Who’s On First

What’s on second, I don’t know is on third.

The classic Abbot and Costello routine about baseball perfectly describes the confusion surrounding the punitive campaign in Iran. We have come a long way from Vietnam, which was the first televised war. During Vietnam, the American media, intentionally or not, published anti-American propaganda disguised as truthful, unfiltered reporting from the front lines. Historians like Mark Moyar, who has pored over Hanoi’s military archives, have unequivocally proved that the conventional narrative about the war was rubbish.

Rubbish is the most charitable description of the pablum produced by the corporate media, progressive technocratic think tanks, SOF Vet Bro podcasters, and a legion of unhinged international loons on Substack. When Operation Epic Fury began, we were warned that dozens of Iran-backed terrorist cells inside the United States would be activated to carry out simultaneous Mumbai-style attacks. As I noted in my March 3^rd post, crying wolf incessantly doesn’t mean there are wolves in the area.

Graphic courtesy of James L Wells

There has been a steady stream of uninformed speculation about impending catastrophes, especially if we put “boots on the ground.” Most focused on Marines being slaughtered when they land on Iranian soil. I heard Darryl Cooper, whom I admire, tell another podcaster that friends inside Tier 1 SOF units had told him they were concerned about being employed recklessly in poorly planned operations. I would not call that a lie, as Darryl is not here to defend himself, but, at the time, I found it less than believable.

After we put over 100 Special Operations boots on the ground for a day, built an expeditionary airstrip, and rescued a downed Air Force pilot without any casualties, how confident are SOF forces in the theater now? That was not a well-planned and rehearsed operation like the capture of Maduro. It was dynamic; there was no pre-planning or rehearsals, just the execution of branch-and-sequel audibles that demonstrated 4th-generation tactical brilliance. I admit I was stunned by CENTCOM’s ability and willingness to operate this way. After the fiasco of our Afghanistan exit, I had little faith in CENTCOM. I’m happy to be proved wrong about that.

The latest round of pearl-clutching started after President Trump’s threat to wipe out Iran’s civilization. But France already destroyed Iran’s civilization in 1979 when it allowed Ayatollah Khomeini to orchestrate the Shah’s overthrow from within its borders. Richard Fernandez, the undisputed champion of rational historical discourse, explains how this happened.

“Khomeini viewed Iran’s pre-Islamic past (Achaemenid, Parthian, Sassanid empires; Zoroastrianism) as an era of darkness or barbarism, to be eclipsed by Islamic rule. Universities were shut down for over two years to create “healthy environments for teaching advanced Islamic sciences” by expelling professors, students, and curricula tainted by “Western” or pre-Islamic influences. Persian culture—music, dance, mixed-gender socializing, dogs (as pets), certain poetry, and storytelling—when they conflicted with strict Shia rules, was banned.

Not content to wipe out Persian culture, the austere cleric did a number on the Marxists. Between June 1981 and March 1982, one of the largest massacres of leftists in modern history occurred: thousands of leftists and socialists were killed. The regime saw atheistic Marxism and organized leftist opposition as existential threats incompatible with Shia theocracy. It used torture, forced confessions, show trials, and extra-judicial killings. The Iranian left—once a major revolutionary force—was largely annihilated inside Iran.

But it didn’t stop there. Iran’s strategy of treating Lebanon and Syria as expendable forward bases against Israel and Sunni powers delivered the former to Hezbollah and precipitated civil war in the latter from which it has yet to recover.”

Nobody expects our media or credentialed elites to be honest or even knowledgeable about historical events that contradict their manufactured consensus. As a result, they are incapable of understanding or interpreting what has happened during the first 40 days of Operation Epic Fury. This void of fake news and misinformation needs some informed speculation from a military professional who spent a couple of years working on the Iranian border and dealing with Iranian security officials.

The Arab’s view of Iran is another aspect of this campaign that is not ignored by our elite media

The stated objectives of this operation are as irrelevant as President Trump’s wildly fluctuating statements about Iran. What matters are the results of a 40-day-long, one-sided, high-tech assault on the foundations of the Mulla’s Islamic Republic. We have turned a regional power into Trashcanistan. Big Serge explains how:

“The American and Israeli air campaign is, in a very real sense, a try at manufacturing ungoverned space within Iranian territory — rendering the Iranian government unable to exercise effective control over large swaths of its own military and industrial infrastructure, unable to guarantee the security of its own leadership and command apparatus, unable to project force across its borders or even to defend its own airspace with any reliability. This is sovereignty denial as a strategic objective, achieved not by occupation but by aerial pulverization of the instruments through which sovereignty is exercised. The recent move to expand targeting to include infrastructure is perfectly consistent with this theory.”

Ungoverned spaces normally result from an insurgency, but we are creating them from the opposite end of the technological spectrum. We have demonstrated the ability to attack a country of 90 million people with a large, potent military that has been preparing for decades to confront exactly this kind of attack while sustaining minimal casualties. This is a strategic innovation that will be studied in detail by our adversaries and ignored by our elites. The Iranian regime that emerges at the end of this conflict will be fundamentally different from the one that entered this conflict. If it is not replaced, it will be a hollowed-out shell of its former self. Unable to pay the thugs who keep it in power, and unable to control important provinces like Sistan-Baluchistan.

The only weapon Iran has left is to close the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused a serious decline in global oil stocks, triggering a chain reaction in the UK, Western Europe, and Australia. It has created fuel shortages that windmills and solar panels cannot offset. It is pushing governments that already heavily tax their workforce to support welfare, migrants, and renewables to contemplate higher taxes. It has created demands for more drilling and nuclear power, which is anathema to progressive elites. And exposed the inability of woke governments to provide energy or contribute to international security.

The international energy market is being forced to adapt to a constricted Persian Gulf, with both short- and long-term fixes. In the long term, we will see large pipelines stretched across Arabia to avoid the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. In the short term, we have seen every available large oil tanker and LPG carrier in the world change course and head toward the Texas coast at top speed. Russia is sanctioned, Venezuela is controlled by the Trump administration, and Iran cannot get a tanker on the open seas now that the US Navy has blockaded the Straits of Hormuz. The only major oil producer capable of increasing production and handling an increased flow of super tankers is in the Gulf of America, north of the Rio Grande.

Texas is about to generate some serious revenue for the country.

The blockade of Iranian ports, which takes effect today, will cost Iran approximately $276M/day in lost exports and $157M/day in disrupted imports. The Iranian rial has dropped to 1.5M per dollar, and Iranian banks are limiting withdrawals to $30.00 a day. The blockade makes continued resistance economic suicide.

But that’s not all: Iran has around 55 million barrels of oil storage capacity, currently over 50% full. When it can no longer store the oil it extracts, it will have to shut down production. Maid Maleki explains what happens next:

… when mature oil wells shut down, bottom water rushes in, a process called water coning. Oil droplets get permanently trapped in rock pores. This oil can never be recovered. Iran’s fields already decline 5-8% annually. Forced shut-ins could permanently destroy 300,000-500,000 bbl/day of production capacity, that’s $9-15B/year in revenue, gone forever.

Once again, President Trump has shown that a media monetized to lie for clicks and drowning in partisan alt. media takes has only a fleeting relationship with reality. He has revealed that the cosmopolitan intellectuals who comprise the Democratic Party and the permanent DC managerial class are detached from America, viewing their fellow citizens through an anthropological lens colored by condescension. We can only pray that this truth emerges from the fetid swamp of our dumbed-down social media before the Trump train is derailed by MSM propaganda and democratic party election shenanigans.