long since lost all the references but I am pretty confident of my conclusion.
Israeli police bar Latin Patriarch from Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre on Palm Sunday
Here’s the link to the full press release:
Joint Press Release: The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Custody of the Holy Land
People forget that the Israelis want the Christians out as well and have been harassing them for years. One Ultra-Orthodox had the bright idea of spitting on monks – probably not the only one – on their way to carrying out their religious duties until one day he spat on a monk that happened to be an American ex-gridiron football player….
Pizzaballa? Had to check that the link wasn’t The Onion.
Obviously you’re not very familiar with the Catholic Church. Pizzaballa served as the Custos of the Holy Land for 12 years before becoming the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in 2020. He was one of the favorites in the last papal election, but the fact that he was the candidate who would stand up most strongly against Israel doomed him in the end, alas.
The last two Latin Patriarchs of Jerusalem were Arabs: a Palestinian, then a Jordanian. Putting an Italian, and one that was quite Israel-friendly at that, was a big retreat and concession by Pope Francis. Yet, today, we are looked upon with ever greater contempt by Israelis.
There is no appeasing a bully.
Both Meloni and Macron have condemned the Israeli police forces for this action. Beyond the pale, but it’s Israel, so that’s their day-to-day.
Won’t be surprised if all holy week activities in Jerusalem are barred.
Silly thought, but could this be a set up for a false flag attack on the Holy Sepulcher and or the Al Aqsa mosque?
Red flare for Trump: ‘No Kings’ rallies a show of political force
The demonstration outside the Minnesota State Capitol for the marquee “No Kings” rally, with Bruce Springsteen and Jane Fonda on the bill, wasn’t the most notable development during the day of protests on March 28.
More notable was the “No Kings” march in Staunton, Virginia. And Salisbury, Maryland. Rockford, Illinois. Beaver, Pennsylvania. Eugene, Oregon. Chillicothe, Ohio. Port Huron, Michigan. Flatwoods, West Virginia. And more than 3,000 other places across the country, plus a scattering around the world.
Trump’s ‘Rogue Judges’ Rhetoric Breaches His Oath
Eugene resident here – our event this time was actually held in Springfield. This neighbor city skews much more working class (made famous by the Simpsons) and the move was an intentional effort at extending the local coalition to organizations in that community. Trying to reach past liberal UO.
Well attended but with a lot of Eugene imports so work in progress.
Keep in mind that Trump is bored with this War, if Hegseth or anyone else asks him what to do next he will probably say something like “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m working on my golf swing, just take care of it”.
That way he doesn’t actually have to make a decision and when things don’t go according to plan he can blame someone else.
Maybe others who understand this or can use AI-translate could summarize (despite the likelihood of total bias):
RU YT video by Ruslan Suleymanov about his time in Iran.
70 min.
youtu.be/QKgGstM4WRc
via TWITTER Alexander Baunov
Mar 23
https://nitter.poast.org/baunov/status/2036158496706535776#m
What Iran looks like from the inside right now, and what people there are saying.
Ruslan Suleymanov returned from Iran yesterday. IN RUSSIAN
time stamps
00:00 Beginning
00:32 Ruslan Suleimanov returns from Iran
01:30 Visa and border: how to enter Iran
04:20 Why filming is prohibited
05:30 How the Iranian dictatorship works
07:50 IRGC, checks, and detention
12:20 Basij and total control
14:10 Life under wartime conditions
17:00 Destruction and fear in the cities
20:50 Pro-government rallies and propaganda
27:30 Actions of the opposition
36:40 Who comes after Khamenei
41:40 Attitudes toward Russia and the world
01:01:40 Internet, censorship, and isolation
01:08:20 Leaving Iran and interrogations
fog is thick, and all, but dmitri lascaris in in iran…wandering around talking to a whole buncha people, high and low.
fremen vibes…desert power. these folks aint cowering in bunkers.
Satellite image of the destruction of an AWACS (E-3G) command and control aircraft at the US base in Al-Harj, Saudi Arabia.
Registration number 0005-81, belonging to the 552nd Air Wing stationed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma, USA, was destroyed as a result of a missile-drone attack by Iran on Al-Harj air base in Saudi Arabia. The damage shows that the munition hit the most important part of the aircraft, namely the tail section, where sensitive systems are located, including the AN/APY-2 radar station.
