So much going on these days, right? I mean, geez, we aren’t even three months into the reign of Mad King Donald, and he’s already turned the whole world upside down, making disastrous policy decisions and committing unlawful and unconstitutional sins – some verging on crimes against humanity – at a rate that makes the pace of his first term’s clownfuckery seem positively languid. We all went to bed last night reeling from Trump’s ruinous decision to tariff the ass off of everybody and everything, everywhere on earth, in a program of economic vandalism so comprehensive that it was thought necessary to impose 10% levies on the hypothetical products of numerous uninhabited islands scattered around the world’s oceans, one of them a little rock near Antarctica that hosts a goodly number of penguins and not a hell of a lot else. No fooling.
Funny thing, though: no tariffs on Russia. Hunh. Anyway, this unconscionable scheme is apparently designed deliberately to plunge the whole world into a new Great Depression, the way Smoot-Hawley did back in the 1930s:
…and it’s a very big deal for me and mine, because it’s causing markets to plunge everywhere, and among the trillions in wealth swirling around the bowl are my own life savings, when here I am retired with nothing else to fall back on but whatever I’m due under the Canada Pension Plan, for which I’ll soon be eligible, praise be to the Saints. I think that might be enough to pay my cable bill. You can see, then, why I’d be preoccupied with what Donald’s doing to destroy me personally, but actually I’m not, because I’m far more worried about what’s going on right now in the Middle East, scary stuff to which almost nobody in the media, outside of the specialist web resources I follow, is paying sufficient attention. The way things are going, what Trump’s insane tariffs are doing to my financial prospects could soon be the least of my worries.
See, it’s starting to look as if Donald is planning to launch a major air offensive against Iran.
This is, as I’m sure you already understand, a very dicey proposition with potentially dire consequences.
Over the past couple of weeks, significant additions have been made to America’s already robust military resources in and around the Persian Gulf. The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson has been dispatched to join the Harry Truman, already on station and currently occupied bombing the living bejesus out of the Houthis in Yemen, thus prosecuting the latest game of geopolitical whac-a-mole. More ominous, as depicted in today’s masthead photo, is the deployment of at least six (and some sources say seven) B-2 stealth bombers to the U.S. base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, where they’ll be perfectly placed to take part in strikes on the hardest, most deeply-buried targets in Iran – the facilities involved in Iran’s nuclear program, and its ballistic missile storage bunkers.
The B-2s are perhaps America’s ultimate silver bullet weapons systems, designed for an astonishing degree of survivability in even the most highly contested threat environments by way of what’s thought to remain, decades after their introduction into service, the most effective implementation of all-aspect broad-frequency stealth ever achieved on a combat aircraft, pending the introduction of the new B-21. Now, contrary to what you may have heard in the press, stealth does not make an airplane “invisible to radar” (much less actually invisible to the naked eye, as Donald seems to believe, based on repeated statements over the years), but it does make it very hard to detect at anything beyond very close range, and even harder to lock up with a proper firing solution. That’s obviously highly advantageous when contemplating a strike against a country like Iran, but perhaps even more important in the present context is the B-2’s unique capability to carry what’s known as the Massive Ordinance Penetrator, or “MOP”, a 30,000 pound “bunker busting” bomb designed to be dropped from high altitude and reach penetration speeds sufficient to burrow deep into hardened underground facilities, including even those that are tunnelled into mountains. Just how much rock, dirt and reinforced concrete these things can penetrate is of course classified, but rest assured it’s a lot, and it’s believed that the availability of the MOP gives the USAF the unique capability to take out the facilities that Iran has buried in its quest to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Each B-2 can carry two of these diabolical things.
