A typically excellent digest of recent events from Simplicius, published earlier today, June 15th. I'll post all the text, with some minor sub-edits, and only select images:
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True Promise 3: Iran Responds With Long-Awaited Hypersonic Retaliation
Iran launched the next stage of their True Promise 3.0 operation, targeting various sites of Israeli energy and military infrastructure. This time it reportedly included the latest Fattah-1 hypersonic missiles, which made quite the dazzling impact all over Tel Aviv and northern Israel—a sight so spectacular it is rivaled only by last year’s Oreshnik strikes.
[video via article]
The scenes were almost too unreal to believe, like something from an over-produced Michael Bay blockbuster. Among the targets was the Haifa refinery and Israeli research center of the Weizmann Institute for Science in Rehovot, near Tel Aviv:
[see also link to post 8542 posted earlier for video footage - TQ]
What role does Haifa’s refinery have, that Iran targeted? The Haifa Oil Refinery in northern occupied Palestine supplies more than 60% of Israel’s fuel needs, from gasoline and diesel to jet fuel for the Air Force. With these facilities damaged in tonight's Iranian attack, Israel’s will face a fuel problem. This successful attack on Haifa’s refinery is a strategic blow to Israel's economic and military backbone. The fact that Israel remains silent on the impacts on its refinery, and has not yet said anything but focused on the impact in Tamra—which I believe was caused by Israel’s own failed interceptor missile (we’ll have to see), shows that the damage was painful. And it’s only the beginning…
The New York Times, citing images shared with them, reports that Israeli research centre, The Weizmann Institute for Science, has been damaged by an Iranian ballistic missile in the most recent attacks on central Israel. The building is located in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, and a fire has reportedly broken out in one of the buildings which contains laboratories.
Meanwhile, Israel had likewise hit Iran’s largest natural gas field—the South Pars—which also happens to be the largest in the world:
Israel is bombing Iran's ability to export oil and natural gas. This will remove Iran's ability to export about 2 million bpd, most of which goes to China. Iran's South Pars natural gas field is shut down, Shahran oil field is on fire. Multiple oil refineries in Iran are reportedly on fire. This will cause gasoline and diesel shortages in Iran. Oil and natural gas prices will skyrocket when markets open on Monday.
However, Israel’s first round of strikes predictably did much less damage than claimed. Most people have no idea how to do BDA and simply jump to conclusions based on emotive images of one “destroyed” object or another.
Take Tabriz facility for instance, one or two small buildings were ‘damaged’:
Natanz—a gigantic facility, as can clearly be seen—saw a few power transformers and a substation receive slight to moderate damage:
Furthermore, it was also shown that most of Israel’s strike footage against Iranian ground assets turned out to be decoys, as none of the MRBMs were seen to ignite at all after massive ordnance landed on top of them.
Source:
https://x.com/simpatico771/status/1933895237195211075
Likewise, claims of ‘Israeli air superiority’ were a sloppy concoction stitched together from footage of low-flying IAI Heron drones briefly circling over Tehran for PR photos—likely before being shot down, as clips emerged of some ‘large aircraft’ Iran claimed were destroyed F-35s, but which were probably drones. Also, claims of Israeli ‘infiltration’ success and ‘secret bases’ appeared to be more exaggerated psyop fodder as it turned out Israelis were operating out of secret Azerbaijan bases, launching drones and various other objects at Iran from every direction. This, by the way, is not anything new—from 2012:
The only part of the operation that did prove relatively successful was the assassination of key Iranian leaders and nuclear figures.
After the strikes I had posted on twitter:
The ultimate falsifiability test on the 'success' of Israeli strikes: watch how quickly Israel will claim Iran is "once again" close to getting the bomb. Celebrations now, but in 2-3 months Bibi will be screeching that Iran is once more "at the 90% mark" of enrichment.
The biggest question: when Bibi screeches in 2-3 months, will current "celebrators" admit the strikes were a total failure? Or will it be swept under the rug like every previous time...?
It seems my prediction came true much sooner, because almost immediately it was announced that Israel is actually incapable of destroying Iran’s nuclear program, and that Israel was urgently requesting US help to do so:
Axios writes that Israel lacks the large bunker busters and their strategic-bomber carriers to inflict real damage on Iran’s key underground facilities.
The plan all along was obviously to goad Iran into an overwhelming response that would somehow incite the US to enter the war on behalf of Israel, in order to finish off Iran. The nuclear program was likely a false target, the real objective being the total overthrow of Iran’s leadership and the fomenting of civilian uprisings throughout the country to bring Iran to heel under a Western puppet-led government.
Now Trump stands poised on the knife’s edge of one of his most historically critical decisions—whether to betray the mandate of the American people and consign his second term and dwindling legacy to the trash heap of history, or to pull back on the strings of Miriam Adelson and other donors and show a spine in standing up for the real ‘America First’ vision he promised to all. As of this writing, there are reports of urgent meetings in the Pentagon surrounding precisely the issue of Israel’s request for the US to officially enter the war to ‘finish off Iran’.
