So Tu Iran (UpDate1)

Trump’s SOTU was especially aggressive towards Iran and indicates a likelihood that there will be a US attack on Iran, if not now, then soon. The section on Iran, as with most of the speech, was littered with gross falsehoods and inaccuracies, including the utterly ludicrous assertion that Iran had “invented” the roadside bomb, and that millions had died as a result. In his broadcast today, Alexander Mercouris (Mercouris) dissects these and other lies.

Mercouris cites at length a recent report from the CSIS (CSIS) - an institution that closely reflects prevailing perspectives of the military industrial complex - that substantiates the argument that Trump’s assembled armada is not only not nearly as awsome as that assembled by Bush Jnr in 2023 (Operation Iraqi Freedom) or by his father in 1991 (Operation Desert Storm), but resembles that of Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign in 1998 (slipped in a year before his bombing of Kosovo), which failed to dislodge Saddam Hussein from power.

In addition, it can be argued that today’s US armory, precisely because it is more technologically sophisticated is also, ironically, more maintenance heavy and less flexible. While many analysts are tending towards the view that the armory assembled by Trump is insufficient to achieve any of the goals supported by various false pretexts that have been given for the strike that has been prepared against Iran (e.g. it has a nuke, it has ballistic missiles that pose a threat to the US, that its allies in the Middle East - Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis - constitute a threat of some kind to the US, and the totally ridiculous assertion that Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terror [that’s the US, just so you know]), this assessment is contained by largely undefined and indefinable anxieties about the extent to which the government of Iran and of its communities have been penetrated by Western and perhaps by other intelligence agencies.

That this was considerable has been demonstrated in the strength of the violent protests that broke out in December. While there is clear evidence that these were instigated deliberately by means of a campaign of economic war against Iran’s economy for which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent takes some credit, it seems very unlikely that all those or even a majority of those who took part in the protests were actually primary agents or coordinators but, rather, that they were discontents roused to action, or simply paid, by Western-backed forces. Simply put, there are reasonable worries that in Iran as in Venezuela, victory has been purchased in advance of action by CIA bribes and threats.

In additon there are concerns as to the overall competence of the Iranian government and of its army. It does seem astonishing that Iran had not prepared itself for an assault on its currency by striking some kind of prior back-up arrangement with China for example (since Iran, like China, is part of the BRICS) whereby China could off-set a US currency assault by buying Iranian rial. While China and Iran appear close to a deal on the supply of advanced Chinese hypersonic anti-ship missiles, one can reasonably wonder why this is happening only now, when it is unlikely that the missiles in question could be made ready within the space of a year. Similarly in the recent past there have been clear examples of Iranian reluctance to call on aid from Russia and, most likely, China (renewal of the Russian-Iranian strategic partnership took an excruciantly long time to secure and even then falls well short of a mutual defense pact).

The fact that even now the empirical evidence overwhelmingly supports the claims of Iranian leaders themselves (backed by a fatwa from the Supreme Leader, no less) that they do not have a nuclear weapon nor even want one (because, as they explain, that would be morally wrong - how quaint when set against a reigning hegemon that murders people at sea without any evidence or due process) suggests a government that would risk annihilation by not undertaking something that it could have done fairly easily a long time ago, which is to develop a nuclear bomb. Even though Israel has some two to four hundred nuclear warheads. Claims along the lines of Witkoff’s recent statement that Iran could enrich uranium to the level necessary for a bomb within a week, or of the utterly absurd incantations of fear that the world has heard from Netanyahu and propaganda-compliant western media for two decades, have long been exposed yet continue to be made without apology to the good sense of most attentive people, some of whom may wonder how is it possible that Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear energy program in June 2025 was totally successful and yet, here we are again eight months later being told that it needs to be destroyed all over again?

Trump’s SOTU contempt for Iran notwithstanding, some analysts including John Mearsheimer, actually see a ray of hope in the fact that in his speech Trump mainly seemed concerned with the nuke issue, saying bizarrely that he would not rest unless he heard the “secret words” from Iran that it would never have a nuclear weapon. Since Iranian leaders have been saying this for twenty years, you may well ask, what then is the problem? The real problem is Trump’s indebtedness to, if not ownership by Zionist billionaire sponsors and the Israeli lobby.They will not be content with another JCPOA. This is not about nukes; it is about securing a greater Israel that has nothing to fear from Iran, its major regional competitor. In the bilateral talks that begin again tomorrow in Geneva (where the teams sit in separate rooms) and brokered by Oman, the two Zionists who represent America, Witkoff and Kushner, will show far more sensitivity to Israeli concerns than those of Iran.

All very interesting, as a Russian ship heads towards Cuba to bring fuel relief to a desperate nation, Cuban coast guards kill four and injure six in a shootout with a Florida registered speedboat off the north west coast of the island, and the British government stands ready to topple in the face of as yet unclear but perhaps more hideous revelations of treasonous corruption at the highest levels of power.