#iran #armed #forces

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Why Did They Start the War Against Iran?

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Israel’s determination to attack Iran and the certainty that US troops would be targeted in response forced the Trump administration to take pre-emptive strikes, Rubio said, in a new explanation for Washington’s surprise entry into the conflict.

The rationale drew divided reviews from top members of Congress who on Monday evening received the first briefing by the Trump administration since it ordered the air campaign to begin over the weekend.

“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters at the Capitol.

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Vance said in an interview on Fox News on Monday night that the US aim was to make sure “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”.

“The president wants to make it clear to the Iranians and to the world that he is not going to rest until he accomplishes that all-important objective of ensuring that Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon,” the vice-president said.

Vance has been the member of Trump’s administration most opposed to military interventions and has spoken less frequently about US actions in Iran than Rubio.

Since the conflict began, the United States and Israel have carried out waves of airstrikes across Iran, and Tehran has retaliated with drone and missile attacks against US-aligned countries across the Middle East.

The air campaign has killed several of Iran’s top military and political leaders, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

#iran #war #vance #rubio #netanyahu #israel

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The US military has acknowledged the deaths of six service members, while the Iranian Red Crescent Society said more than 500 people have been killed in the country.

Reactions to the administration’s explanation for entering the war split along party lines, with Republicans rushing to defend Trump’s gambit while Democrats condemned what they view as an unnecessary conflict with unclear goals.

“This is Trump’s war. This is a war of choice. He has no strategy, he has no endgame,” the Senate’s Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer said before going into the briefing.

As he exited, Schumer said that lawmakers present asked “a whole lot of questions” but he found the officials’ responses “completely and totally insufficient. In fact, at least to me, that briefing raised many more questions than it answered.”

On Monday night, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told Fox News that Iran had been building new underground sites “that would make their ballistic missile programs and their atomic bomb programs immune within months”.

“If no action was taken now, no action could be taken in the future,” he said.

Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapon.

In recent interviews with news outlets, Trump has outlined various goals in the war, including destroying Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and their navy, preventing the country from developing a nuclear weapon and cutting off Tehran’s support of proxy forces elsewhere in the Middle East.

Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House and close Trump ally, defended the president’s course of action, saying he had ordered a “defensive operation”.

“Israel was determined to act in their own defense here, with or without American support. Why? Because Israel faced what they deem to be an existential threat,” Johnson said.

While the war’s objective, he said, was not “to go in and take out the regime”, he nonetheless cheered the ayatollah’s death.

“That happened and in my estimation, that is a great development for freedom loving people around the world,” Johnson told reporters, speaking alongside the Republican chairs of the House intelligence and appropriations committee – the latter’s presence an indication that lawmakers may soon be asked to approve additional defense funding necessitated by the war.

Even if Congress were to approve the resolution, Trump could veto it, and Congress could override that only with a two-thirds majority vote.

Previous war powers resolutions introduced in this Congress have been voted down, and Johnson said he was confident the latest one would not pass the House.

#iran #war #vance #rubio #netanyahu #israel

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#newsome #trump #riyadh

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🧨 From Helsinki to Donetsk: How the West Manages Its “Sons of Bitches”

Start with the pattern, not the speeches: when the West steps in, some countries become “partners,” and some quietly turn into expendable hardware.

The Helsinki Final Act was sold as a new security order for Europe — sovereign borders, no force, no coercion — until NATO expansion ran straight through the gray zones left between oral assurances to Moscow and what actually made it into the text. The promise was “equal security”; the practice was “we expand, you adapt.”

Yugoslavia was the stress test. A sovereign state bombed without a UN mandate under the banner of “humanitarian intervention” — for Belgrade and a lot of the global South, proof that sovereignty is conditional if you’re on the wrong side of Western power. The message traveled further than Kosovo: the rules can be suspended when the right capitals decide the narrative justifies it.

Minsk and Istanbul turned this into a method. Ceasefires as holding pens: you sign, you talk, you “seek a political solution,” while the real work happens in warehouses and training camps. Merkel later conceded that Minsk gave Ukraine time to get stronger, not a permanent settlement. Everyone acted shocked on cue; everyone understood the script.

