Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Ian Welsh Page 3 of 451

The Iran War Has Just Had A Major Phase Change

By

On September 10, 2026

18 Comments

Recently the US started hitting Iranian oil tankers. The Iranians had said that if this happened, they would escalate and they have done just that. This is a very serious change in their strategy: before they retaliated, but did their best to keep casualties low, rarely made serious attacks on US naval ships, and their attacks were relatively small. That’s all changed.

(Footage of the US firing off more than 100 patriot missiles to try and stop an attack in Jordan.)


As best I can tell the interceptors also mostly failed to stop the missiles. The attack was much larger than normal, 30 to 50 missiles, showing that the previous smaller attacks were a choice, not an operational necessity. According to CBS 9 planes were damaged on the ground.

The change in doctrine was also confirmed:

Iran Threatens 20 Strikes For Every 2 Targets Hit

General Mohammadi says Iran has reached a new stage of retaliation and laid out its demands to END the War:

1) Completely END the war and military attacks

2) STOP further threats against Iran

3) WITHDRAW Israeli forces from Lebanon

4) END the siege of Yemen

5) RELEASE $24 BILLION in frozen Iranian assets

6) STOP interference in Iran’s NUCLEAR program 7) STOP interference in Iran’s MISSILE program

He says the era of limited retaliation is over.

Attacks on US ships have yet to take any out, but they force the use of interceptors and ships have very limited stockpiles. When they run out they have to pull back and wait for naval resupply or go to Diego Garcia for resupply, since all closer naval bases are no longer operational.

Jordan is the last shield before Israel. They routinely intercepted attacks against Israel from Iran during the early part of the war. Once their ability to do so is damaged, Israel lies open. In addition, the US is running very low on patriots – less than 900 before this attack seems to be the consensus estimate. And they just burned off 100 to protect from one attack.

As I said day one of the war, the math is on Iran’s side: the US will run out of interceptors long before Iran if Iran chooses to go all out. They didn’t because once the Strait was at least partially interdicted, they figured that the long term math favored them economically: the US and world economies would crack before they did. But that calculus changes if the US is going after Iranian tankers, so they’ve escalated. They’ve also been hitting far more tankers from other other countries than previously, again showing that hitting only 3 or 4 a day was a choice, not something they had to do.

Since Iran keeps saying that Israeli occupation of Lebanon is a red line (they’ve dropped Gaza, as I suspected they might) and since the war won’t end as long as Israel tells America to keep going, this war is moving back towards direct attacks on Israel.

This follows the Supreme Leader replacing moderates with hawks in various key positions.

To put it simply, Iran is now on the offensive. It does show that they have a weakness: they need at least some oil sales getting thru, but it also shows that they are militarily dominant in the region, especially against land based assets. And my guess is they still aren’t seriously trying to take out naval ships, but are just firing enough missiles and drones to drain interceptors and force a withdrawal.

Iran also needs to put more pressure, fast, on the US economy before the mid-terms.

Meanwhile, in Yemen, the Houthis are advancing aggressively.

The Yemeni Armed Forces through a series of rapid operations, have achieved significant advances in the Taiz and Hodeidah provinces within just a few hours, covering an area of approximately 2,600 square kilometers, and have liberated numerous areas, including the strategically important port of Al-Mokha.

On the Taiz front, the Yemeni Armed Forces have made rapid progress in the districts of Al-Wazi’iyah and Mozah in western Taiz province. During these rapid advances, with the support of popular committees, the Yemeni Armed Forces have cleared the Al-Wazi’iyah and Al-Mokha, the important Khaled bin Walid base, and areas in the Al-Wazi’iyah district, including Al-Hania, Al-Aqma, and Al-Gheil, extending to the outskirts of Al-Shaqira, the center of the Al-Wazi’iyah district.

In southern Hodeidah province, the Yemeni Armed Forces have taken control of the important towns of Hays and then Al-Khukhah, and by continuing their advance along the coastal strip and liberating Yahtal, they entered and took control of the strategically important port of Al-Mokha.

The advances of this morning are reminiscent of the rapid advances made five years ago in the Hodeidah province, when, in November 2021, the Saudi-led coalition forces were forced to withdraw from the entire coastal strip, from within the city of Hodeidah to north of Al-Khukhah in southern Hodeidah province.

