What a Gas! (UpDate1: 04.03.26, 3:30am GMT).
As I write at 7:00pm, California time on March 3, Israel has launched new airstrikes targeting Iranian leadership and a nuclear research site. Targets included the Supreme National Security Council and the Presidential Office in Tehran. Hundreds of government sites have been targeted by air strikes. 504 locations have been impacted across 153 cities. The announcement of a seven day public holiday after the killing of Khameini seems a bizarre call to inaction when the fiercest reaction to attack might be expected.
In addition, Israel has reportedly sent ground troops into southern Lebanon as the conflict widens to include Hezbollah targets, while the Lebanese government under treasonous leadership complicit with US and Israeli war aims has attempted to prohibit Hezbollah’s action in national self-defense and Hezbollah assaults on northern Israel.
A suspected Iranian drone hit the U.S. Consulate in Dubai causing a fire but no reported injuries. Iran has also targeted U.S. embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, leading to their closure. The Pentagon has identified four of the six U.S. service members killed in an Iranian drone attack in Kuwait on March 1, all members of the Army Reserve’s 103rd Sustainment Command. The Iranian Red Crescent reports at least 787 people killed in Iran, with other estimates suggesting numbers in the thousands. Roughly 1,600 Americans have requested evacuation assistance from 14 Middle Eastern countries due to security concerns.Trump has announced in a post on Truth Social that the U.S. Navy will escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz if necessary, while also ordering the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to ensure shipping companies can get insurance if their ships are attacked amid the tensions in the Middle East
Oil prices have surged and stocks have fallen, reflecting fears of a prolonged conflict. Higher oil and gas prices as a result of war paradoxically increase the costs of war and the costs of war’s consequences. Even when a war is fought on the basis of earlier stockpiling, those stockpiles sooner or later have to be replenished. We can added a few percent therefore to the $12 million a day that the US taxpayer has to fork out for carriers Ford and Lincoln, not to mention all those other ships and fighter jets. In the meantime Iran has achieved significant hits on US and Gulf oil as well as military assets throughout the Middle East.
Many countries have reserves: three to six months is usual among the wealthier nations. But that does not protect them from having to pay more for their energy. European oil futures have almost doubled over the past week, and especially in response to the termination of Qatari LNG production. This, of course, may be a windfall for US LNG producers who, since the destruction of Nord Stream and voluntary European abstinence from Russian oil, have become a major supplier to Europe, even if this is no good for the consumers in either the EU or the US who will end up paying considerably more (I dont think it likely that US energy prices can be insulated from global, and prices are already rising in the US even though they are still well short of record levels.
Iraq’s crude production is reported to be on the cusp of collapse as its biggest fields including Rumaila and West Quarna 2 are shut down because of a lack of transport vessels and storage capacity. This whole situation asserts the inevitability of strong, global, inflationary consequences. Maybe the political West can shoulder a long war but there will be knock-on effects, including higher prices, for almost everything for the foreseeable future.
Russia could be a major beneficiary of a closure of Hormuz and Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping, and European powers will be sorely tempted to reverse course and return to Russian supplies. China will depend increasingly on Russia and so too will India: 80% of energy through the Strait of Hormuz is destined for Asian countries; Japan and South Korea stand to be particularly impacted. Rising costs of energy will add to the burdens of Ukraine at a time when Europe is feeling intense strain on its ability to continue financing the previous major US war of provocation. Ukraine’s Zelenskiy is even talking about sending drone and missile interceptors to help the Gulf countries (some of whom, most notably the UAE, are already running out of air defense interceptiors), provided that Russia would agree a long ceasefire - something which seems almost inconceivable, although Russia is already adding its voice to calls for a return to negotiation rather than concentrating on what one might consider its primary responsibility to the BRICS to ensure that this conflict ends with the end to US hegemony.
Why is this war being fought? The least plausible explanation, but the one most commonly utterered is that it is intended to stop Iran developing a nuclear weapon. This is utter rubbish for the following reasons: Iran has never had a nuclear weapon; all that it has had, and still has, is a peaceful nuclear energy program; perhaps, twenty years ago, some folks in Iran gave some preliminary consideration to the possibility of developing a weapon (I have some suspicions that even this narrative is an Israeli fabrication) but this was terminated by the Supreme Leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons. Even if Iran did develop a nuclear bomb it would be confronted by Israel’s illegal nuclear armory which is now said to include as many as 400 nuclear warheads. So even with a nuclear weapon Iran would be powerless. Even countries with very considerable nuclear armories such as Russia and China seem paralyzed when it comes to actually using these weapons - even when subject to the most extreme pressures.
So the war is not about nuclear weapons. The Supreme Leader was Iran’s firmest opponent of nuclear weapons, so why does the US find it in its interest to kill the one man who was the best possible bet that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon, and whose death amidst a more general decapitation slaughter is the one thing most likely to make Iranian progression to a nuclear weapon more certain?
If US was so alarmed by the thought of an Iranian nuke, how come it has been unable to stop North Korea from developing such a weapon? How come it is so calm about India and Pakistan (mortal enemies) both of whom have nuclear weapons? Given how US relations with Europe are spiraling downwards, how come it is not more worried about French nukes which, unlike those of Britain and Germany, are relatively independent of US controls. Besides, if Iran really needed nuclear protection it has been offered a way forward into the Pakistani nuclear umbrella.
