The title says it all. So did Clausewitz.
We committed an act of war against a sovereign state that had every right to peaceful nuclear power.
Tulsi Gabbard told Donald Trump in March that Iran had NO nuclear weapons program.
There is a huge difference between radio medcine and nuclear power, and a nuclear weapons program. Iran has the former by legal right under the NNPT and does not, nor has plans for the latter.
This war will spiral out of control just like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in July 1914.
Prepare yourselves. We will all suffer before this is over.
Stephen Johnson
The post seems to be missing…
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Okay, I’ll go first. I really truly did witness it. It made me question our reality — AGAIN. I question it hundreds of times a day but this was still morning so I had only questioned it maybe tops 20 times so far up to that point.
I made that comment yesterday about what’s in it for Donny Dove and how the young stud leader of Syria is better looking than Bibi and obviously stirs Donny Dove’s loins. In mentioning that, I made reference to an Elvis Presley lyric. namely “a hunka, hunka burnin’ love.”
I have no idea why I chose this lyric. It just came to me unconsciously out of the ether and in fact I didn’t even realize it was Elvis Presley until after I posted the comment and said to myself, “hey, that’s Elvis..”
A couple of hours later my wife and I travel to the grocery store which happens to also have a recycling center. We pull into the recycling parking and unload our recycling and get in the car and right as I am putting the car in drive, I kid you not, an obvious Elvis impersonator gets out of his car and walks right in front of us to unload his recycling. Fyi, we do not live in Vegas and this is the first time we have ever seen an Elvis impersonator in public let alone this location.
He didn’t have on the beyond-the-pale get-up but the hair was the tell. He had jet-black hair and the side burns and sunglasses. It was Elvis. My wife drew my attention to it. She said, “hey, look, it’s Elvis.”
It’s obvious what’s going on here. This is yet more clear evidence we are living in a simulation as if I, or you, needed any more evidence.
Aside from that, Sean, what is your take on Katherine Mayo’s Mother India considering you once upon a time wrote a piece on India? I started reading a bit of it yesterday on the Internet Archive and it ruined my dinner. I think that was the intent and if so, it worked. I only read about 10 pages but that’s enough for now until I can regroup and recover. The silence of the kids (goats).
bruce wilder
I dreamt it.
Mark Level
I heard it, from Pepe Escobar, a few minutes ago. Apparently Judge Napolitano put it up yesterday. Pepe’s at a big Confab in Russia, Putin among the speakers.
He said it would be announced this morning, that China is about to make major capital investments in the Donbass oblast of the growing Novorossiya. Business partnerships, etc.
Nothing from the Western State media I could find online, but I did find this from late Feb. 2025– https://en.topcor.ru/56939-kitaj-razvorachivaet-svoju-dejatelnost-na-donbasse-vopreki-opasenijam-okazatsja-nepravilno-ponjatym.html Despite the AI-garbled verbiage, “Is things getting better?”, very Bush Jr. grammar, I believe the writing was on the wall, soon to be reality on the ground.
Everybody Loves A Winner, as the song says. Trump in particular since he imagines himself one. Will he be cut out due to all his bullshitting, betrayals and squid ink? Stay tuned.
Pepe also said “We are not in World War 3” currently: That is an opinion and even having heard it I can neither confirm nor rebut it, not enough data. To those who assume that Russia and China will idly stand by and witness the destruction of Iran, knowing they are next on the menu, I think they are mistaken. Only time will tell, however.
Oh, and a final note. There are some interlocutors who are notoriously wrong 90% of the time or more. We have a new one who replaced Tallifer, who guaranteed us many dozens of times Ukraine would crush the lilliputian Russia. Tallifer kind of knew when s/he was on thin ice, however, would run away if challenged. Newbie just spins more words, words as strong and relevant as Polonius’, in hopes of being taken seriously. Wind circulating in a vacuum.
marku52
What now? i follow Armchair Warlord on X. He’s ex US mil, and over the last year I’ve found him to be unemotional and restrained, and generally correct. His guess is that the US did not send B2s deep into Iran, where they would return across hundreds of miles of contested airspace. We never even risked them in Yemen, for Dog’s sake.
So what we did was launch 36 Tomahawks from subs (a very low risk maneuver) and rearrange some rubble in the Iranian mountains. Declare victory and go home. (No evidence of radiation from the strike, and Iran had already announced everything had been moved to safety)
What Iran should do now is ignore this pinprick and continue their methodical daily disassembly of Israel. However, I saw unconfirmed tweets that Iran was going to close the Gulf of Hormuz. That would definitely bring in the US to frontal confrontation.
We shall see.
Stormcrow
Mark Level wrote …
Why on earth do you think that Iran is about to be destroyed?
This strikes me as the same sort of assumption about American “omnipotence” that I kept hearing, from people who really ought to have known better, during the Iraq War. People in what passes for a left wing, in the arid desert of American political discourse. Eventually, the US gave up, handed the government over to the Shiite majority, and left with its tail between its legs. Does anyone really suppose we’re going to do any better against a country with almost 3 times Iraq’s population, where the areas of major population density are in mountainous terrain that is an automatic nightmare for any external ground force? We’re going to get our asses kicked and when we’ve decided we’ve bled enough for zero value gained, we’re going to leave. How many wars has America actually won since 1950?
KT Chong
About three weeks ago, Trump suddenly started complaining and whining about Chinese rare earths, about how “unfair” it was for China to severely restrict rare earth exports to the US. At the time, it seemed like more of his incessant whining. However, in 20/20 hindsight: at the time he already knew Israel was going to attack Iran, and he had already decided to join Israel in the war against Iran.