“A painful lesson for Americans on the runway”
https://t.me/parstodayrussian/199781
https://t.me/parstodayrussian/199784
I hate to sound a contrarian note, and I want USrael to lose this as much as anyone here, but I think the Iranian response to the attack on its universities and water distribution infrastructure (the latter was also reported yesterday) was the first sign of weakness in these weeks.
A demand for an apology in 48 hours or else, instead of prompt retaliation, is what Trump does when he doesn’t have any options. Iran had been engaging in a quid pro quo, but now it decided to give the USraelis 48 hours to blow more stuff up while waiting for an apology that won’t come, and guarantees that aren’t worth the computer memory the corresponding tweets are stored in? What for?
I can only conclude that Iran’s offensive capabilities have been degraded to the point they need to engage in bluffing and posturing. That’s not an entirely bad thing. They may be saving the remaining long-distance missiles for later use should things escalate even more. But if we combine this with the part in today’s post where raspberry jam is quoted as saying that ordinary Israelis haven’t been seriously inconvenienced yet, can we really say Iran gains anything by not blowing up the Technion and the Weizmann Institute immediately? Today was the first day in this war when we didn’t wake up with news of the latest missile wave against Israel, though Iran did hit important US assets in GCC countries.
Well, maybe I’m jumping the gun and expecting a quick resolution that was never going to come. But I still cannot find convincing evidence that the US are going to be kicked out of the MIddle East, or that Israel will cease to function as a viable settler state. Things sure could bank that way, but we’re not at the point where this is self-evident. Then again, if we think of geopolitic changes in terms of phase shifts – when in one moment everything seems like it ever was, and then change comes abruptly – perhaps Israel will look fine till the very end, and then will be gone rather quickly. One can hope.
I’d hate for Craig Murray to be right, but I have to consider the possibility until events allow me to dismiss it.
I disagree. Iran is trying to condition Trump to de-escalate, as in be able to admit error or retreat.
It is a no-brainer that Iran could wipe out all those campuses immediately. They hit the Ras Laffan LNG infrastructure and other energy assets within hours of the attack on the North Pars gas field. They have NOTHING to prove in the potency front. That is a US issue.
And a fast response would kill a lot of non-belligerents. The Shia have higher moral standards than we do.
“Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.” Attributed to Thucydides.
Wait, what? Do you mean to say the Israeli campuses are active, as in not evacuated already? Like, classes haven’t even been suspended? That’s… some complacency alright.
I also appreciate your take. I hadn’t thought of the Iranian strategy as how Pavlov would treat Trump. I suppose it’s fitting, no one is in more need of some good conditioning as he. I’m all for placing electrodes on him, as well.
I don’t think you understand what Iran is saying.
US universities have what amount to extension schools all over the Middle East, such as NYU, Johns Hopkins,
See from Politico in Iran threatens US campuses in Middle East:
https://www.politico.eu/article/iran-threatens-us-campuses-in-middle-east/
The administration and certain tech-bro algorithm mavens already have shown a disregard for institutions of higher learning. Think of how they are currently dismantling, disrupting, or destroying institutions without bombs.
RE: higher moral standards
I think Iran has played this well. Giving a public warning before any retaliation really highlights who the bad guys are here, and also minimizes casualties. Iran wants the US out of the region, and they are doing it by destroying their stuff rather than deliberately murdering civilians.
If this report from today’s links about 80% of Iran’s missiles getting through is accurate, the Zionist entity is in big trouble.
If Iran wins this and comes out with the moral high ground, we’ll have had a real global paradigm shift. I’d expect to see more US bases around the globe overrun and abandoned.
The group said U.S.-affiliated campuses in the region could become “legitimate targets” unless Washington formally condemns the attacks on Iranian schools by noon on Monday, according to a statement first reported by Fars news agency,
Yes, these aren’t real military targets, so minimizing civilian deaths is good PR but also note it will transpire in the middle of the trading day. It probably hasn’t escaped Iran that Trump is intentionally timing escalation to manipulate the stock market. Its a game that two can play.
