#trump #hegseth #borders #strenght

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#aragchi #soldiers #interview

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 ISIS vs. ‘Islamic Takeover’: Two Extremes, Same Script

New York just staged a miniature war of narratives outside the mayor’s house: a far-right “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City” protest on one side, and two young guys who showed up with TATP and ISIS talk on the other. The bombs didn’t detonate, but the intent did — one suspect allegedly told agents he wanted something “even bigger” than the Boston Marathon, the other shouted “ISIS” on bodycam and scrawled a pledge to the group, according to the federal complaint.

Officials now call it “ISIS‑inspired terrorism,” while carefully stressing there’s no link to the Iran war or overseas commands. Convenient, because then nobody has to admit what this really is: a protest already built on fantasies of civilizational siege becoming the stage for kids who swallowed the mirror image of the same fantasy and decided to throw live explosives into it.

In court, it will be framed as lone‑wolf jihad and heroic law enforcement. On Fox and fringe podcasts, it will be proof that New York is under Islamic attack. For the mayor — the city’s first Muslim, already cast as a symbol — it’s one more reason to condemn “reprehensible” violence and every reason to avoid talking about how a country that wages holy wars abroad keeps breeding hobby martyrs at home.

The through line is simple: if your politics runs on apocalypse, someone eventually brings a bomb to the rally.

#nyc #terrorism #isis #farRight #mamdani #war #uspolitics #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#military #strikes #graham

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#wright #energy #secretary

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Netanyahu’s ‘New Middle East’ 3.0: From Trade Corridor to Controlled Collapse

Benjamin Netanyahu has been workshopping his “New Middle East” for three decades — and the Iran war is just the latest beta release. In 1996, his “Clean Break” blueprint openly imagined Israel reshaping the region with the U.S. as the main vehicle, keeping Israeli dominance by managing permanent, controlled chaos.
​
Version 1.0 came to the U.N. in September 2023: Bibi with a red marker and a map of a “New Middle East” with no Palestine on it, selling an IMEC trade corridor from India to Europe as a “blessing” and Iran’s nuclear program as the “curse.” The vision was highways, fiber and pipelines across the Gulf, Israel and Europe — prosperity for “two billion people” — as long as Palestinians stayed erased from the picture.
​
Version 2.0, at the U.N. in 2024, split the map in two: a green “blessing” camp (Gulf states, Egypt) and a black “curse” bloc (Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen), with an explicit call for regime change in the “cursed” states. The same speech still talked about a shining corridor from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean — but now the business plan sat on top of a demolition plan for entire governments.
​
Version 3.0 is the war you’re watching now. Since October 7, Netanyahu has promised not just victory over Hamas but a fundamental “change in the face of the Middle East,” stretching that mission to include Iran and the entire resistance axis. Commentators around him now describe the February 28 strike that killed Khamenei as the forcible birth of a new regional order, with Israel trying to engineer the collapse of the resistance camp, not just manage it.
​
So when you see maps, corridors and talk of “blessings,” that’s the ad copy. The underlying product hasn’t changed since 1996: a region broken into manageable pieces, with Israel as the permanent project manager and the U.S. as the enforcement arm.
​
#israel #iran #netanyahu #newMiddleEast #war #uspolitics #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Oil at $120, Futures on Fire

Global markets just got a live reminder of who actually arbitrates “order”: Brent flirts with $120, stocks slide in Asia, Europe and on Wall Street, and suddenly the Iran war isn’t “over there” — it’s in every gas receipt and rent hike on the planet. The U.S.-Israeli campaign has turned shipping lanes and pipelines into collateral, and investors aren’t panicking about democracy or human rights; they’re panicking about inflation and rates.

In Tehran, the regime answers that pressure with a raised middle finger in clerical robes. Senior ayatollahs just crowned Mojtaba Khamenei — the late leader’s son, a hard-liner wired into the Revolutionary Guards — days after Trump publicly labeled him “unacceptable” and Israel hinted it might kill the next Supreme Leader too. The message is simple: succession sold as resistance, continuity as weapon. Iranians opposed to the system shout “Death to Mojtaba” from their windows while the state doubles down on the one thing it still knows how to market: endurance under siege.

