Yves here. Even though Rob Urie is correct to be very worried about the potential for nuclear escalation, he makes a key assumption which I believe leads him to considerably over-estimate the odds of the US (or its Israel attack dog) resorting quickly if at all to that option. Of course, we are led by recklessly stupid people who think using a “tactical” nuke is no biggie.
Yes, it seems to be true that the US cannot destroy all or even most of Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, underground missile caches and launch silo, and underground factories. Ted Postol has come to the same conclusion as Scott Ritter, cited below.
However, destruction of these facilities is not an objective but a pretext. The objective is regime change. If the Collective West succeeds in that aim, it can simply have its pet new government give access to all these bunkers and let the new masters decide what to do about them.
Indeed, there is a very big argument against destroying these bunkers, even if we could. Iran has a lot of missiles, including hypersonic missiles, a type of weapon the West has yet to put into production. The Collective West is extremely short of missiles. What better way to replenish our kit for the purpose of Project Ukraine and Project Get China than take a big cache from Iran? Recall (and I do not know by what process) that a lot of Syria’s weapons allegedly made their way to Ukraine.
So I am sticking with my early bet: that the real plan is to pound Tehran, as Israel did with Beirut. It was the toll on civilian life and infrastructure that led Hezbollah to back off on its campaign in support of Palestinians. Sure, the US and Israel will also pound on Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan. Even if the Israel plus its NATO friends could destroy them, that would not achieve regime change. Failure to do what is deemed to be sufficient damage could thus justify further attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Another factor to consider in the immediate trajectory is that Western outlets are admitting that Israel is taking body blows from Iran, such as the very-pro Israel Telegraph three days ago in Iran’s high-tech onslaught punches deadly holes in Israel’s air defences. The Washington Post has said that Israel will only be able to intercept Iranian missiles for another 10 to 12 days, not that it is doing all so well even now.
One would think that the evidence that the war has not gone according to US and Israel plans would lead to quick US entry, and not just quick US threat display.
However, US/Israeli self-serving propaganda is leading to official belief in a variant of a familiar narrative, “Iran is just about to run out of missiles. From Larry Johnson:
I am reliably informed by someone with access that Trump and his team believe, based on Israeli intelligence, that Iran is running low on missiles and will soon exhaust their supply. This is utter nonsense. Iran has been building and stockpiling missiles for more than twenty years. These missiles are stored safely underground, out of the reach of Israeli and US bombs.
In other words, the US is likely to be overconfident yet again over what it can achieve via conventional means. I suspect we’ll have to see the US and Israel encounter more cold doses of reality before they decide whether to go the nuclear route.
And a not-quite-as-fast-as-some-fear escalation path increases the odds of Iran play the “closing the Strait of Hormuz” card, which might get Mr. Market to knock some sense into Trump’s head.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
As this essay is being written, military supply ships, aircraft carriers, and refueling aircraft are being sent by the US to West Asia as the US appears ready to formally enter the war that it started with Iran. With nuclear weapons being the only option left for busting Iran’s bunkers (details below), their ‘pragmatic’ use for bunker busting would cross every nuclear red-line that an increasingly resistant world has put forward. Once the nuclear line is crossed, it is a matter of days or weeks until human life on the planet ends. The escalation logic is inexorable.
Despite press assurances in the West that the attack on Iran is an Israeli affair, the fingerprints of the US can be found all over the plot. As the initial attack was ongoing, the US Navy attempted to shoot down Iranian missiles as Iraq, under the control of the US, closed its airspace to Iranian fighter jets. Donald Trump’s claim that ‘he knew everything’ is because the US is uniquely responsible for the attack. At this point, claims that ‘it was Israel’ are quaint.
Graph: Over recent decades, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign aid by a significant measure, with most of it aid being used to buy weapons and materiel. Lest this remains a mystery, the US gives Israel money to buy weapons from the US, and Israel does so. In other words, the US launders payments to private military producers by running them through Isreal. Source: Council on Foreign Relations.
Scott Ritter offered that the US has already deployed its largest conventional bunker buster, the thirty-ton air-fuel bomb, which failed in Yemen against less deeply buried bunkers. This leaves the US with nuclear weapons as the only escalatory step available. However, nuclear weapons represent a boundary which once crossed, can’t be uncrossed. The Russians have promised no first strike. But they have also warned that once the boundary is crossed, they will respond in kind.
Remarkably, the list of nations in West Asia that have been unilaterally attacked by the US since 2003 matches both the list of nations in line for US regime change operations leaked by retired US General Wesley Clark in 2003, as well as most of the nations that form the Zionist fantasy of Greater Israel. Given that Donald Trump was not in the government in 2003, the current US policy was set in motion twenty-two years ago.