I want USrael to lose this as much as anyone here
Not speaking for anyone, but I do not want USreal to lose, I want Israel to find a way to live peacefully with its neighbors, instead of trying to kill them and steal their lands. I want Israel to grant equal rights to all persons within the boundaries of its national control. This would be a real victory for Israel.
I don’t want the US to lose. I want the US to play a constructive role in the ME, working to provide conditions of stability and prosperity, instead of death and chaos. This would be a real victory for the US.
Regardless of what I want, it appears highly probable that US/Israel will lose because they do not seem capable of responding to Iran’s asymmetric warfare tactics. They couldn’t stop the Houthis. But even assuming Iran loses, that won’t stop anything, America will retain its strategic weaknesses and its corrupt procurement system and still be unprepared to deal with the changes in warfare, and Israel will just be lobbying for war with Turkey. Nothing will change.
I respect your opinion, and I think that’s a perfectly reasonable stance to have.
During many years, I supported the one-state solution. Israel as a state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean for all its citizens, without encroachments in other people’s lands and living in harmony with its region. I didn’t believe the two-state solution because the Bantustan-like fragmentation of the Palestinian-occupied territories was a non-starter, and there’s the issue of the huge refugee camps in Lebanon and the Sinai. I wasn’t as positive about this as the late Uri Avnery, who thought a one-state solution would mean the end of a state called Israel as Palestinians became a majority, the Knesset changed its name to Mahjlis and Jews started emigrating due to not being able to bear equality. He thought the two-state solution was viable till the end of his distinguished life as an activist on behalf of peace and the enfranchisement of Palestinians.
But I don’t think this has been possible anymore since 2023. Israel was already a Herrenvolk pseudodemocracy, but while the Palestinians were just second-class citizens, an accommodation like happened in South Africa was possible. But Israel has since gone where the South African whites never fully went. The genocide seems to me to have erased all possibility of reconciliation. One could argue that genocided minorities all over the world have managed to find a way to live in the settler state that was once theirs (like native North Americans), but the problem is that the Palestinians are nowhere close to a minority, and I don’t want to contemplate what needs to happen for them to be.
So to me the solution for the Israel impasse is not the South African one, it’s the Algerian one. Let the settlers resettle elsewhere. If a rooted fraction of them, the ones whose ancestors were already in the Middle East before the Balfour Declaration, decide to stay, and live like the Iranian Jews as a peaceful minority community in a muslim country, fine with me.
As for a constructive role for the US, forgive me, but there has never been a case of a distant hegemon playing a constructive role anywhere. When you live across an ocean and don’t have to bother about the consequences of spreading mayhem in distant lands, you’ll never change your ways. There are simply no incentives. Heck, the US is throwing its closest allies except for Israel under the bus right now. That’s in agreement with past behaviour of hegemons. So it doesn’t make sense to me to expect improvements. At best, a more powerful country may treat adjacent, weaker countries with some benevolence because geographic contiguity means even a small country can cause a world of pain to you. So I believe Russia can play a constructive role in the post-Soviet space, and China on East Asia, and even that comes with lots of qualifications. But the US is bullying its only contiguous neighbours, Mexico and Canada, as we speak.
I’m chiming in for the first time in a long time. It’s hard to really believe this is happening. I’ve been saying for weeks “surely cooler heads must prevail”. It’s hard to believe that the Joint Chiefs, or high ranking intel officials, or oligarchs, or the Chinese or the Russians – all the worlds powers that could possibly have any kind of leverage – it’s hard to believe they will allow the world to endure $200 oil. But it seems we’re just careening along without any breaks.
I have a family with three kids and at this stage it’s hard to envisage things like driving my kids the 30 mins to and from summer camp in July. And I don’t raise that example as a way to say “oh woe is me” but more to ask – “how much shit is the American working class going to be asked to eat?”
Like realistically, is the US elite looking at the game board and saying – the American people will just have to shut up and take $10/gallon at the pump? Surely not!
To your last point, according to the footnote above on the Nixon administration, that is exactly what they did a half century ago, so why not now? We can’t have those poors sharing the wealth, so every so often the government comes in and mows the lawn so to speak.
