A reminder that as the US continues to threaten countries around the world, fedposting is to be very much avoided (even with qualifiers like “in Minecraft”) and comments containing it will be removed.

Image is an illustration that I have made to show what each side means when they say that Hormuz is “open” or “closed”, as various officials and analysts have created a lot of confusion with their statements, both intentionally and unintentionally.

I’m tentatively going back to the weekly thread format in the hopes that even if/when the conflict resumes, daily comment counts will keep us at or below ~3000 per week. If not, we’ll just go back to the 3000 comment threshold being what triggers a new thread being created.

The events of the last two weeks have been the most unintelligible of at least the last four years, and on some days I took one look at the situation and decided to just not even bother and do something else until the next day.

To attempt to summarize:

long summary

Against many people’s expectations, including my own, the ceasefire was not immediately scuttled upon its inception despite violations (predominantly against Lebanon), which indicates to me that both the US and Iran wanted a ceasefire more than they wanted to continue firing, at least for two weeks. For both sides, it represented an opportunity to reorganize, rebuild, and restrategize going forward.

The US has continued its rapid flurry of airlifting to and from the Middle East, and while what exactly they have brought and intend to do next is a mystery, airlifting is a very inefficient method of transferring resources en masse, meaning that any kind of massive ground invasion is still many months away (though I still strongly doubt it’ll ever happen). Attempting to do more raids like the failed Istafan raid seems like the most likely option, as well as perhaps some disastrous attempts to hold Gulf islands.

Meanwhile, Iran has been excavating the entrances to their missile cities and has rapidly rebuilt bridges and railway lines. While the rate of reconstruction has shocked some observers, people like us who have paid abnormally high attention to the Ukraine War will not be surprised - infrastructure is very difficult to take out for any meaningful length of time even when it’s not purposefully decentralized. It also seems extremely likely that Iran has continued to receive shipments of resources and weapons from Russia and China, though what exactly is being supplied is not concretely known.

Iran sent a highly qualified team to Pakistan to negotiate, and the US sent, among others, Vice President Vance too. After a marathon ~20 hour session, no deal was struck, and both sides left Pakistan (the Iranian team taking many precautions to not get shot down). While the nuclear issue seemed to be the major sticking point, it is very difficult to see the US - and Trump in particular - formally agreeing to a tollbooth in Hormuz or the retreat from their Middle Eastern bases even if they have already effectively retreated from most of them.

These negotiations took place in an environment of constant violations of the ceasefire on the Lebanon front. Iran initially tied their attendance of talks to a total cessation of conflict in Lebanon, though ultimately decided to go to Islamabad without a de facto ceasefire but with some sort of guarantee that we’ll go tell Netanyahu to stop firing for a while. A few days after the negotiations failed, a more comprehensive ceasefire was actually achieved in Lebanon. It’s still a Zionist Ceasefire (“you cease fire, we keep attacking”), and the Zionists committed several massive civilian atrocities just before the ceasefire began. After the ceasefire began, violations have, to my knowledge, been remarkably few up to the time of me writing this.

Shortly after the failure of negotiations, the US began their own blockade of Iran’s ports. As the US Navy cannot get within a few hundred miles of even the entrance of the Strait of Hormuz, the blockade is taking place at some line in the Sea of Oman, where Iranian ships will be intercepted. The confusion caused by this situation has been incredible, with a few days of people tracking Iranian tankers closely, concluding that if they had crossed the Strait of Hormuz, they had successfully ran the blockade (they had not). After about a week of this de jure blockade, it was indeed confirmed to be real when the US captured its first Iranian oil tanker. This prompted Iran to fully close the Strait of Hormuz (see the megathread image), and there are reports of, as always, at best questionable veracity that in response to the US’s blockade of their blockade, Iran possibly intends to 1) totally blockade Gulf State ports in the Persian Gulf of any kind, not just oil, and/or 2) talk to their ally Ansarallah and have them blockade the Red Sea (and they seem keen to do so in support of the Resistance).

Additionally, Iran has made the end of the US blockade the precondition to enter into new negotiations. The short term and even medium term effect of the US blockade will be minimal - China has a colossal strategic petroleum reserve which will last them several months even with their economy at full steam even assuming all Middle Eastern imports are cut off overnight, and Iran itself is not wholly reliant on oil exports for basic survival like other oil states (though it’ll certainly hurt the economy if prolonged). There are also certain ways that the blockade can be subverted, like potentially some advanced shadow fleet tactics with the cooperation of allied countries, or, in the long term, the construction of overland oil transportation routes (a significant railway route was constructed in the last few years between Iran and China).

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.

  • test_ [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    118·
    3 days ago

    Biden Official: Biden Was Preparing To Bomb Iran If Re-Elected

    https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/biden-official-biden-was-preparing

    Former senior Biden advisor Amos Hochstein said during an interview on Sunday that the Biden administration had been preparing to bomb Iran if they had won re-election in 2024.

    more:

    Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, “In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon if Iran had decided to do so. There were indirect negotiations that the Biden administration did, but it went nowhere. So when President Trump argues that he did what no other president would, is it just simply that the bill was coming due and it fell on his watch?”

    “I do think there’s a certain element to that, and that’s why I was supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein replied. “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”

    Hochstein, for the record, is an Israel-born IDF veteran who reportedly played a major role in the Biden administration encouraging Israel’s horrific bombardment of Lebanon in September 2024. And his narrative that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “may have had to happen” under a theoretical second Biden term is false.

    In March of last year, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khomeini [sic] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” contradicting both the claims of President Trump and of Antony Blinken the year before.

    But even if you accept that Iran was a nuclear risk, there was nothing stopping the Biden administration from simply restarting the nuclear deal that the Obama administration secured with Tehran in 2015. The JCPOA was working fine while it was in place; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to war with Iran, and the Biden administration refused to reverse this move because they wanted war too.

    [Embedded tweet by Branco Marcetic – https://xcancel.com/BMarchetich/status/2046284223187726497]

    Democratic partisans have been pointing to Trump’s war for weeks to chide Hasan Piker and anyone else they blame (read: everyone but themselves) for losing in 2024. But it turns out the Biden admin was planning to attack Iran if they won a 2nd term

    The Democrats were beating the drums of war for Iran well ahead of the 2024 election. Here’s an excerpt from the official 2024 Democratic Party platform explicitly attacking Trump for not going to war with Iran in his first term:

    “All of this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency. In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.”

    Kamala Harris, who controversially replaced the dementia-addled Biden as the Democratic candidate late in the race, labeled Iran the number one enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

    I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that Trump’s depravity in Iran proves everyone should support Democrats, but it’s clear the Democratic Party is just the more polite-looking face on the same evil power structure.

    The war with Iran was always planned. Analysts like Brian Berletic and Richard Medhurst have been laying out solid arguments that this American war is more about attacking the economic and energy interests of Russia and China in a last-ditch effort to retain planetary hegemony than it is about assisting Israel. This places the United States on a dangerous trajectory toward increasingly hostile escalations between nuclear-armed powers.

    These moves were planned years in advance, and would have been rolled out regardless of what impotent meat puppet happened to be wheeled into office in January 2025.

    You don’t get to vote out an empire. Whether or not the US will continue working to dominate the planet will never be on the ballot. We will continue seeing reckless US wars of immense human consequence until the empire falls, or until the American people bring the revolutionary change to their country that the world so desperately needs.