Over time I tend to accrue miscellaneous half-writes: drafts awaiting a suitable moment, works in progress eclipsed by more urgent matters, else forays I abandon as not taking me any place I want to go. Often they wind up in the trash; occasionally they are revisited and developed into a full post.
Once in a while neither happens but they are incorporated as items in the kind of wandering post CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair wittily calls “roaming charges”. This is one such.
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The Metropolitan police has said it will resume arresting people who show support for Palestine Action just weeks after it said it would no longer do so following a high court ruling that the ban on the direct action group was unlawful.
After last month’s judgment, the Met said it would immediately stop arresting people for such offences but would gather evidence for potential future prosecutions.
But on Wednesday it said it had “revised” its “interim position”. Deputy assistant commissioner James Harman said:
While the high court has found the proscription of Palestine Action unlawful, the judgment will not take effect until the government’s appeal has been considered which could take many months. It is still a criminal offence to support Palestine Action. We must enforce the law as it is, not as it might be at a future date.
Guardian March 25, 2026*
When Huda Ammori’s appeal against Yvette Cooper’s deceitfully missold ban succeeded on February 13 – a high court triumvirate finding it disproportionate and inconsistent with the UK government’s own policies – the pessimists among us suspected a hollow victory. Presiding judge Dame Victoria Sharpe, no friend to Palestine, ruled that the ban remain in force pending a government appeal by Cooper’s successor at the Home Office, Shabana Mahmoud.
Now the Met is saying the arrests will resume …
… leaving me, who defied the ban only once and got away with it, with little option but to once more step into the breach at the earliest organised protest.
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In an exchange below the line of yesterday’s post, Nick Heffernan wrote:
… the US now aims to control the global production and transport of energy, with a view to strangling China before it can attain energy independence, which the think tanks that serve as the collective brain of the US oligarchy estimate could be as little as a mere five years away. The attack on Iran is very much part of this agenda. The destruction of Iran’s energy-production infrastructure cuts off another supply line to China; meanwhile, Iran’s closure of Hormuz and destruction of the Gulf tyrannies’ energy resources and infrastructure further strengthens the US grip on global energy supplies …
I agreed:
Most years see the US as a net exporter of energy. Its ruling class is not interested in safeguarding its own consumption, or even primarily in profit, but in domination. As you imply, one of many threats to US rule of the world is that the PRC is light years ahead of the West in transiting from fossil fuels. The temptation for the US to strike before it gains hydrocarbon independence is immense but China is too well defended for direct attack. Strangulation by encirclement, as nation after nation falls to the empire, is the name of the game; regardless of the scale of human suffering. I wish more folk of good heart and brain, but oddly unable to join dots, would wake up to this.
By cosmic coincidence an item in my steel city inbox this morning argues much the same. If memory serves, the eponymous Les of Les’s Geopolitical Essays hails from down under, which would explain why, though posted today, it lay in wait for me when I fired up the computer at daft o’clock. Be that as it may, Western Resolve: the Attack on Iran – its kicker, Pathway to China – is well worth the read.
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One swallow doth not a summer make, nor one downed F-35 a resounding imperial defeat. All the same, this report in India Today had me sit up and take note:
India Today, March 21 2026
Few Western media have touched this story. It’s true the UK’s Independent did …
Independent, March 19 2026
.. but without using the f-word, and in terms calculated to minimise the significance of what had happened. The F-35, unit cost $100 million and product of a trillion dollar program, is not meant to be detectable. Least of all by a state whose air defences, Trump boasted, are ‘obliterated’.
My first thought was that Russia’s S-400 air-defence system, developed to detect stealth war-planes, is in Iran. If so the Islamic Republic would be the first country outside Russia to receive it – but then, Russia can no more than China take the defeat of Iran lying down. As reader Bryan commented two posts ago, there are too many players here with existential skin in the game.
On March 13 I wrote as follows in Iran’s more clinical realities:
We already have evidence of [Russia] 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.