The Americans, trying to cash in on the “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War, only bought 21 B-2s, one of which subsequently crashed, so the forward deployment of a third of the force is a big deal. While one or two of them will occasionally be sent to places like Guam to show the flag and remind the Chinese that two can play that game, soldier, they usually stay home at Whiteman air force base in Missouri, and have even run global strikes on targets as far away as Libya from there. They wouldn’t be at Diego Garcia unless something was up, and my bet is that they can’t do what they’re there to do from Missouri because carrying 60,000 pounds worth of MOPs imposes range restrictions that put too much strain on aerial refuelling assets. That’s just a guess. In any case, their presence in theatre definitely means that military action, if not inevitable, is certainly on the table, and it seems like too much force if the aim is simply to rain more shit down around the ears of the Houthis in Yemen (not that they won’t, in the interim, use them to bomb the crap out of the Houthis too, just to send an emphatic message, in case anyone had any doubts about what these machines can do). It’s got to be about Iran.
But why? And why now? Well, Donald, perhaps spurred on by his good buddy Bibi Netanyahu, has a bug up his ass about the Iranians joining the nuclear club, which they now can, pretty much any time they please, thanks to Trump having himself torn up the carefully negotiated treaty that Obama and his team managed to to broker with the nasty theocrats in Tehran (a monumental achievement, in retrospect). They haven’t yet, but nobody doubts they’re able. You know how it goes when Donald gets a bug up his ass about something: he starts with the bully-boy threats and posturing, and then, sadly, often follows through with spectacularly ill-conceived and counter-productive spasms of bad policy (see the discussion of tariffs, above). At the moment, he’s attempting to frighten the Iranians back to the bargaining table, and the Iranians, quite rightly (much as it pains me to agree with them) are telling him to pound sand, even though some sort of half-hearted negotiations are ongoing, because what possible point is there to signing a deal with Trump’s America? They already had a deal. Trump tore it up. He’ll likely tear this one up too, won’t he? Hell, he tears up hugely important treaties with his closest allies, and makes threats against nations he’s obliged by treaty to defend, just ask Canada, Mexico and Denmark. Why would anyone think he’d stay true to a deal with a nation he despises as much as Iran?
If you were Iranian, would you sit down with Burnt Umber Voldemort and sign a worthless document aimed at preventing you from acquiring the one thing that might stop the orange bastard from turning around and bombing you back to the Stone Age anyway? Take a look at recent history. Muammar Gaddaffi: no bomb, international U.S.-led coalition deposes him, and he ends up bayonetted to death in a ditch. Saddam Hussein: no bomb, U.S.-led coalition kicks him out of his palace, and he winds up swinging at the end of a rope. Kim Jong Un: has the bomb, yuks it up with impunity in Pyongyang even though everybody, the Americans most of all, would love to see him exterminated. What’s the lesson here, kids?
Look, I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be nice to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. I don’t want those miserable bastards to have the bomb, what, are you nuts? Of course I don’t. It’s just that the safe, tidy option for achieving that end was blown to smithereens by Donald, and while I suppose it’s possible he may yet bully the Iranians into a new deal on broadly similar terms to the one Obama’s team negotiated, I’m not optimistic. That leaves only the military option, and I’m not going to write another 5,000 words just now on why that’s not necessarily such a great idea under the circumstances. If you want to read an excellent analysis of all the ways starting a major war with Iran at this point could send the whole world spiralling towards Hell in the proverbial hand-basket, have a look at this from Tyler Rogaway of The War Zone, an excellent resource for information on such matters:
https://www.twz.com/air/is-the-u-s-about-to-go-to-war-with-iran
Suffice to say, it could be a real shit show. Especially since, in all likelihood, the Russians are already reading the detailed war plans as they’re being formulated in real time by Trump’s crack national security team, gabbing back and forth over unsecured, malware-infected personal phones on Signal, or Gmail, or Reddit, or some such shit, and no doubt Vlad’s spooks are telling the Mullahs all about it. If Donald gives the go-code, don’t expect the attack to have the element of surprise.
It’s day 73, or 74, I think. How much more do you suppose Donald can fuck up within the traditional “first 100 days” Presidential honeymoon? Tell you what, don’t bet against a new pandemic starting up over the next couple of weeks. RFK Jr. is working real hard on that one. But hey, look on the bright side. If Donald ties up his armed forces in a conflagration in the Persian Gulf, he won’t have the military bandwidth to invade Greenland, or annex Canada, right? See? Always a silver lining!
the needlefish 
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