Yes

 

Are they in the room with us now?

The cartoon is from the New York Times. The cartoonist is Bill Bramhall. Actually some sort of negotiations might be happening. We don't know.

The USA after the Cold War ended

 

“Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.”

“There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people.”
Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes

The Mossad CIA MI6 plot to create an Iranian revolution caused a lot of Kurdish and Baluchi fighters and Mossad assets to be killed

Mossad was impatient and thousands of their people died. They would have been useful now to the Israel-USA hippogriff, but I am pretty confident that the Iranian government was anyway too strong. 

Max Blumenthal:

NY Times has essentially confirmed that Israel played a role in stimulating the violent regime change riots that left around 3000 dead in Iran this January 8 and 9, but which were marketed in the West as pro-democracy protests.


It was well understood by the Mossad that those riots would help stimulate military action by Trump.


Israeli intel merely needed to convince the feeble-minded president that a wave of decapitation strikes would unleash a massive upheaval to immediately topple the Islamic Republic. The January riots were presented to Trump as a preview of what was to come.


Western media, including the NY Times and The Guardian, played a central role in legitimizing Israel's deception by falsely characterizing the violent regime change riots as mere protests, massively inflating the death toll and covering up the fact that many were murdered by the Israel-backed rioters themselves


The whole of Western media and the Western human rights industrial complex deliberately misrepresented the real character of those riots. But now that the war they helped to instigate is going badly for the US and Israel, that same media is now free to reveal a few kernels of truth.

MB is right about the outrageous role of Western media. In fact thanks to the Russians showing the Iranians how ro hack Star Link the intended revolution did not happen. We do not know if Israel knew there would not be an uprising if the top leaders were killed but it seems the head of Mossed did think this. Israel does not care so long as they have a war between the USA and Iran and the latter is defeated. Yes Trump is showing many signs of a deteriorating mind on top of whatever psychological disorders he may have had before.

I watched the former head of MI6 last night say the Iranian government machine gunned up to 10,000 people in January and this long-term dooms the regime. That's much less than the 30,000 journalists quote which comes from a NED front organisation, meaning from the Americans. 

I am not convinced. I think the people killed were mostly Mossad CIA assets and there is no real evidence to the contrary. 

He said he had spent many years fighting the IRGC. I suppose they really have become a threat to Great Britain. Heads of MI6 see things in terms of threats like generals do. Most Muslim terrorists have been Sunni, of course, like the new government in Syria that England gets on well with.

Many  British and American conservatives cheer on this war and many Americans see Trump as a hero. What on earth does this have to do with Great Britain or Europe? I have no idea and have been in Romania since the 1990s. I can only think people, went mad after 11 September 2001 and see themselves as at war with all Islamic extremists, though allies with some extremists ad hoc. It is obvious that Israel is the threat to peace not Iran but they cannot see that. 

It is very worrying but great is the truth and shall prevail - except it very often does not prevail. People believe all sorts of legends that they mistake for history: about Washington, Lincoln, Chamberlain and Churchill and on and on.

Clown show

 From Larry Johnson's new site, which you should visit.

Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez: Iran has spent 40 years preparing for this war. It will be very much worse than Iraq.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez decided to naturalise 500,000 immigrants recently. I do not have much good to say about the man but I agree with what he said today to the Cortes. 

He warned that Iran has spent 40 years for preparing for this war. It will be very much worse than Iraq.

"This is not the same scenario as the illegal war in Iraq. We are facing something far worse. Much worse. With a potential impact that is far broader and far deeper. This time, it's an absurd and illegal war. A cruel one that sets us back from achieving our economic, social, and environmental goals."

I am not concerned about economic, social and environmental goals. Politicians shouldn't have many goals beyond good governance and low taxes, but avoiding war is one. Not aiding countries that start unjust wars is another.

What They Said

"But the weird thing about this fantasy is the fantasy seems to change minute by minute. I mean George Bush and the Iraq War, that was a fantasy. But it was a coherent fantasy. I mean it all went a cropper of course. But they had outlined this. They were just wrong in all of their assumptions, but Trump doesn't even seem to have any assumptions. And they could change. I'm sure they will change today. Where are we at this morning? This morning we're at he's going to negotiate. Except he doesn't know who he's going to negotiate with. Nor does he know what he's going to negotiate. What does he want? What would we take? What would they give? None of this is clear, except that they have a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz, which could have been anticipated." 