The intense pressure exerted by the Yemeni fighters on all fronts in western Taiz province and southern Hodeidah continues, and the forces of Tariq Saleh are reportedly fleeing the fronts towards Aden.

Overall, with the advances made over the past three days, the conditions have been created for the complete liberation of the southwestern coast of Yemen, and also for the strategic Bab-el-Mandeb Strait.

The Houthis are just better fighters than the mercenary forces Saudi Arabia is using, and the Saudi Army is a joke in any case.

The real battle of the Iranian war is yet to come: once Iran has cleared away the US forces protecting Israel, they will need to force Israel to tell the Americans to go to peace. By clearing the forces they will also make it much harder for America to hit Iranian tankers and infrastructure

Stay tuned. This is the most important war of the last 50 years.

Update:

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

Different Times And Places Are Different

By

On September 8, 2026

13 Comments

One of the failures of imagination I see most often is the inability to understand that things were, actually, different in the past and that they are different in other places.

I live in Canada. In the West. Our leaders are all functionally psychopaths. They’re all corrupt and they all lie like they breathe. They have zero interest in anything but making their donors happy, and have spent over 50 years destroying the egalitarian society built by FDR and his successors, in order to give more money to the rich.

Many people think this is universal behaviour. It isn’t.

Different places and times are different.

Someone like Trump could not have become president even 30 years ago. Impossible.

These days the children of elites don’t fight in wars. In WWI and WWII they did, even FDRs sons went to war and the carnage in the British ruling class in WWI was epic because they personally lead the charges right into machine guns.

Different times are different.

Right into the early 90s it was possible to walk into almost every government and private building in Canada. No security guard would stop you. Not just walk into, take the elevator to pretty much any floor. You might have trouble getting to a few people, because they had secretarial or receptionist gates, but you could definitely get right up to that receptionist and if you insisted you could walk right past her.

Oh, and you could go into almost every building and use the bathroom.

I remember when there were no food banks because they weren’t needed.

For decades inequality decreased, not increased. This was a choice and the political elites were mostly onside with it. Even a lot of business elites were (though definitely not all.) When John Kenneth Galbraith investigated why corporate leaders in the 60s didn’t earn more he came to the conclusion it was cultural: they didn’t believe in paying more and anyone who tried was shut down hard by that consensus.

Even small things can be very different. We go on and on about female breasts and attractiveness, but traditional Japanese society did not find breasts sexy, and bound them tight: they associated them with child raising. They even didn’t like bright white smiles, this was considered “showing your bones” and disgusting, so women often blackened their teeth.

Anthropological studies show that in hunter-gatherer bands leadership is often chosen from people who are slow to anger and not aggressive. When testosterone was studied carefully, it turned out that high-normal testosterone isn’t actually about violence, it’s about status behaviour. Put a male with high T in a society that favors hugging and being empathetic and that doesn’t like aggressiveness and suddenly they’re the big huggers and empathizers.

Chinese leadership is not the same was Western leadership. They have different goals, incentives and values. They don’t act or think like us. This is also true of Russian leadership.

All of these things are contingent: they change over time based on circumstances. People have biology, but they also have vast amounts of conditioning based on what their society is like which forms their personalities. Leaders are chosen and promoted in different ways, emphasizing different morals and personalities at different times. Western leaders right now are mostly soulless psychopaths, but that hasn’t always been the case and even when it was, the morally neutral virtues they valued were different. (Courage, for example. Think what you want of 19th century British elites. They were scum. They were not cowards and intensely shamed cowards and people who didn’t do their duty.)

Humans are always humans, but the details change with the society and the time. If you over-generalize from your own time and experience you will make serious mistakes when you try and understand outside your time and society. This often becomes clear to people as they get older: I can assure you that the culture and the type of person was quite different back in the 70s and even 80s from now. I remember people who grew up in the Great Depression and they were not like Boomers, let alone like Zoomers. Nor would they have put up with someone like Trump.

Time change. People change. Different places are different and produce different types of people.

