I have a longer statement below in spoiler tags, but for those who just want to get into the megathread itself, the very short version of my take is: things are going about as well as they realistically could go for Iran as of me writing this on March 2nd; the US and Zionists have clearly misplayed their hand; there’s so much propaganda it’s hard to get a good perspective of the overall conflict; I think if Iran is still fighting on at approximately the same pace as the end of this week then things are looking VERY bad for the West; I am unsure what the ultimate result of this conflict will be now that the new crop of Iranian leadership are in charge after Khamenei’s assassination but am hopeful that anti-American sentiment has been yet further cemented and those in Iran who seek repproachment with the West will be further discredited in favor of those who wish to look East.
My Idle Ramblings
As we are now past the initial 48 hours of the war, what can be said with confidence is that the Iran of today is in a considerably more organized position than they were during the Twelve Days War, as the initial delay on meaningfully responding to enemy attacks was brought from something like 10 hours to about 1 hour. Unfortunately, given the not-insignificant number of Iranian top figures killed, Iran still has considerable opsec problems; whatever the hell Sinwar was doing to stay alive for over a year in the most bombed territory on the planet obviously hasn’t reached Iran yet. However, to Iran’s credit, the recovery was fast and effective, Khamenei had already drawn up detailed plans for the succession chain in the event of his death, and the new figures were clearly in position to take control of the situation within the hour. The name of the game appears to be greater decentralization of the military, making Zionist narratives about “decapitation” essentially meaningless - the hydra has a thousand heads.
This time around, there are fewer direct critiques to level at Russia and China. In an abstract sense, they could certainly “do more” (Xi, donate one million Chinese drones and let Iran and Yemen blot out the sun!), but to be geopolitically serious, it appears that the Twelve Days War delivered a swift kick up the ass of both Iran and China to start working more closely together, and so Iran now has access to Chinese intelligence and satellite tools, has been receiving certain military equipment like much better radars, and, one hopes, will provide greater economic assistance during and after this war’s conclusion.
The overall impacts of the US’s and Zionists’ strikes on Iran, and vice versa, have been very hard to assess due to the customary tsunami of misinformation and comical exaggerations. Clearly, the most sensational claims - that Western aircraft feel safe enough to fly directly over Iranian territory (let alone that they have air superiority, let alone that they have air supremacy); that Iran’s leadership have been killed in meaningful numbers; that Iran is on the verge of collapse or giving in; that Western losses are insignificant; that things are going well or better than expected; etc, are obviously for the general population and peanut gallery, and the situation looks very different from within the halls of power. Nonetheless, stitching every individual missile/drone strike together from both sides into a cohesive picture from which we can draw conclusions has always been a major challenge of present-day warfare, and is certainly challenging here. What can be generally gathered is that Iran does not seem to fear striking Occupied Palestine or American bases directly and with pretty significant firepower, but either is deliberately not focussing on the fleet or does not have the capability to focus on it, leaving American warships intact. And from the highest perspective, it’s unclear whether Iran is only beginning a long term war of attrition, or whether they hope to not overly anger the US and Zionists so that an offramp later is possible, or indeed, that the West is succeeding in attriting Iran’s offensive capabilities faster than Iran can attrit the West’s (or a mixture of all three).
The assassination of Khamenei and other figures is a symbolic victory for the West, as he was one of the last remaining pre-October 7th Resistance leaders alive or in power. Reports are that he stayed at his compound despite being advised in the days before the attack that he should leave, knowing that he would likely very soon die, as he did not want to flee to Russia or hide in bunkers. It’s currently unclear to me how impactful his death will be in the end. On the one hand, it is obvious to every serious analyst that his death will not negatively impact Iran’s military operations, nor will it lead to regime change in the short or medium term - Iran’s government is not a strongman regime (few governments truly are), and the current government is both very durable and has very widespread legitimacy. His replacements and subordinates are already in charge, and from what I can tell, effectively were in charge long before his death.
On the other hand, succession is a bit of a risky process for nations today, in the short and long term. If whoever is left as his replacement at the end of this war - I cannot safely assume it will be Khamenei’s immediate replacement in the current environment of Western strikes - ultimately leans even a little more reformist and towards reproachment with the West than Khamenei did, then this whole war may be worth it to the West regardless of the materiel losses. Alternatively, if this war causes a permanent shift away from repproachment and genuine, sustained, and hard-to-repair damage to America’s foothold in the Middle East as well as the attrition of most of the US’s interceptor missiles, we may indeed be looking at a region soon to be free of Zionist designs. It is much too early for me to distinguish which path we are on.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I’ve seen a lot of users post about the US collapsing and the invasion backfiring, but what’s that based on? The 12 days war had the same start and that one ended with Hezbollah completely fucked and iranian nuclear facilities destroyed, not to mention the massive wave of assassinations. Seems like US capabilities are still fine, doing long-distance bombing runs and so on. The military bases close to Iran have been bombed, but the US didn’t station their important equipment there.