Michael Wolff

"Christ will return... Will he be a supporter of the criminal killers who shed the blood of millions of people in order to have power over oil, money and markets? Or will he be a supporter of the weak, the poor, the maltreated and the oppressed?" 

"Christians and Hezbollah unite against 'Epstein empire'". The very pro-Israeli Daily Telegraph published this off-message news story but then took it down. I found it and publish it here.

Did the newspaper receive a call from MI6 or the Foreign Office or even the Israeli Embassy?


Fortunately it is still available via MSN here and I copied it below in case they take it down from MSN and Yahoo News.







The complexity of Lebanon is apparent in few places more than Ras Baalbek, a Catholic Christian town in Lebanon’s northern Bekaa Valley close to the borders with Syria.

The town, which boasts two Byzantine churches, has teamed up with Hezbollah in a bid to preserve its heritage and protect its 6,000 devout Catholic residents.

So close are the two communities that the Iranian-backed militant group buys a Christmas tree each year for the village.

“The relationship between the village and Hezbollah is stronger than with the Pope,” Rifiat Nasrallah, 60, a quarryman and village leader whose marble sarcophagi line the village cemetery, told The Telegraph during a visit in the midst of war.

British opinion about the Iran war -most say a plague on both their houses

12% of British people and 7% of Conservatives sympathise more with Iran, 19% more with the Israelis and Americans. 

22% of American Republicans and 93% of Democrats disapprove of the US strikes on Iran. I wonder if the question were phrased like that how British Conservatives would answer. 

I also wonder how anyone can approve of these strikes.

Bad news

This is the most extraordinary and worrying war I have seen in a long lifetime following politics obsessively. 

Everything is different now. 

It is possible that the United States will be forced to leave the Middle East which would be good for every country in the world including the US, Israel excepted. 

But can Israel and their Saudi ally prevent this? 

In any case financial Armageddon looks likely. 

Will Europeans leave Nato or are they too frightened of the Russian bugbear? A bugbear that is the product of, to put it very mildly, inept American diplomacy. 

Nato as we know protects Nato members from the dangers created by belonging to Nato, rather as America protects the Middle East from dangers created by America protecting it.

Trump wants to obliterate something but it may be he obliterates American global rule. 

History is full of such ironies, as Gibbon knew.

The Economist:

Even if Donald Trump and Iran reached a deal to stop fighting tomorrow, it would thus be another four months before markets regained some semblance of normality. Producers elsewhere cannot crank up output fast enough to recover past losses. The result is to shave off some 3% of planned global oil production this year. Every month Ras Laffan stays shut, the world loses around 7m tonnes of lng—nearly 2% of projected annual supply. And full capacity will, owing to the latest strikes, be lower than before. The upshot is that production will fall 4% short of demand this year even if Qatar started pumping what it can today.
The implications are stark. Global crude stocks, on course to end March in the bottom third of their historical range, will also keep dwindling for weeks after Hormuz reopens. As countries with thin buffers run out, they could trigger bouts of panic-buying and price spikes. Bidding wars for lng are equally likely. The last cargoes from Qatar to leave before Hormuz closed will reach Asia and Europe in days, says Ashley Sherman of Vortexa, a ship-tracker. After that, buyers must seek supplies elsewhere or go without, jeopardising the restocking of reserves for winter (see chart 4).
Oil and gas traders are still banking on a spring miracle. The world is praying for one. But even if Mr Trump and Iran’s ayatollahs grant this wish, the logistics of oil and gas will not be easily appeased. Energy markets will be living with the war’s fallout well into northern winter.


Fred Weir:
Through the hurricanes of bluster, and jungle of utterly contradictory statements, it's becoming more obvious with each passing hour that Trump is in way over his head, and has no idea what to do. This is better than his previous threat to "devastate" Iran, but solves nothing. And it's likely that neither Iran nor Trump's wag-the-dog ally Netanyahu will even let this dodge play out.

Alan Dershowitz, Epstein's lawyer and friend: 

"This is the most important war since 1939, since Nazi Germany. Had President Trump been in charge in 1935, 1936, I think the Holocaust would have been prevented."

General Stanley McChrystal in an interview in the New York Times: 'If you like this war enjoy this first part, because this is the best part'

"I tell people about this war, if you like this war enjoy this first part, because this is the best part. Because everything after this will be harder."

"There are three great seductions that happen to American administrations and to the military.

Historian David Gibbs is convincing on the reason for the Iranian war

Talking on Neutrality Studies he reminds us that Trump is only following the policy of his predecessors in seeing Iran as an enemy. Why did they?

