Iran’s more clinical realities

What I  believe is more multi-layered – though no less chilling – but most Americans  believe Trump started the war against Iran as a distraction from the Epstein files, while the man himself believes he has God on his side …

US pastors with the president in the Oval Office, March 5 2026

… and his Secretary of War …

… that “this was never meant to be a fair fight” …

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I mention these things lest we forget our humanity, and the psychopathy of the Epstein class, before getting down to realities more clinical.

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Two days ago Iranian Professor Mohammad Marandi, often featured on this site, guested on Glenn Diesen’s channel to speak of his country’s rejection of Trump’s “ceasefire” offer. Their dialogue ran to fifty minutes but a same day summary was offered by Yves Smith on Naked Capitalism:

Ceasefire is not an option. This war will continue until Iran’s demands are met. Iran will no longer accept a situation in the region where the United States can threaten it again. That’s over. Iran will no longer allow regimes in the Persian Gulf to act as bases for the United States to threaten Iran. And Iran will demand and get full compensation for the slaughter and the destruction.

Iran will keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. [Trump] can try to talk the markets down. It will work for a couple of days, but there’ll be a shortage of energy every day. 20 million barrels of oil and it could increase if Iran punishes the the regime in Baku, Azerbaijan or if the Yemenis strike the Saudi oil pipeline through the Red Sea. It would get worse.

But for now 20 million barrels are disappearing from the market and every day an extra 20 million is added [as in the total loss is compounding]. So he can talk down the market for a couple of days and Western media and governments can help him do that, and then release their reserves. But G7 reserves can only last two months and I don’t think Iran plans to open the Strait anytime soon. So, we’re heading for a global economic crisis …

… two hours ago air air strikes on Tehran bombed highways and civilian targets, slaughtering more people. Last night saw multiple massacres. So what more can they do? If they want to destroy Iran’s key infrastructure, that’s a possibility. But then Iran will destroy all key infrastructure in the region. Everything. All oil and gas installations in the Persian Gulf and Caucasus will be gone, finished. Not damaged but destroyed. And that will mean the key infrastructure of the USA will collapse. The world will collapse because it will enter a severe global economic depression.

On his Sonar21 site, former CIA intelligence analyst Larry Johnson, another empire gamekeeper turned poacher, assesses the impact, country by country on three key products – oil, LNG and the urea used in fertilisers – affected by that closure. See Choke Point: The Global Economic Consequences of The Persian Gulf Shutdown.

(The BTL comment on his post is not for the faint hearted, with Putin damned on grounds the mirror opposite of those Westerners are accustomed to hearing, and no shyness in taking the specious trope that Israel rules the USA onto unabashedly antisemitic terrain.)

Given Larry’s breakdown of what is at stake, no one in their right mind would expect the West, with its five hundred year history of ruthless exploitation of the global south, to take the Strait’s closure lying down. Here to discuss that aspect of the matter is WSWS, writing March 12 under the header, European imperialism joins in the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran.

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That Hormuz closure will impact catastrophically on the global economy (and Trump’s already dismal domestic ratings as America approaches the mid terms) is now well known, albeit not in the granular detail Larry provides. Less talked about are Iran’s attacks on companies – Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and other corporate players you and I know as providers of functionality – of satnav and search engine, Windows OS, online shopping and gaming chips – around which our daily lives now revolve. But that’s not the reason Iran, in a war all but the irremediably clueless knew would be asymmetric, is targeting the regional presence of such household names.

On March 2, two days after US-Israeli forces launched their war of criminal aggression, ¹ Iranian missiles torched Amazon server farms in the UAE. Though Pentagon planners had foreseen the Hormuz closure, albeit while fatally underestimating its duration, with stupendous complacency they had failed to see that the behemoths identified here – the operational infrastructure of US military power in the cyber age – would be targeted. How do we know? By the total absence of protection for those companies’ extensive presence across the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula.

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Oh, and did I mention the desalination plants? When the US targeted one on Iran’s Qeshm Island, on the elbow of the Hormuz choke point, it was not only a war crime. It opened up yet another front on – dare I say it? – WW3.

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For my baby boomer generation, the first to go from cradle to grave in the shadow of the bomb, it was axiomatic that WW3 will last fifteen minutes. ² Perhaps it will end that way but the signs are it’s already begun. Earlier I spoke of the folly of assuming the collective West will take lying down the closure of the Hormuz Strait …

Scott Bessent on US warships escorting vessels through Hormuz

… whereas in other posts I’ve spoken of the mirror opposite folly of assuming China and Russia will take lying down the fall of Iran to the US empire.

Prior to the 1979 Revolution, US and UK interference installed a puppet Shah in a nation not just oil-rich but straddling east-west land routes linking China to Europe, north-south routes linking Russia to the Persian Gulf, and commanding the Hormuz choke point.

We already have evidence of their providing Iran with targeting information that allowed her to take out THAAD sites, crown jewels in the US multi-layered defence system, in Jordan, UAE and most devastatingly in Qatar. It now seems Russia’s state of the art S-400 air defence systems are in Iran, presumably – since there hasn’t been time to train Iranians – operated by Russians, with all that implies politically.

To grasp the significance of this development at the purely military level, we need only know two things. One, US and Israeli use of  F-35 stealth warplanes has given them freedom of the skies. Two, the S-400 uses multi-frequency radar to remove the F-35’s invisibility.

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Have I missed anything? Sure I have – Israel’s nukes. But that’s one for another day.

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1. On America’s part the war is criminal both under international law, which prohibits the use of force against another country except where the latter poses an imminent threat, and under US law by which only Congress may declare war.
2. During the Cuba Missile Crisis 1962, a young Bob Dylan noted in Talking WW3 Blues that “the whole thing started at three o’clock fast, it was all over by a quarter past”.