A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like "in Minecraft") and comments containing it will be removed.
Image is of Iranian missiles in one of their many fortified underground facilities. I sincerely hope this isn't AI generated, because I'm very wary of posting footage of explosions or combat and having it later turn out to be fake.
Now that the initial shock of the war's beginning is over and there's a meaningful dataset to analyze, the takes from the many hundreds of Geopolitics Understanders are flying in, with predictably extreme variance about how long they predict this war to last and who will ultimately be the victor - and, indeed, what victory even looks like for either side. There are some who are already toasting to their side's victory, but most serious analysts seem to believe that if there isn't any negotiations, and it's just attrition to the death, then it's gonna be a long war (months or even years), and then, depending on the analyst, either the US or Iran then concedes defeat.
All of these takes are being informed by quite possibly the worst information environment yet conceived by humanity. There's the usual stuff: falsehoods, lying by omission, wild exaggerations, state propaganda, doctored videos, masses of bots boosting certain narratives, etc - but now also easily accessible AI which creates images and videos that can be quite convincing unless further inspected by tools online, and people claiming that some non-AI videos were made with AI. On top of all of that, censorship across the Middle East is now in full effect, spawning arguments about whether Iran's strikes have actually decreased in intensity (and if they have, then why), or if we just aren't seeing them as much on social media anymore. Scant footage here and there confirms that strikes are still happening, but I suspect that most of the evidence of further damage to Western facilities will either be satellite imagery or indirect indicators like rescue crews gathering in certain areas, as well as the he-said-she-said of official statements by either side. Given the West's utter lack of reliability with reporting... well, pretty much everything, but especially the Ukraine War, I know which side I'm predisposed to believe, but obviously Iran's government generally isn't going to report successful strikes by Western forces for a myriad reasons.
However, the military conflict is being gradually eclipsed in importance by the growing likelihood of a global economic crisis of massive proportions. A very large proportion of the fuel that keeps the world running is now not moving, and may remain so for weeks or months. Some are even predicting that 2026 will be the year of the biggest energy crisis in world history, dwarfing the crisis of 1973, as countries around the world begin to restrict oil and gas exports and tap into limited reserves. In such a situation, Iran clearly holds all the cards, because even if the US eventually achieves air supremacy, it is still relatively trivial to fire cheap drones en masse at tankers in the strait and at oil facilities throughout the Gulf. Assuming that Iran and the US do not negotiate, then even if the US eventually somehow wins and can reopen the strait within a few months, the global economic and political situation may be so degraded that the victory will be pyrrhic.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Barely on topic, but I was curious if comrade @MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net or someone else could explain how a somewhat developed Iraq with a standing army was overrun in 2003 (and maybe 1991 while we are at it). Idk some of you military nerds are good with the technicalities of how that stuff goes down and I was curious.
In '91, the US specifically did not try to take over all of Iraq, but mainly focused on liberating Kuwait and pushing partially into Iraq for a short period. This was still the more Kissinger-esque generation of competent ghouls, who retained an inkling of how to fight a war with actually clearly defined and appropriately limited goals. They nevertheless inflicted heavy damage on the Iraqis, because the situation was just pretty lopsided:
For '03, Iraq had been under sanctions for over a decade by that point - and thanks to the economic devastation that wrought, the Iraqi political class and military leadership weren't particularly motivated, and were very vulnerable to bribery. Plus, Iraq as a country, was additionally vulnerable to sectarian tensions, so there were plenty of people rooting for the government to fall and ready to start jockeying for positions in the new post-war order. Remember how Assad's Syria kind of just dissolved, to all our collective shock? This wasn't quite as bad, but still, in reality, Coalition forces simply didn't do that much fighting
There was again a substantial build-up (I think around 4 months this time), lots of bombardment, and then they did a lighting-fast blitz on the capital, still managed to run into logistics issues, and were so lighting fast that they didn't actually really substantially damage the Iraqi army's manpower - they didn't exactly overrun them (unlike in '91, when there was actually a broad-front offensive, with Coalition forces inflicting heavy casualties all across it) - they mainly just punched a hole through to the capital. Not that that isn't impressive, but it has different strategic implications - Iraqi forces simply aren't actually being destroyed in such large numbers in this scenario. Coalition forces were so lighting fast that they kind of neglected to actually secure basically anything in the country outside of the immediate vicinity of the capital and a couple major cities, allowing tons upon tons of weaponry, and particularly explosives, to just fall into the hands of civilians. The IED crisis that Coalition forces later faced was pretty much of their own making - the insurgents didn't just conjure up all the ordnance they made their bombs out of from thin air, Coalition forces practically handed it to them.
