middle-east

The war of the crazy bastards (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 39, April 7th 2026)

As I write, the US president is threatening to kill Iranian civilisation, ‘never to be brought back again.’ The craziest thing is not the business of threatening genocide on impulse. It’s the fact that we won’t even remember this in a week. There will be some other flashpoint, some other deadline. I’m laying my cards on the table: Trump is bluffing again, just like two weeks ago when he extended a 48-hour deadline to 5 days and then appeared to forget about it altogether.

Sooner or later, the bluffs will spill over into escalating horrors, because the terrifying logic of this situation means there is an ‘up’ button but no ‘down’ button. And yes, this might be the time it spills over. So if I’m wrong and Trump abides by his deadline in some more-than-token way, it will do more than add a few more pages to the catalogue of sordid and pointless war crimes. It will provoke an escalation that will make the blowback so far seem mild. So I don’t make this prediction lightly. But I am sick of how Trump keeps saying nonsense that he doesn’t follow up on, and we still hang on his every grotesque word.

To get some sense of order out of all this chaos, and as we wait for Trump either to fulfil his threat or forget about it, let’s run through the various facets of this war in turn: what I’ll capitalise as the (1) Machine War, (2) the Oil War, (3) the Regional War and (4) the potential for a Ground War. The latter two I will hold back for a separate post to go up in a few days.

Khosro Heyratnegari. Kharg Island in 2015. From Wikimedia Commons

The Machine War

Fatalities on the US/Israel side have stayed strikingly low through 39 days of war (from what we can gather through the screen of wartime censorship) while, by contrast, the death and destruction in Iran and Lebanon have been appalling. But don’t be fooled by that. The basic idea I laid out back on March 3rd was: the US has walked into a situation which only their adversary, Iran, actually has the power to end. The war is not over while Iran is still hitting US assets with drones and missiles, still saying who passes through the straits. In my post from Day 12 of the war I placed importance on the idea of a ‘missile-interceptor gap;’ weeks later, I’m not sure if this was right: Iran is still bombing away due to its bottleneck of launching capacity while on the other side it’s not clear if their woes are due to “running out of interceptors” as such.

A lot of the questions I posed were answered on March 21st when Iranian strikes hit Arad and Dimona in Israel. Footage showed massive destruction, and 180 injuries were reported in a single evening. We are still seeing near-daily reports of successful strikes on Israel in particular but also on facilities across the Gulf. Is this the missile-interceptor gap, the effect of cluster munitions, or the sooner-or-later outcome of a numbers game where if there are enough missiles no so-called “iron dome” can catch em all?

On March 21st, Israel’s health ministry stated that over 4,292 people in Israel had been injured since the start of the war, a number that has surged since then. As of today, officially 39 people including soldiers have been killed. The disproportion between injuries and fatalities generally strikes me as odd. The idea that no-one lost their lives in Arad or Dimona seems strange to me as the pictures showed buildings really flattened.

Another straw in the wind is a report on US personnel in the Gulf being forced to ‘work remotely.’ This puts an image in my head of Napoleon explaining that his army has to ‘work remotely’ from Moscow. This places the “fatalities are so low” argument in a different light. They are low because the US facilities have been abandoned (and the naval vessels are anchored thousands of miles away). The low fatalities on the US side (taking them at face value) are not in this case a measure of success. There’s nothing new about running away as a means of reducing fatalities.

Hegseth brags about ‘lethality’ as if killing people were an end in itself. (Maybe it is, for him and for his church. And he calls Iran a death cult!) But the really crazy thing about this war is that the US bombardment is many times greater than the Iranian bombardment in ‘lethality’ – but so much less effective. In the future it will be difficult for history teachers to explain this. But the strategic reality is what it is. Speaking very broadly, the Iranians are fighting for survival and are ready to endure suffering. The Americans are ‘like the poor cat i’ the adage’ who want to catch fish without wetting their paws.

Oil War

The conflict over the oil fields is a warning. On March 18 Israel bombed the South Pars oil field, which is shared by Qatar and Iran. The US government were angry at Israel for escalating the war, so angry that they threatened to punish… Iran. Iran escalated in response with more attacks on oil facilities, then the US threatened an astronomical escalation, then extended the deadline, then extended it again, and again… What interested me about this episode was that it pushed the world to the brink of a far greater escalation. And a few weeks later we are again on the brink. It’s a measure of how wild the situation is: the US government has blown up tens of thousands of targets in Iran, and the Iranian government has closed the Strait of Hormuz. You’d think that was extreme, but there’s a lot of room left to escalate. Things can still get a lot worse and it’s easy to see how.

On the other hand it’s very difficult to see how things could get better, how the oil could flow again: even if Trump changes his meds and declares victory, Netanyahu could kick things off again with some unilateral action that would spoil a deal. The US have now essentially established a set of rules where negotiating is just a cover for the next act of aggression, which means that even if Trump and Netanyahu are both visited by seasonal ghosts who scare them into changing their ways, the Iranians will not come to the table for fear that the table will be blown up.