This is not me arguing the US hasn’t suffered losses - Israel is being bombed, that radar got fucked, two F-15s are down and the USS Abraham Lincoln might have been struck. So please don’t respond with “actually here is a video of the US suffering a loss”.
What I am asking isn’t “did the US suffer casualties?” What I am asking is “why do you say the US attack is collapsing? What makes you think the attack has backfired?”
On top of that, does anyone have any idea of the status of Iran at the moment?
Except it very specifically didn’t - the decapitation strikes seemed to have worked back then, with Iran taking a while to start up their response.
This time, despite a way more severe decapitation (at least in the eyes of the US/Israel, of course in reality Iranians aren’t Star Wars droids and Khamenei has no bearing on military operations), Iran kicked their response into gear pretty much immediately.
Additionally, back in the 12-Day War, it seemed that a lot fewer Iranian missiles managed to get through and hit targets in Israel.
You have to look at war through an attritional lens. Fine, but for how long? As @Parzivus@hexbear.net said, officials in the military have openly admitted that they don’t have the munitions to sustain this effort.
Germany looked pretty good in July-September 1941 - and yet, the casualties they were taking (sure, they were killing and capturing way more Soviets, but Germany had way less of a capacity to replace their losses), the fuel they were burning, the supplies they were expending, were setting them up for their eventual running out of steam, and by December, their offensive had ground to a halt.
The very fact that the US had to evacuate the bases already indicates their position is less tenable - planes flown from further away are going to have shorter effective ranges and be less able to actually penetrate deep into Iran, and the reliance of aerial refueling is going to make this whole operation cost way more per-flight-hour.
This is an argument I’ve seen a couple times already online, the “well, the bases are empty anyway so the Iranians striking them doesn’t mean much” - but the whole point of a base is for it to not be empty, to allow you to project power from it! If the strategic situation changes to the point where you have to abandon the bases because you can’t defend them, that’s practically equivalent to if actual enemy ground troops had just rolled in and taken them, it’s you admitting that you can no longer actually maintain a presence in the region. The US can’t just keep a carrier group on permanent deployment in the Gulf until the end of time - perhaps the US of the Cold War could have, but not the modern one. That’s why they invested in building those bases in the first place - them being pushed out is already degrading the empire’s capacity to project power into the region in the future.
uh… citation needed? They were struck - whatever actual damage was dealt still remains unclear.
War is politics through other means. Iran has already achieved its political goal of completely discrediting the Arab comprador regimes through their inability to defend themselves and discrediting their imperial master’s willingness to defend them. No amount of cruise missile the US fires at Iran can repair the damage. The comprador regimes all got unceremoniously thrown under the bus for the sake of the Zionist entity exactly as how every single AoR leader and commentator said they would. These pathetic Arab and Muslim Zionists have been asking it for so long, and now they’re going to fucking pay.
Bahrain is ripe for regime change and Kuwait’s military is proving to be very “accident” prone. May a true Arab Spring sweep across the region, sparing not a single Muslim Zionist.
The US military has openly admitted they don’t have the capacity for a larger war. The extreme long range missiles they’ve been using as well as the air defence missiles are both very limited in number after years of sending them to Ukraine and Israel. If they want to continue the amount of attacks they’ve been doing, it will require flying deeper and deeper into Iranian airspace while accepting more US casualties from poorly defended bases.
Of course, we don’t really know how long this can be sustained by either side, or really anything that’s happening inside Iran that isn’t reported by state media. But the goal of regime change doesn’t seem possible without US boots on the ground, and that isn’t happening without 9/11 2.
The US/Israel wanted to trigger a massive uprising that toppled the goverment and installed pro-zionist pro-Shah forces, everyday that isn’t happening means the attack has failed and everyday Iran bombs and destroys significant assets across the region means the US/Israeli attack has backfired
But the greatest damage Iran has inflicted isn’t to the US or even Israel directly, but to the stability and credibility of the Arab comprador states, Iran has humiliated them in the eyes of their people, called into question their iron grip on power and unlike the US with its infinite money reserves, the gulf states can’t simply brush off the loss of tens of billions like its nothing, especially when those lost assets are physical
The continued inability of the US empire to provide total cover for its clients is the true damage Iran has inflicted on the long term viability of the empire, the loss of expensive military assets is just a bonus
Yeah, I thought they would wait for their next color revolution attempt before bombing Iran. A few astroturfed protests and then a few bombs to help “liberal reformers” and “moderate rebels”.
The bombs humiliate the liberal reformers and prove their enemies right, though. Everyone in Iran knows what America wants to do to them. Not even the most childish comprador could ignore this now.
The ones in diaspora still would deny it. They say, “Whatever, we will rebuild it, this ayatollahs just need to go.”
everybody who comments on geopolitics, especially war on social media is a little kookoo in the head about it