It appears that the operations Epic Fury (U.S.) and Roaring Lion (Israel) are not going well at all. The campaign seems to have been predicated on a gamble: that a bit of kinetic action from the air, killing Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (plus 165 school girls + 20 female volleyball players) would galvanize the Iranian people to overthrow their oppressive regime and usher in freedom and democracy. Note, in this day and age, the current regime still insists on the medieval superstitions that men can’t get pregnant and that there are only two genders.
According to Simplicius’s latest sitrep, it seems that Iranian people will have to wait a while longer for their own helping of export-grade democracy and freedom. The New York Times and other reliable sources finally owned up to the fact that the cowardly Iranians completely blinded U.S./Israeli long-range $1 billion AN/TPY-2 air defence radars that provide targets for THAAD and other high end systems.
This is probably the best radar system in the world, but such assets need robust defenses against incoming projectiles and it is now clear that these defenses were either ineffective or non-existent (from the footage that emerged on social media, it seems they were non-existent). In other words, U.S. and Israeli defences have no early warning systems against Iran’s most potent weapons: their massive stockpiles of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones.
Certain reliable sources have reported that the Iranians will run out of ammunition, almost as quickly as the Russians did in Ukraine back in 2022. At the same time, some far-right fringe conspiracy theorists who should probably be debanked and deplatformed, claim that Iran has well over 100,000 of such projectiles, since they have been preparing for this conflict for more than 20 years.
Of course, as they say, truth is the first casualty in war and discerning truth from propaganda is very difficult as each side is claiming superiority. There are a few difficult to contradict reasons why Iran has a very substantial advantage over the U.S. and Israel:
The need for troops on the ground is why the U.S. and Israel are now panic-scrambling whomever they can marshal into Iran: the unenthusiastic and exhausted U.S. troops, the Kurds, the Azeris, Al Qaeda, ISIS or whoever. But as much as Trump and Netanyahu might want and need to win this conflict, it still remains mission impossible: you can penetrate a nation and blow up a lot of things but to take control of a country of the size of Iran, you’d need several million troops.
Their combat operations (which would inevitably turn into a long war of attrition) would have to be supported by robust logistics networks which simply can’t be put together in that region: most of the supplies and materiel would have to be shipped in from the U.S., Europe and other allies who are thousands of miles away.
Such supply chains would be easy to disrupt, and disrupted they are: the strait of Hormuz is closed. These are just some of the reasons why nobody thought it a good idea to invade Iran since its revolution in 1979 - it’s why it never happened until now.
Even in the short-term, the situation could be much worse than we know. Three days ago, Israeli journalist Alon Mizrahi published a piece that should sober up all the war enthusiasts in the West. Here it goes:
"We are witnessing history. Iran, to everyone's surprise, is destroying American bases so thoroughly, on such a large scale, and so decisively that the world is not ready for this. In 4 days, Iran has managed to expand its sphere of military dominance in the region. Iran has destroyed the most valuable and expensive military bases, property, and equipment in the entire world.
The American bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are among the largest military facilities in the entire world. These facilities have cost trillions of dollars over several decades to build. We are talking about the fact that the bulk of the military spending that has been made over more than 30 years has gone up in smoke.
We see radars costing hundreds of millions of dollars each being destroyed in an instant. We see entire military bases being abandoned and burned, looted, and destroyed. And I'm telling you, as far as I know, the U.S. has never suffered such destruction in its entire history, except perhaps for Pearl Harbor, but that was just one attack. No enemy in a conventional war has ever done this to American military forces as Iran is doing right now. It's hard to believe.The military situation is so serious that censorship is blocking almost all new information about this war. If you've noticed, we're getting less and less information every day. Thirty-five years ago, during the first Iraqi war, we were shown endless footage from Iraq. Back then, smart bombs and cameras were a novelty, but every night we were shown night-time footage. Now we hardly see any videos at all.
Understand this! Supposedly, this is the world's largest military power, with the world's largest air capabilities, and on the fourth day of the U.S. offensive, and supposedly breaking through Iranian defenses, we don't see any signs of American dominance in the Iranian sky. Where are all the video recordings of our planes flying over Tehran or any other part of Iran, for that matter?
American soldiers can't even dream of setting foot on Iranian soil. And to understand how desperate this war is, on the fourth day you're already hearing the most insane proposals and ideas from the Trump administration. They're proposing sending military escorts for oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf. What are you even talking about! You want to send American ships into the zone of destruction of thousands of Iranian missiles? NOW no one can get through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranians have been preparing for this for decades. They're flaunting the idea of arming Kurdish militias to invade Iran. What the hell are you talking about? Have you seen a map of Iran!? It seems the Trump administration has never seen a map of Iran! Do you know how vast it is? What does it mean to invade Iran!? Do you think a militia of 10,000 people could invade Iran!? Or even 50,000? Or 100,000? Iran will swallow them up.
The U.S. and Israel have already lost this war. The U.S. and Israel can kill millions of civilians in their homes. They have powerful bombs and can blow up buildings, but they won't win this war. Iran's military infrastructure and weaponry is deep underground all over Iran. Neither the Americans nor, especially, the Israelis have any chance of reaching any of it. They're in deep shit.
They started something they have no chance of finishing. When this all ends, the U.S. will never return to West Asia. There will be no American presence in the Middle East. I'm telling you this now with certainty."
It might be weeks before we know the score, but this is itself a problem: this war wasn’t meant to last weeks - it was meant to be finished in days with the toppling of Iran’s government and their return to the negotiating table - as supplicants. Well, as Robert Burns put it in his 1785 poem, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men oft go awry.” We are in completely uncharted waters.
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By Independent News Roundup