This shouldn’t need saying, but it is evident that it does.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Open Thread

By

On September 7, 2026

9 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Lack of Fear of Death

By

On September 4, 2026

28 Comments

Back in 93 I spent 3 months in hospital. It was… beyond bad.

But it had one great advantage. I lost my fear of death.

I don’t know what happens after death (though as someone whose done ludicrous amounts of spiritual work I have strong suspicions) but even if it’s “that’s it, it’s over” I don’t fear it because I know that bad shit, beyond most people’s imaginations, can happen while you’re alive. Death can becomes one’s best friend.

Westerners fear death greatly. They say stupid things like it being your job to make the other person die for their country.

Sure. Obviously killing them and not dying is preferable in most cases.

But being willing to die for your beliefs, whatever they are, is also incredibly powerful. You’d think so-called Christian countries would understand the power of martyrdom.

Shi’a society is remarkably based around this. Iman Hussein refused to acknowledge the Umayyad caliph Yazid I, whom they considered corrupt. He went into battle knowing he would lose and indeed he did. He did the right thing even though it cost him his life.

And what that has lead to, in the modern era, is organizations like the Iranian government and Hezbollah. Sure, they’d rather not die, but they know there are worse things than death, like living on your knees or crawling on your belly. Martyrdom is celebrated. It helps, of course, that they believe there’s a heaven waiting, but so do many religions whose followers are far less willing to die for their beliefs. (Most Christians aren’t any more.)

You see Iranian leaders say things like death is preferable to living in an unjust world. Almost every single senior leader of Iran from before the war was killed in the first part of the war. I believe only two survived.

And it didn’t make a difference, except that it strengthened hard-liners who wanted to fight.

Western leaders are, as a group, cowards. This wasn’t always the case: in WWII elites fought or sent their children to war. Many of the died. In WWI the cream of Britain’s elite youngsters died in the trenches, often leading suicidal charges.

But our modern leaders like Trump are cowards. They never fought in war and they don’t send their kids to war. They aren’t willing to die.

Further they lead societies where they are hurting the majority of the population. Western leaders think they are special because the people who work for them fundamentally don’t want to. There is no sense of mission, despite all the MBA bullshit trying to create purpose and meaning in corporations.

Everyone knows that the only thing Western leaders believe in is making the rich (themselves, usually) richer. So to get a western organization to work requires extreme incentives: greed for the rulership class, the whip of hunger and homelessness for the peons.

Western leaders thus consider themselves special, because they need to force people to do what they want and without their constant threats and incentives their organizations would fall apart. No one works for a bank or private equity because they believe in anything other than getting rich, or at the lower level, they believe in not winding up homeless.

So Western leaders are, in fact, important: they’re leading their societies in directions that are bad for most people, and that takes an immense amount of cunning and work.

Further there isn’t a deep bench. Because no one believes in the mission who isn’t near the top. Why would they? It doesn’t benefit them, and there’s nothing uplifting about “mint more billionaires”.

This is not to say that all Iranians are true believers or support the government. But the people in the military and government, do believe in the “mission”. They are the metaphorical children of Iman Hussein. They do not fear death.

Hezbollah is the same, but more so: if you’re a Hezbollah member, odds are you believe strongly and you know that Israel only left Lebanon last time because you forced them to.

And if you get killed, someone else replaces you who believes. There’s a deep bench, right from the top to the soldiers and bureaucrats (and remember, Hezbollah runs clinics, picks up garbage and even provides pensions. It’s a government within Lebanon.)

Western leaders can’t wrap their heads around this. They’d do anything to save their own lives and they don’t understand people who would rather die than give up their beliefs. They don’t understand the people who then replace the dead and continue the fight.

If Iranian leaders feared death, the war would be over. They would have cut the sort of deal Delcy Rodriguez did in Venezeula “yes master, I’ll do whatever you say if you leave me at the top of a society I no longer run. Just don’t kill or kidnap me, please.”

Greedy coward.

That won’t happen in Iran. There’s no one in the leadership with enough support to pull it off, if there’s anyone at all who would consider it.

Sometimes to serve your cause, to remain true to your beliefs, you have to be willing to die. Americans knew that once. The West knew it once. Christians knew it once.

Today? The leadership of the West are substantially all cowards.

