Is it to be war on Iran? Part 1

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, an esteemed source for this site, thinks the US will attack Iran. “I hope to God I’m wrong”, he adds.

The rest of us, noting the pressures on Trump the real estate mogul, and unsuitability of his two envoys – also real estate dealers, ¹ one the son in law whose felonious father Trump pardoned then made ambassador to France – are hedging our bets.

Let’s set aside what was done to Iran in 1953 and how it responded in 1979. Let’s even set aside, for the moment, the treachery last June. Let’s instead start the countdown, as the world stands at the brink of a regional inferno with globally catastrophic potential, in late December 2025.

It was then, as US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent boasted, that Washington used proxy traders in the Gulf to attack Iran’s currency. The consequent hit to the rial – a 30% drop in value – caused the ‘bazaaris’, Iran’s merchants, to take to the streets, their long struggling businesses now facing liquidation. These economic protests were infiltrated, as had been carefully planned over the months since Iran finally flexed its hypersonic muscles in June, by CIA, Mossad and MI6 recruits who used extreme violence coordinated from outside the country by Starlink terminals smuggled in to counter the Iranian government switching off the internet. ²

Our media, including left-liberal columnists like Owen Jones, played their part – more witless than conspiratorial – by painting these protests as spontaneous and peaceful (hundreds of police were murdered) and by shifting the narrative from economic protest to colour revolution against a despised ‘regime’ …

… while ignoring much larger demonstrations in support of their government by a people for whom the June treachery – a murderous decapitation strike even as the US was putting on a comedy show of negotiating on nuclear enrichment – had revealed the extent of US-Israeli perfidy. ³

The failure of the June treachery, which killed hundreds of Iranian civilians – imagine that in New York, Frankfurt  or Newcastle –  was followed by that of the January ‘colour revolution’ when Tehran, with Chinese and Russian help, took out Starlink to leave the CIA/Mossad infiltrators deaf, blind and easily rounded up.

This is the immediate backdrop both to Trump’s “beautiful armada” – a USS Abraham Lincoln carrier fleet now in the region; though not, for reasons discussed in Floating pointlessness, in the Persian Gulf – and to the talks headed up on the American side by special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

In part two I’ll get to why those ‘talks’ were doomed from the outset, and where that leaves the main players: Washington and Tel Aviv – and a Tehran which now knows beyond shadow of doubt that any new strike by either must be met with maximal response.

The calculus has changed. For the Islamic Republic, appeasement has become the more dangerous option.

Proceed to Part 2.

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1. It’s already been commented on this site that real estate dealers aren’t best placed to understand supply chains in a globally interdependent world. (Real estate doesn’t move; the components in a supply chain do – across oceans and continents. Had Trump the nous to think five minutes ahead he might have thought twice before launching his ill-fated tariff war on China, a near monopoly supplier of the rare earths used in, inter alia, the auto industry and – such irony! – advanced warplanes like the F-35.) Even more obviously, state diplomacy is by tradition conducted by polymaths with extensive knowledge of culture and history.  Real estate braggadocio doesn’t quite cut it.
2. It was child’s play to sell, to Western audiences rendered clueless by the cradle to grave indoctrination of the most sophisticated and far reachingly powerful propaganda machine the world has ever known, Tehran’s shutting down of the internet as yet more evidence of a repressively mediaevalist theocracy. As a more generalist aside, China’s control of information is attacked by liberals in the West, labouring under the delusion they have free access, unfettered and unfiltered, to truthful depictions of reality. See in this regard my posts, Road to WW3 Part 5, and How fiction advances empire agendas.
3. For how corporate media, answerable on all that most matters to  Big Money, manage our perceptions of the world by lies of commission, yes, but even more by lies of omission, see Telling a Martian what hospitals do.