On the map, this is no longer a neat triangle of U.S.–Israel–Iran. Iranian missiles are now meeting NATO air defenses on their way toward Turkey, with debris near bases hosting U.S. forces, while Saudi and Bahraini energy facilities find themselves on the front line instead of just in communiqués. Bahrain says it can’t meet oil contracts, Saudi Arabia is intercepting drones over its capital, and Qatar’s prime minister goes on TV to call Iran’s strikes a “betrayal” even as he begs all sides to step back.

Meanwhile, the official death toll in Iran from U.S. and Israeli strikes has already passed 1,300, Iranian attacks have killed dozens more around the Gulf, and new video reinforces what investigations were already showing: an elementary school full of children was almost certainly hit by an American missile, not by Iran’s own fire — directly contradicting Trump’s version. The war planners call this “messaging.” The parents call it burying kids.

So today’s balance sheet is straightforward: a hereditary Supreme Leader promoted as defiance, a region dragged toward NATO’s red lines, markets held hostage by crude, and a U.S. president threatening “complete destruction” while insisting everything is under control. For everyone not in the war room, the choice is between paying more at the pump and paying in lives. The conflict is advertised as a show of strength, but it looks a lot more like an extremely expensive way of proving how little control anyone really has.

#iran #oil #markets #trump #israel #mojtaba #nato #gulf #war #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 G‑7 to Drivers: Enjoy the War, Pay at the Pump

Oil spikes toward $120, stocks slide, gas races toward $4 — and the G‑7’s big wartime move is: “We’ll monitor.” Finance ministers talked about tapping emergency reserves, then walked out without opening a single valve, effectively outsourcing policy to Brent and the bond market.

The logic is technocratic on paper and brutal in practice. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively shut by drones, missiles and insurance companies, choking off a route that handles about a fifth of global supply. That means U.S. oil, Asian oil and Gulf oil all get repriced by the same fear — and ordinary drivers become the shock absorbers for a war they never voted for.

In the U.S., average gas is now in the mid‑$3 range and climbing fast, diesel already well above $4.50 and heading toward $5 nationally, $6 in places like California. Every extra cent runs straight through freight, food, airfares and deliveries — which is why UPS and big shippers are quietly slapping on fuel surcharges while politicians loudly promise “relief.”

Trump built his brand on cheap fuel and “no more stupid wars,” then chose a war that closes the world’s most important chokepoint and calls the resulting price spike “a very small price to pay… ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!” The same administration now toys with small sanctions waivers for Russia and 30‑day deals for India, as if tweaks at the edges can offset a structural decision to gamble with Hormuz.

The G‑7’s refusal to tap stockpiles isn’t “prudence,” — it’s a message: the strategic reserves are for them, the strategic pain is for you.

#oil #G7 #iran #trump #energy #inflation #markets #war #StraitOfHormuz #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 The Anti‑Shia Jihad Franchise

While everyone is watching Trump, Netanyahu and oil charts, the ground war is quietly being outsourced to the old jihadist underworld. The Syrian army and security services are absorbing radical fighters — including ex‑ISIS — just as thousands of detainees are moved out of camps and prisons under U.S. supervision into Iraqi facilities. “Stability” now means recycling the same militants in a new uniform.
​
At the same time, the U.N. Security Council removes Hayat Tahrir al‑Sham from its sanctions list, lifting penalties from what was yesterday a jihadist outfit and today is rebranded governance. The decision lands the very day before the Iran strikes, legitimizing a Sunni hard‑line authority in Syria at the exact moment a U.S.-Israeli war starts to target the Shia axis in Iran, Lebanon and Iraq. Call it timing, or call it a portfolio rebalance in the regional proxy market.
​
On the Lebanese front, Hezbollah rockets give Israel the excuse for massive bombardment of Shia areas; entire districts are hit, tens of thousands displaced in days. In one border village, Israeli soldiers leave graffiti in Hebrew — “the only good Shia is a dead Shia” — a slogan documented by NPR long before this war and now resurfacing almost word for word in new reports from the current operations. The message isn’t “precision,” it’s sect.
​
Layered on top is open religious framing: Syrian officers calling this a sacred war against Shia, Saudi clerics blessing “noble jihad,” American Christian nationalists around the Pentagon talking about crusades and Armageddon, Israeli leaders invoking Amalek on Purim as missiles fall on Iranian cities. Sunni jihadists, Christian nationalists and messianic Zionists all sell different brands — but the product is the same: a holy war that conveniently aligns with their regimes’ interests.
​
If this is “regional security architecture,” then jihad is just another subcontractor, hired when things need to get uglier than press conferences can admit.

