Thursday, 5 March 2026

A friend asked me at dinner tonight how long I thought the war would last

I was stumped. If Trump is wise he'll end it in a couple of days but it looks like he will stir up the Kurds, Baluchis and perhaps even the Azeris to rebel. The Kurds I expect will fight and die and be betrayed by the Yanks in Iran as in Iraq and Syria.

All because Trump wanted to score a win and was conned by Netanyahu. The War of Trump's Ear.



Well done, Sir Keir! Starmer for the first time has done something right

I can't tell you how much I despise Kemi Badenoch for saying Ukraine and Israel are fighting proxy wars on our behalf. 

"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."


Dr. Stephen R. Parsons writes this

[An Iranian woman in Denmark in her early thirties] told me that 40,000 people had been killed in the two-day protest in January, and although her parents still lived in the country, she put her faith in the coming military attack by the US (´the only hope`). Again, a case of my enemy`s enemy is my friend.

First, of all I told her that a figure of 40,000 was absurd and I asked her how she as a scientist could believe in such a number? I said I`m not in doubt that the authorities in Iran are ruthless when it comes to repressing opposition but any serious person knows that such a high number of fatalities would require bombs, tanks, and machineguns and for people not to run away. The Israelis have needed 2 years and an estimated 200,000 tonnes of explosives on a population confined to an area 141 sq. miles to kill about 100,000. Moreover, if really tens of thousands had been killed, mass burials would be necessary, given that every inch of Iran is under satellite observation – the Americans would have released pictures of such a thing. I`m afraid I`m getting crotchety in my old age – it makes me angry when educated people don`t use their common sense and just swallow such obvious propaganda. One believes something because one wants to believe it (on one occasion, another colleague told me she believed the report in her newspaper that the Russians had blown up the Nord Stream pipeline).

If 40,000 had been killed, then an attack using 500 missiles or even a tactical nuclear weapon seems less outrageous. Since when have unprovoked (Iran has not attacked another country – it has been the victim of attacks by Iraq, Israel, and America) aerial attacks not led people in the said countries to back up their government/state? Even if such a military action collapses the existing power structure (which I doubt – recently, an estimated 30% of the population were out on the streets to mark the founding of the Islamic Republic), what would come in its place? As I said to the woman in question, ´don`t think something cannot be worse than it already is`(there needs to be some coherent political strategy that doesn`t mean you end up as a fifth column for foreign powers that are not motivated by the interests of the Iranian people). Ethnic division and bitter civil war, and a splitting up of the country as has happened in Libya and Syria? In Syria, the Kurds (who put their faith in the Americans) are now being militarily suppressed, and the country has a former ISIS/al-Qaeda leader as its president, with areas under Israeli and Turkish occupation. As with Iraq, the historic presence of Christians has now ended.

The United States is now an amoral predator, dropping 2,000 lb bombs on Tehran

America is dropping 2,000 lb bombs on Tehran. 

Bombing open cities used to be considered barbaric. 

It became normal in World War Two but it remained and remains barbaric.

See here the damage being wrought on civilians in a war that has no justification, legal, moral or even pragmatic. 

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima weighed about 9,000 lb but the nuclear device's yield was exponentially higher than conventional 2,000 lb bombs due to fission.

The Iranians will like America after this?

The United States is now "a predatory hegemon", a dominant great power that “views all bilateral relations as inherently zero-sum and seeks to extract the greatest possible benefits from each one”, according to Stephen Walt in February 2026 in an article in Foreign Affairs, house magazine of the US defence establishment. 

You recall that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer wrote the leading book about the Israel Lobby which Jeffrey Epstein got cancelled with the help of Alan Dershowitz.

Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary-General: "NATO is there to protect us collectively against any adversary, be it Russia or whoever, or terrorism. But also it is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage." 

That's candid, at least. It's as much aggressive as defensive and we'd all be better off without it.




It's obligatory to refer to NATO as a "defensive alliance" even as it attacks countries that have not even threatened NATO countries. Here Rutte explains that the role of NATO also entails projecting power around the world.
We had air superiority over Vietnam, and spent 8 years dropping millions of tons of bombs on it. They never begged for peace, let alone let us pick their leader.