Stanislav Krapivnik tells Pascal Lottez 'the Americans have no plan. They never had a plan. Trump was convinced four days and that's it.'

Stanislav Krapivnik is a former US Army officer now based in Russia. He was born in Lugansk, emigrated to the US as a child, served in the US army, did not like what it was doing in the former Yugoslavia, quit, and returned to Russia. Here he is talking to Pascal Lottez on the latter's podcast yesterday about the Iran War. I didn't know much about his story when I posted this but his Russian sympathies (he is a Russian-American after all) do not necessarily invalidate what he says. It is good to listen to Russian, Chinese and especially Persian voices.

"We're about to enter a much worse phase for two reasons. Obviously, now it's become an oil war and we're watching it step by step  evolve and it gets worse for two reasons. One, the Americans have no plan. They never had a plan. Trump was convinced four days and that's it. You know, we're in day nine and the oil markets have have panicked. They're finally starting to really realize that this is long-term, so oil hit 110. It's not stopping."

"Why are they here? Well, they finally start coming out. They're here because of the oil. I know. It's a shock. Everybody's shocked. They want oil....."

"You know it's  the best commercial for any nation in the world to nuke up.  North Korea, it's not been touched, plenty of resources, will never be touched by America because, you know, they can reach out and touch America. That's that's the lesson for every single nation that has anything worth taking. Arm up. I'm not talking conventionally. Arm up with nukes. We're gonna have an unfortunate thing by America's stupidity. It is every nation that can is going to nuke up. 

"The other thing is you're dealing with Israelis - first of all we know that this all started because of the Israelis. As we heard the big word salad from Marco Rubio and then Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, and they went blah blah blah. Lots of lots and lots and lots of words. And you boil it all down to, well, we weren't planning on doing this, but the Israelis were going in and we had no choice. Sure, you had a choice. You could have gone, Iran, we're not in this. Have fun with the Israelis. Don't touch us. We're not touching you. That would have worked real well. But then the donor class would be very very upset with you, wouldn't it? And Marco Rubio's chances would be president would be zero. That's the big difference to the 12-day war last year in June, right? That when Israel attacked and the United States said, "We are not we are not part of this" until the very end. I mean, we know that they were part of it. We know that they prepared, but this time it's a completely different game."

"And Trump came out with this insane statement of what the war aims are and he keeps repeating that at the moment Iran must unconditionally surrender or else we continue. So in that's the language that they used with Japan at the end of the second world war before they dropped the nuclear bombs on them and you know that was the war aim and it was achieved by completely like bomb bomb bombing and killing the civilian population and it seems to me that this is very much what they're after at the moment here. I mean the the Red Crescent just published actually a letter saying like look the in in the first one week we've we've had 6,668 civilian structures that were bombed, 5,500 residential units, 1,000 commercial units, 14 medical centers, 65 schools and so on and so forth. Seven red crescent relief workers have been killed in in this thing. And the pictures that reach us from the bombing of the oil drilling or refining stations is apocalyptic. We can see in Tehran, the ditches, the burning. I mean the ecological disaster that the US is now wreaking on Iran and actually the entire region because this stuff is going to spread all over the place is in in any way, shape or form just like horrendous, like apocalyptic is the word to use, so in a sense the Iranians were not as lucky as the Ukrainians of dealing with a civilized army  on the other end. But here we have people who wreak havoc on a massive scale on their city centers."

"What can you make out of the way that the US is implementing the war?"

"This isn't the US, this part. Let's be honest on this. US wants resources. This isn't getting resources. US wants the infrastructure intact. The problem here with the US why Trump is saying unconditional surrender. He wants anything to end this war at this point because he's fucked, pardon my French.  I don't have any other words. That's the best word. Sometimes you got to use words like that to describe just how Trump had is his presidency is over. His and possibly a lot of other people's chances of ever becoming president are over. He's burning the chances for for the others as well."