#iran #syria #lebanon #hezbollah #israel #isis #jihad #religion #war #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Project 2025, Trump’s War and Bibi’s ‘New Middle East’

On paper, the Iran war looks chaotic. On closer reading, it’s disturbingly coherent. Three U.S. documents — Project 2025, the 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy — stack neatly under Netanyahu’s “New Middle East” blueprint like ideology, strategy and execution.
​
Project 2025 lays out the political theology. It demands unconditional support for Israel, defunding the Palestinian Authority, maximum pressure on Iran, shelving the Kurds in favor of Turkey, locking in Saudi normalization and building a Middle East “Quad” of Israel, Egypt, the Gulf and India. By March 2026, every point is either implemented or in motion: Israel as the one ally exempt from “paying for its own defense,” Iran under sanctions and bombardment, the Palestinians reduced to a budget line marked “cut.”
​
NSS 2025 then reframes the region as solved and outsourced. Iran is mentioned just three times in 29 pages, the Gaza war is treated as wrapped, normalization as expanding, and the expectation is clear: Israel and Gulf monarchies will “take the lead” on Iran while the U.S. pivots to China and the Western Hemisphere. That is exactly Netanyahu’s dream setting — Washington steps back, Israel becomes the primary security contractor with a standing license for “any measures it deems necessary,” paid for by regional clients and backed by U.S. cover fire.
​
NDS 2026 turns the theory into targeting folders. It boasts that operation MIDNIGHT HAMMER “destroyed” Iran’s nuclear program and that the “axis of resistance” has been “devastated,” and it names Israel a “model ally” that can fight with “critical but limited” U.S. support. Gulf states are told to buy more American systems and “do more” for their own defense, while Washington reserves the right to “focused, decisive action” — in other words, occasional heavy strikes while locals carry the long war.
​
Read against Netanyahu’s three versions of the “New Middle East” — the IMEC trade corridor without Palestine, the blessing‑versus‑curse map with open regime‑change talk, and now a shooting war meant to “change the face of the region” by breaking the resistance axis — the alignment is suspiciously coherent. One ecosystem writes the ideological manual, the next declares the problem solved and delegated, and the last gives Israel maximum autonomy to remake the map by force, with no exit plan anywhere in the paperwork.

#israel #iran #trump #netanyahu #Project2025 #NSS2025 #NDS2026 #war #oligarchy #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#hegseth #strikes #civilians

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Trump Is About To Wrap Up the War In Iran. But Did He Win?

🔠🅰️🔠🔠1️⃣

Trump has said that the war in Iran is “very complete, pretty much”, as the economic toll of the joint US-Israeli operation has risen, disrupting global oil trade and threatening to engulf the Middle East in a regional war.

Trump made the comments before a speech and press conference in Florida where he sought to emphasise that the US military campaign would be ending soon amid concerns from Republican allies that the US was being dragged into another long-term conflict in the region.

“I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he said in a phone call with CBS News. “They have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no air force.”

Addressing Republicans on Monday afternoon, he said: “We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. I think you’ll see it’s going to be a short-term excursion.”

But he also indicated he was not yet declaring the US mission accomplished in Iran. “We’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough,” he said.

US and Israeli warplanes launched new waves of strikes on targets across Iran on Monday, as large crowds took to the streets in Tehran in a defiant show of support for Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s newly appointed supreme leader.

In Lebanon, Israel pressed its offensive against Hezbollah with raids in the south and airstrikes in Beirut, while an Iranian missile was shot down over Turkey. As drone strikes were reported in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, Macron, said France and its allies were preparing a “defensive” mission to the Gulf protect oil supplies.

In Tehran’s Enghelab Square on Monday, thousands gathered to offer allegiance to Iran’s new supreme leader, hours after the appointment was formally announced.

