No. They were obviously trying to stop him from doing this by dangling an award in his face. They knew, he knew, everyone knew if he went ahead and did this he wasn't getting that award. It was a carrot.
It's not that they thought he was the greatest peacemaker ever, it was that they thought they could appeal to him to keep his non-involvement agenda by dangling hope of something he resented Obama for getting.
Yeah they're done. The US is very, very good at this type of stuff and acting like they're clowns just makes people look unserious. They're they more experienced military in the world.
There is no way Fordow didn't sustain, at least heavy damage that will take months to fix unless there was some factor not known to the imperialists about its construction. I bet they ran extensive simulations, maybe even modeled it in miniature somewhere using real explosives and matching construction on a smaller scale.
They probably determined they needed 5 but used 6 anyways. Probably successive explosions each one busting the earth open deeper for the next.
I have to question what the end-game is for the west here given they can continue striking the zionist entity. Maybe it's a show of power and now they offer them peace if they stop firing now that they have gotten their immediate want and acted all tough.
I get bad vibes from the announced Trump speech thing. Maybe he's just going to yammer on and play up the tough guy act and issue an ultimatum to Iran to totally surrender but maybe he's going to announce we used a tactical nuclear weapon and it was totally justified and good. My guess is either way he'll say the ball is in Iran's court and they can submit or .
Thoughts:
Was this just a gesture? Did they even seriously hit Fordow with for example nuclear bunker busters? Because their conventional ones would need several hits for sure success.
Also once again this proves Iran's air defenses are not good folks. They just strolled in. I was thinking originally maybe they hit facilities near the borders with glide bombs but to hit Fordow they'd have to go deep. Is it too much to ask for them to down a B2? Apparently so and it really puts doubt into my mind about those claims of shooting down f-35s from the zionist air force.
This attack was CLEARLY telegraphed. The whole waiting two weeks was such an obvious ruse just as they'd attacked them during talks that if Iran wasn't on full alert they are naive as hell. If they were it shows they're powerless against American air power. I mean WSJ leaked it was happening.
Iran is a sitting duck and it is frustrating to read this. They should have gotten a nuke. They should have expected these bombings and should have developed or bought or stolen better air defenses. They should have chosen at least one of these to do.
Let's say they moved the nuclear materials. But if they did they now have to hide them and move them and hide them and I doubt they have any places as hardened as Fordow. Mossad infiltration is pretty deep so if Iran doesn't go sicko-mode on the US and zionists in response the US will just bomb that new location and act like it's not an act of war.
At this point frankly I don't get the point of bluffing with the uranium enrichment beyond 60%. I understood it to be an Iranian tactic to threaten to get nukes and show they could in order to get concessions in negotiations but given how the west has shown their dishonesty both with Iran and Russia it seems kind of silly at this point. But perhaps they believe in great man politics and hope a Democratic politician will negotiate (and for some reason that a Republican won't just undo it like Trump did).
If it was an empty gesture, if no real damage was done to say Fordow and Trump is just going to declare victory regardless it may be tactically smart for Iran to stay mum on the failure of the strikes and let him have his win. Though the problem with this is Bibi may publicly announce it failed anyways to pressure Trump into more strikes.
If on the other hand these strikes were successful Iran needs to hit back by sinking a carrier group. Closing the strait of Hormuz is an option but one which will fuck up China's economy if maintained for any significant period of time.
Iran however may no matter how bad the damage choose to just grit and bear it. They chose the "poison pill" of the JCPOA after all in 2015 and may choose not to do more than symbolic retaliation which of course emboldens the empire to hit them again and more frequently as well. Iran frankly either stands up right now or they can kiss goodbye any hopes of reclaiming their regional power status. With Hezbollah already on the backfoot and Syria out of the picture their power projection and proxy projects were already fucked up medium-term at least. But if they let the west salami-slice their way to hitting them however they want, decapitations, strategic bombings to take out valuable assets in their borders, etc they cease to be a functioning state and enter Syrian circa 2018 failing state territory where more pushes and shoves will come until they topple them and remove them from the picture.
So I fear the US and the zionist entity slowly strangling and bombing them to death as they turn the other cheek again and again because they fear escalating and allow the salmi-slicing tactics to work.
Those planners are frankly ignorant babies. They're the type who cannot see the bigger strategic picture. They see things in terms of what can we do purely with military and intelligence assets. Our assets vs theirs who wins. And from that perspective China is only growing stronger and the chances of us beating them in a straight up stand-up fight in their backyard and/or toppling them diminish every year we wait. They're a hammer so they go looking for nails but don't understand what furniture is being built or what the factory is.