Interestingly, few voices supporting Iran are linking the downed F-35 to the rumoured S-400. The same goes for a report five days ago by Iranian state broadcaster, PressTV. Has Russia (and in all probability China, its state of the art eavesdropping vessels known to be in the Gulf and likely feeding US naval locational data to the Iranians) taken a leaf from the Israeli playbook to pursue a course of strategic ambiguity?
Moscow to Tehran – you can have the S-400 (almost certainly with Russian operators) but it’s all, ahem, under the radar …
Then again, it could be me barking not for the first time up the wrong tree. Whatever, this from PressTV’s Yousef Ramazani, writing March 21 under the Hannibal Lecteresque header, Silence of the stealth: How Iran shattered the ‘invincibility’ of US F-35 fighter jet
In the early morning hours of March 19, 2026, the Islamic Republic of Iran achieved what no country had ever accomplished before: a successful engagement against the US Air Force’s crown jewel, the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter, irrevocably altering the strategic calculus of the ongoing US-Israeli aggression against Iran.
For nearly two decades, the F-35 program represented the zenith of American military hegemony – a multi-trillion-dollar fifth-generation platform designed to penetrate the most sophisticated air defenses on the planet with total impunity.
That myth was dismantled over the skies of central Iran, where the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) deployed the indigenous Majid infrared-guided system to expose the fundamental vulnerabilities that marketing campaigns had long concealed.
As the aggression enters its fourth week, Iran’s integrated air defense network has not only withstood the most intensive aerial bombardment since the Persian Gulf War but has systematically eroded the technological arrogance of the US-Israeli war machine.
From the destruction of more than 125 advanced drones to the confirmed engagement of the first F-35, Iran has demonstrated that it possesses the capability to defend its sovereignty against the most advanced weaponry the Western military-industrial complex can produce, while forcing a humiliating reassessment of American air power by allies and adversaries alike.
Anatomy of a historic engagement
The operation began at 2:50 a.m. local time on March 19, when IRGC air defense operators detected an anomalous signature penetrating central Iranian airspace.
Although some reports attributed the engagement to the Talaash system, multiple lines of evidence suggest the Majid short-range air defense system was the platform responsible for downing the American stealth fighter.
Unlike conventional radar-based systems that would have alerted the F-35’s sophisticated electronic warfare suite, the Iranian operators utilized the Majid short-range air defense system (AD-08), an indigenous platform that operates on infrared guidance.
This choice of weaponry was no accident. The F-35’s vaunted stealth capabilities, achieved through painstaking reductions in radar cross-section, have always been compromised by a persistent vulnerability: its heat signature.
The Pratt & Whitney F135 engine, while powerful, generates immense thermal emissions that no amount of engineering can fully mask.
The Majid system, produced by the Iranian Armed Forces Logistics Department’s Defence Industry Organization and first unveiled in April 2021, exploits precisely this weakness.
With an engagement range of at least 700 meters and a ceiling of around 6 kilometers, it was designed for point defense rather than area coverage.
Its infrared seeker operates without emitting any radar signature, meaning the F-35’s radar warning receivers remained silent.
The aircraft’s electronic countermeasures, designed to jam radar frequencies, were rendered useless against a passive optical system.
Iranian footage of the engagement reportedly shows that a single missile was sufficient—a testament to both the system’s precision and the F-35’s thermal vulnerability.
Decoy strategy: Luring the predator into the trap
The successful strike on the F-35 did not occur in isolation but represented the culmination of a sophisticated tactical deception that began on the very first night of the US-Israeli aggression.
Military sources within Iran have revealed that on February 28, when American and Israeli warplanes initiated their initial bombardment, Iranian commanders executed a calculated withdrawal of operational radar systems from active service.
These assets were concealed in hardened positions while an elaborate network of decoy installations was activated across strategically significant areas.