Chanting “Death to America, Death to Israel,” and “God is Great,” some waved Iranian flags, others banners bearing the portrait of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the new leader’s father, who was killed after 37 years in power by an Israeli airstrike in the first moments of the war. Armoured vehicles lined nearby roads and security personnel were stationed on the rooftops of surrounding buildings.

Another member, Mohsen Heydari, said the late Ali Khamenei had recommended the selection of the candidate who is “hated by the enemy”.

Israel said it will target Iran’s new supreme leader, while the US president, Donald Trump, who has dismissed the younger Khamenei as a “lightweight”, criticised Mojtaba’s selection.

“I think they made a big mistake,” Trump told NBC. “I don’t know if it’s going to last. I think they made a mistake.”

The defiant rhetoric in Tehran and the appointment of Khamenei, who is seen by analysts as a hardliner with close ties to the Revolutionary Guards, intensified fears that the conflict could last for weeks or even months and leave deep instability in its wake. Stock markets across the world fell sharply on Monday after oil prices surged.

But after surging as high as $119.50 per barrel, the oil price fell back down after Trump suggested the war could end “very soon”.

Iran’s attacks in the strait of Hormuz have all but stopped tankers from using the key shipping lane through which a fifth of the world’s oil is carried.

Speaking during a visit to Cyprus to discuss regional security, Macron said a new naval mission would be aimed at escorting container ships and tankers in order to gradually reopen the strait of Hormuz after the end of “the hottest phase of the conflict”.

France has already sent about a dozen naval vessels, including its aircraft carrier strike group, to the Mediterranean, Red Sea and potentially the strait of Hormuz as part of defensive support to allies threatened by the conflict in the Middle East.

#trump #emirats #iran #erdogan #macron #war #complete

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

🔠🅰️🔠🔠2️⃣

Iran’s security chief, Ali Larijani, said in a post on X on Monday that safe passage through the strait of Hormuz would not be restored “amid the fires ignited by the United States and Israel in the region”.

Late on Monday Trump said on social media: “If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.”

The remark was an apparent response comments from a spokesperson for the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards, who said “Iran will determine when the war ends.”

Neither the US, Israel nor the Gulf states that have born the brunt of the Iranian attacks currently appear ready to consider concessions, however.

On Monday, Kuwait’s emir, Sheikh Meshal al-Ahmad al-Sabah, described Iran’s strikes on the kingdom as “a brutal attack by a neighbouring Muslim country, which we consider a friend, even though we have not permitted the use of our land, airspace, or coasts for any military action against it.”

Saudi Arabia said Tehran would be the “biggest loser” if it continues to attack Arab states.

In the United Arab Emirates, authorities said two people were wounded by shrapnel from the interception of Iranian missiles over the capital, Abu Dhabi.

By mid-afternoon, the Emirati defence ministry said 15 ballistic missiles and 18 drones were fired on the country on Monday.

A total of 253 missiles and 1,440 drones have been launched at the UAE since the war began. Four foreign nationals have been killed in the UAE and 117 wounded, authorities said.

Iran also attacked Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, where it hit a residential area, wounding 32 people, including several children, according to authorities.

Another attack appeared to have started a fire at Bahrain’s only oil refinery, sending thick plumes of smoke into the air.

The war has killed at least 1,230 people in Iran, at least 397 in Lebanon and 11 in Israel, according to officials. Israel reported its first military deaths on Sunday, saying two combat engineers were killed in southern Lebanon, where it is fighting Hezbollah.

An Israeli military spokesperson accused Iran of targeting Israel’s cities with cluster bombs.

“We are seeing on a daily basis [that] Iran is deliberately targeting densely populated civilian areas,” the spokesperson said.

The official said that Israel was attacking “terrorist infrastructure” in Lebanon, which has been pulled deep into the war in the Middle East since Hezbollah opened fire to avenge the killing of Khamenei, triggering an Israeli offensive, which has so far killed more than 400 people there, according to Lebanese authorities.

The Israeli military has ordered inhabitants to leave the southern suburbs of Beirut, much of south Lebanon and parts of the eastern Bekaa valley region – all areas that have served as political and security strongholds of Hezbollah.