The truth is that if you will do anything to avoid dying, you’re a slave to anyone who can credibly threaten you with death.

Iranians and Hezbollah members refuse to be slaves.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Tit for Tat US/Iranian Strikes Resume

By

On September 1, 2026

17 Comments

America hit Iran last night, taking out a couple launchers and radar aiming at ships the US is trying to get out of the Strait. Iran responded by hitting a US base in Jordan.

Today, around 8pm Iranian time, the US hit a variety of targets, some civilian (a fish powder plant?) and some military. Iran has now started its retaliation, which includes a lot of anti-ship missiles going after US naval vessels.

Last night’s attack by Iran:

launched its attack on U.S. bases in response to an American strike on Iranian naval facilities, which caused multiple casualties. The reported expenditure of more than 80 PAC-3 interceptors in a single engagement by some estimates represents more than ten percent of the entire American arsenal, at a time when interceptors are in very short supply across the Western world primarily due to mass use against Iran, but also due to mass donations to Ukraine. While U.S. government sources claimed that there was no damage to facilities from Iranian strikes, footage from the ground and satellite imagery has confirmed damage, compounding longstanding concerns regarding the Patriot’s limited effectiveness.

This comes back to what I said day one of the war: that the math favors Iran—the US and Israel will run out of interceptors long before Iran runs out of missiles and drones.

Both sides have been degrading the other sides radar (the US was late on this, but is now hitting the hard), but both sides still have satellite imagery to work from. (I’m 99% sure that China, Russia or both are providing real time feeds to Iran.) Loss of radars degrades defense more than offense, so more attacks can be expected to get thru on both sides, but, of course, Iran never had a lot of AD to begin with so this effects the US more.

Today’s attacks seem to mostly be tomahawks launched from US naval vessels, which are also in short supply.

The US attacks came as:

just yesterday, the U.S. Secretary of the Army AND the U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of the Army both reportedly resigned from their roles, leaving the United States without the Army’s number one and number three man.

Three of the remaining five regional commanders also gave Hegseth a non-concur on the plans, which means “we’ll do it because it’s a legal order, but we think it’s stupid.”

After the second set of American attacks Trump bloviated:

Once again, America can’t do this without indiscriminate use of nukes. Those nukes would not take out Iran’s missiles, which are deep in mountains, and Iranian commanders would then take out Israel, which yeah, they can do. Probably effectively destroy the physical economy of every US vassal within range and those regimes would not survive the fallout. Saudi Arabia is already in enough trouble that they’re negotiating an 8 billion dollar loan.

Iran was willing to let the war drag out because their calculation was that they could take the economic pain for longer than the US, and it avoided a lot of damage to Iran. But that doesn’t mean they can’t win a hot war, by my calculations they can, will and in fact, really already have except that Trump (unlike most of his generals) won’t admit that America has lost.

We’ll see if this keeps going. I don’t really see how it should, given American weaknesses, but Trump isn’t a rational actor. though I’d guess he really wants the war over before the midterms.

As for Iran, they’re digging their heels in hard, saying that peace only happens if Trump and Israel obey the MOU (which includes an end to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, where they are bulldozing entire towns that have existed for thousands of years.)

Since Trump can’t or won’t rein in Israel, if Iran’s serious, this is going to go on until Israel is begging for peace.

And folks? You’re living thru a war which will be studies by historians for ages as the war that marked the end of America as a superpower.

Update: interceptor depletion is real

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

So Tired Of All The Lying

By

On August 31, 2026

40 Comments

Although gaslighting is probably a better word for it.

The lying is just… endless. Key stats are bullshit (CPI is the one I’ve talked about most) or damn nearly meaningless (GDP). There’s a genocide going on and most media organizations are pretending it isn’t happening, even though it’s live-steamed. In Britain “Palestinian Action” is designated terrorists, while Israel is not. The President of America lies almost every time he opens his mouth to do anything but shove another McDonalds burger into it. Everything Israel says is a lie.

The biggest media personalities are mostly lying about half the time and when they aren’t, what they say is misleading.

Software exists to modify surveillance footage. Combined with AI you can’t trust pictures or video any more.