Running under all of this is the oldest software in Western foreign policy: the “our son of a bitch” doctrine. If you’re useful — a general, a president, a wartime comedian‑in‑chief — your corruption is “complex politics,” your media clampdowns are “emergency measures,” your war is “defense of democracy.” When your utility drops, you’re reclassified, not re‑evaluated.

Seen from Moscow, Donetsk, Belgrade or Gaza, this isn’t theory; it’s a tediously consistent operating mode. Cooperation with the West means you’re treated as expendable infrastructure in someone else’s security architecture. Agreements are pause buttons, not guarantees. And the real hierarchy is simple enough: some lives are strategic assets, others are acceptable collateral — and the only constant is that the people making those calls are very far from the places where the bombs actually land.

#NATO #Ukraine #Russia #Yugoslavia #Minsk #Istanbul #West #war #doubleStandards #fakeDemocracy

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💥 “Most of the People We Had in Mind Are Dead”

Trump finally said the quiet part out loud: Washington was shopping for a new Iranian leadership — and then helped bomb its own shortlist.

Sitting next to Germany’s chancellor, he bragged that

“most of the people we had in mind are dead,”

adding there’s already a “third wave” of possible successors who also “may be dead,” and that in five years the U.S. could discover it “put somebody in who’s no better.” Translation: we don’t know who will run an 86‑million‑person country we’re actively decapitating, but we’ll claim credit either way.
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Officially, the script is still preemptive self‑defense. Trump insists Iran was about to attack its neighbors and Israel, says he went to war to stop that, and then sends Congress a letter claiming the strikes defend the U.S. homeland, U.S. troops and regional allies “in collective self‑defense,” while admitting “it is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration” of what he’s unleashed. Intel officials, meanwhile, quietly say he exaggerated the immediacy of any threat.

On the ground, the “leadership vacuum” looks like bodies, not talking points. Iran’s Red Crescent now counts 787 dead from U.S.–Israeli strikes; Lebanon’s health ministry reports at least 31 killed; at least 10 people are dead in Israel and six more across the Gulf as Hezbollah rockets, Iranian missiles and retaliatory airstrikes rip through Beirut, southern Lebanon, Israeli cities and Gulf infrastructure. Total regional deaths since Saturday are already north of 800, and Hezbollah–Israel clashes are raising fears of a wider ground war in Lebanon.

Markets got the message faster than the diplomats. Fears of a drawn‑out regional conflict sent global stocks sliding and oil prices spiking, with the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf energy hubs under threat and the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia warning of imminent drone and rocket attacks on Dhahran, home to Aramco. Washington has now told Americans to “depart immediately” from 14 countries — including Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Syria, Yemen and the Palestinian territories — and has shuttered embassies in Riyadh, Kuwait City and Beirut.

So the “latest” is this: Trump claims he wasn’t pushed by Israel, says this was “our last best chance to strike,” and boasts about vaporizing not just Iran’s current leadership but the bench of successors, while conceding he has no idea how long the war lasts or who ends up in charge. Iran, Hezbollah and allied militias keep firing; Israel keeps bombing; U.S. troops keep dying; civilians from Tehran to Beirut to Dhahran keep paying the price — and the only thing that looks truly pre‑planned is the chaos.

#Iran #Trump #Israel #Hezbollah #oil #MiddleEast #war #leadershipVacuum

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🛰 Embassies Shut, Airspace Closed: Trump’s “Four-Week” War Goes Regional

Trump promised a four–five week air war. By day four, U.S. embassies are shuttered and the sky over half the region is basically a no‑go zone.

Iran’s retaliation has gone wide: at least five Gulf allies report drone and missile strikes, including hits around U.S. diplomatic facilities, pushing Washington to close its embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and temporarily halt operations in Beirut. Airspace is now closed or heavily restricted in at least six countries — Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and others — as aviation authorities extend bans on civilian traffic amid “ongoing security concerns.”