Trump knew Israel’s missile defense systems — like the Arrow, Iron Dome, and David’s Sling — were going to burn through interceptors fast. And once those stockpiles ran low, the U.S. wold have to resupply Israel, but the U.S. could not build replacement missiles without critical and rare earth elements from China to make them.
So Trump rushed to get ahead of the war. He pushed aggressively for a trade deal with China, hoping to lock in a steady supply of rare earths before the war started. However, he was still an idiot: when negotiators reached what he thought was an agreement, he thought that he was the smartest man in the room and that he had played China. He assumed the trade deal had secured rare earth supply to get China to feed America’s war to support Israel and strike Iran. Trump could not resist from bragging on Truth Social.
But Trump miscalculated.
The trade is NOT finalized until Xi Jinping personally signs off. And at the time, China could not have known the US was planning to go to war with Iran and what the rare earths were truly for. Xi might have suspected something, but the real reason — that China’s rare earths would be used in a war against China’s strategic and regional ally, Iran — was not yet obvious.
Now, the war has started — and Xi knows.
And with that knowledge, the entire trade deal is effectively dead. Even if the paperwork exists, Xi is unlikely to approve it now. There is no reason for China to help America and Israel destroy China’s key strategic partners in the Middle East. There is every reason to quietly sabotage it. Xi does not need to openly reject the deal. He can simply refuse to issue export licenses. He can delay shipments with bureaucratic hurdles, or make up new excuses to restrict supply.
Meanwhile, China continues to buy Iranian oil, strengthens backchannel ties, and lets America bleed resources into a costly war it cannot win quickly — or sustain without rare earth inputs from China.
Trump thought he had outsmarted Xi. He thought he could start a war against China’s ally and have China supply the bullets.
He’ll find out — along with the rest of Washington — that China doesn’t help America shoot its allies. Certainly not for Trump’s “great deal”.
Carborundum
No disagreement as to the fundamental rights held by Iran. The challenge is that everyone else, globally, has transitioned to LEU (< 20% enrichment) for Mo-99 production.
Purple Library Guy
This is not as bad as I was expecting. In a way, Trump confounds everyone–when a President of the United States orders something military to happen, we expect that the point is something military, that the military is supposed to be doing something to change the balance of power in a region somehow. From the looks of it, Trump wasn’t doing any of that stuff. He was doing something that’s in a weird way much less insane: He was using the military PURELY as a public relations prop.
So the planes bombed a few locations associated with Iran’s nuclear power program, probably didn’t destroy them, had no real strategic or even tactical impact at all. Trump said look, we bombed those places, aren’t we awesome, declared victory and went home. He literally doesn’t care if the places were actually destroyed or not, as long as there’s pictures of rubble. Probably Iran will take some kind of revenge on some American troops or something; Trump doesn’t care about that either, so it may not lead to escalation.
Netanyahu’s probably livid–he wanted the US involved in his war, and instead what he got was Trump awarding himself a photo op. If anything it’s worse for Bibi than that–the president of the US just said look, we won this war for you, so it’s over now.
So yeah, I was expecting to feel really upset and worried at this point, but actually I’m almost finding it funny.
Stormcrow
I hope this decays as fast as you think it will, Purple Library Guy. But Trump is so hopelessly stupid and frankly deranged that I’m going to stick to my pessimistic assessment for the time being.
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Just watched Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern. Ritter is blaming Iran for provoking the American response by enriching to 60% thus giving America the right to a preemptive/preventive defensive attack per United Nations Article 51.
I don’t know, to me that smacks very much of blaming the victim. The analogy is blaming a woman who has been raped for wearing a mini-skirt and no bra.
Ritter is using a broad and unjustified interpretation of Article 51. The Article says nothing specifically about preemptive/preventative measures and yet Ritter and others proceed as though that generous, unjustified interpretation is written in stone. It’s not written in stone and in fact to me the interpretation is preposterous and a slippery slope to the justification for aggressive war. It enables bullies.
It looks like Feed Me Seymour Hersh was right on this one. He said it would be this weekend and by golly it was. Larry Johnson, like myself, has said this will be it for Trump, meaning it’s the extent of his aggression unless of course Iran does something beyond-the-pale brazen. Even then, I still hew to my claim Trump will never green-light a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Iran.
Ritter also indicates Iran can throw together a deliverable nuke, or a few even, within a couple of weeks if not less and he believes they are now going to do that. If so, I suppose under Article 51, as it’s narrowly and strictly written and not some absurd interpretation of it, Iran can take out Tel-Aviv and Haifa with the nukes it quickly cobbles together considering it is under attack and it is existentially threatened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45M9q6QnVL0
Fyi, I never claimed Ukraine could beat Russia. I have no idea how it will end but anyone would have to be an idiot to believe Ukraine could defeat Russia in the sense Russia unconditionally surrenders and becomes Ukraine. As for Ukraine being sovereign again as it was just barely prior to Russia’s war on Ukraine, I don’t believe it will ever be the same. There may be some sovereignty in the end but territorially Ukraine will look very different. Once again, this is all predicated on whether AI allows us to exist any longer or exist more or less as we exist now.
NR
I have no idea how effective the strike was (or wasn’t), but anyone who says a lack of radiation at the site means the strike wasn’t effective is just revealing that he has no idea what he’s talking about. Striking a uranium enrichment facility does not release meaningful amounts of radiation. The uranium there has not been blasted with neutrons like in a nuclear reactor so it’s not active. Most of what is at the site would be UF6 which is a gas. Even weapons grade uranium is not very radioactive (the half life of weapons-grade uranium is 700 million years, for U238 it’s even longer). The biggest dangers are chemical reactions to the scientists on site. This is a lot different than striking an operating nuclear reactor or releasing a bomb.