"And so they [the US] were looking for an enemy and Iran was one of multiple enemies. Russia obviously, China is another enemy, Arab terrorism defined very broadly as an enemy and all of these I think didn't come out of nowhere. I mean obviously there's a psychological need for a bogeyman for a simple explanation for all our problems. I suppose that but I don't like psychological explanations. I think there were material interests here and the material interests were to find some justification for this enormous military the United States had, and it was only slightly downsized after the Cold War, to find a justification for hundreds of overseas bases, again which had no function if the Soviet Union was gone but it needed a function. They had to find a function. There were fleets around the world. There was, you know, the the security apparatus, the CIA and all the other agencies."

Interestingly, he says he refuses to mention the Arab-Israel conflict in his classes for fear of being penalised as a result of complaints by pro-Israel students and the Israel lobby.

Larry Johnson thinks Iran has been more sinned against than sinning, going back to the Iran-Iraq war which the US sponsored

This is worth half an hour of your time.

Johnson is former CIA, intelligent and trustworthy. He talks about the CIA attempt at a colour revolution in Iran in December 2025 and January 2026, like the one in Kiev in 2014.

From what Max Blumenthal and many others say, the people Iran killed were mostly assets of the CIA and Mossad but Western journalists believe the CIA story.

They display a sublime lack of scepticism which ill befits journalists, but you see this all the time with most things. I do not really understand it.

America calls Iran the world's biggest sponsor of terrorism but it's not true unless you are thinking of Hamas and Hezbollah attacking Israelis which is part of the Arab-Israel conflict.

Hamas and Hezbollah were certainly subsidised by Iran though Hamas was subsidised by Netanyahu too and he built it up to sideline Fatah. Hezbollah was created by Iran. Still, Hamas and Hezbollah are not Iranian proxies but Iranian allies.

The distinction is very important.

Larry Johnson says that America and Israel are much bigger sponsors of terrorism. He also repeats the story of the US backing Saddam's invasion of Iran which killed 3 million Iranians including 300,000 by chemical weapons.

My question. What is the killing of almost fifty Iranian leaders in what had been till that moment peacetime but terrorism?

This is a serious question, gentle reader.

3 days after starting the war it was apparent to thoughtful people that America would lose it badly

Sadly most of the world will too, Iran and her friends excepted.

“Why would Israel say something that is not true?”

BBC star TV presenter and former political editor Laura Kuenssberg asked a British minister yesterday “Why would Israel say something that is not true?” after he contradicted the country’s claim that Iran has missiles capable of hitting London.

Yet some people claim the BBC is biassed against Israel.

"I don't think Israel has a future as a society because it is built on death."

"I don't think Israel has a future as a society because it is built on death."

"I believe in the American people just as I believe in the Iranian people. I cannot believe in the Israeli people because 97% of them approve of genocide."

This is Israeli Professor Haim Bresheeth talking to the wonderful Katie Halper. 

He says Trump dislikes war but Israel is blackmailing him.

Trump (who was 'a failure as a businessman') is obviously blackmailable. Who doubts that?

I recommend this podcast. 

Well said

"Iran is exercising its legitimate right to defend its sovereignty, its people, and its resources, after being subjected to blatant aggression”. I hope nobody disagrees with these words of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the French left-wing party.

The British Daily Telegraph pointed out that he condemned Hamas's "war crimes" on 7 October 2023 without using the word terrorism. If he is the next French president, as is very possible, I expect he would obey America just like all his recent predecessors. 

Chirac looks a great man for pleading with America not to invade Iran.

Curious Houthis

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

I draw you attention to the curious incident of the Houthis in the Red Sea who can stop Saudi Arabia exporting almost 4 million barrels of oil per day (out of the roughly 9.5 million barrels she produced before the war).

Trump has no way out

How can Iran not win this? 

Can the world avoid a financial crisis?

“The only thing that’s relevant to the market is the Strait of Hormuz and the impact on the price of oil and how that feeds through the supply chain and rattles the economies of the world. So that’s where the focus is. It’s so serious and so dangerous that it just can’t last long, because everybody in the world wants it resolved.” Lloyd Blankfein, former head of Goldman Sachs, quoted in today's Daily Telegraph. 

But of course Iran does not want it resolved and the Iranian government is not going to be toppled. 

Many Israelis by now may want this to end.

Trump cannot meet the various goals he might have set (he hasn't been clear about what they are) and Iran has an extraordinarily large number of missiles to fire at ships.