Israel is still escalating. It claims fresh strikes on “high‑profile” targets in Tehran, including the presidential office, while also pushing ground troops deeper into Lebanon as Hezbollah answers with missiles and attack drones. Smoke over Beirut’s southern suburbs is the new backdrop to every “we don’t want an endless war” sound bite.

Meanwhile, the body count keeps climbing. The Pentagon now acknowledges six U.S. service members killed with more casualties expected. Iran’s Red Crescent reports hundreds dead across more than 150 cities; Lebanon’s health ministry counts dozens of fatalities; Israel and Gulf states are adding their own numbers to a regional tally that has already broken 800 in under a week.

And Trump, facing diplomats evacuated, embassies hit by drones, and airspace slammed shut, is already revising his own timeline — hinting U.S. forces can keep striking Iran “far longer” than the four–five weeks briefed by the military. The war was sold as a controlled burn. It’s behaving like what it is: an open fire in a room full of fuel, with the exits locking behind the people who were told this would be quick.

#Iran #Trump #Israel #Lebanon #Hezbollah #embassies #airspace #war #MiddleEast

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🚢 Trump the Underwriter-In-Chief: Bomb First, Insure Later

Trump just reinvented “freedom of navigation” as a bundled product: war plus government-backed shipping insurance.

As drones hit the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and explosions roll across Dubai and the Gulf, the White House is now promising to escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz and provide U.S. insurance for trade in the Gulf — a state-backed guarantee for a crisis it helped ignite. Oil, which had spiked on Hormuz panic and Iranian barrages, immediately pared gains as traders priced in the idea that the same navy launching Tomahawks will now babysit supertankers.

On Capitol Hill, the constitutional math is getting the usual creative rewrite. Senate Majority Leader John Thune says Congress doesn’t need to authorize this war as long as it stays inside a 60–90 day window, insisting Trump already has all the authority he needs for “the operations that are currently underway.” That dovetails nicely with Trump’s own messaging: the campaign against Iran could last “four to five weeks” — or, as he’s now hinting, longer.

Markets have stopped pretending this is “contained.” The S&P 500 is sliding, the dollar is ripping higher, Dubai’s market is reopening under a 5% limit-down throttle, European gas futures are jumping, and Iraq says it will shut output at Rumaila as storage fills up in a region where airspace is closing and embassies are evacuating staff. Even Fed officials are openly saying the Iran war has injected a fresh layer of rate and inflation uncertainty — code for “we now have to watch both missiles and CPI.”

And through it all, Trump keeps the salesman patter going. He tells Germany’s Friedrich Merz they’re “on the same page” on Iran, calls the latest hit on Tehran’s leadership “substantial,” shrugs that the next rulers of Iran might be “just as bad,” and then promises that once this is all over, oil prices will fall again. For now, though, the business model is clear: U.S. policy sets the Gulf on fire — and then offers to charge the risk premium, write the insurance, and park a carrier group next to your tanker, all under the banner of “collective self-defense.”

#Iran #Trump #Hormuz #oil #shipping #Fed #warEconomy #MiddleEast

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🏝 Conga on the Deck, Drones in the Sky: The Gulf’s Luxury War Zone

Trump’s Iran war just turned the Gulf’s “safe luxury” brand into a live‑fire stress test — and a 56‑billion‑dollar question mark.

