Ian Welsh

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Iran-Israeli War Update

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On June 16, 2025

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Let’s take this in steps.

Air Defense Iranian air defense was not active for the first attack wave. They were online for the second one, about six hours later. It’s unclear why. I have heard two credible claims. The first is that they were hit by a cyber-attack, but came online faster than the Israelis expected.

The second is that the Iranians deliberately played rope-a-dope. The first attack was largely a matter of stand-off munitions, which the Israelis have (had) very limited supplies of. The Iranians tanked that hit, counting on the fact that most military targets were underground and hardened. Then when the second attack happened, which required close in attack, the air defenses were turned on. Because they had not been compromised in the first attack (air defense use makes air defense visible) they were much more effective.

Intelligence Penetration of Iran This was obviously severe, given the number of senior personnel killed during the initial attacks, and given how much of the initial attacks were carried out by drones and automated anti-air defense inside Iran. But what needs to be understood is that Mossad’s networks are being severely degraded. Intelligence networks which are passive, which don’t do anything very active, can exist for years or even decades, but when they go live and are actually used for attacks assets are exposed. Reports are pouring out of Iran of raids on Israeli intelligence agents and collaborators, and while they may be overstated, I find them credible, because it’s how such things work. Israel has gone big, and they are burning assets.

Iranian Counter-Attack This was strong, but not as strong as it could have been. While there’s reason to believe that a lot of the missile launchers hit were dummies, the Iranians should have been able to launch about a thousand missiles in a salvo, and they didn’t. Air defense systems are very subject to be being overwhelmed by numbers. Now it’s possible that they didn’t because they wanted the data from initial strikes to pinpoint air defense, and that each wave was designed to “clear a path”, the first strike, even, hit hard: taking out a lot of military assets and state capacity.

It should also be noted that Iran has not used its most advanced missiles yet. The stuff being sent is mostly old crap that would have been decommissioned in a few years anyway, interspersed with some better missiles, but not the most recent varieties. Iran still has a lot held for future attacks.

If you need a little cheering up, this video compilation of hits on Tel Aviv (obviously partial), may help.

Here is some footage of destruction:

Some footage of destruction in Tel Aviv itself.

All of this is much worse than the previous Iranian attacks. Real destruction. I will point out that if Iran had done this after the embassy assassinations they might have restored deterrence and not suffered this particular attack. Cowardice has its price, and it is often greater than that of bravery.

Finally, from the IDF itself:

Israel does not have enough interceptors and air defense to stop the Iranians from completely devastating their country, which is why they are begging everyone to help them. Iran is already beginning to target Israeli Air Defense. US naval assets can only help so much, as they carry limited supplies and the US itself produces very few air defense missiles every year. Using them all up in Israel will make America completely defenseless in any other war (and Zelensky is already squealing.)

This is entirely a race between Israel’s ability to destroy missile launchers with its aircraft, and Iran’s ability to keep launching missiles. The math is that simple. As an aside, Iran should be priority targeting Israeli air fields alongside air defense.

And What About Nukes? Well, I find this interesting. Directly contradicting Khameini in public is important.

Iranian Major General Mohsen Rezaei on Iranian Radio and Television:

We are still exercising restraint and have not deployed all our capabilities to avoid global chaos.

However, we may reach a point where we use new weapons.

We are seeking to form an Islamic army with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and several other countries.

We should move towards the atomic bomb, but according to the Supreme Leader’s fatwa, we do not currently intend to build nuclear weapons.

Iraq should know, it is their turn after us. Iran may be forced to take actions that could destabilize the entire region.

It is, of course, obvious that if Iran had nukes, much or most of this would never have happened. North Korean leaders do not worry about being murdered in their sleep by foreign missiles, drones and bombs.

The China Syndrome. All of the materials required to build drones and ballistic missiles are available, cheap, from China. China gets a lot of oil from Iran, uses Iran for transhipment, and is in general a major ally of Iran. It is also aware that taking out Iran is one of the steps before war with it. Just as I said that China would not allow Russia to be taken out by sanctions (and was right), I expect China in the case of any sort of duration of this war, and, indeed, after it, to supply Iran with everything it needs to ramp up production of missiles and drones. Since China’s production abilities exceed those of the West when it comes to these requirements, this is not a small thing.