If it is not about nukes then of course it is not about uranium enrichment. One of many Iranian mistakes is to have conjured up its uranium enrichment as - what it thought would be - a bargaining chip in negotiations with the political West to help reduce Western sanctions. Of course, after the only time that that strategy had worked (as in the case of JCPOA) then the US, under Trump, moved the goalposts and insisted that any agreement must also include ballistic missiles. Besides, Iran has made practically ever possible concession at one time or another on uranium enrichment, although it has never given up its right to defend itself. Its continuing possession of ballistic missiles (maybe 6,000, many of them deep underground, many of them mobile - and some of them hypersonic, very manouverable, and almost impossible to intercept by Patriot interceptors or anything else), some of them reportedly hypersonic, has until now never been a threat to the Saudis or to other neighbors even though so many of these neighbors have proven themselves Arab patsies for the US, and certainly never the remotest possibility that they would be a threat to the US.
More likely as an explanation, and one of the many various reasons admitted by the US administration - i.e. regime change - is that the only country for whom Iranian ballistic missiles are a threat up until now is Israel. Not because Israel has really feared such missiles, but because their existence has made it more difficult for Israel to pursue its Zionist ambitions for a Greater Israel, and, because Iran up until now has been able to stand strong because of its considerable defenses, this has given moral and practical courage to Iranian allies among shia in the region, in Iraq particularly, and both shia and suni in Hezbollah in Lebanon (and previously in Syria), Hamas in Palestine, and the Houthis in Yemen.
But this is not only about the US acting once again as the handmaidan of the genocidal state of Israel and the dispossession of Palestinian lands in Gaza and West Bank - something which acts against the interests of the US as a nation. It is also part of the fanatical drive of the Trump administration to bring about global chaos and confusion (following Trump’s weird and illegal tariff policies, and its threats and/or actual hostilities to Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland and, of course, Iran and Yemen), with a likely view to creating a situation in which the US Republic can be destroyed in favor of a sick, plutocratic dystopian dictatorship.
This seeming chaos also has another strategic purpose, which is to further divide and weaken the BRICS as a possible adversary to the Trump project for the restoration of US hegemony. The BRICS are ready showing signs of falling apart, further exposing what has only ever been a very weak measure of cohesion. The alliance between Russia and China, although strong, is weakened by Putin’s constant distracting compulsion to look westwards and seek deals with the one nation, the one that constantly pummels and embarrases it over Ukraine and that is least capable of good faith negotiation and deal-making - the US.
For the moment, China’s need for Russian oil, its ability to discipline the US by threatening the withdrawal of trade in refined rare earths, and its need for a Russian and Central Asian hinterland that it hopes will protect it from Western sabotage of its Belt and Road Initiative in alliance with some of the “stans” and the likes of Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as from being surrounded by US bases and even blockaded at the most important choke-points for the supply of energy to China, will hold it fast to Russia.
India, by contrast, every day more projects weakness and dithering, unsure whether it should be pleasing Trump and cutting back on its imports of Russian oil, while sending Modi to say nice things to the Zionists in Tel Aviv even while the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank continues. Brazil looks incapable of taking any meaningful action to prevent the fall of Latin America to the extreme right. Indonesia, in the company of a medley of easily forgotten countries, shames itself and the Global South by signing up to Trump’s hideous, one-man freakshow alternative UN, the BOP, reneging on any claims it may have ever had to the defense of Islam and the Muslim world.
Will we see a pushback from Congress in debate over the war powers act? Lawmakers in both the House and Senate are expected to hold votes on either March 4 and 5 on resolutions aimed at curbing military action. There were no congressional consultations prior to a war that has been planned since the end of December and which took place before even the briefing of top administration officials—including the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and CIA Director - which may have taken place yesterday or today.
When in recent years have we seen meaningful push-back in the US against forever wars? Even a President who was elected because of his apparent criticism of forever wars turns out to be a liar and to be the greatest neocon (actually, something immeasurably worse even than that). It is difficult to be hopeful, but resistance to the latest forever war is fractionally stronger than I, for one, anticipated, so it could conceivably provide a platform for a more sustained defense of the American republic. But what resistance there is has already been divided.
Half a dozen moderate House Democrats have introduced their own war powers resolution, Politico reports, as the chamber “barrels toward a floor vote later this week on a bipartisan measure to curb President Donald Trump’s use of force in Iran”. Politco reports as of Tuesday evening that the new proposed resolution from the six lawmakers calls for an end to military operations in Iran within 30 days unless Congress provides authorization for use of military force or a declaration of war. In contrast, the resolution that is being forced for consideration Thursday from Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) would require the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iran.
“The co-sponsors of the alternative resolution are Democratic Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Greg Landsman of Ohio, Henry Cuellar of Texas and Jared Golden of Maine, alongside Reps. Jim Costa and Jimmy Panetta of California.
The Massie-Khanna resolution has little chance of becoming law, even if it makes it through the House — which is no guarantee. Still, there’s pressure on Democrats to take a unified stance in support of the bipartisan proposal and against the Trump administration’s actions, with Democratic leadership and ranking members of key committees urging a yes vote to rein in the president.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said House Democrats will discuss the matter Wednesday afternoon, following an all-member House briefing scheduled for Tuesday evening with Trump administration officials on the unfolding situation in Iran.
“We’ll continue to make the strongest possible case,” Jeffries said. “There is going to be very strong Democratic support for the War Powers Resolution across the ideological spectrum.”
Bipartisan members worry that the Massie-Khanna resolution is overly broad and would hamstring the administration regarding key national security efforts
To Be Continued.
Trump has announced in a post on Truth Social that the U.S. Navy will escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz if necessary, while also ordering the U.S. Development Finance Corporation to ensure shipping companies can get insurance if their ships are attacked amid the tensions in the Middle East