This last point requires further explanation. The reason why Donald Trump’s foreign policy so closely resembles Joe Biden’s foreign policy is because presidents don’t decide US foreign policy. Consider, the attacks on both Iran and Russia were conceived and put into action at some time prior to the present. The scuttlebutt in the establishment press keeps landing on eighteen months ago. Joe Biden was president eighteen months ago, not Trump.
Logically, the Western attack on Iran required 1) a will to attack and 2) the capacity to attack. Neither alone would motivate the act. Will without capacity lacks capacity. And capacity without will lacks will. Israel possesses will but not capacity. And the US supplies the capacity with full understanding of what it will be used for. This makes the US a participant in Israel’s actions. American prosecutors regularly prosecute those who provide criminals with the weapons they use in their crimes.
Ominously, it was the US that cancelled the sixth meeting between the West and Russia to discuss peace in Ukraine. The cancellation followed a reported enthusiastic phone call from V. Putin to Donald Trump. Mr. Putin undoubtedly detected a mismatch between what Mr. Trump is saying and the facts as they can be determined. More to the point, the Western effort to assassinate Mr. Putin while attacking Russian nuclear assets looks very much like the current Western effort to decapitate the Iranian regime with its attack on Iran.
Despite the tone of the phone exchange, Mr. Putin is reported to have offered to mediate between Israel and Iran, and Mr. Trump is reported to have been open to the suggestion. That this is taking place as the US is moving military personnel and equipment into place in what is increasingly looking like the launch of an American war across West Asia, suggests that Mr. Trump is saying one thing while doing another.
According to the informed speculation in the US, the initial attack on Iran was intended to produce a result akin to the dissolution of Syria. Decapitation strikes were supposed to break Iran’s will to fight as US bombs destroyed what is alleged to be Iran’s ‘nuclear program.’ With the decapitation effort ongoing, the West hasn’t yet been thwarted. But Iranian missiles landing in Tel Aviv wasn’t supposed to happen. As it currently stands, Iran can land hypersonic missiles inside Israel at will.
The pretense that Donald Trump is being sandbagged by neocons into prosecuting wars that he doesn’t want is wearing thin. His ‘tweets,’ or whatever one calls the technology this week, that proclaimed his role in the airstrikes launched against Iran, suggest that he is in junior high school, a boy, likely American, and is desperate for recognition from his fellow humans. What they didn’t suggest is that he understands the power that he wields to destroy human existence.
Where this lands with respect to Iran is that Russia has lots of business with Iran, it has a soft defense agreement with Iran, and unless the Russians have suddenly ‘gone American,’ Russia understands that the US is coming for Russia if it (US) prevails in Iran. Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he is a willing foot soldier in the Western imperial project. The strategic inflexibility that this program implies will end the world.
To the US – Israeli claim that Iran must end its nuclear weapons program, the US intelligence services have repeatedly stated that such a program does not exist, Meanwhile, Israel is known to possess 75 – 300 nuclear weapons that have never been declared, and are therefore illegal. The point is that the US has no ideological or moral qualms regarding the possession of nuclear weapons. Differences emerge over who it is that possesses them.
With the wars in Ukraine and West Asia now merging, the economic basis of the conflict is being revealed. The US is trying to destroy BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Iran joined BRICS in 2024, and isn’t represented in the acronym. Three of the BRICS nations possess nuclear weapons— Russia, India and China. An economic bloc (BRICS is a soft bloc) that possesses nuclear weapons makes it a geopolitical bloc.
Ritter also identified a complication in the Iranian predicament when he pointed out that Iran’s policy of near-enrichment violated thresholds that the US will not tolerate. However, under existing nuclear agreements, Iran appears to be within its rights to possess the enrichment program that the US is objecting to. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that Iranian negotiators had already agreed to the Western level of enrichment, US proxy Israel attacked Iran without warning or provocation.
Ritter’s point is important. But given that Iran is already in compliance under existing agreements, it devolves to might makes right, which is an operational principle, not a legal principle. With Israel’s illegal cache of undeclared nuclear weapons, the US conspicuously couldn’t care less about nuclear proliferation, else its primary target would be Israel. With might-makes-right as its operating principle, the rest of the world can comply with the US or destroy the US. What it cannot do is to negotiate for peace.