No Army Means No Fall. Iran cannot be defeated by airpower alone unless there is a significant uprising in the country which the army is unable or unwilling to stop. One should never underestimate the CIA’s regime change abilities, of course, but if they don’t pull it off then this war is about reducing Iran’s power projection ability: doing enough damage that they surrender in spirit if not in fact.

The Khameini Problem. Nations rot from the top, and this is clearly the fundamental problem in Iran. Khameini is cautious, even timid. He has underplayed his hand every single time during this crisis, most importantly when not sending ground troops to stop the fall of Assad. This caused great problems with the younger members of the Revolutionary Guard, who are hardliners almost to a man. The elimination of senior members of defense and government is not strengthening moderates, it is strengthening hardliners.

Israel has said that Khameini is not off-limits for murder. If they do so, it will be a huge mistake. It will end the non-nuclear fatwa (though the Iraniams will lie about that) and put hardliners in charge. Ironically, the best thing Khameini could do for Iran right now is be Martyred. If Allah Wills It, let it be so. I don’t want to get too down on him, in many ways he’s run Iran very well, but he is a victim of Machiavelli’s dictum that when times change most leaders can’t change with the times and the virtues that made them good leaders in the past make them terrible leaders in the present.

The Russia/China Issue. Iran could have had a full military alliance with Russia. If they did, they’d be in a lot stronger position. Iran really wants to be an independent major regional power. The other option is to be the junior partner in a tripartate bloc with China and Russia. I understand why they want to avoid that, but being in the world’s strongest alliance (and yes, that’s what it would be) comes with an absolute ton of benefits. They need to reconsider this issue. They will get some support from Russia and China, indeed, a lot of support, but neither country is going to go all out for them. If either would, Iran would be in a lot less danger.

Final Ironic Cowardly Nazi Note. 

Most of Iran’s air and missile command was killed in an underground bunker during a meeting. Hezbollah’s senior leaders were killed in an underground bunker during a meeting. Israel knows Iran has missiles capable of doing the same thing to them, but they know that Iran won’t strike a hospital to kill them. They of course have destroyed many hospitals, in one were the high command of their enemies hiding.

May God grant the side of good, whichever side that is, victory in this conflict and bring an end to genocide.

***

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Open Thread

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On June 14, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts (no Iran/Israel.)

Israel Hits Iran Hard

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On June 13, 2025

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The senior commanders of the air and missile forces are dead, and so is the commander of the Revolutionary Guard. Multiple nuclear sites were hit, plus civilian targets.

Iran previously threatened that if Israel hit their nuclear program, they would hit Israel’s nuclear sites in retaliation.

Iran’s leadership are incompetent. That statement will enrage some readers and commenters, but they have allowed their allies to be taken out one by one, they have not yet launched significant retaliation, and their current actions, sending a hundred drones to attack Israel, are pathetic. It is no favor to them to pretend their strategy is working; it is clearly failing.

They should have had a plan for an immediate, overwhelming counter-attack. Iran’s missile force is massive and has proven able to penetrate Israeli defenses.

Once again Iran has underestimated Mossad’s penetration of their services; the air chiefs were taken out in a meeting at an underground bunker — exactly what was done to Hezbollah’s leadership. Iranian air defenses don’t appear to have intercepted anything of significance.

The entire conflict has seen the “Resistance,” with the exception of Ansar-Allah, allow Israel to set the terms of engagement, choose when attacks happen, telegraph their own rare attacks, and allow complete control of the initiative to Israel.

If Iran isn’t going to fight, it should submit. Give up its nuclear program, then slowly be destroyed by Israel and the US over a period of years, until they fall like Syria and Libya did. (Remember always that Libya was taken out after Gadaffi gave up his nuclear program, and that Iran was invaded not because it had WMD, but because it didn’t.)