In Turkey, Nato air defences intercepted a ballistic missile that entered the country’s airspace – the second such attack since the war started. President Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey’s main goal is to keep the country out of the “blaze” of the conflict.

#trump #emirats #iran #erdogan #macron #war #complete

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

#turkey #ballistic #iran

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Putin Offers ‘Peace,’ Trump Offers Markets

Trump and Putin just had an hourlong call the Kremlin described as frank and businesslike — which, translated, means they talked war, oil and leverage. Moscow says Putin pitched “quick political and diplomatic” fixes for the Iran conflict after calling Gulf rulers and Iran’s president, while Trump responded from the vantage point of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli operation. One sells himself as the arsonist-firefighter, the other as the landlord who can’t quite remember who lit the match.

Publicly, Putin warns that destabilizing the Middle East will “inevitably” wreck the global energy system, then immediately advertises Russia as the “reliable supplier” ready to increase deliveries to “reliable partners” in Asia, Slovakia, Hungary and anyone else who doesn’t lecture him. Europe, which voted to ban Russian gas by 2027, is told that Moscow might just cut them off early — unless, of course, they change their mind and decide they still need him. War as risk for everyone else, opportunity pricing for the Kremlin.
​
Oil, meanwhile, is doing the only honest talking in this story: Brent has spiked to the highest levels since the last round of global disaster, and traders are openly panicking about a long conflict and a half‑closed Strait of Hormuz. Trump shrugs off tapping U.S. reserves and frames the price shock as a “small price” for safety, while chatting with Putin about Iran and even Venezuela “in the context of the global oil market.” When presidents discuss wars and pipelines in the same breath, it’s not a twist — it’s how the system is built.

So you get the photo‑friendly version — two great powers talking peace — and the real one: two energy states negotiating how much chaos the world can absorb without breaking the revenue stream that keeps them in power. Everyone else is there to pay the volatility premium.

#iran #trump #putin #oil #war #energy #russia #uspolitics #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Macron’s Hormuz Escort Service: Late to the War, Early to the Optics

Emmanuel Macron has discovered his grand role in the Iran war: traffic cop at the world’s most explosive shipping lane. While the U.S. and Israel bomb Iran and oil rips past $100 a barrel, he shows up in Cyprus to announce a “purely defensive” European‑led naval mission to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz “as soon as” the most intense phase is over. The message: Paris won’t stop the fire, but it will happily manage the smoke for the cameras.

France and “European and non‑European partners” are supposed to guarantee “freedom of navigation” in a corridor that exists mainly to pump Gulf crude into a global market now being gamed by Washington, Moscow and the very monarchies everyone pretends to constrain.

Macron talks like a responsible steward of maritime law while the U.S. quietly grants India a waiver to buy Russian oil again and openly floats easing sanctions on Russian fuel to calm the shortage. The navy escorts the tankers; the real deals are cut in back rooms with Moscow.

The war around Hormuz has already shut down a route that normally handles about a fifth of the planet’s oil. Prices spike, Europe panics, and Putin cashes in as the “reliable supplier” to any “reliable partner” who doesn’t annoy him with sanctions. Macron’s pitch boils down to this: Paris will help reopen the choke point that others closed, so European voters blame Iran and “instability,” not the people who turned the strait into a bargaining chip.

So you get the choreography: Trump bombs, Iran fires back, Russia profits, the Gulf plays both sides — and Macron arrives to promise that once the storm has passed, Europe will bravely escort the tankers that feed the same system that just blew up their energy security. It’s not leadership, it’s crisis management as self‑preservation: a president who feels his own clock ticking, trying to look indispensable in a war where his only real power is to wave ships through a lane someone else can close again tomorrow.

#france #macron #iran #hormuz #oil #russia #eu #war #energy #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Perpignan Inc.: Law, Order and Overdraft

Perpignan is the National Rally’s demo version of France: more cops, more cameras, more debt, and a mayor who might be legally disqualified before he can finish bragging about it. Louis Aliot sells the city as a “laboratory” of far-right governance — security as the core product, municipal politics as a test bench for 2027.