Overall, the idea of '03 as a victory is heavily based on just arbitrarily drawing a line in the sand when Saddam's government falls, and pretending that the subsequent insurgency was just this independent Act of God that happened for completely unrelated reasons. Except, when you look into the composition of the insurgent forces, and find out that their core was literally just a whole bunch of former Iraqi Army soldiers, it kind of starts seeming like Coalition forces are essentially fighting the same entity they were fighting at the start, just having undergone a transformation. So, when you start viewing the whole thing as a single continuous conflict with several phases, it starts looking rather different - an initial victory, followed up by a grinding attritional quagmire that doesn't really end the best for the occupiers (although of course, they do manage to slaughter or otherwise ruin the lives of a substantial amount of civilians in the process, in typical imperial fashion)
Excellent analysis, this is spot on.
Just wanted to do a little elaboration on a couple of points, mainly from my experience - I was 19 at the time and had just started to read The War Nerd column in the eXile (ah, those were the days!).
First of all, you have to remember the context. In '91 Iraq had just fought a bloody years-long war with Iran, they had a lot of hardware and some experience using that equuipment, even though command was very top-heavy and centralized - the old Soviet model (at least that's what many people said back then and since, always seemed plausible to me). So yeah, at least theoretically they were in a somewhat good starting position. But then again the US onslaught was just insane and much bigger in numbers and mass then today. I won't look up the numbers, but it was 500+ US aircraft at least, and like Tervell said, the distances involved where much shorter. You could take off and bomb Iraqi targets within a hour as a US pilot.
Fighting in '91 was quite rough at times. Iraq had Mig-25s and SAMs that actually engaged and shot down US aircraft. Iraq fired Scuds into Saudi and Israel - much smaller than what we saw last week, but it was a factor to consider for US planning and weapons use (much like today, interceptors failed and bombing launchers was much harder than imagined at first). The coalition had to do weeks of preparatory bombing, with 100s of aircraft. There is a YT channel that does these map-based visualizations and they have several videos on the air war, with representative aircraft counts (just search "operations room gulf air war" and skip through the videos to get an idea) - it's just insane seeing the sheer mass of US strike packages flying into southern Iraq and Baghdad, like dozens of aircraft flying in from three different directions and on a very small part of the Iraqi map, so to speak. I'm not gonna link it because they tend to be on the US propaganda side a bit too much for my taste - but I guarantee you they can't do that in Iran now. Too much distance, too much territory to cover, just not enough aircraft.
Terrain was different, too. Kuwait and southern Iraq is mostly just desert, and all these US weapon systems never, ever found a better environment to work in than the Arabian desert. Anytime the war moved to cities, Iraqis might put up a fight and US forces had a much more difficult time (e.g. Battle of Khafji in '91, Battle of Nasiriyah in '03). At the same time, these desert actions featured a lot of friendly fire - totally not unlike today. Back then people joked that the biggest enemy of British combat troops was the USAF/the US Army missile defence corps. Compare that to Iran - endless mountains, endless distance, and all these nice IRGC tunnels; Iraq had no tunnels at all.
Couple thoughts on the ground effort: You have to remember that the US Armed forces were at their absolute peak, maybe ever. You had all that cold war equipment, a huge standing army, and constant training for that Fulda Gap tank action everybody assumed for decades back then. There was probably never a better time for coordinated air campaign-ground warfare pushes from a US perspective, and it showed. Even though, they still took months dismantling the Iraqi Army from the air first. The ground package in '03 was smaller - like Tervell said, they mostly just did a tank rush straight to Baghdad, shooting up everything along the way - and the US forces still needed like 3 weeks for basically 400 miles of desert highway.