However the planners of the deep state, the more studious types, the ones who orchestrated the victory of the US in the cold war understand that we will not beat China military to military. Their plan is to repeat the first cold war. That is they intend to isolate China as the USSR was isolated, to deprive it of key technology, to deprive it of key raw inputs, to inflict economic pain and force either an early transition and loss of quality of life to higher stages of socialism and state planning and control. They know a straight fight would be bad so instead plan to use our established network of bases, our air power, our logistics network, our network of vassal states and the powerful NATO navy which is still a force to reckon with to not necessarily fight China's navy though they'll do that but to hurt them economically, to enforce this blockade and isolation of China. To enforce locking the rest of the world in with the US for exploitation and locking China and Russia and a few other regional countries in a small block. And then you deprive that block of the middle east, of oil, of any relations with the counties that control the petrodollar system or can otherwise fuck the west by messing with oil supplies. You secure that for your own security and plenty and give them instead scarcity and you count on that to wear them down like the USSR, to spread discontent, disillusionment, nihilism, etc among the enemy. This is a project of decades of cooking them in a pressure cooker, of pulling all resources and all peoples to you under the gun and denying them the same. Using those resources and people to attempt to technologically break out ahead of them.
Maybe this plan won't work but China is counting on multipolarity and these planners are aware of it and working to counteract it. China cannot take on the whole world on its own nor does it want to. The belt and road exists for a very real reason, a real fear, a real problem and if Iran falls the last part of it is effectively snipped. India will absolutely side with the west when the cards are down so they can't count on them. Russia is also a fair-weather friend, there is a reason they so loudly protest how good their friendship is and it is because it isn't that secure. Russia has been trying to get back in with the west before burning roads with China and Ukraine seems to have burned some bridges but it is a country in the grips of reaction and capitalists who are only friends with China and anti-imperialism out of tactical necessity. Even with Russia firmly in their corner they can't do a lot.
Basically this is setting up a winning chessboard for the eventual fight with China. This is taking out sub-lieutenants that buff the big boss before the final boss bottle rather than going directly there with them active. They're cutting off China's friends, they're locking down regions, they're locking down resources. They're blocking the belt and road. They're setting up everything for when they pull the trigger so they're in a position of strength.
China already has means of production. Waiting a few years won't give them meaningfully more and in fact might give the US access to a bit more with all the build-up and demand they've generated with Ukraine and now this and it gives them an opportunity to battle test their armies and their weapons in a way China won't be able to. China will be fighting experienced armies with field tested weapons that have been refined in the field not simulations and China won't have that advantage.
The US is settling all the other scores right now, taking out all their enemies and problems so none of them can rise up and draw some of their forces away while they're badly needed fighting China. Imagine if for example the US didn't do this and for example Hezbollah and Iran were both strong forces when the US started a fight with China, a high intensity war even requiring all their missile production capacity and suddenly the zionist regime is drained of weapons and screaming in pain and in danger and the US has to either weaken it's fighting force against China or let the zionist entity collapse. These types of actions and moves prevent that being an option, they clear the path and allow them to focus.
China has its own reasons for biding its time and playing the part of the neutral party, unfortunately it may end up being a trap the west uses against them knowing their particularities there and finding a way to turn that strategy against them.
Depends where.
A city there will be some repercussions for US image and it will push more countries to try and slip away from the grasp of the US but also allow the US to terrorize a lot of countries successfully with threats by pointing to that. Anti-imperialist solidarity will rise but also probably the willingness of nations to capitulate to the US because they're unhinged and faced no consequences will also rise as they make the calculation they can't risk American nuking them.
If they nuke Fordow I expect other than some protests and the usual anti-nuclear movement (aging now) being angry very little will come of it. Russia and China will condemn, NATO and media and most Americans will shrug and either see it as bad because we shouldn't be bombing Iran (not because of being nuclear) or as good because we should or as neither because they couldn't care less and are late for brunch.
If they do nuke Fordow I think it would be interesting to see if Russia uses the opening from that to use a tactical nuke on a hardened Ukrainian military installation in a similar way and as a kind of response.
Not entirely wrong though.
Soft power comes in handy when you're already the world hegemon or in bed with them but when you're the upstart in every way it's not going to counter the hard power of the enemy until they've lost it or you've smashed it first. Libs criticize that apocryphal Stalin quote about how many divisions the Pope has but he wasn't wrong. The only reason the pope had relevance was because of his buy-in with the people who had hard-power e.g. western Europe.
Fact is US used hard power last century to crush so many communist revolutions and the soft power to paper over it after. China's soft power means nothing if the US can and will roll in and set up moderate rebel terrorists in your lands and topple your government and install some greedy, comprador pig who sells the country to the west and kicks out China and forms up a repressive regime.
Even the total destruction of almost every building in North Korea did not defeat them.
They were Marxist-Leninists hardened by years of fighting and enduring Japanese colonization, occupation, and barbarity.