Also, be sure to laugh in the face of the next person who tells you there is a ‘free market’. That is the last thing US oligarchs want, so they use the government to make sure they can dominate, and competition is not really welcome. If there is any overarching strategy to this mess of a US foreign policy over the last decade plus, it’s to break up China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
India ships 38,000 MT of fuel to Sri Lanka amid West Asia crisis and local panic
As war rages, Iranian politicians push for exit from nuclear weapons treaty
While US-Israeli attacks hit key infrastructure, hardliners demand withdrawal from Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Finland reports suspected territorial violation by drones
https://www.reuters.com/world/finland-reports-suspected-territorial-violation-by-drones-2026-03-29/
‘People should be scared’: convictions in US ‘antifa’ trial set dangerous precedent
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/29/texas-leftwing-antifa-activist-trial
Iran warns US over ground attack as regional powers meet in Pakistan
China used fake profiles to spy on NATO, EU: source
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting info
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2026/03/29/2003854647rmation from staff, a European security source said on Friday.
>China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting info
Could be rephrased as “NATO and EU have bad opsec”
Re the supposedly bearing up mood in Israel–latest Alastair Crooke has Hebrew press excerpts, no pay wall, that paint a different picture and one of a society falling apart.
https://conflictsforum.substack.com/p/what-awaits-israel-in-the-next-round
The IDF is failing and the settlers are rioting out of control. Netanyahu is alive and on the scene but travels around in a bunker on wheels. The revival and entry of Hezbollah has thrown Northern Israel into chaos.
Crooke is relying on Hebrew press, and he admits to that.
This is what raspberry jam wrote yesterday:
Yves, I believe that the key lies in something Alastair quotes from the former IDF Ombudsman General Yitzhak Brik:
“The Israeli public must understand: convenience is the enemy of preparedness. The illusion that we can continue to live in a Tel Aviv bubble or in shallow political discourse while the earth is shaking is the surest way to the destruction of the Third Temple.”
This reads like an attempt to shake the relatively comfortable residents of Tel Aviv out of their complacency and would confirm the (highly prized) raspberry jam’s account.
In his talk with Chris Hedges Gideon Levy talks about how the Israeli govt. and almost all of the press go out of their way to brainwash their public and hide “inconvenient truths.” This is ironic given how much the Good Germans have been tarred in the Holocaust narrative.
But the truth is … they’re furious at him because he just wrecked their alibi for the next screw-up.
I think the problems are going to be much worse than Tel Aviv residents being complacent. The real question is what will happen when sectors start breaking in Israel.
I’m thinking that the mass killing of civilians is something Iran wants to avoid. I think that Iran believes in international law. Those laws were intended to safeguard civility, were written to hold countries to a civilized standard of behavior. It’s possible that Iran will be forced to be more brutal, but that will be because of the US/Israel aggressors’ level of brutality. For both the US and Israel, might makes right and winning is all.
US Army raises maximum age for enlistment from 35 to 42 for new recruits.
Army raises maximum enlistment age to 42
I am not at all wedded to my current view, but unless Turkey or Azerbaijan enter on behalf of the US side, I am extremely skeptical that a four month military conflict is even possible. Does the US even have enough equipment to last for four months plus? Does it have the troops to do so (and a place to house them)? If not, does it have enough standoff munitions to keep going (maybe, I guess, if it completely strips all of its stockpiles from the Asian theatre??) Does it have the public support to endure such a conflict? Already Israel looks unlikely to be able to sustain four months, so what exactly will the US be attempting to accomplish over this time?
As for the economic crisis: yep–that is completely unavoidable. And since the west’s finances cannot sustain a four month economic crisis, this is going to end up running far longer than four months, I think.
This has got to be the stupidest possible way to lose an empire imaginable.
New public (no paywall) post on Rbt Pape’s Escalation Trap Substack. Compares Iran War to Vietnam War escalation stages in detail.
https://escalationtrap.substack.com/p/vietnam-shows-exactly-when-air-wars
He summarizes the “you are here” X-marks-the-spot-on-the-map moment as follows:
Forward positions are under threat; Airpower is active but not decisive; [Ground] forces are being positioned; The logistics question is now central – Not whether forces can deploy — but whether they can stay.