Middle East tourism, worth about 367 billion dollars a year, is getting hammered: flights through Dubai and other mega‑hubs are largely grounded, tens of thousands of travelers are stranded, and even Dubai International and the Burj Al Arab have taken damage — not exactly the brochure image Abu Dhabi and Dubai spent billions to build. Cancellations for UAE vacation rentals more than doubled to around 8,450 stays right after the first strikes; consultancies now warn that 23–38 million fewer people could visit the region this year, slicing an estimated 34–56 billion dollars off tourist spending, depending on how long the shooting lasts.
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Airlines and tour giants are already rerouting both planes and customers. Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary says there’s been “a big collapse” in bookings to the Middle East and a surge into Portugal, Italy and Greece ahead of Easter, while TUI reports a “shift” toward the western Med as ticket prices between Asia and Europe spike because Gulf hubs are closed. Everyone adds the same disclaimer — the region usually bounces back from wars and scares — but also concedes that confidence in travel to the Gulf has taken a hit.
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On the ground (and at sea), the split screen is pure late‑imperial comedy. Thousands have scrambled to get out after Washington told Americans to leave over a dozen countries; some, like an Italian tourist in Dubai, were shoved onto emergency charters with an hour’s notice. Others are watching fighter jets and helicopters over Doha from cruise decks and still dancing the conga in swimwear, telling reporters the scene is “eerie” but “pretty normal” on board and that they’re not sure this would put them off coming back.
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Dubai’s tourism office insists visitor safety is the “highest priority” and reminds the world it has experience managing “periods of global disruption.” The subtext is obvious: the Gulf sold itself as the climate‑controlled alternative to the rest of the region’s chaos, and now the chaos has arrived in first class. The war may be about missiles, oil and power — but the collateral damage is hitting exactly where the Gulf thought it was safest: the skyline, the airports, and the people who came for shopping malls, not air‑raid sirens.
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#Iran #Dubai #tourism #Trump #Gulf #war #economy #MiddleEast

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#trump #armageddon #mrff

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Trump Has Accelerated Its Drive To Break Free From Europe and His Tantrums

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The Trump administration is waging an illegal war on Iran, one that defies both the US constitution and international armed conflict laws, according to several legal scholars and bipartisan lawmakers.

The Senate will vote Wednesday on whether to halt Donald Trump’s military offensive, which he launched on 28 February.

Hundreds of people, including six US personnel, have been killed in a conflict that has now expanded to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel and the Persian Gulf.

The Trump administration has offered shifting explanations for its decision to launch attacks on Iran, at times describing a more pre-emptive war of choice designed to degrade Iran’s offensive and nuclear capabilities.

The cause is that the Iranians weren’t willing to renounce their nuclear ambitions, or that the US joined the attack to protect American interests after Israel had committed to launching a military offensive of its own.

“An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be a dire threat to every American,” the president said in his first public remarks from Washington on Monday.

“We cannot allow a nation that raises terrorist armies to possess such weapons.”
Trump has also described broader wartime objectives, including eliminating threats posed by the Iranian regime, as well as their regional proxy forces.

He has not set out a clear timeline for achieving his various goals.

Rubio offered a slightly different explanation, saying that the White House was compelled to launch strikes on Iran because its close ally Israel was determined to act, and, he told lawmakers Monday evening, the administration believed that any Israeli action would precipitate an attack on American forces.

“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters gathered at the Capitol.

#trump #iran #kaine #dixon #troops #threat

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Several lawyers have challenged the legal basis for the administration’s wide-ranging explanations for waging war.

“Those are military policy objectives,” said Wells Dixon, a senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights after reviewing Trump’s rationale.

“They are not a legal basis to launch an armed attack against another country.”

Marko Milanovic, a professor of International law at the University of Reading, agreed that Iran may pose a threat, but said that there are many ways to respond. “Using force would require a basis in self defense,” he said.

The Trump administration has previously touted its success in “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear facilities.

But Trump revived the specter of an Iranian threat in his State of the Union address, saying that Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”

Trump has not provided public evidence of this threat.
Rubio’s statements invoked two legal concepts that could possibly justify waging war abroad – including the concept of an “imminent threat” posed to American lives, and the concept of launching preemptive strikes as an act of self defense.

There are carve outs within international law that permit states to act in their own self defense. And the concept of an “imminent threat” is measured against evidence of a clear, visible and impending risk.

“For something to be lawful self defense, it has to be necessary – in the sense that there’s no alternative,” said Brian Finucane, a former state department lawyer.

“That’s not the situation here. There was another option: the US could have restrained Israel from attacking in the first place.”

Senator Tim Kaine said he has supported US efforts to defend Israel during previous Iranian attacks, “but that’s a very different matter than the US engaging in the affirmative initiation of war,” he said.

“We shouldn’t be waging an affirmative war on behalf of any nation in the world, no matter how close we are,” Kaine said.