Michael Wolff thinks Trump chose to attack Iran to do what no other president dared. 

This is why he told the easily disproved lie that a former president told him he wished he had attacked Iran. In his head they are saying this to him. 

He asked the service chiefs if he had the power to 'obliterate' (his favourite word) and was told 'yes, but..' and ignored the but.

Likud Prime Ministers

Benjamin Netanyahu

“Terrorism is the deliberate, systematic murder, maiming and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear in order to gain political ends.” Speaking in June, 1984 at a conference held by the Jonathan Institute, named after Benjamin Netanyahu’s older brother, who was killed in 1976 during the raid at Entebbe. 

Yitzhak Shamir 

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: ‘Ye shall blot them out to the last man.’ 

50% of American Democrats think Israel committed genocide in Gaza

John Mearsheimer has seen data that show that half of people who voted for Biden decided that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

This is very important.

Other polls show 30 percent of Republicans under 30 no longer support Israel. This has huge implications for the world.

Gaza lost Kamala the 2024 election but much good it did the Palestinians or the Iranians.

Trump's Vietnam

The Iranian war is shaping up to be as disastrous for America as the Vietnam war or more so. Fun fact: Donald Trump described his relations with women in the 1970s and 1980s as "my Vietnam".

Will anyone negotiate with America or Israel again?

Is murdering heads of state and leaders now normal? Yes. No European government condemned it, nor did the Western press.

Strait of Hormuz could be closed for half a year or more

CNN breaking news: "A recent internal assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that was circulating inside the Pentagon in recent weeks determined that Iran could potentially keep the passage shut for anywhere from one to six months, four sources familiar with the document told CNN."

This blog told you this on March 11. I didn't get it immediately but it was obvious before March 11. 

"Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."

Keeping the Strait closed is Iran's H-bomb. 

America well deserves this punishment but it is the rest of the world that will suffer.

But why only six months?

Lebanese cellist Mahdi Saheli playing Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian's Andantino in the ruins of southern Beirut

 

Lebanese cellist Mahdi Saheli playing Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian's Andantino in the ruins of southern Beirut. pic.twitter.com/jdmMXFjYxx

— Kegham Balian (@kbalian90) March 18, 2026

I am ashamed of my country's government but few are any better - Ireland and Spain maybe

On the day that the USA attacked Iran Professor Jeffrey Sachs watched country after country on the UN Security Council, including Britain and France, condemn Iran!

“Every country that condemned Iran after an Israeli-U.S. aggression hosts an American military base on its soil. They are not sovereign countries. They dare not speak. They host the U.S. military. They host the CIA. They watch their backs.”

Only three countries on the Security Council condemned the US  attack: Russia, China and Somalia.

A sleazy, brutal US administration bought by billionaires

Alastair Crooke's sources tell him that Trump approved the Israeli bombing of the Iran's South Pars oil field, which led Iran to attack the Qatari Ras Laffan gas facility where a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas was produced, costing Qatar billions and sending prices soaring. Jared Kushner, whose fund has received huge sums from Qatar, called his father-in-law to report Qatar's anger at the US and Trump therefore lied that he hadn't known about it. Was there ever a more corrupt or more incompetent US President or one with so little concern for international law or honour?

The Israelis killed Ali Larjani because he was negotiating to provide Trump with an off-ramp.

Gaza and Epstein have not changed the attitudes of many or any British and European journalists. 

They now support the US-Israeli unprovoked attack on Iran, as if their countries were at war not two foreign ones on other continents. 

I recommend Max Blumenthal who is a much better source of information than mainstream journalists.

Here he is talking to Andrew Napolitano:

'And this is the Israeli strategy. This is why the Israelis killed Ali Larjani, who was essentially running the Iranian government, because he was negotiating behind the scenes with the Gulf States to provide Trump with an off-ramp and the Israelis need to keep the US in this war for as long as possible because the Israeli goal is not the same as the US goal. 

'We don't actually even know what the US goal is, but the Israeli goal is to destroy Iran as a nation. And to do that, they need the US military to be involved for as long as possible. And Iran is demonstrating that it can not only hit back, but it can reclaim escalation dominance. And that the entire narrative that we're hearing about the Iranian military from the Israelis, which has infested our own media narrative, that their missile launching capacity is been wiped out, that their drone production is wiped out, is totally false. 