A little graph on US troop strength to illustrate my point:
And finally, speaking of distances, one thing I haven't seen talked about a lot is just how far away Iran is from Israel. Imagine you're flying an F-35 mission out of Eilat AFB or whereever. You take off, refuel over Iraq, and then you fly towards Tehran or central Iran - roundabout two hours until you're even on station (!). You have to piss your pants around that point - no toilet in an F-35 - and now you have to fly around two more hours playing whack-a-mole with Iranian targets. Oh, and then it's two more hours back to Israel, piss yourself again on the way, and those go-pills you just popped to stay awake really make you want to poop like, soon-ish. But nooo, you still gotta refuel first, and then the landing part...are we really to believe that every American pilots performs flawlessly under these circumstances? I'd rather believe that like at least half of them fly into Iran, try to shoot their load ASAP to fly home again and take a well-deserved dump in a real toilet. Who cares if you just hit 5 tractor-trailers, half of whom are out of service anyway. Just get the fuck home, you have to do it again tomorrow anyway because there's not enough planes. Add to that the duress of flying over a hostile country, at night, with alarms and warnings from all you super-duper F-35 EOTS going off constantly, and whatever dozen subsystems you have to watch all by yourself... six hours of pure stress in a cramped F-35 cockpit. Yeah no, I fully believe this air campaign is completely different from '91 and '03.
In '91 you take off from a carrier, fly into southern Iraq for 30 minutes tops, do your 1-2 hours on station and fly back again. Might not even have to piss your fly-diaper once, and the biggest challenge is keeping your head straight from all the talk you hear on the 10+ radio nets coordinating 200 coalition aircraft covering 100 square miles or something. And even back then you had plenty of evidence that US pilots just wanted to over-bomb any target they saw and fly the fuck back ASAP.
So yeah, hope I could offer some additional points to your excellent question. Iraq had a solid military in '91 but they just couldn't go up against the US empire at its all-time power peak. 2003 was a smaller war, and an exhausted Iraq faltered under a somewhat comparable air onslaught, and he US still managed to fumble the overall war effort. Iran is different, the US empire is visibly panting, and the geographic aspect of a war that at this point is entirely waged from the air is quite possibly as disadvantageous for an US air campaign as it ever was.
I hadn't thought as much of the demands on the pilots, you really painted an evocative picture there
. Funnily, I had quoted some excerpts from an article in another comment, one of which was
and while they meant stamina more in a metaphorical sense there, I guess there is also just the actual literal physical stamina as well - the real strain on the pilots. May aviation accidents only increase further
Do they realy take their gopills mid flight? that's so silly, take your meth with breakfast
10 years of sanctions, then the generals were bribed.
I guess you could listen to season 1 of blowback (the podcast and not the Mehdi Hasan show)
Ah sounds good I listened to the Cuba seasom but you're right I should have listened to the others by now ty for the reminder
The cuba one is great too
Seconding blowback s1, it's great.
Ah the Syria model
If you want a breakdown of all of the events of Iraq 2003 this video is nearly completely comprehensive: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNYnhk_6YRY
My take: Iraq were easily defeated in conventional warfare due to technological superiority. They then won the following insurgency through asymmetrical tactics long after the opponent declared a victory that was never really completed.
I don't think we can call the insurgency a victory when the ultimate result was a Western-aligned rump state littered with US bases. The victory was in 2003 and everything else was just neoliberals experimenting with statecrafting
Can’t call the insurgency a victory, yet! Although I guess it’s a different insurgency
By '03 the regular army was in complete disarray, thrown into a hopeless battle and they understood the only way out was to simply give up. On paper it was a big army with some, again on paper, decent formations, but in reality it was a hollow army that simply didn't have the will to fight an army they had fought about 10 years prior and completely massacred them with sheer airpower. The bulk of the fighting for the Iraqi side was carried out by the remnants of the Republican Guard (better equiped and more motivated, but nothing compared to what it used to be in the early 90s) and the Feyadeen Saddam, a militia loyal to Saddam and led by Qusay (his son). In fact the Feyadeen had some early successes against the US Coalition and can be seen as the proto-insurgency that would later appear.
Also defending in Iraq while being attacked from the southern deserts is not an easy task, Iran is different to the chain of mountains that offer a natural line of defense... in Iraq you kinda had to dig in and wait for your aviation + air defense network to do the heavy lifting (they tried, but it was almost hopeless). Another factor to keep in mind was the utter ridiculous massacre that was the Iran-Iraq War, both sides ended with heavy losses and attrition.
Just like the race to Damascus. The SAA had been defeated years before, and most of them were waiting out their conscriptions.
First time round was air superiority, second time the army was hollowed out from the first rounds of fighting.