The unintended consequences of meddling in matters you have no idea about – or, put more in popular social media terms, “f–cking around and finding out” – is about to hit Donald Trump in the coming hours.
Trump was encouraged to strike Iran with promises of an easy win. However, the Iranian Army’s fighting ability, the sheer size of Iran (bigger than Western Europe) and its geography, must be making Trump rue the day he allowed himself to be talked into the attack. An outright US defeat is now a real possibility. Will Trump consider using nuclear weapons to avoid this?
Iran continues its retaliatory strikes on US military assets in the region. On Friday the IRGC announced that it had destroyed several US fighter jets in Jordan, a Patriot air defense system and a compound of American personnel in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan
Israeli military officials have pointed to the photos as proof that the bombing campaign unleashed on February 28 wasn’t as effective as initially claimed.
“The Kremlin now understands, they only partially understood up until recently, that the Europeans and the Americans are out to wreck Russia”, says John Mearsheimer
Iran has warned new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, “any base used for aggression against Iranian territory is a legitimate target,” after he pledged to continue to allow the US to use air bases in Britain to launch strikes on Iran
Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi tells Pascal Lottaz about the situation in Tehran and why still relatively quiet, it nonetheless has the potential to massively escalate
Iranian missile strikes are taking a mounting toll of US radars, weapons systems and regional US military facilities and equipment
“Iran is going after capabilities rather than people”, says former UN Weapons Inspector and US Marine Intelligence officer Scott Ritter. That’s why US casualties have been relatively low. But that means that US air defence capability and ordnance stocks are also dangerously low.
If an MOU 2.0 is put together Trump’s position will be very weak, while Netanyahu’s will be very strong. Bibi is never going to pull IDF troops out of Lebanon, and so a peace deal will be impossible, leading Trump to only one recourse: the mother of all bad ideas, which is the land invasion of Iran
This should serve as a long overdue wake-up call to those Americans who still support America’s “greatest ally”
America’s ability to continue in a prolonged conflict could be undermined by its rapidly depleting stocks of interceptor missiles. This is all according to plan: Tehran planned for a protracted war.