'Pete Hegseth the defe-, whatever he is, war secretary, claimed that Iran's air defenses had been flattened. And guess what happened today? For the first time in history, an F-35 was hit with a missile, an Iranian [missile]. And the pilot only escaped because he was probably on the border region in western Iran and was able to get back. Otherwise, he probably would have been taken captive. So, the US doesn't even have control over Iranian skies. This caused all the other bombers that were on their way to Iran to to basically pause and turn around after this pilot got hit.'

This is very much worse than I thought. Congress should impeach Trump now

 

You cannot blame Netanyahu for taking advantage – probably never again would his country get to deal with a president so gullible

Christopher Caldwell is characteristically  brilliant in the Spectator today.

'You cannot blame Netanyahu for taking advantage – probably never again would his country get to deal with a president so gullible. But as soon as the attacks began on Iran, the news brought talk of tactical ‘divergences’ between Israel and the United States. Israel wanted Iran wrecked and weak and was hitting oil infrastructure that the United States had warned it not to. The United States wanted the oil industry up and running – first to lay claim to the oil for Trump, as happened in Venezuela, later to prevent the tit-for-tat strikes on Middle Eastern oil that could cause a global depression.'

Do you not know, my son, with how very little wisdom the world is ruled? (Count Oxiensterna)

An hour ago.

Retired Judge Andrew Napolitano: 'What are the 2,500 Marines going to do?'

Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson: 'Be killed.'

Can this be true? No. Surely Trump lives to be admired and to win.

Sohrab Ahmari in UnHerd: 

One almost wishes, however, that they had succeeded with DeSantis, who by all accounts is a competent crisis manager who has cooperated effectively with Sunshine State lawmakers to legislate his priorities. As president, DeSantis would have been an old-school, donor-beholden hawk. But we are getting the same thing with the second Trump administration, only with the chaos, messaging confusion, and sheer incompetence characteristic of the multiply-bankrupt ex-developer and reality-TV shouter.

If the United States was bound to waste $200 billion (the Pentagon’s latest ask from Congress) on another Mideast war radiating instability into Europe and beyond, would that it were under a commander in chief blessed with an orderly mind and advised by policy heavyweights instead of yes men. A president who wouldn’t be surprised by the Iranians lashing out at the Gulf — something they repeatedly threatened to do in case of attack. A president who wouldn’t suddenly beg European allies to join him in the adventure, then insult them when they declined. A president whose son-in-law wouldn’t shamelessly commingle diplomacy with the pursuit of profit.

Please click on the link about Jared Kushner receiving billions from Arab governments for his investment fund while conducting negotiations on behalf of President Trump.

Quotations

Cardinal Newman described the Church of England in 1864 as “a serviceable breakwater against doctrinal errors more fundamental than its own." Daily Telegraph

“The mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.” Goethe, quoted by Oswald Spengler

"The great replacement isn’t a theory, much less a conspiracy. It’s measurable, physical reality that has changed the West more profoundly than any war." Tucker Carlson

Virginia Woolf’s diary entries on James Joyce’s Ulysses: 

“An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. … I finished ‘Ulysses’ and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.”

Iran on X

Arnaud Bertrand

@RnaudBertrand

·

Mar 18

It's now unarguable that the war on Iran is one of the most blatant crimes of aggression in history. You now have not 1 but 2 external participants of the US-Iran talks (Oman’s foreign minister and the UK's National Security Advisor) who confirm that the US and Israel attacked despite Iran effectively meeting US conditions for a deal - ensuring it could never build a nuclear weapon, permanently.

Glenn Diesen

@Glenn_Diesen

·

12h

The US goes for massive escalation with the attack on the world's largest gas field, and then suggests to end such attacks. This tactic will not work. If Iran permits the US to decide when to escalate and de-escalate, its deterrence collapses and it will also lose the war. The energy infrastructure of the Gulf States will now burn and US escalation control remains a delusion.

Hamja Ahsan

@HamjaAhsan

·

Mar 16

I am prosecuted German for saying for a Facebook comment on the Guardian written in UK which had "Fuck NATO" and criticised Olaf Scholz as a "neoliberal-fascist pig." for demilitarisation of Germany, led by Volker Beck. Months in prison or a 12,000 euro fine. and put in an official German State Anti-semitism guide for an artwork about a fictional Fried chicken chain called Kabul Fried Chicken which had the line "No Chicken for NATO". Have all the documents. I don't return tk Germany as I fear prison.

Trita Parsi

@tparsi

·

Mar 17

The US/Israel bombed an elementary school in Shiraz, and it appears to be another case of AI identifying the target without human oversight. How so? Because the name of the school contains the word "Shahed"...