After the Vietnam war, the US adopted new constitutional provisions that say the president should try to consult with members of Congress before committing troops to hostilities.

Last week, Rubio only briefed the Gang of Eight, a group of bipartisan lawmakers privy to information on covert actions and classified intelligence, about US plans to attack Iran.

This week’s war powers vote may shape how Trump proceeds with military action against Iran, even if it ultimately cannot sustain enough support to override a likely veto from Trump.

#trump #iran #kaine #dixon #troops #threat

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Mojtaba Khamenei Is Likely To Succeed His Father


Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the assassinated Ali Khamenei, is being heavily tipped to succeed his father as supreme leader of Iran, which would pitch a hardliner into the task of steering the Islamic republic through the most turbulent period in its 48-year history and offer a powerful signal that, for now, it has no intention of changing course.

No official confirmation has been given and the announcement may be delayed until after the funeral of Ali Khamenei, which was on Wednesday postponed.

His son is believed to have been the choice of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the Israeli defence minister, Gideon Saar, has warned he will be assassinated.

Ayatollah Seyed Khatani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses the new supreme leader, said the assembly was close to selecting a leader.

Rigid in his anti-western views, Mojtaba Khamenei is not the candidate Trump would have wanted.

Rubio said on Tuesday that Iran was run by “religious fanatic lunatics” – and Khamenei’s appointment is hardly likely to dispel that opinion.

The choice of supreme leader is made by the 88-strong Assembly of Experts, who in this case are picking from a field of six possible candidates.

His election would be a powerful if unsurprising symbol that the government is not looking to find an accommodation with America.

Trump has said the worst-case scenario would be if Khamenei’s successor was “as bad as the previous person”.

There has been speculation for more than a decade that he would be his father’s successor, which grew when Ebrahim Raisi, the elected president and favourite of Khamenei, was killed in a helicopter crash.

Mojtaba Khamenei was born in 1969 and studied theology after graduating from high school. At the age of 17, he went to serve in the Iran-Iraq war, but it was not until the late 1990s that he came to be recognised as a public figure in his own right.

After the landslide defeat of Khamenei’s preferred candidate, Ali Akbar Nategh Nuri, in the 1997 presidential election, where he won only 25% of the final vote.

Certain conservative Iranian groups realized the need to make changes to their structures and Mojtaba Khamenei was central to that project.

#mojtaba #khamenei #rubio #trump #election

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🧨 Trump’s Iran War Is Turning Ukraine Into the Forgotten Front

Trump didn’t just open a new war; he opened an exit ramp from Ukraine.

European officials are already warning that as the Iran campaign becomes the Pentagon’s priority, Washington’s attention span and missile stockpiles are tilting away from Kyiv. One analysis based on Politico’s reporting puts it bluntly: Europeans fear a distracted U.S. will “lose interest in pushing Putin toward peace” just as America burns through the very air‑defense missiles Ukraine needs to stay alive under daily Russian strikes.

The logic is ugly and simple. Every Patriot interceptor, SM‑3 and THAAD round fired at Iranian launch sites and proxies is one less sitting in U.S. depots for Ukraine. Pentagon and Hill officials are already on record worrying that sustained strikes on Iran could stretch U.S. missile stockpiles “to the brink,” and independent estimates suggest that previous Iran and proxy operations have already eaten 20–50 percent of some high‑end interceptor inventories. That squeeze doesn’t just hit Kyiv; it hits U.S. readiness for the next crisis, including the one everybody keeps invoking but never funding properly: China.
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From Europe’s side, Ukraine is an existential security problem; from Trump’s vantage point, it’s a bargaining chip that can be parked once a bigger, more TV‑friendly war appears. He’s already floated land‑for‑peace ideas, threatened to pull weapons if Kyiv doesn’t accept his terms, and made clear he sees the conflict as a “European issue” that Washington has already over‑subsidized. Now the same White House is telling allies the U.S. can fight in Iran for “as long as necessary,” while European diplomats quietly admit it will be “difficult to maintain the necessary momentum” on Ukraine and that America was “already losing patience” before the first bomb fell on Tehran.