These were not rudimentary mock-ups. Iranian military engineers have developed radar decoys capable of emitting false signals indistinguishable from genuine batteries, each costing upwards of $10,000.
Israeli and American drone operators, relying on electro-optical and infrared sensors to conduct battle damage assessment, observed what appeared to be successful strikes against Iranian air defense positions.
The destruction of these decoys, coupled with the absence of active radar emissions, led US Central Command and Israeli Air Force planners to conclude that Iranian air defenses had been effectively “flattened” – a claim publicly boasted by US war secretary Pete Hegseth on the morning of March 19, coinciding with the very hours his F-35 was being engaged.
This miscalculation proved catastrophic. Believing they had achieved air superiority, American and Israeli commanders authorized deeper penetration missions, sending fifth-generation fighters into airspace they assumed was defenseless.
Iranian operators, meanwhile, had quietly reactivated their concealed radar networks and positioned short-range infrared systems like the Majid along likely approach vectors.
When the F-35 entered the kill zone, it was met not by a crippled defense network but by a fully integrated, strategically deployed air defense system that had been waiting for precisely this moment.
Beyond the F-35: A pattern of attrition
The March 19 engagement represents the first confirmed strike against an American F-35 in operational history, but it is far from the only loss suffered by US-Israeli forces since the aggression began.
According to comprehensive assessments, Iranian air defenses have destroyed at least 10 MQ-9 Reaper drones, with nine eliminated in flight and one struck by a ballistic missile while parked at an airfield in Jordan.
The MQ-9, valued at approximately $30 million per unit and representing the backbone of American unmanned surveillance and strike capabilities, has proven particularly vulnerable to Iranian infrared-guided systems, which have previously demonstrated their effectiveness against similar platforms in Yemen.
The losses extend beyond unmanned systems. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq successfully intercepted a KC-135 strategic tanker aircraft over western Iraq, employing an appropriate weapon that killed all six crew members aboard.
An additional five KC-135 tankers sustained damage from Iranian missile strikes while parked at an airfield in Saudi Arabia.
US reports also indicate that three American F-15s were lost to so-called “friendly fire” incidents in Kuwait, a euphemism that cannot conceal the broader disarray within US operational coordination as Iranian missiles and drones force constant repositioning and create conditions for catastrophic errors.
These attrition rates surpass any comparable US air campaign since the 2011 aggression in Libya, where only three combat losses were reported over four months. That the US-Israeli coalition has sustained such losses in less than one month of operations speaks to both the intensity of the aggression and the effectiveness of Iran’s multi-layered defense strategy.
Technological sovereignty: Majid and beyond
The astounding success of the Majid system underscores a broader trend in Iranian military development: the achievement of genuine technological sovereignty in the face of decades of sanctions and military pressure.
The system’s infrared guidance represents a deliberate doctrinal choice that circumvents the electronic warfare supremacy that US and Israeli forces have long enjoyed.
By operating outside the radar spectrum, Iranian air defenses deny adversaries the ability to detect, track, or jam incoming threats using standard electronic warfare platforms.
This approach has been further reinforced by strategic acquisitions. Leaked documentation from early 2026 indicated that Iran had finalized a $580 million agreement to procure 500 9K333 Verba man-portable surface-to-air missile launchers and 2,500 9M336 missiles from Russia.
The Verba system, widely considered the most capable man-portable air defense system in existence, features a three-spectral seeker—ultraviolet, near-infrared, and mid-infrared—that provides unparalleled discrimination between actual targets and countermeasures such as flares or directional infrared countermeasures.
Should deliveries continue despite the ongoing aggression, Iran’s low-altitude airspace will become among the most contested environments any adversary has ever faced.
The combination of indigenous systems like the Majid with advanced imports like the Verba creates a layered defense architecture that addresses the F-35’s operational profile at multiple altitudes.
The F-35’s continued reliance on Block 3 software—with the more advanced Block 4 upgrades still delayed—has left the aircraft unable to launch air-to-surface missiles from standoff ranges, forcing pilots to approach targets more closely and thereby exposing themselves to precisely the short-range systems Iran has prioritized.