If Iran is going to fight, it needs to take the gloves off and seize the initiative. Hit unexpected targets. Don’t telegraph moves. Make sure its allies have real dangerous weapons. Get the Houthis some serious anti-ship missiles, for example.

By letting their allies be badly damaged (Hezbollah) or destroyed (Syria), Iran finds themselves almost alone in the conflict. If they had been launching missiles throughout the first year of the war and had rescued Syria, they would be in a vastly better position now.

They also have either been lying about their nuclear program (and have some nukes) or have been complete and utter fools by refusing to get nukes. The idea that they could insist on their rights under the non-proliferation agreement is absurd, and has always been ridiculous. They were never going to be allowed to operate an enrichment program for civilian use. They could either join the nuclear club or submit, because only nukes guarantee the continued existence of their country and form of government.

Trump claims the US was not involved (I’m sure they at least helped with targeting and intel), but has made savage threats. The US and Israel will dismantle Iran if it does not make it clear that the cost of doing so is more than Israel and the US can stand.

Hit back. Hard. Or submit. Or die.

Those are the options. Stop talking about Resistance and actually fight.

Remember what happened to Gaddafi. Does Khameini want to die after being sodomized by a knife?

***

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State & Police Vulnerabilities in an American Insurrection Scenario

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On June 12, 2025

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As unrest spreads, I think it’s worth looking at the weaknesses of American police forces in particular. Most of these vulnerabilities also apply to the National Guard.

Non-violent protest has been the dogma, especially on the center-left, for generations now. It wasn’t always thus; old time unions fought pitched battles with police and, in one case, coal miners straight-up fought the military. Blowing up buildings was not verboten, nor was assassination. US history is not what pansy-moderns think it is, and the same is true of Britain, Canada, and so on. Our forbears did not think that letting the state beat you, shoot you, torture you, imprison you, and kill you without fighting back was either virtuous, or in many cases, smart.

Modern Americans, increasingly impoverished (average Chinese have better standards of living, more on that in a later article) and living paycheck to paycheck, increasingly homeless, and with less and less to lose may decide that dying on their feet is better than lying there and letting cops beat the shit out of them, or than having ICE deport them to some third world torture prison.

If they do, and I, of course, would never suggest such a thing, then American police have significant weaknesses. The most important weakness is simple:

Modern American Police have been trained to be cowards. This sounds like rhetoric, hyperbole, or at the least, like exaggeration for affect. Let me assure you it is none of these. American police are trained to care about their own safety more than anything else. As a result they are trigger happy and unwilling to risk themselves against anything that looks genuinely dangerous.

This means that they travel in packs, and when threatened, they clump up in large groups for their own safety. This was shown when cop-killer Christopher Dorner, a trained soldier, killed a cop and her fiance. The police immediately clumped into large groups and used most of the force to protect themselves and their families.

Nor is this just a matter of extreme circumstances. Anyone who’s watched how police act around demonstrations will see that even tiny demonstrations attract much larger numbers of cops than necessary. Modern police, unlike those of fifty years ago, almost always wait for SWAT teams or at least backup before entering situations they consider dangerous and their threshold for what they consider dangerous is often very low.

This makes the police easy to deal with by any coordinated group which has not been infiltrated. Simply set of a bomb or use a drone attack on police or their families. Then do it again. Then again. Make threats against a number of targets. They will clump up, be unable to search from their own fear and become ineffective.

Then the group simply hits whatever the real target is.

This speaks to the basic principle of guerilla warfare: Attack where the enemy is weak. It’s just that American police, and I’m betting the National Guard, won’t be much better. They are especially easy to move around, because American police are cowards and because their doctrine is one of overwhelming force and caution, it’s easy to push them into a defensive posture or to push them off balance.

Simple, standard insurgency techniques will work well against American police. A few IEDs near where police can be expected to go, remote triggered as police drive over them, will see the police retreat even further into a shell. Civilian drones can easily be used to make helicopter operations dangerous, as well. The police will move slowly, in force, and retreat easily when something explosive happens.