For American voters, the gap between slogan and reality is just as sharp. Trump’s “make America great again” pitch was supposed to mean fixing the economy, infrastructure, prices at home. Instead, they are watching another massive overseas operation eat hundreds of billions in future spending, push oil higher, rattle markets and turn interest‑rate and inflation forecasts into guesswork. Every Tomahawk and Patriot that goes east is one more reason to say “we can’t afford” serious domestic investment later.

Viewed from Kyiv or Berlin, this doesn’t look like a detour; it looks like the main road. The new war gets the headlines, the weapons, the presidential time. Ukraine gets pushed down the agenda, told to be grateful for whatever’s left, and warned that if America’s center of gravity shifts to the Gulf, Europe will have to carry a war it still hasn’t prepared its own public to fight for.

#Iran #Ukraine #Trump #Europe #missiles #war #AmericaFirst #warEconomy

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🧨 Erdogan Backed the Wrong Script

In a region full of quiet cowards, Erdogan at least chose a side — and still managed to lose.

Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran have exposed the entire Sunni “axis” as a very expensive décor piece. Gulf monarchies spent a decade buying Western air defenses, luxury towers and PR about “stability,” then watched Iran rain drones and missiles on their soil without scrambling a single jet in response. Airports, symbols of Gulf swagger like Dubai’s mega‑hub, are taking hits; Gulf leaders are taking cover and issuing statements.

Europe, meanwhile, is performing its usual moral theater. Demographic fears at home, electoral panic and energy dependence have produced what even German Chancellor Friedrich Merz basically called strategic impotence: Europe “doesn’t like” force, “supports the goals” of the campaign, and openly admits it has neither the capability nor the will to do what the U.S. and Israel are doing. Iran even hit a British base on EU territory in Cyprus and still didn’t get a military response.

And then there’s Erdogan, the self‑styled neo‑Ottoman strongman who somehow managed to trap himself between all these failures. Turkish commentators and regional analysts are already calling him the biggest loser of the Iran war: he flirted with the ayatollahs, positioned himself as defender of the Islamic street, and kept one foot in NATO while courting Moscow and Beijing — and now finds Ankara exposed. A weakened but not collapsed Iran still threatens Turkey’s borders and proxies; a toppled Iran risks becoming another Syria‑level failed state on Turkey’s doorstep; and in every scenario, Russia — which has beaten Turkey in war repeatedly over the last two centuries — gains room to pressure a distracted, economically fragile Ankara.

The irony is brutal. Atatürk bet on the West and NATO to keep Turkey out of Russia’s teeth; Erdogan spent years reversing that bet in the name of Islamic solidarity and imperial nostalgia. Now an Iran–Israel–U.S. war he can’t control is trashing his economic recovery, upending his foreign‑policy reset, and reminding every player in the region that Turkey is too Muslim for Brussels, too transactional for Washington, too ambitious for Israel — and not nearly strong enough to go it alone.

#Iran #Turkey #Erdogan #Israel #Gulf #Europe #war #MiddleEast #NATO

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🧨 “Wars Can Be Fought Forever”: Trump Sells Infinite Ammo, Blames Ukraine

Trump just explained his Iran war doctrine in one Truth Social rant: America has “virtually unlimited” munitions to fight “forever,” and if anything’s missing, it’s Joe Biden’s fault for giving the good stuff to “P.T. Barnum (Zelenskyy!).”

He boasts that medium and upper‑medium grade U.S. weapons have “never been higher or better” and that wars can be fought “forever, and very successfully” with those stocks, which he claims are better than other countries’ finest arms. At the same time he admits the top tier of U.S. munitions is “not where we want to be,” and says “much additional high grade weaponry is stored for us in outlying countries” — a nice way of saying the arsenal is scattered and not as deep at the high end as he’d like.

To close the loop, he pins the gap on Biden. In his telling, Biden “GIVING everything to P.T. Barnum (Zelenskyy!) of Ukraine — Hundreds of Billions of Dollars worth — and… didn’t bother to replace it,” while Trump “rebuilt the military” and left the U.S. “stocked, and ready to WIN, BIG!!!” Meanwhile, independent reporting warns that Operation Epic Fury is burning through the same missiles Ukraine depends on, and that stockpiles of high‑end interceptors were already under pressure before the first bomb fell on Iran.