Global repercussions: F-35’s reputation in ruins
The destruction of an American F-35 over Iran has sent shockwaves through defense establishments worldwide, undermining the foundational assumptions upon which dozens of nations have based their air force modernization strategies.
The F-35 program, already the most expensive weapons system in human history at an estimated $1.7 trillion over its lifecycle, was built on the premise of near-invulnerability—a stealth aircraft so advanced that it could operate freely in denied environments where fourth-generation fighters could not survive.
That premise is now untenable. Iran’s achievement has provided empirical proof that fifth-generation stealth aircraft are not immune to modern air defense systems, particularly those employing infrared and optical tracking methods that bypass radar-based countermeasures.
The implications for global defense procurement are already manifesting, with nations reassessing their commitments to the American platform.
Spain, a NATO member and traditional US ally, has formally abandoned plans to acquire the F-35, redirecting its €6.25 billion procurement budget toward European alternatives including the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS).
The Spanish Ministry of Defense confirmed that the F-35 was no longer under consideration, citing sovereignty concerns over US control of aircraft software and data, as well as broader geopolitical considerations in the wake of the Israeli military debacle over Iran in June 2025.
Turkey, expelled from the F-35 program in 2019 following its acquisition of Russian S-400 systems, has taken decisive steps toward finalizing an agreement for 40 Eurofighter Typhoon jets, with preliminary agreements signed with the United Kingdom and Germany.
India has formally informed American officials of its decision to forgo F-35 procurement, preferring co-development partnerships that support its domestic defense industry rather than the F-35’s limited customization options.
Swiss lawmakers have called for cancellation of a $9.1 billion F-35 purchase, while Canadian military sources have reiterated that they are reviewing alternatives to an additional 76 aircraft.
These decisions, intensifying in the weeks following Iran’s first announced successful engagements in 2025—then without concrete evidence but now likely true—reflect a fundamental shift in the global defense market.
The myth of American technological invincibility, carefully cultivated through decades of marketing and limited combat against asymmetric adversaries, has been exposed as hollow by Iranian air defenses operating against the full might of US-Israeli air power.
A new military reality
As the US-Israeli aggression against Iran continues into its fourth week, the military-technological landscape of West Asia has been permanently altered.
Iran has demonstrated that fifth-generation stealth aircraft, the most expensive and heavily promoted weapons systems ever devised, are not the invulnerable platforms their manufacturers claimed.
The combination of indigenous infrared-guided systems, strategic decoy operations, and integrated Axis of Resistance coordination has produced a defense architecture capable of not merely surviving American air power but defeating it.
The F-35 that now sits—whether in pieces across central Iran or damaged in a US facility—represents far more than a single aircraft loss.
It represents the end of the era in which American military technology could be marketed as invincible, the beginning of a global reassessment of defense procurement priorities, and the demonstration that the Islamic Republic of Iran possesses both the strategic patience and the technological sophistication to defend its sovereignty against the most powerful military the world has ever seen.
For the United States and the Israeli regime, the implications are profound. The air campaign designed to force Iranian submission has instead produced a series of humiliating losses, from the decimation of the MQ-9 fleet to the first-ever combat engagement of an F-35.
The narrative of inevitable American victory, proclaimed by officials who view their aggression in quasi-religious terms, has collided with an undeniable reality: Iran’s air defenses remain not only operational but increasingly deadly, and the Axis of Resistance has proven capable of inflicting costs that no amount of Crusader rhetoric can obscure.
The silence of the stealth has been broken, and the sound it made was the unmistakable crack of Iranian precision.