The Oil War is really having an effect. At the start of this war the countries of Western Europe came out very much on the US/Israel side. This was surprising given they had been mad at Trump over Greenland only weeks before. The way the war is dragging on, and the way things have gone with Hormuz especially, has pushed the US-Europe relationship back to where it was over Greenland. The anger from world leaders toward Trump for choosing to create this situation is very obvious. The Gulf countries are in a far more desperate situation. There are hints that Saudi Arabia and the UAE would support a broadened US war. I doubt Qatar and Oman are pushing the same agenda.

The US cannot replace the Iranian government. The US cannot collapse Iran as a state. The US cannot spirit away a huge quantity of highly enriched Uranium. The US cannot disarm Iran. The US cannot make the Strait of Hormuz safe on US terms (see my post from Day 20). You can’t make predictions so early in a conflict that could last years. But right now the US has no way to achieve any of its stated goals.

A pattern we see in many wars – arguably in Ukraine – is that the weaker side, intoxicated by early wins, overplays its hand and misses an opportunity to cut a deal before the tide turns. Trump is threatening to carry out massive-scale war crimes against Iran. But from the Iranian point of view, I would imagine there is little the US and Israel can do that would make the situation significantly more serious than it is, short of a nuclear attack or a ground invasion. I think that right now the Iranian leaders would only be ‘crazy bastards’ if they reopened the ‘fuckin’ straits’ and sat down with the Americans for another game of negotiate/assassinate. Trump’s speeches and posts read like a man who is trying, with mounting desperation, to scare people who are already beyond fear. The threats fail to hide a deep fear of further escalation.

Often over these last ten years it has felt like the entire human race was being forced to live inside the brain of Donald Trump. But reality is asserting itself and it now feels like we are on an interface between Trump’s grey matter and a real world that has ceased to cooperate with him solipsism. The mullahs are more formidable opponents than Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. It is even clearer now than it was a month ago: the US-Israel alliance can cause a lot of pain and suffering, but they can’t win this war.

Stay tuned. In a few days I will post a follow-up looking at the various frontlines of this war across the region, and assessing the potential for a ground invasion of Iran.

[Update, 3AM GMT, April 8th. There is a ceasefire. The devil is in the details and in the execution. But there is after all a down button on this thing, and someone has pressed it.]

The Machine War (US/Israeli War on Iran, Day 12 – March 11th 2026)

Following on from last week’s post, I want to thrash out from uncertain evidence where things stand in the war as of today. Day 12 is a landmark because twelve days was the length of last year’s June conflict between the same antagonists. The day has come and gone with only the most unconvincing signals from the US president that there might be some dim prospect of a peace deal. But as I said last time, the basic strategic situation is: it’s the Iranian side who get to say when the war ends.

But it may be the end of the beginning. I think we are getting on towards the end of the first phase of the war, a machine war mostly of missiles, bombs and drones. The main questions in this first phase of the war are: what do the Iranians do when they run out of missiles? What do the US and Israelis do when they run out of interceptors? And who runs out first? A missile-interceptor gap in favour of Iran would mean a sudden ramping-up of damage to Israel, Gulf oil infrastructure and US bases. A gap in favour of the US means Iran’s chief offensive weapon is spent.

Where are we now?

Where do things stand right now in relation to this question? Almost nobody who knows anything valuable has any incentive to tell the truth. Here I will sum up the contradictory stuff I’ve read from various more or less non-credible sources.

  • That there are x5 fewer missiles than expected because Iran has lost so many launchers to air strikes.
  • That the US is pulling military hardware out of places like Korea and Ukraine to throw it into the Iran situation.
  • That the rate of Iranian missile fire has slowed a great deal since the start of the war.
  • That in comparison with last year’s 12-day war, fewer Iranian missiles are being launched – but they are causing more damage with the population of Tel Aviv being forced to run in and out of bunkers all the time.
  • That the Iranians are tricking enemy pilots by literally painting warplanes on runways.
  • That Tel Aviv is being hit really hard in the last four days, that the “Iron Dome” is breaking.
  • That US/Israeli planes are swarming the exits to Iranian bunkers, blowing up anything that pokes its head outside.
  • That civilian life in the Gulf has returned a good deal of the way to normal.
  • That Iran has pivoted to blowing up oil facilities in the Gulf.
  • That these attacks on oil facilities are not Iranian at all, but Israeli false flag operations (If the Gulf countries choose to do a deal with Iran in the future, they can all pretend to believe this).
  • That Iran is still holding back its biggest missiles.
  • That Iran can churn out Shahed drones at several times the rate that they are destroyed, and that these drones can do enough damage to make a big difference in the war.
  • That Iran can fight on at a fraction of the financial cost that the war is imposing on the US.
  • That the US side are not actually worried about running out of interceptors, only about leaving Ukraine exposed by overcommitting to Israel and the Gulf.
  • The US has not lost vessels. But that could be because their navy is hanging back and not committing itself to combat.
  • That the entire Iranian navy and air force have been destroyed, and 80% of air defences destroyed.
  • That 17 US installations in the Middle East have been damaged.
A Shahed drone shot down in Ukraine. Image courtesy of Npu.gov.ua