This is the threshold moment of the Stage 3 escalation trap. “A small ground force is not stable. It creates a binary choice: reinforce it — or lose it”
He states that the next 10 days will show whether the logistics support system is being built at scale.
an aside: Ed Dowd mentions in passing – and only as an aside as one possibility, or maybe only a coincidence – that just as C19 arriving at the same time the stock market was starting to wobble gave the US govt a reason to pump billions of dollars in C19 relief into the economy which also steadied the stock market, now as then, the stock market is wobbling and a new war gives the US govt a reason to pump more billions of dollars into the economy to the MIC and AI which is also steadying the market, at least temporarily.
Even Dowd says he doesn’t really want to believe that’s what’s going on and is likely a too cynical take on things. However, he wonders why this war, this spending, just now. Given what looks like recent market manipulation with insider trading, it’s an interesting question, imo.
Is that even feasible? Money may be infinitely available, but physical resources are not just finite, its supply just got cut by a big percentage. All that money pumping would fo to spark massive inflation.
I’m going to pay more attention to the DOD (it’s still called “Defense” on Sam.gov) engineering contracting opportunities to see where they are located. The military has contracted nearly all of that out since (of course) Clinton.
Iranian attacks across Gulf continue as major industrial sites hit
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp86yrq5jy7o
The ripple effect of the Iran war on struggling U.S. farmers: “It couldn’t have come at a worst time”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ripple-effect-iran-war-struggling-u-s-farmers/
Damaged Ust‑Luga terminal may force Russian refineries to cut runs, sources say
Incidentally, this thought isn’t at all original, but how much longer are the Intel fab plant and design center and Nvidia’s Israel-1 AI supercomputer going to last (Apple has large R&D teams as well)? I can’t imagine them remaining intact if the war runs another few moths, and I can’t imagine either company just shrugging off the losses.
Russian oil producers could declare force majeure over attacks on Baltic ports, sources say
In first, Japan to send ‘combat’ troops to major military drills in Philippines
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/03/29/japan/politics/japan-sdf-philippines-balikatan/
Precursor to Russia leaving EU high and dry? I have trouble imagining that the damages were big, but I do think it gives the Russians perfect legal justification (and the Russians are legalistic to the end) to cut off Europeans ahead of whenever existing arrangements expire.
‘It’s biblical’: Maga anxiety over Iran war on display at CPAC as Trump skips event
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/29/cpac-maga-anxiety-iran-war
Anger at Iran war is growing among ‘more-right wing White House staffers,’ insider claims
‘They’re very frustrated,’ an insider said. ‘They didn’t love the war to start with’
Fox News Host Asks Trump if Iranians Are Starving. He Responds by Calling Her Attractive and Reminiscing on a Lunch They Shared
Ladies and gentlemen, behold the wonders of AI!
Covfefe!
I wonder whether sky-high hydrocarbon prices might breathe life into the thermal depolymerization concept.
Perhaps discarded plastic will start to be regarded as a resource, too.
Nope, too many NIMBYs around for that tech to become popular. Thermolization, pyrolysis, all those things, no one wants a facility close to them that does it. The calculus might change when enough well off people are confronted with a plastics and oil shortage. I’m sure acceptable locations far away from land with property values will be found. But until then, no dice. Too many people would protest against any facility seeking a license to do this process on their site.
Iran hits a chemical plant in southern Israel industrial zone near Beersheba
It’s also worth pointing out that the thus far limited scope of the war (the immediate region of the Persian Gulf) is likely a deliberate choice by Iran. It seems clear that they could spread destruction much more widely than they have, and much more seriously than it has, if Iran had decided to do it.
My point here is that the US and Israeli militaries are not forcing Iran to limit their actions, but rather just putting up with (and reacting to) what Iran is deciding to do to them.
The US is definitely on the back foot.
More epic trolling from Iran:
https://x.com/AdameMedia/status/2038243277166538766
My first thought / guess after reading this opening was that the Nixon administration was happy to have the overall cost of living raised substantially since in the aftermath of World War II the US middle class had become substantially more well off. From the standpoint of wealthy elites, it’s obviously better to have your population struggling to survive and focused on acquiring the basics, rather than looking beyond their immediate situation and trying to fix the things that are broken in the society at large.
I assume this is the common viewpoint held by people that run most western societies, and explains why, even in countries that have tremendous per capita wealth, so many people are struggling financially and otherwise. I’m certain that keeping the population poor is the analog of “keeping your wife barefoot and in the kitchen.” If you want to run something without opposition, you have to make your opponents weak and desperate, not well off and possessed of a lot of leisure time to make trouble for rulers.