The entire non-Western world is now watching this pivotal turning point moment with bated breath: Trump can either make a move to redeem at least some lost hope for America’s global leadership, or instead pound the final nail in its coffin, forever edifying the rising Global South as to the true nature of the immoral, barbarous, and unprincipled West. It is a metaphysical crossroads: Trump will either stay true to his quasi-spiritual mission of world betterment, or he will drown the US in the blood of neocon imperialism.
I had posited on X that, for those white hat ‘believers’, there may be a tiny chance that Trump played us for fools in a game of 5D chess. We learned last time that he had reportedly deceived Iran, lulling them into a false sense of security simply to allow Israel to launch its cowardly sneak attack.
But what if Trump was actually setting a trap for Israel the entire time? Israel had expected the US to join in and “finish off Iran”, while Trump could now pull the rug from under them, leaving Israel to its devices and instead letting Iran finish Israel off—or at least facilitate the deposition of the Bibi regime. Could it be? Maybe there’s a tiny chance it’s possible, if Trump is much smarter than we give him credit for—or simply much more fed up with Bibi.
The more grounded counter to this theory was puzzled out by Zei_Squirrel:
[T]he US and Israel did not launch this war to try to eliminate the nuclear sites. They know they can't. They are too well-protected and dispersed and any damage can be reconstituted in the short-term. They launched it to cause total state collapse in Iran, beginning in phases. The first phase was the eliminate the top military and IRGC leaders, while also going after scientists and mass killing civilians in the process.
This would create the false impression that they are still somewhat restrained and focused on military/nuclear targets.
After taking what they expect will be a similarly constrained response from Iran, they will see that as confirmation that Iran will not adhere to its own stated red lines and is still afraid of meeting Israel at the same level of escalation.
That is their green light to proceed to the next phase, which is to target and kill top political leaders, including Khamenei.
Their hope isn't to replace the current government and state with some re-hash of the monarchist Zionist fascist through his failson, they know there is no base of support for that inside the country.
Their hope is to do another Libya and Syria: Unleash proxy forces they fund and arm together with the Gulf "Arab shield" puppet regimes and NATO-Erdogan and turn it into a spiral of death and chaos, a concocted "civil war" where Iranians are paid and armed by the CIA and Mossad to kill Iranians.
The MEK and other such proxy forces have already been trained and prepared and are ready to be activated. They will begin with car bombings and terrorist attacks mass killing civilians. "ISIS" will reappear again and do its typical job for their CIA-Mossad masters.
The US and Israel decided to launch this war since before Trump was elected, and it has the full and total support of the entire US military-intelligence-industrial complex and the media and political class, both Republicans and Democrats and it would have also happened if Kamala Harris won the election.
They see Iran and the Axis of Resistance and its alliance with Russia and China as the main obstacle to full and total Zionist US-NATO-Israeli imperial hegemony in the region and by extension the world, and they want to destroy it as it is the only one that unlike Russia and China does not have a nuclear deterrent and they want to get to it before it obtains it.
This is an existential war of survival not just for the Iranian state, but for Iran as a nation.
If this project succeeds, the country will be balkanized, ethnic divisions will be stirred by foreign actors, the CIA and Mossad and the Gulf puppets will fund and arm dozens of proxy death and rape-squads roaming their fiefdoms, tens of millions of lives will be destroyed.
Everything must be done to prevent this. Iran has the weapons to do so. It has the capacity to do so, it is only a question of will. Does it have the will to do what it takes to prevent the mass destruction of their own people and nation. I hope it does. We must all hope it does.
My prediction for what will happen?
It all depends on Trump’s decision—but if he chooses not to enter the war, then Israel’s strikes will peter out after a few days, and both sides will likely seek de-escalation, with both declaring ‘major victory’ to their respective home audiences. Israel will fabulate a series of objectives that were ‘completed’, and that will be that. Afterwards Israel’s domestic situation will deteriorate rapidly as no one will be convinced that Israel ‘won’ anything, or did any serious damage to Iran.
But if the US enters, then either all hell can break loose and Iran fulfills its promise to close the Straits of Hormuz, potentially sending the world into an economic tailspin, or—to appease his Israeli handlers—Trump flashes a ‘devastating’ show strike then declares the Iranian nuclear sites as “obliterated” and immediately pulls out to begin a new de-escalation regime with Iran.
I have it as 70/30 chance that saner heads prevail in the US with Trump electing to not enter the war, and things go the way of the first option, but we’ll see how it develops.
Re: Israel vs Palestine/Lebanon/Iran/Yemen/Syria: a New Middle East War
Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
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Point well made.
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Re: Israel vs Palestine/Lebanon/Iran/Yemen/Syria: a New Middle East War
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