All of the above cannot be true. But some of it is. We have to use our own judgement. It appears to me that while the balance of fatalities is massively against Iran, the war is proving to be a massive logistical, political and economic challenge for the US.

What do we know for sure?

The outstanding fact of the war is that there has been a slaughter of civilians in Iran and Lebanon. Next in significance is the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz, the mere warning of which has led to economic turmoil around the world. Moving on from warnings, today three ships were hit by Iranian weapons in the straits.

Incentives to de-escalate are not there. An initiative by the Iranian president to mend fences with the Gulf States was blocked by the military, with strikes continuing, for example on a desalination plant in Bahrain the very next day. Yesterday I saw multiple headlines about Trump saying peace was coming very soon, and I just find it both funny and irritating that there are still journalists hanging on every word out of Trump, as if this is a man who weighs his words for even a second before vomiting them up, or stays true to them afterwards.

The US/Israeli bombardment, with its toll in civilian lives, can carry on for, in effect, as long as the US population will continue to pay for it and to tolerate it morally. But Iran will run out of missiles or of launching capacity sooner than it runs out of resolve. From a two-sided air war it will become a one-sided bombing campaign like what the US did in Korea and Vietnam (without unseating a regime). The 12-day duration of last year’s war could indicate that this first phase, this machine war, might be reaching its limits. But assuming the two sides are better-prepared this time, it could go on for another week or two.

At the end of that period, a missile-interceptor gap in Iran’s favour would mean an episode of more serious damage being inflicted on US bases and on Israel. Such a ‘Tet Offensive’ moment, especially so soon after the outbreak of war, could have a huge effect on public opinion and mood. A missile-interceptor gap in favour of the US would, on the other hand, settle the air war into a one-sided conflict until such time as the Iranians can restore capacity – if they can restore capacity at all under such pressure.

Next post I intend to explore what a second phase of this war might look like, assuming that the first is coming to an end. To finish today, a note on the Iranian regime.

Iran: strengths and weaknesses of the regime

I said last week that Trump, Hegseth, Miller et al are fools. The Iranian leadership, on the other hand, are reactionary and ruthless, but they are not fools. Unlike the American and the Israeli leaders, they cannot afford to be fools. The Islamic Republic is deeply imbedded in society through a nearly fifty-year history. Iran’s strategic doctrine of distributed “mosaic” resistance and multiple designated successors for every position is an impressive response to the last quarter-century of a US and Israeli doctrine of blitzkrieg and assassination. In the future, the current war could be written up as an epic of resistance that could supply the clerical regime with a whole new legitimizing narrative that it can spin decades of mileage out of.

For what it’s worth, I don’t support the Islamic Republic regime – and I think any regime that Trump might install (or Biden, Obama, Bush or Lincoln, while we’re at it) would be a lot worse. A new regime emerging in a genuine way, from a popular uprising such as the Women, Life, Freedom movement, or from Iranian labour, would be a different story. To me this is a very simple point. It’s not complicated at all. Some people insist that any criticism of Trump’s idiotic war is a defence of the clerics. On the other hand I’ve noticed a semi-ironic identification with the Iranian regime from people who are simply relieved to see some powerful entity standing up to the US and Israel at long last.

Even taking into account the rounding effects of irony, I think this is unwise. Already the clerical regime is directing its propaganda appeal to the anti-Israel layers of MAGA more so than the progressive anti-war left.

Anyway, I don’t feel any need to wring my hands, accompanying any remarks with a token condemnation of the Iranian government for the sole purpose of covering my arse. That’s not why I’m writing this. But a relevant point, for my purposes, is to look at how the nature of the Islamic Republic might inhibit its ability to fight imperialism. On Drop Site News a week ago I heard an Iranian official using this war as a retrospective justification for the killing of thousands of protesters by the government in January in operations that were extraordinary in scale and ferocity. On the contrary, there must be severe confusion and demoralisation in the armed forces and among the public following the winter bloodshed. This kind of war demands the full mobilisation not only of the armed forces but of all of society.

I’m going to leave that point very general because of weaknesses in my knowledge of Iranian culture and politics. But as a general rule the nature of a regime has profound effects on how it fights a war. We can’t put the clerical authoritarian regime in a box and forget about it for military purposes. It will tell.