I like to think this kind of retrograde zero-sum thinking is slowly dying out, whether in individual households or in society at large. Hopefully (and deservedly) so.
My first thought / guess after reading this opening was that the Nixon administration was happy to have the overall cost of living raised substantially since in the aftermath of World War II the US middle class had become substantially more well off. From the standpoint of wealthy elites, it’s obviously better to have your population struggling to survive and focused on acquiring the basics, rather than looking beyond their immediate situation and trying to fix the things that are broken in the society at large.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Blowing nordstream was imo a direct hit on european unions and safety net, both of which in usa have been destroyed. Successful programs must be starved and the elite won’t miss a meal. The problem for usians is that 90% of us have been wiped out while 10% got bailed out. But the elites now are after the 90 to 99’s and they’re likely to get it.
“first they came for the gypsies…”
Added bonus if they can somehow knock off 5 or 6 billion people, it’s practically be the garden of eden…
New Ben Norton/Michael Hudson talks about that long ago agreement. Hudson:
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2026/03/29/war-iran-change-economy-michael-hudson/
Hudson says the plan–if one cares to believe Trump even has a plan–was for USA to gain control of Iran’s oil in a quick coup and then present this new leverage to China in upcoming summit. In other words it’s the same plan USA has been following since at least the 70s. He also says, though, that the petrodollar gambit is no longer what it once was. Much more at the above link.
hell, the bidness elite and their press have been saying that out loud and shamelessly for as long as i can remember…”disciplining the workforce” and other transparent euphemisms. but the workforce apparently doesnt pay attention to the bidness elite and their press…or at least have convinced themselves that its too complicated and thus do not understand the euphemisms. but once one sees it, one cannot unsee the disdain “our betters”(or ‘bettors’?) have for all the rest of us. that old gailbraithe(pere) saw about how we’re all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires still stands.
There continues to be considerable chatter regarding use of nuclear weapons in the war against Iran. Question to the commentariat: Would the presence of American boots on the ground in Iran prevent the Israelis from using a nuclear weapon in Iran? Admittedly, Iran is a big country and Tehran is a long ways from Chabahar but the very idea of American grunts or jar heads being threatened by one or more (likely many more) Israeli nukes might give some pause. Or would (will) the Israelis just claim they are trying to help out and the Americans got in the way? So sorry.
Would US boots on the ground stop Trump from using nuclear weapons?
Hezbollah attacking from the north, Houthis from the south. It looks like Iran is for the time being concentrated on mopping up some in the Gulf, attacking US and Ukrainian soldiers, and letting others create problems for Israel.
European country vows to give homeowners ‘free electricity’ instead of switching off wind turbines
Starmer reaffirms UK will not join Iran war despite US pressure
Netanyahu orders expansion of security buffer zone in southern Lebanon
‘Massive operation’: Canadian driller, shipper enlisted to help tap Greenland oil
Canadian companies are playing key roles in the effort to tap what Price said could be one of the world’s largest oil basins. The drilling rig is courtesy of Stampede Drilling Inc., a Calgary-based outfit normally active across Alberta and Saskatchewan. Quebec City-based shipping firm Desgagnés is handling transport.
The prize could be enormous, to the tune of 13 billion barrels of gross oil, according to an independent estimate from energy consultancy firm Sproule ERCE. Price likens the potential to the Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska discovered some six decades ago and forming the state’s economic backbone since.
Price said that samples taken from Jameson Land show the oil is akin to the crude long produced further east, off the shores of the United Kingdom and Norway. North Sea oil is light, sweet and easy to refine. Its price benchmark, called Brent, has been trading well over US$100 per barrel recently, at a premium to West Texas Intermediate produced in the U.S.
I don’t think the planet can handle another oil boom like the West Texas oil boom.
Interesting.. is the current war a way to make oil sufficiently expensive for the Greenland play to be irresistible? It feels crazy even to be typing it, but see Nordstream.