All of this will work well against US paramilitary organizations as well. ICE would be trivial, as their movements are very predictable, and they are likely even more cowardly than normal American police, as their job is almost entirely about brutalizing unresisting people.

During the Irish revolution, assassins would walk in on British officials eating breakfast with their family, kill the official (leaving the family unharmed) and walk away.

A little fear goes a very long way to gumming operations up completely.

Smart insurrectionists will not, of course, do what Dorner did and target family members, as propaganda is always part of any successful guerilla organization. (Mao discusses this at length in his class work on guerilla warfare.)

Other principles of operation should be obvious. Use a cell organization so that damage from discovery is limited. People can’t reveal what they don’t know. In the modern environment, don’t use or even carry mobile phones, except perhaps ones that are deliberately damaged so they have no connectivity. (Everyone carries a mobile phone, so operatives should appear to do so.)

Do everything old-style. The modern state is excellent at electronic intelligence, but has let human intelligence wither to a large extent.

Successful insurrectionists will have a rule that they 100 percent kill any informants or undercover operatives. No deal will be made with prosecutors or police; they always backfire in the longer run.

Of course, I hope that none of this happens, and this article is just a look at what smart insurrectionists would do, taking natural advantage of police weaknesses. The police are welcome to read this and decide to change their doctrines and training to be less cowardly and avoid the worst of these weaknesses. As a side effect, they’d also kill less people because of their fear, and that would make insurrection less likely.

Ideally, American elites will realize that they are better off and safer if everyone is cared for. From enlightened self-interest, they might start taxing themselves again and make sure that ordinary people have enough money for rent and food. They will end predatory pricing, be fair and kind, and make medical care easily available. The American people, who, like all people, would rather live a good life, will respond and prospects of insurrection will fade like mist against the noon-day sun.

But if they refuse to discontinue their policy of mass impoverishment backed by fear, it should be understood that those who finally do decide on insurrection will not find, contrary to various myths about American impregnability, which repeated losses against men in pajamas should have put to rest, that American forces of law and order (or repression, depending on your politics) are not without weakness.

May God grant that it never comes to this. If it does, may the side of good, which cares for the welfare of the people, win.

***

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Ukrainian War End Prediction

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On June 11, 2025

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When the war started, I predicted that Russia would win militarily. That was an easy, obvious prediction based on the fact that Russia is larger, has more industry, and that China would not allow sanctions to take out Russia, knowing it would be next, but would keep the Russian economy running.

This prediction is a little more risky because the war could end due to a peace deal. There’s no question that Ukraine is losing, and that the battlefield is getting worse and worse for them.

Russian forces are back within 300 kilometers of Kiev. While advances are slow, they are speeding up. The Ukrainians are running out of manpower, are considering mobilizing women for infantry, and have huge problems with desertion and recruitment. Russia has ramped up weapon production far more than the West.

So I’m going to keep this one simple: The war will end next year with the Ukrainian army collapsing. Ukraine will be forced into an unconditional surrender, and Russia will take what it wants.

There’s lots of ways this could go wrong. The Euros could rush in “peacekeeping forces.” Putin could agree to peace before then. The “Ukrainians” could provoke Russia into using tac nukes with their strikes of strategic nuclear infrastructure. Putin might die, and if he does he’ll be replaced by someone far more aggressive. So this isn’t a “sure thing” prediction, just a best guess.

But basically, that guess is that the Ukrainian army collapses next year, and we see huge “big arrow” movement.

Putin is likely to remember the lessons of Syria’s frozen conflict, and of Russia and Ukraine’s fake peace of 2014/2015. No frozen conflicts, no fanatical enemies still able to fight. Russia has paid dearly to crush Ukraine, and it would be foolish to throw away what is being won on the battlefield at a fake peace conference with Europeans and Americans who have no intention of keeping any deal.

So, most likely, he will win the war and impose the peace. If he’s really smart, he’ll take Odessa and turn Ukraine into a landlocked state, even if that means some extra casualties and time.

Russia was always going to win the war. The questions are simply when, by how much, and what Ukraine is left with afterwards.