On the metrics he chose, he delivers: municipal police up from 161 to 199 officers, 1.6 local cops per 1,000 residents — the highest ratio among big French cities and nearly triple Paris — plus plans for 50 more officers and 200 extra cameras, especially in poor, heavily North African and Roma neighborhoods. Drug-trafficking cases and fines explode, crime stats go up, and RN spins that as proof it’s finally “doing something” about the violence it talks about nonstop.

The bill arrives quietly: debt per resident is far above comparable cities, property and business taxes are higher than in most peers, and opponents say the PR machine is the only thing truly overperforming. Yet Aliot still leads in the polls, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella use Perpignan as a backdrop to promise “public order as an absolute priority,” and even skeptical voters admit they feel the streets look cleaner — then add they don’t buy the rest of the program.

This is the far-right offer in one city: turn poverty and neglect into a permanent crime scene, flood it with police, send the bill to taxpayers, and call the whole thing “responsibility.” If it works in Perpignan, they’ll scale it — not because it fixes anything, but because fear and fines still poll better than admitting you have no answer for why the city was abandoned in the first place.

#france #perpignan #Aliot #LePen #Bardella #farRight #security #police #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Lebanon Emptied, Pumps Refilled

Nearly 700,000 people are already displaced in Lebanon, Tehran is still being hit, and Washington is quietly paying for it all with Russian oil. Israeli strikes and evacuation orders have turned Lebanon into a new mass exodus zone — hundreds of thousands sleeping in schools, offices, cars, and on sidewalks — while the Pentagon reports 140 wounded U.S. troops and Trump’s press secretary explains that “unconditional surrender” doesn’t require Iran to actually say the words, only for Trump to decide they’ve complied.

At the same time, the U.S. is loosening the very sanctions that were supposed to punish Moscow for Ukraine: a 30‑day waiver lets India buy Russian oil already at sea, and Treasury openly talks about lifting more restrictions to calm the price spike triggered by the Iran war. The message is blunt: the war can go on, as long as there’s enough crude to keep U.S. gas prices from destroying the polls.

Even the Strait of Hormuz is running on spin. Fighting has slowed traffic through a corridor that normally handles roughly a fifth of global oil, and the U.S. energy secretary briefly claimed the Navy had “successfully escorted” a tanker — only for Central Command to deny it and the post to vanish. Pakistan, not the U.S., is the one openly escorting ships to keep its own lights on.

On the ground, Lebanese officials and aid agencies are warning of a humanitarian disaster, with nearly 700,000 displaced and hundreds killed, while Iranians breathe black rain from burning fuel depots and watch Israel announce “many more targets” in Tehran. The official line is that this is about security and surrender; the facts look more like a region being emptied out and poisoned so leaders can prove they’re strong, then patched over with discounted Russian barrels so voters don’t revolt at the pump.

#lebanon #iran #israel #trump #russia #oil #hormuz #war #refugees #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

📰 Putin’s Side Hustle: Bleeding America for Profit

Russia is not “watching” the Iran war — it’s in it, just smart enough to bill it as someone else’s mess. U.S. officials say Moscow is feeding Tehran targeting data on U.S. troops, ships and aircraft in the region, the same way it once allegedly paid Taliban fighters bounties for killing Americans and handed satellite imagery to Houthis to hit Western shipping. Call it outsourced: Iran pulls the trigger, Putin collects the leverage.

The partnership that started with Iranian Shahed drones over Ukraine is now running in both directions. Tehran helped Moscow build a factory to mass-produce cheap kamikaze UAVs; now Russia is reportedly helping Iran find American targets from Kuwait to the Red Sea. U.S. soldiers die in drone and missile strikes, American facilities get hit, and it’s very hard to argue the Kremlin’s fingerprints aren’t at least on the map, if not on the launch button.

At the same time, Trump is doing Putin a second favor: turning a proxy war into a revenue stream. Oil and gas still provide a massive share of Russia’s budget, and the Iran conflict has already pushed prices higher — exactly the “energy shock” Western sanctions were designed to avoid.

Washington’s answer so far is a 30‑day waiver so India can buy stranded Russian crude and open talk of more sanctions relief, all marketed as a “stopgap” to calm markets while pretending the money flowing back to Moscow is somehow incidental.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s point is brutal and correct: instead of deepening support for Ukraine — the one military that has actually learned, in blood, how to fight Iranian‑designed drones — Trump spent years signaling that getting closer to Putin mattered more than locking in Kyiv as a frontline ally.