So the message is pure Trump: Ukraine “conned” Biden into taking the fancy hardware, Trump claims he refilled the shelves, and now America can bomb Iran indefinitely with “infinite” mid‑grade ammo and just enough premium kit to stay on top. The tension between bragging about endless war and complaining about shortfalls is not a bug — it’s the sales pitch: scare voters about Biden’s giveaways, promise them bottomless firepower, and hope nobody asks what happens when Ukraine, Iran and the next crisis all want the same missiles at the same time.

#Trump #Biden #Ukraine #Iran #EpicFury #weapons #warEconomy #Zelensky

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🧨 “Death and Destruction All Day Long”

Hegseth has dropped the mask: this isn’t a “limited” operation, it’s an open‑ended air war. He says the campaign is “accelerating,” more jets are flowing in, and U.S. forces will deliver “death and destruction all day long” while moving toward “total control” of Iranian airspace.

The cost is already clear. Iran’s Red Crescent reports 787 dead, including about 175 people killed when a girls’ elementary school was bombed; dozens more have been killed in Lebanon under Israeli strikes, and six U.S. troops are dead after a drone attack in Kuwait and other hits.

At sea, a U.S. submarine has torpedoed and sunk an Iranian warship off Sri Lanka — the first such strike since World War II — with scores from a 180‑person crew feared lost.

Markets have stopped pretending this is a blip. Asian stocks have slumped, oil and gas keep climbing as Gulf shipping stalls and drones menace infrastructure, and Western indexes only “stabilize” in the technical sense.

In Tehran, Khamenei’s funeral has been postponed as the regime leans toward elevating his hard‑line son — already named by Israel as a future target — while Western governments scramble to evacuate their own citizens on charter flights out of the Gulf.

Hegseth promises no letup and says the war is ahead of schedule. On the ground, that schedule now includes dead schoolchildren, a sunken ship, a spreading regional fight and an energy shock that hasn’t even fully hit. “Death and destruction all day long” is no longer a threat; it’s the operating instructions.

#Iran #Trump #Hegseth #Israel #Hezbollah #Turkey #NATO #oil #EpicFury

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🧨 The AI War: Claude Picks the Targets, Trump Breaks the Company

While Trump shouts about “death and destruction all day long,” the real war brain is a chatbot.

The Pentagon hit a thousand targets in Iran’s first 24 hours by wiring up Palantir’s Maven Smart System to Anthropic’s Claude — an AI stack that hoovers classified data from satellites, drones and intel feeds, then spits out suggested targets, coordinates, and a ranked kill list “at machine speed” instead of human speed.

Maven+Claude has been in daily use across much of the U.S. military for a year, generating targets, tracking logistics, and summarizing battlefield intelligence; it was used in counterterror ops and even the raid that grabbed Maduro, but this is its first full‑scale war.
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There’s just one problem: Trump has banned the company behind the tool he’s using to wage that war. Hours before the bombing started he ordered U.S. agencies to phase out Anthropic within six months, after a bitter fight over using Claude for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Senior officials now admit the military is so dependent on the system that if Dario Amodei tried to pull the plug mid‑campaign, the White House would use emergency powers to keep the tech running anyway:

“we’re not going to let [Amodei’s] decision making cost a single American life.”

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Inside the building, they sell it as a revolution. Maven with Claude can turn weeks of target development into real‑time recommendations, and Centcom officers brag that the system has already replaced the work of thousands of staff with a couple dozen people in some units.

