The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps did not confess to accidentally bombing a girls school in the Iranian city of Minab last weekend, killing 165 students. Israeli warplanes weren’t involved, either, and U.S. military investigators have tentatively concluded that U.S. forces were responsible.
Here’s a huge and amazing story from Fox News on Wednesday: Thousands of Iraqi Kurds launch ground offensive in Iran. Absolutely nothing of the kind occurred, not even close, as Fox itself was later obliged to admit in a sideways kind of way.
A major US radar installation at Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base was not destroyed by an Iranian drone strike in the early hours of the war. The USS Abraham Lincoln was not hit by four Iranian ballistic missiles last Sunday. And no, 650 U.S. troops were not killed in the first two days of fighting. The number of U.S. servicemen who lost their lives: six.
Elon Musk’s X has been an absolute swamp of “fake news” and video-game imagery and burning buildings in Dubai that actually burned in Tel Aviv last summer. I can’t even be bothered to debunk a fraction of it. More pressing business is at hand.
Let’s get something important out of the way, up front.
Its about what we mean when we talk about “the war.”
The wildly ambitious American-Israeli operation that began last weekend as a now-or-never confrontation with the hydra-headed Khomeinist military-industrial theocracy in Tehran had become, by the third day, another war altogether.
By Wednesday the war was primarily an all-out Khomeinist war against a dozen countries in the Greater Middle East, a war of survival that was itself merely an immediate extension of the war the regime had been waging against the Iranian people since last December.
The European Union’s foreign affairs and security chief Kaja Kallas described the state of play succinctly on Wednesday: “Tehran’s strategy is to sow chaos and set the region on fire. By indiscriminately attacking its neighbours, the regime is making a strong case for its own demise.”
The war Kaja Kallas described is merely the most urgently prosecuted campaign in the same war the Iranian regime has been waging in various forms and phases, both subterranean and out in the open, by regional proxy and by state satrapy, ever since 1979.
The many Khomeinist wars against Israel and by necessary extension against the United States and the rest of “the west” have been waged most consistently and brutally against the democratic rights of the Iranian people themselves, especially Iran’s women and Iran’s minorities.
Those are the “forever wars” you haven’t been hearing much about over the past week in all the complaints, from the “left” as well as from the “right,” from certain Liberal Party pseuds and Code Pink noisemakers and batshit MAGA influencers Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly about what the White House has gotten itself into.
Hellbound and Down 