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Meanwhile the Israeli U.S. response? To carpet bomb Tehran a city of nearly 10 million people with thousands of years of history. This is truly insane. I now think Israel is basically operating from an instinctive righteousness that is angry it has such a small piece of land when it deserves the whole region. So it’s just going to murder the people and steal it – not only Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon – the whole of the Middle East. Including possibly even Egypt. Because they are the Chosen People of the One True God. Truly a collective insanity. Meanwhile in the U.S. there is another maniacal religious belief at work. Do not underestimate the insanity of millions of the Christian Right who want to trigger Armageddon because that will be the Second Coming where the righteous (obviously them) will be saved. I know the insanity of religion and how it destroys life, love and laughter. Yes there are all the economic and political aspects – but I can also see the extremely dangerous religious dimensions. And there is no intelligence whatsoever in fanatic religion – not even self preservation. Because the after life is more important than the living breathing feeling soft animal bodies of this life. I’m sorry but I can see the possibility of a true apocalyptic destruction across the whole globe. Read between the pipelines and you’ll see an even deeper insanity operating. I hope I’m wrong. Meanwhile make tea not war, fight truth decay and enjoy your new home Phil!
Hard to contest your gloomy prognosis, Anne …
Yes, it looks like zionism and extreme right-wing christianity combined have turned into some kind of Freudian death cult. Freud himself would have been aghast at this sort of anti-life madness. I suppose it’s the logical pinnacle of Liberalism – if you can combine liberalism and apocalyptic religion.
You can combine liberalism, given sufficient arms’ length for plausible deniability to the credulous, with pretty much anything that suits empire purposes.
Iran is just following in the footsteps of Serbia, which brought down two examples of earlier ‘stealth’ aircraft. The. whole idea of radar stealth, while useful to a certain extent, under certain circumstances, has been turned into a huge marketing scam by US armaments suppliers who must have known better, with predictable results.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, this is an interesting article from Alastair Crooke – note the Russian and Chinese reactions at the end of the quote! :
“Sayyed Khamenei outlined three concrete demands, each with a defined timeline: A rapid U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East: a full rollback of sanctions within 60 days, and long-term financial compensation for economic damages”.
“Then came the ultimatum: Fail to comply, and Iran escalates, economically, militarily, and potentially nuclearly. Not hypothetically, but operationally: Closing the Strait of Hormuz, formalizing defence ties with Russia and China, and moving from ambiguity to declared nuclear deterrence”.
The timing of external reactions was just as telling. Within hours, both Beijing and Moscow issued statements aligning in a carefully worded, yet unmistakable way, with the new Supreme Leader’s framing, suggesting coordination.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2026/03/27/iran-audacious-strategic-moves-declared-missile-dominance-over-occupied-territories-warning-of-nuclear-deterrence/
Our reservations about Yves Smith notwithstanding, her daily war briefings at Naked Cap are now a must read for me. Yesterday’s was no exception. Though less focused on the common purpose now more overtly shared by China, Russia and Iran, its tone aligns with what you say.
It’s been said by many, including me, that in a war of attrition – including economic attrition – time is more on Iran’s side than America’s. (Israel’s a separate issue, whose overlapping rather than fully identical interests I’ll address soon.)Yves’ piece yesterday notes, pace Shanaka Anslem Peres, seven clocks loudly ticking for the US. The first being oil derived fertiliser shortages just as maize and soybean planting begins mid April …
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/03/iran-war-accelerating-economic-damage-creates-urgency-on-strait-of-hormuz-closure-shambolic-us-assault-preparations-continue-iran-demands-recognition-of-sovereignity-over-strait-houthis-set-to-str.html
Re your opening para, the PressTV article replicated in my post argues – I think forcefully despite its own obvious bias – that the downing of that F-35 is bad PR for Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon (or whatever it calls itself these days) et al!
“the downing of that F-35 is bad PR for Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon (or whatever it calls itself these days) et al!”
Absolutely – the F-35 has been the subject of hundreds of articles over the years, detailing the literally thousands of ways in which it is a comprehensive failure – except in moneymaking terms, where it is a really stupendous success. But as you say, the scam is now being revealed even to the suckers who bought the Kool-aid.