In history, the first time that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Iran would have a nuclear weapon ‘within a matter of days’ was thirty years ago. He has been wrong for thirty years. All of the US intelligence services agree that Iran 1) has no nuclear weapon and that 2) Iran has no program to develop nuclear weapons. Mr. Netanyahu, like Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine, is in power because of his skill at doing the bidding of the US. In the present case, he is simply lying.
Ugly American Lindsey Graham, with 82 of his ugly American brethren and sistren in tow, Senators all, is now demanding the complete destruction of Iran. Why? Iran has no nuclear weapons and it has no nuclear weapons development program. If Mr. Graham truly disagrees, why doesn’t he hash this out with the intelligence agencies? Between them, the bet here is that the intelligence agencies have collected and considered the evidence, whereas Mr. Graham hasn’t.
For those who recall George W. Bush’s ‘Iraq WMD’ fraud, this is well-trodden territory. Mr. Trump’s innovation is to forgo seeking cover from the difficult-to-pin-down ‘international community.’ Implied is that the North – South divide has redefined the relevant boundaries. In attacking Iran, and through it, BRICS, the Western pretense of fealty to ‘the rules-based order’ has given way to the West being the premier rogue international actor.
With the CIA the likely lead in the permanent government’s move to accelerate WWIII in West Asia, Donald Trump seems to have made his peace with the agency. For the American people, this is truly unfortunate. While he revoked security clearances for the rogue elements who directly interfered with his 2020 electoral prospects, he left the operational core unmolested. This is why Genocide Joe is followed by Genocide Don. Carnival barkers for empire, all.
That the tactic of using military drones that had been hidden in anticipation of future use took place mere weeks apart in both Russia and Iran, considered in conjunction with decapitation efforts against both regimes, suggests that a singular geopolitical strategy / actor unites the efforts. That Russia has had an agreement with Iran to build between two and eight nuclear reactors for civilian nuclear purposes complicates the geopolitics.
Image: Donald Trump and Miriam Adelson. Ms. Adelson contributed $150 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign in return for favorable treatment of Israel. Debate has raged over whether Trump would honor the commitment. The answer is in. With military equipment being rushed to West Asia, the Zionist genocide remains intact. To be clear, this refers to genocide by Zionists, not genocide against Zionists. Photo source: Middle East Eye.
Donald Trump’s subterfuge by publicly pronouncing ongoing negotiations with Iran as preparations for attacking it were underway will likely turn out to have been too-clever-by-half. The race in future negotiations with the US will be over which party screws the other first. The logical end of this, where communication becomes a matter of competing lie-bots. is particularly unconstructive given the prevalence of nuclear weapons. The limited utility of fake negotiations— they only work once, suggests that maybe real negotiations would have been the better strategy.
That Miriam Adelson paid Donald Trump $100 million to attack Iran, and that Mr. Trump is dutifully doing so, illuminates a brave new way-of-doing-business for the US. Joe Biden performed this same service for only about 4% ($4 million in campaign contributions) of Mr. Trump’s take. Possibly the US wishes to set up a ‘marketplace’ for launching wars for foreign interests. This could be DEI for politicians, bringing equity to the commission of genocide.
As unpleasant as doing so may be under the circumstances, the point must once again be made that Donald Trump’s actions with respect to Israel and Iran date to decisions made by the permanent government of the US in the 1990s – early 2000s. While it would be heartwarming to imagine that Adelson wasted her money on a deal that had already been made, Donald Trump either was never in on the deal, or he lied to his MAGA devotees about wanting peace.
With little ability to affect US foreign policy in the near term, the American people have some decisions to make. Donald Trump and his advisors have been astonishingly reckless with respect to nuclear weapons to date. The Western attack on Russian nuclear assets would have ended humanity were Russia guided by less steady hands. Should Trump use nukes in Iran, no human will get a good night’s sleep for the remainder of human existence.
There is no electoral solution to the problem of Trump, just as there was no electoral solution to the problem of Biden. The permanent government in the US is impervious to electoral outcomes. Donald Trump may have imagined that by firing Federal workers through DOGE, the permanent government would be diminished. But the workers he fired weren’t, with a few exceptions, making policy. The result is that Trump is acting the puppet while believing himself to be the puppeteer.
If they care about living for more than the next few hours, Mr. Trump’s foreign policy handlers should warn him against using nuclear weapons in Iran. While in his lizard brain, Trump may believe that using nuclear weapons will increase the size of his penis (peace through strength) , what doing so would in fact accomplish is to turn it into stardust. Everyone who controls nuclear weapons has the same power that Trump has. Why we need to learn this lesson the hard way is a bit of a mystery.