Muhoozi Kainerugaba Says Uganda Could Capture Tehran in 14 Days
https://voennoedelo.com/en/posts/id14480-uganda-general-claims-army-could-take-tehran-in-2-weeks
Rift deepens between Iran’s president and Guards chief over war, economy
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603288722
Don’t strike a deal with Iran’s current leaders, opposition figure Pahlavi warns
More AI propaganda slop – there is no rift between the president and the Guard. The Guard is in charge. Full stop. They have already repeatedly overruled the civilian leadership.
Iran Sends US Warning Over Troops on Ground
A senior Iranian official has warned Tehran will set U.S. troops “on fire” and attack American allies in the Middle East if the White House puts ground troops onto Iranian soil.
https://www.newsweek.com/iran-sends-us-warning-over-troops-on-ground-11753281
The War with Iran may be ushering in a new nuclear age
The Iran war has a new front in Yemen. Here’s how it could escalate
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/world/yemen-houthis-iran-war-intl
Only Sleboda could out-talk Krapivnik.
just dropping a note of gratitude to Yves. these posts are essential reading for any semblance of understanding this current moment. thank you for all your time and work posting these every day
There Are Now Over 50,000 American Troops in the Mideast
The arrival of 2,500 Marines and another 2,500 sailors is keeping the number of American troops in the region at roughly 10,000 more than usual.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/us/politics/us-marines-middle-east-iran-war.html
In a number of recent interviews, Professor Marandi (this morning with Danny Haiphong), has indicated he expects Yemen to move into Saudi Arabia and Iraq into Kuwait before this war is over. So far he has been more prescient about the course of the war than the Pentagon.
I also expect Hezbollah to recapture N Israel. In the discussion between Stas and Mark S. they review how in the SMO, advances are by artillery, drone, and small infiltration groups – and Hezbollah is way better at this than Israel – due to the all-pervasive presence of drone and satellite ISR
NEW: Israel plans to propose to the United States the establishment of military bases on its territory, aiming both to relocate existing bases from elsewhere in the Middle East and to build new facilities amid the war with Iran, according to Israeli Channel 12.
(italics mine)
The IRGC has confirmed the successful shoot-down of a U.S. RQ-21 Blackjack tactical drone in the eastern Strait of Hormuz. This engagement removes a persistent surveillance asset designed specifically for low-altitude maritime and coastal monitoring.
https://nitter.poast.org/iwasnevrhere_/status/2038310973774123036#m
The RQ-21A Blackjack is designed to support the U.S. Marine Corps by providing forward reconnaissance. A Blackjack system is composed of five air vehicles and two ground control systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Insitu_RQ-21_Blackjack#Design
Maersk halts operations at Oman’s Salalah port due to security incident
Facts Only
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps shoots down a US RQ-21 Blackjack tactical drone over the Strait of Hormuz
US deploys additional troops to the Middle East due to perceived threats from Iran
Maersk halts operations at Oman’s Salalah port due to security incident
Israel plans to propose military bases on its territory
Professor Marandi predicts potential advances in Yemen and Iraq during the ongoing war
Executive Summary
Full Take
This article demonstrates a pattern of escalating tensions between the United States and Iran, with the IRGC shooting down a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz. This incident serves as a reminder of the delicate balance in the region, where military presence and potential conflicts can impact global oil supply. The predictions made by Professor Marandi about possible advances in Yemen and Iraq indicate a broader regional conflict that may be unfolding.
It is crucial for readers to recognize the potential manipulation in this narrative, particularly emotional exploitation (fear appeals) and false framing (forced binary choices). For instance, the article presents the US deployment of troops as a response to perceived threats from Iran, but it does not explore alternative perspectives or question the motives behind these actions.
The root cause of this narrative can be traced back to geopolitical rivalries and strategic interests in the Middle East, specifically oil resources and regional dominance. The implications are significant, as these tensions have the potential to disrupt global oil supply and escalate into a larger conflict involving multiple parties.
To foster cognitive sovereignty, readers should ask questions about the motivations behind military deployments and consider alternative perspectives on the events unfolding in the region. They should also be mindful of coordinated influence campaigns that might seek to manipulate public opinion regarding these sensitive issues.
Sentinel — Human
The text exhibits strong indicators of human authorship, including erratic sentence structure, personal voice, and detailed attribution, with no signs of AI-generated uniformity or fabrication.