Now U.S. troops are learning the same counter‑drone lessons in real time under fire, while Ukrainian experts are flown in as consultants to help defend American bases in the Middle East.

So you get the full circle: Iran armed Russia to bleed Ukraine, Russia now helps Iran bleed U.S. forces, and rising oil prices bail out the Kremlin’s budget while Washington loosens sanctions just enough to keep the pumps running.

The White House still talks about “deterring Iran” and “managing escalation,” but the scoreboard from Moscow is simpler: Americans are dying, Ukrainian aid is under strain, and Russian barrels are back in demand.

#russia #iran #trump #ukraine #oil #sanctions #war #putin #uspolitics #fakeDemocracy

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Tehran: The Nightmare of the City and Its Inhabitants You Should Know About

🔤🔤🔤🔤➖

Tehran residents say the Iranian capital has endured what they described as its worst night of aerial bombardment, as the US defense secretary Hegseth, followed Trump’s suggestion on Monday the war could soon be over with a warning of more strikes to come.

“We are under heavy bombardment and I can hear back-to-back explosions. The place they hit has caught fire. It’s not clear where it exploded, but the buildings are shaking,” Niloufar, who lives in east Tehran said early on Tuesday, speaking under a pseudonym for security reasons.

“They are destroying Iran,” they added, saying there were low-flying jets above.

Israel, which launched an air campaign against Iran with the US on 28 February, on Tuesday said it had hit a weapons development facility among a wave of strikes.

Other residents told the Guardian of rolling blackouts, and that much of Iran’s communications were down.

The World Health Organization has urged Iranians to stay inside, saying “black rain” falling after strikes on oil facilities could cause respiratory problems.

One Tehran resident described the city as “the last stop before hell”.

At least 1,245 civilians have been killed, including 194 children, by the US-Israeli war on Iran, according to the US-based Human Rights Activists in Iran group.

In Lebanon, at least 486 people have been killed by Israeli bombing, while 11 have been killed in Israel. Seven US troops have been confirmed dead and 140 injured, eight severely.

As jets bombed Tehran, US officials issued contradictory messages as to how long the war could last.

Trump said on Monday that “the war is very complete”, in a call with CBS News. Hours later, Hegseth said the war would end on “our timeline” and that the US would not stop until “the enemy is totally and decisively defeated”, promising Tuesday would see the most intense strikes in Iran yet.

It’s not for me to posit whether it’s the beginning, the middle, or the end, that’s [Trump’s decision] and he’ll continue to communicate that,” Hegseth said.

Gen Dan Caine, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, said US forces had hit more than 5,000 sites in Iran in a campaign aimed at destroying Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capacity, degrading its navy to reopen the strait of Hormuz, and hitting “deeper into Iran’s military and industrial base”.

Iranian officials, meanwhile, said that they would not accept an end to the war until they had inflicted a painful price on the US and Israel. Iran’s head of the national security council, Ali Larijani, said in a social media post that the “nation of Iran does not fear your empty threats”, while implying Iran could target Trump himself.

“Even those bigger than you could not eliminate the Iranian nation. Be careful not to get eliminated yourself,” he wrote, responding to the US president’s threat that Iran could be hit “20 times harder” if it blocked the flow of oil through the strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s remarks came as US consumers began to feel the pain at the pumps and investors the world over reeled at the skyrocketing price of fuel.

Economists said a continued disruption to Gulf oil production and to shipping out of the strait of Hormuz – a choke point for a fifth of the world’s oil transit – could plunge the world into an energy crisis not seen since the 1970s.

Iran continued pounding Gulf states and Israel on Tuesday, part of its strategy to inflict as much pain as possible on the US’s influential Gulf allies and on the world economy to raise the price of the war.

In Bahrain, a woman was killed and eight more people wounded in an Iranian attack on a residential building in Manama, while firefighters in the UAE tried to put out a blaze near petrochemical plants after an Iranian drone strike.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait said they had intercepted drones over their territory.

#iran #war #trump #hezbollah #lebanon #hegseth

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