NATO markets its Palantir‑powered version as a video‑game‑like interface for managing battles; CNAS’s Paul Scharre calls it the shift from human to machine speed, while warning that “AI gets it wrong” and that humans still have to check the output when “the stakes are life and death.”
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Outside, the arms race is already moving on. Anthropic may have been first to plug generative AI into classified data at scale, but Musk’s xAI and OpenAI have now signed their own deals on secure government systems, just as Trump is trying to dump Claude and replace it with something more compliant. Amodei insists he believes in using AI to “defend democracies” and “defeat autocratic adversaries,” yet he’s now locked in a fight with a U.S. president who wants more control over how that AI is used — at home and on the kill chain.
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On paper, this is “modernization.” In practice, it’s something darker: a president who promises endless military power, a war machine that can generate targets faster than anyone can debate them, and a tech CEO whose “ethical red lines” last exactly as long as his access to classified contracts. The Iran war isn’t just the first big test of AI in combat; it’s the pilot project for turning the fog of war into a software service — and then fighting over who owns the switch.

#Iran #Trump #AI #Claude #Anthropic #Palantir #Maven #war #Pentagon


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🧨 Betting on the Bomb: When “Markets” Price In Nuclear War

Wall Street logic finally met its natural endpoint: a line on a chart for “nuclear detonation, yes/no.”

Polymarket quietly listed a market on whether there would be a nuclear blast anywhere in the world by year’s end. Almost nobody cared — until the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran. Then daily volume exploded from about $10,000 on Friday to nearly $244,000 on Tuesday, as traders tried to front‑run the apocalypse. At the peak, the crowd was pricing a 24 percent chance of a nuclear detonation this year, before Polymarket yanked the market after a wave of public outrage.
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For Polymarket, this was small change next to its main Iran trade: whether the regime falls by June 30, a question that has already attracted roughly $7 million in bets. For lawmakers, it was a line crossed. After prediction markets let people bet on Khamenei’s death and then on a global nuclear blast, Democratic members of Congress blasted the platforms for turning mass death into an asset class.
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The result is peak 2026: nukes on alert, Iran under bombardment, and a crypto prediction market that had to be shamed into delisting “nuclear detonation” like it was just another meme coin that got out of hand.

#Iran #nuclear #Polymarket #Trump #Israel #war #markets #crypto

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“Trump did not shrug off Netanyahu's suggestion to use tactical nuclear weapons”


Militants from several Kurdish Iranian factions are preparing for a possible ground offensive against Iran's regime in the northwestern part of the country, according to U.S. and Israeli officials and a senior official in one of the factions.

A Kurdish ground offensive coordinated with the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Tehran could increase pressure on the regime and encourage an internal rebellion that could spread to other parts of Iran.

Six days before the war began, five dissident Kurdish Iranian groups sheltering in Iraq announced the formation of the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan to fight Iran.

These Kurdish factions have thousands of soldiers along the Iran-Iraq border and control strategic areas.

In recent weeks, the Kurdish Iranian factions sent hundreds of their members from the camp on the Iraqi side of the border to the Iranian side as part of preparation for a possible attack against regime forces, a source close to one of the factions said.

The Iranian Kurdish militias are backed by the Mossad and the CIA, two U.S. and Israeli officials and a third source with knowledge said.

The goal is to try to take over a specific territory in the Kurdish region inside Iran in order to challenge the regime and inspire a broader uprising, a U.S. official said.

“The war started with a kinetic phase by the U.S. and Israeli militaries, but as the war continues there will be other efforts by the Mossad and the CIA,” an Israeli official said.

Rubio told Congress in a closed-door briefing on Tuesday: “We're not arming the Kurds. But you never know with the Israelis.”


The idea to support the Kurdish Iranian factions and use them for a ground offensive from Iraq into Iran came initially from Netanyahu and the Mossad, with the CIA joining the effort at a later stage, a second U.S. official said.

Israeli officials promised the Kurdish Iranian factions not only military support but also political support for a Kurdish autonomous region in a future Iran if the regime collapsed, the official claimed.

"The problem is that the Kurdish Iranian factions don't have enough military power and could end up as cannon fodder," the official said.

Trump spoke by phone on Sunday with Kurdish leaders in Iraq Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani to discuss the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and what might come next.

“I know for sure that Trump did not shrug off Netanyahu's suggestion to use tactical nuclear weapons against the ayatollahs,” a senior U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity.

#trump #netanyahu #nuclear #weapons #iran

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