***

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Greta Did Her Job

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On June 10, 2025

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What a lot of people don’t know is that the aid ship Greta was on wasn’t the first ship sent. The last one didn’t get to Israel either, but because there were no major celebrities on it, most people who aren’t 24/7 news or Gaza obsessives don’t know it even existed.

This aid ship was never expected to be able to deliver food and medical supplies. Everyone knew Israel would stop it. It was meant to highlight the fact that Israel has created a deliberate famine in Gaza.

Because Greta, in particular, was there, it succeeded. That was her job. She wasn’t required to die, or to wind up in prison, though both were possible. She’s just a lightning rod. I’ve seen at least half a dozen op-eds, most of them negative, about Greta and the relief ship.

But negative is fine. Neolibs and right-wingers love to hate Greta. They can’t shut up and not talk about her, which is what they should have done. Instead, they have to take their potshots, and so far, more people know that a ship full of food was hijacked in international waters, and that Israel is starving Palestinians to death.

Celebrities, and Greta is a celebrity, have one main job when it comes to whatever causes they champion: to get press. That’s what Greta did, and good for her.

As for all the haters, well, Greta’s right that genocide is bad, and she’s right about the environment, so hating her most likely means someone wants mass death, or that they’re stupid and think environmental issues aren’t real.

***

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The L.A. Riots/Protests & the Paradox of Protest

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On June 9, 2025

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

So, there were protests in L.A. over Trump’s immigrant removal strategy, some turned violent, and Trump is calling in the National Guard and talking about using the military.

It’s worth pointing out that Trump has deported less undocumented immigrants than Biden did over comparable periods. But this isn’t about deportation, as such.

What it is about is Gestapo tactics: Sending people to torture prisons without due process; wearing masks and refusing to show badges or warrants; giving ICE the right to create its own warrants without judicial oversight (clearly unconstitutional), and; seizing people who are showing up for meetings at immigration facilities or immigrant courts.

It’s not what Trump is doing, it’s how he’s doing it —- in the cruelest, most lawless, and unconstitutional way possible.

The message is, “We can do whatever we want, and you can’t stop us.”

Thus, the protests, and, thus, Trump escalating immediately to the National Guard (i.e., military force –that’s what the Guard is. Military.)

Protestors are caught in the paradox of protest in a fascist state: If you don’t protest the powers that be, they assume they’ve gotten away with it and will escalate. If you do protest, they use that as an excuse to escalate.

(Forget the whole violence / non-violence thing. That’s just another excuse.)

The US isn’t a meaningful democracy, and even oligarchic elites who aren’t Trump-aligned are under assault right now, as in the case with Harvard.

The choice is to bend the knee or fight. But ordinary people, especially immigrants, unlike Harvard-aligned elites, don’t have much to fight with. All they can do is put their bodies on the line.

At which point, those bodies will be assaulted, locked up, and otherwise abused, because cruelty with impunity is how the fascist right shows its power. Again, “We can do anything we want to you, and you can’t stop us. No one can.” It’s a toned down version of what Israel does to Palestinians.

There are three ways to go.

  1. Keep throwing bodies into the grinder and pray that the legal system still works with a stacked Supreme Court.
  2. Give in. Hide, stop protesting, and go with the legal attempt.
  3. Move to real violence, which this is not.

The police and National Guard have huge, easily-exploited weaknesses if anyone does decide to get serious, and there are plenty of people in immigrant and immigrant-adjacent communities who have the necessary experience and skills to exploit those weaknesses.

Of course, if real violence is used, Trump and his allies will escalate even more. At the extreme end, part of the country turns into “no go” zones, and the monopoly of force is broken. This is more than possible: the US is huge, their military is overrated, and their police are weak and have been trained to be cowards.

Trump’s trying to bring Americans to bridle. Some are already there, the natural fascists, the people who would have signed up with Hitler as soon as they realized he was serious and stood a chance.

But others? Others need to feel the whip.

So, will Americans kneel, then fall to their bellies? Will the legal system and the constitution work? Or will this escalate until the US is a failed state?

***

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Open Thread

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On June 7, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

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