Iran’s war of economic attrition

Even if I didn’t enjoy the own-goals of those I despise, especially own-goals vainglorious in the making, I’d be delighted that the phrase Operation Epstein Fury, a play on Operation Epic Fury, has caught on. And just the other night I saw an Iranian interviewee on a US channel repeatedly using, to the clear chagrin of his interlocutor, the phrase Epstein regime.

Never forget that those instigating wars on the global south, and who unilaterally tore up the few remaining constraints on thermonuclear proliferation, are all over the Epstein files. Those who govern a waning and by that fact triply dangerous superpower swim in a cesspit.

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A core axiom of this site is that, on matters which go to the heart of ruling class interests, the business models of corporate media render them systemically incapable – for reasons given many times including here and here and here – of speaking truthfully.

No matter goes deeper to that dark heart than war. Consequently the lies come thick, fast, and in two forms. One has to do with culpability – who is to blame?  (A question whose mendacious answer, as served by our political and media classes, is underpinned by a lie more fundamental. Just as Christians say the Devil’s greatest victory lies in convincing us he does not exist, so too, applying a more objective metric, has Empire’s been to hide its existence right out in the open, aided by corporate media … to have us believe it died, along with direct rule colonialism, after a short illness following WW2. For evidence of this highly successful conjuring trick, look to this century’s string of wars on the Middle East, each studied in isolation as earth’s most intensively propagandised peoples, liberal no less than conservative, dutifully loathe a Saddam or Gaddafi, an Assad or Shi’a theocracy, without thinking to follow those huge footprints to the elephant in the room.)

Then there’s the Goebbelsian inversion of culpability in Ukraine, which took in and continues to take in millions who should have known better. But I won’t labour the point. Today my focus is the second category of lie, who is winning?

My own country’s craven leadership, a comprador elite fully owned by Washington, is by slow degree dragging us into a war of choice whose outcome I can’t foretell. I simply urge readers to pay a little more attention to the price of Brent crude – which this weekend hit $119 a barrel, its highest since Russia’s SMO began in 2022 – and a lot less to Guardian reports of how dreadful life now is for an Iranian people staring into the abyss of supposed defeat.

Israel imposes a news blackout, with severe penalties for transgressors, on the havoc wrought by Iranian drone and missile strikes increasingly able to pierce the world’s most costly defence shields in a war of economic attrition. ¹ And those hits on US military bases, their devastation captured by Iranian satellite for all the world to see? If Washington narrative managers are to be believed, these have resulted in minor damage and a handful of casualties.

Be sceptical. Be very sceptical. Meanwhile, over to the mellifluously down-under tones of the Frum Report, for a twenty-five minute assessment markedly different from those of Western corporate media and their credulous – if we’re being kind – stenographers.

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Oh, I almost forgot. The rapid depletion of eye-wateringly expensive weaponry replaceable at rates far below those required to sustain a war Bibi told Trump would be wrapped up in a few days – I mean the Patriot missiles and THAAD systems – has been duly noted in Kiev.

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1. The susceptibility of Iron Dome and David’s Sling, demonstrated in June but seemingly ignored by the Israelis and Americans, to being overwhelmed by cheap drones and older missiles prior to attacks which deploy Iran’s hypersonic capability was long ago foreseen in the poem, Arithmetic on the Frontier. On the 19th century assassination of a senior Raj officer during a punitive expedition into Afghanistan, Kipling wrote of:

   A scrimmage in a Border Station—
   A canter down some dark defile—
   Two thousand pounds of education
   Drops to a ten-rupee jezail