China helped them. Without the PVA it's unlikely we'd have a DPRK. We'd instead have a united occupied Korea on China's border, the remaining elements of communists would have been murdered off by the 70s or before and they would have begun causing problems for China. China's willingness to not blink in the face of the threat of nukes plus big brother USSR looming over them with newly acquired nuclear weapons really helped and probably swayed western planners not to nuke China with the idea that if they did it might push the USSR to use nuclear weapons back in their own next conflict against the west.
The US will absolutely accept a Libya or Syria style situation. The zionists are deranged and hope for a puppet but the reality is so long as the central government is removed and the IRGC scattered to the wind the US can and should count it as a victory for their hegemony and the final piece in their designs for strangling China that they need in place before launching a hot war and all out sanctions and decoupling against them to decide who controls the rest of this century and sets the agenda for the next.
I cannot recall a non-Marxist-Leninist power that resisted a direct war with the US and "won". The Taliban sorta but also sort not because the US held them off for 20 years and successfully occupied the country for as long and really just kind of got tired and decided it wasn't important to hold the country and wanted its resources elsewhere. I also can't say for certain the US didn't decide they wanted the Taliban to stick around in some form and couldn't bring themselves to get rid of a former tool like that for some reason and so hampered their efforts to truly win by trying to have their cake (image of western liberal "democracy" puppet gov) and eat it too (Taliban proxies to use on others elsewhere from say Pakistan).
If the US could keep Iran from being an anti-imperialist power for a mere 10 years that would likely be enough time for their designs on China. The fact is the US tried to turn Afghanistan into a proper western puppet state under the neo-con model of building this perfect western puppet "democracy", if they'd from the start just tried to keep it destabilized by creating other factions like ISIS and so on and playing them and warlords off the Taliban it's quite possible they could keep it in a Libya type failed state situation without one singular government for decades. They also were not able to operate with full effort against the Taliban in Pakistan as though they flew tons of drones and killed lots of them and lots of civilians Pakistan's nuclear status meant they couldn't just straight up invade even if they'd wanted to. Iran has no nuclear armed neighbor its forces can retreat over the border to regroup under, all its neighbors are hostile and in bed with the zionist entity or client states of the US.
Even wins by ML states are few. Korea is kind of a half-win as the DPRK remained but the US occupies the southern half to this day, Vietnam was the only solid, uncontestable win. Every other attempted revolution was crushed usually using coups, fascist strongmen, military juntas, and so on without the need for a direct US war.
Eh sorry but people said the same type of things about Syria and Assad at the start of that. The US doesn't have to defeat Iran right away, they just have to disable the central government, plunge the country into economic and other forms of chaos and keep them in a state of civil or other war for years until society starts to break down. Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria. This isn't just a "greater israel" thing like Lebanon was, Iran is a bonafide regional power and a big partner for China and Russia.
In 2002 Iran's small boats very well would have defeated the US navy in the strait of Hormuz but 2002 didn't have zionist/US/UK hackers who could disable and destroy their logistics, communication, and physical equipment with advanced malware and electronic warfare. It didn't have an Iran that had been under the kinds of sanctions it's been under for decades that started in the 2000 with Bush's "axis of evil" stuff.
I hope Iran pulls out a win but I could see them collapsing so many ways. This is a big, big moment and if they do manage to stand and fend off the US it spells doom for the empire. If the empire wins well China will find itself in a very, very bad position and with it the world.
The chickening out for me IMO is likely Trump deploying the bunker busters on Fordow, striking it with several of them if not half a dozen then taking a step back, throwing up his hands and saying sorry bad dudes but we can't allow you to have a nuke, but if you don't hit us back we can consider this the end of things and we'll sit back, just don't close the straits or punch America directly. And they'll then cast Iranian response as aggression, say oh we tried to avoid this, they wouldn't negotiate, they escalated, etc, etc.
So he tries to duck the conflict within the confines of appeasing the neo-cons and the zionist entity and within the confines of not looking incredibly weak and maybe even thinking bombing them is a negotiating tactic to get them back to the table because he's like that but the response forces the hand and he isn't able to back down and gets walked into this thing while looking and feeling not entirely happy with it. Which isn't to say that planners of empire won't be happy with it of course because they will. PNAC needs this so badly. Rubio and others will bully and shout him into committing. They're just trying to get him to dip his toes in, in a way they know forces an Iranian response so they can use that to force him to wade in deeper. Once that first move is made I don't think there is any turning back.
Maybe if the Iranians turn the other cheek but that has immense dangers of its own and will likely embolden the zionist entity to start more strikes and bombing campaigns down the road in 6-12 months because Iran won't hit the US. For one thing the US loves salami-slicing tactics so turning the other cheek now will encourage Trump or someone later to hit them again in another escalation.
Just reminding viewers that his name doesn't matter. It's the state he represents that did this and which should be held to blame for it as the clear and obvious result of decades of propaganda, aggression, and build-up. Not one man.