In the US politicians scream about communism, when there has never, ever, not once, been a US government that was remotely communist and there isn’t a single communist elected member of Congress. Most Americans couldn’t even define communism, and think it’s things like universal healthcare or being against genocide, not workers controlling the means of production.

Outright lies about enemies are common:

I mean, no, he never said that. Ever. Similar to the concerted media lies (an academic study found over 80% of media articles lied about Corbyn.)

It’s just relentless. I feel like I’m an intellectual janitor facing a mudslide worth of shit. No matter how fast I shovel, there’s always a thousand new lies.

Today I saw some scumbag claiming that building data centers is re-indstrialization (no, and it makes re-industrialization harder because it raises energy prices and misallocates capital.) I saw someone else say that insurance companies in the US are heroes because they deny care and someone has to tell doctors no, when international comparisons show that universal systems which deny far less care produce better results and cost less.

Sigh…

Nothing.

Nothing can be fixed if we believe lies. Nothing.

All of these lies exists because some group of evil scumbags want to do something that they know is bad for the majority of people. They need to manufacture consent, or at least muddy the issue enough to enrich themselves by impoverishing, sickening or straight up killing people.

It is that simple. It is that simple. It is that simple.

And it is radicalizing me to a degree I would never have thought possible because nothing can be fixed while these people are in charge or even tolerated. They all need to be removed from having any influence or power or wealth. This means basically every senior executive, every politician and every senior editor, producer or media owner. (Yes, there are exceptions, they are so exceedingly rare that they are meaningless.)

“Climate change isn’t real. There isn’t a genocide going on. Having billionaires hasn’t destroyed the middle class completely, the price of cars is only slightly higher than in the 90s.”

Remember all the idiots calling Clinton and Obama communists?

Garbage. Flaming mountains of garbage. All in the service of wanting more money than anyone could need, said money to be “earned” by hurting as many people as possible.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Once Again Orientals/Chinese/Whoever Are Not Innately Superior People

By

On August 29, 2026

17 Comments

This excerpt commenting on China’s accomplishments needs pushback:

The Orientals ( SE and Far East Asia+ China) are a superior people: far more inventive, very hard working, system and procedures driven.

No.

If Orientals were innately superior people they wouldn’t have spent centuries being curb stomped, essentially at will, by Europeans.

Europeans were not innately superior either, they happened, for solid historical reasons, to have had a technological revolution which made them superior at war and later at production for a while. That is all.

No one is innately superior.

Some societies are superior to their competitors for a time. The Roman Republic (not so much the Empire, which was unable to expand significantly and keep those expansions. Before them the Greeks (everyone seems to forget the Hellenic world.) Before them various Mesoptomians and the Egyptians (who still have the all the time record for an enduring multi-millenial civilization, and during that time probably thought they were the bestest of the best, then got conquered repeatedly and forcefully had their own civilization and religion taken from them and replaced with Islam.)

Before China took the lead in the East, India was . Then China had a great run, but got its faced pushed in three times over 2,500 years–Mongols, Manchu and Europeans.

No one is innately superior. Under the right circumstances any society can rise to a dominant position. Then they will lose it when the conditions that gave rise to it end, often due to their own foolishness.

Every culture where people start thinking they are innately superior will commit atrocities at whatever scale they are capable of. The moment a culture thinks they are the best and that it is innate, they look down on everyone else and see them as non-human.

If you want to see what this looks like, go find a list of the British Empire’s atrocities. Or Amerca’s. Or the Mongols. Or most Mesopotamian kingdoms.

Or go watch some videos of what the people who think “God Chose us!’ are doing right now: all the mass murder, rape and torture, which an especial enjoyment of child murder.

Your society may be superior in some ways, for a time. This will always end, it is never innate and it always dependent on contingent circumstances.

If you think it is innate not only will you become monsters, but you will lose your superiority sooner than if you understand it is a result of historical contingencies and not something you don’t have to work hard and wisely to keep.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Mid-Week Open Thread

By

On August 26, 2026

32 Comments

Have some health issues flaring up and minor surgery on Friday, so may not post much till Monday, although I’ll try. Anyway, an open thread so you can discuss what’s going on. As usual, if I covered a topic in the last week, please comment there instead.

Page 3 of 451

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén