Tag: perpetual war

Trump Says He Must Have a Say in Picking Iran’s New Leader

President Trump said in an interview with Axios on Thursday that he must have a say on who is chosen as Iran’s next leader following the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, contradicting other administration officials who say the US’s goal is not regime change.

Trump made clear to Axios reporter Brak Ravid that Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has reportedly emerged as a frontrunner to replace his father, wouldn’t be acceptable to the US.

“They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela,” the president said, referring to Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodriguez.

The US didn’t choose Rodriguez as Nicolas Maduro’s replacement, but she was the next in line as the vice president and has been willing to work with the US to stave off another attack. A much different dynamic is unfolding in Iran as the killing of Khamenei has not slowed Iran’s military response, and the country’s leadership shows no sign of backing down despite the massive US-Israeli bombing campaign, which has killed over 1,000 civilians.

Trump said that he wouldn’t accept any leader who continues Khamenei’s policies because it would result in the US launching another war within five years. “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me. We want someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran,” he said.

Earlier this week, Trump said that all of the people he had in mind to replace Khamenei have been killed and acknowledged that in the end, Iran’s next leader could be “as bad” as Khamenei.

“The worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” he said. “That could happen. We don’t want that to happen. It would probably be the worst — you go through this and then in five years, you realize you put somebody in who was no better.”

Keep reading

Plot Twist: Kuwaiti Fighter Jet Shot Down All Three US F-15s

In a remarkable feat, a single Kuwaiti F/A-18 Super Hornet took out all three of the American F-15s that were shot down over Kuwait on Sunday, according to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. The new narrative replaces the initial reports that attributed the shootdowns to a Kuwaiti Patriot missile battery. 

Launching just three missiles, a single pilot went three-for-three, destroying the trio of F-15E Strike Eagles, which were purchased for something like a combined $93 million in 1998 dollars, or $187 million today. New F-15EX models go for about $100 million apiece. All six crew members parachuted safely in Kuwaiti territory, though one of them had an unsettling reception from a pipe-wielding Kuwaiti who may have mistaken him for an Iranian pilot.

The incident happened shortly after an Iranian drone hit a US tactical operations center in Kuwait, killing six US Army Reserve soldiers, say the Journal’s sources, who are familiar with the initial reports on the mishap. With many other drones having swarmed the area, when an amped-up Kuwaiti pilot saw jets on his radar, he started blasting.

The airspace in the theater of operations is a madhouse, packed with fighter jets, bombers, reconnaissance craft, fuel tankers, drones, cruise missiles, HIMARS rockets, interceptor missiles, and incoming Iranian missiles and drones. “It’s a busy, busy air environment, and in times of stress, tension, crisis, and, certainly in this case, conflict, even more so,” retired US Air Force B-52 bomber pilot Mark Gunzinger told the Journal.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Dan Karbler, who led the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command provided additional perspective on these types of incidents and what investigators will look at: 

A fratricide incident like the one in Kuwait usually happens because of several breakdowns in communication or failures in equipment, Karbler said. Investigators will be looking to see if the aircraft friend-or-foe transponders, which are supposed to broadcast the information about a plane electronically, were working properly. Other factors are whether the Kuwaitis knew the planned flight paths of the American jets, whether the aircraft themselves were flying the correct routes and whether Kuwait was able to talk to the F-15s, either electronically or by voice…

“It’s all the more complicated when you have different air defense systems operating on different frequencies that aren’t integrated, and some of those systems are actively trying to counter threats such as drones,” he said.

Keep reading

Pentagon in Talks on Buying Ukrainian-Made Interceptors To Counter Iranian Drones

The Pentagon is in talks on purchasing Ukrainian-made interceptors to counter Iranian drones, the Financial Times has reported, as senior US officials have told Congress that US forces in the Middle East are having more trouble intercepting Iran’s drones than expected.

The report said that at least one Gulf country was also in talks on acquiring Ukrainian-made drone interceptors as they been using advanced US Patriot missiles, which cost more than $4 million apiece. The Ukrainian systems are much cheaper and have been designed to counter the Russian version of Iran’s Shahed drones.

One Ukrainian official said that the talks were “sensitive” but that it was “obvious that there is a surge in interest in the Ukrainian drone interceptors, which can intercept the Shahed for a very low cost.” The Ukrainian drone interceptors cost a few thousand dollars to stop one Iranian Shahed drone, which is estimated to cost about $30,000 each.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this week that he has been in contact with Qatar and the UAE about the use of Ukraine’s anti-drone systems, though he expressed concern about Ukraine’s own stockpile.

“Ukraine’s expertise in countering ‘Shahed’ drones is currently the most advanced in the world,” he said. “However, any such co-operation aimed at protecting our partners can only proceed without diminishing our own defence capabilities.”

Ukraine’s anti-drone technology, which includes smaller drones and anti-drone guns, has struggled to intercept the Geran-3, a Russian-produced drone based on Iran’s Shahed-238 and powered by a jet engine.

Secretary of Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine told lawmakers this week that US forces will not be able to intercept all of Iran’s drones and that more US casualties are expected.

Since the US and Israel launched the war against Iran on Saturday, US Central Command has confirmed the deaths of six American soldiers, who were killed by an Iranian drone that hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. According to media reports, they had no notice or warning to evacuate before the drone struck.

Keep reading

Pentagon Prepares for Possibility That Iran War Will Last Through September

The US military is preparing for the possibility that the US-Israeli war against Iran lasts until September of this year, according to a report from POLITICO, far beyond President Trump’s initial four-week timeline.

The report said that US Central Command is asking the Pentagon to send more intelligence officers to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days, but likely through September.

The news of the Pentagon preparing for a long war comes as US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said that the US is sending more forces to the Middle East and will be escalating its bombing campaign.

“More bombers, fighters are arriving just today. And now with complete control of the skies, we will be using 500-pound, 1000-pound, and 2000-pound GPS-and-laser-guided precision gravity bombs, which we have a nearly unlimited stockpile,” Hegseth said on Wednesday.

Hegseth has also declined to set a timeline on the war. “You can say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three,” he said. “Ultimately, we set the pace and the tempo. The enemy is off balance, and we’re going to keep them off balance.”

So far, more than 1,000 Iranian civilians have been killed by US-Israeli strikes, and at least six US soldiers have been killed by Iranian drone attacks. The Pentagon is working to get more missiles and air-defense munitions into the region, as its stockpiles have quickly dwindled after the first five days of war.

The POLITICO report also detailed how the State Department was scrambling to get stranded Americans out of the Middle East as the administration had no evacuation plan despite a months-long military buildup in the region and Trump’s constant threats to bomb Iran.

Keep reading

‘Cowardly and Despicable’: Hegseth Condemned for Sinking of ‘Defenseless’ Iranian Ship

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday was condemned for his boasts on Wednesday about sinking an Iranian military ship after allegations emerged that it was “defenseless” at the time it was torpedoed in international waters by a US submarine.

Military.com reported Thursday that the Iranian ship had been departing from a biennial multinational naval training exercise that it had been invited to participate in by the Indian government.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has so far remained silent on the US attack on the ship, but other politicians in India delivering sharp condemnations.

According to the Times of India, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi tore into Modi for not speaking up after the US torpedoed a boat that his government had invited into its waters.

“The conflict has reached our backyard, with an Iranian warship sunk in the Indian Ocean,” Gandhi said. “Yet the PM has said nothing. At a moment like this, we need a steady hand at the wheel. Instead, India has a compromised PM who has surrendered our strategic autonomy.”

In a social media post, former Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal said there was no way that the Iranian ship could have been perceived as any kind of military threat.

“I am told that as per protocol for this exercise ships cannot carry any ammunition,” he wrote. “It was defenseless… The attack by the US submarine was premeditated as the US was aware of the Iranian ship’s presence in the exercise to which the US navy was invited but withdrew from participation at the last minute, presumably with this operation in mind.”

Drop Site News reporter Ryan Grim noted that, in addition to striking what appears to have been a defenseless boat, the US also didn’t help rescue any of the shipwrecked men who were aboard the vessel.

“The Sri Lanka Navy was left to pull the dead bodies from the water,” Grim commented. “I am hard pressed to think of any other nation throughout history that would do something so cowardly and despicable. We are genuinely in a league of our own, and American media—mostly shrugging off the bombing of a girls school and acting as if carpet bombing Tehran is a normal military tactic—is deeply complicit.”

Author Bruno Maçães also pointed to the decision to leave the shipwrecked crew at sea as an act of historic depravity.

“Really quite extraordinary that the US bombed an Iranian ship and then left the surviving sailors to drown,” Maçães wrote. “There are many many accounts of the Nazis or Imperial Japan saving survivors at sea. I see we have now dropped below that level.”

Mohamad Safa, executive director of PVA Patriotic Vision, an international multilateral organization with special consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, said that the US attack on the Iranian ship constituted either a war crime or straight-up murder.

“What Pete Hegseth ordered the military to do violates international law,” he wrote. “The Iranian ship was near Sri Lanka, in international waters outside the combat zone and on a training exercise. Under the Geneva Conventions, you are obligated to rescue the crew of a ship that you sink during war. Abandoned any survivors and leaving them to drown is illegal and a war crime.”

Keep reading

The Misconception That Air Supremacy Has Been Achieved Over Iran

There are growing misconceptions that the U.S. and Israel have achieved total control of the airspace in Iran and sanitized the threat of ground-based air defenses to a degree that their forces have relatively free rein — commonly referred to as air supremacy. This is absolutely not true, nor has this been the outright claim of the U.S. military. It also should be of no surprise at this point in the campaign.

A lot of the commentary I try to provide for events like this is on X. It allows me to respond quickly to what is going on, and often that includes trying to swat down false narratives, some of which originate in the social media echo chamber and among general commentators/influencers, but also increasingly among the mainstream media. This is one of those times.

Moving as fast as possible from standoff attacks to stand-in (direct) attacks isn’t just about trying to conserve expensive long-range munitions. In fact, this is far from the primary concern. Doing so is absolutely essential to ramping up the frequency and amplitude of the air campaign. This is something we have been highlighting in our rolling coverage of the conflict for days.

Moving to direct strikes allows for a significant increase in the total volume of targets hit, as well as offering a broader array of effects to be brought to bear on those targets. Very deep-penetrating bunker-buster munitions, for instance, are typically not available in a standoff capability.

This transition to direct attacks has now begun.

Keep reading

Covering for International Abusers, Media Reverse Victim and Offender in Iran

People who study domestic violence have an acronym, DARVO, for the set of tactics abusers use to avoid accountability: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.

It’s that last tactic that came to mind while reading news reports of the United States and Israel’s unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran, and the assassination of Ali Khamenei, its leader. US corporate media frequently presented Iran as responsible for the predictably violent consequences of the US/Israeli aggression.

Sometimes the reversal is straightforward, as when an NBC News “analysis” (2/28/26) warned that “Iran’s Retaliatory Strikes Threaten an Escalation Across the Region”—as though it is Iran’s response, and not the ongoing attacks by the US and Israel, that poses a threat to the region.

Another NBC analysis (2/28/26), by Richard Engel, more subtly tried to pin the blame on Iran, noting in the headline that “Iran Is Now in Conflict With Pretty Much All of Its Neighbors.” Wrote Engel:

Today Iran has launched drones and missiles not only at Israel, but also at US military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq…. It puts Iran in a difficult position, because now it is at conflict with pretty much all of its neighbors.

Pretty much all of its neighbors, that is, except for Turkiye, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. (Azerbaijan said Iranian drones crashed in its territory on Thursday; Iran denies targeting the country.) And if we’re going to count Jordan as Iran’s “neighbor,” then Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan as well. Aside from those, though, pretty much all of them.

The point of depicting Iran as “in conflict” with “pretty much all of its neighbors,” of course, is to paint it as the country that no one can get along with. In reality, the countries Iran isn’t getting along with are the ones allowing the US to use them as platforms for launching bombs and missiles at it—behavior that will put a damper on any relationship.

Keep reading

Appallingly shoddy Vietnam War memorial to be torn down after $1million was spent on building it

A $1million memorial dedicated to Vietnam War veterans is set to be torn down just a year after a fraud scandal plagued the community behind the project.

California officials announced the memorial in 2023 as a way to honor Vietnamese soldiers allied with the US during the war. 

The construction began in the upscale Orange County neighborhood, which is also home to the largest Vietnamese population in the US. 

Former Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do spearheaded the project, allocating $1 million in taxpayer funds to the Viet America Society nonprofit. 

It was later revealed that Do was funneling money through the organization for his personal gain, and the disgraced politician was sentenced to five years in prison on conspiracy charges as a result.

Do’s fall from grace left the Vietnam War memorial in shambles, with new leadership appalled by the shoddy construction. 

A county report obtained by the Los Angeles Times found that repairing the unfinished monument would cost between $168,000 and $420,000, with an additional $40,000 to finish engraving the names of fallen soldiers. 

Since demolition would only cost a fraction of that estimate, county officials opted to start the project from scratch. 

Crews arrived at Mile Square Regional Park this week to tear down what remained of Do’s tarnished legacy. 

His successor and former political rival, Janet Nguyen, called the monument a ‘disgrace’ in a statement to the Daily Mail. 

‘The county decided to tear down the wall because we can do better. This memorial is a disgrace to veterans and not the respect they deserve. We have been looking for alternative options, including a space at the new veteran’s cemetery,’ she added. 

Nguyen told California news outlet, KTLA, in November that it was ‘heartbreaking’ to see how veterans were honored.  

The new county supervisor added that the monument was not even accessible to those with disabilities. 

Veterans from Vietnam are now elderly, but the monument was designed in a part of the park without a wheelchair-accessible path. 

‘What was the point?’ Nguyen questioned at a press conference in November. 

‘They … put up these cheap materials that are getting worn down already within not even a year, just so they could launder the rest of the money themselves.’ 

Keep reading

Epstein Army: Jeffrey Epstein helped place 18-year-old woman in ‘elite IDF unit’

Emails show sex trafficking billionaire Jeffrey Epstein worked Israeli connections to help his lawyer’s daughter join an elite IDF unit. The woman, who Epstein wrote would make a “fantastic ambassador for Israel” at Columbia University, served on the board of Hillel International.

Jeffrey Epstein personally recruited an 18-year-old girl from New York to serve “in one of the elite IDF units,” email records show.

Epstein’s request came in a June 29, 2011 email to Anat Barak, the daughter of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. In the message, the financier described the girl in question, “Tali,” as an 18-year-old who’d been accepted to Columbia University’s Barnard College and had “been to Israel more than a dozen times.”

His young female friend had spent a summer hiking the so-called Israel Trail and another “working as a counselor at a summer camp in Dimona Israel for children who are victims of terrorist attacks,” and would therefore “be a great asset to any unit,” Epstein wrote.

Tali, he said, would continue serving Israeli interests long after her placement in the Israeli army. Upon her return from military service in Israel, Epstein wrote that “she would be a fantastic ambassador for Israel” at what he called “one of the more important college campuses in the country, Columbia.”

Keep reading

They Are Still Lying About Iraq

The lack of shame exhibited by the US government as it lies about Iraqi improvised explosive device (IED) attacks that killed thousands of American service members to justify its new war on Iran is breathtaking. President Trump led off his press conference today, the first since the attacks began Saturday morning, with this lie. Trump’s proxies on cable news, in the newspapers and online have been repeating it non-stop.

The lie is essentially that American soldiers were killed and wounded in Iraq at the orders of the Iranians. That the people responsible for blowing up American vehicles and sending home US soldiers in caskets or without body parts were Iranians, not Iraqis. The reality, of course, is that responsibility for those deaths and mutilations belongs to George W. Bush and every politician, general, government official, journalist, pundit and citizen who supported that war. I put myself into that disgraceful camp as someone who twice went voluntarily to that war.

This lie gets recycled whenever the prospect of war with Iran is present. For example, in 2019, the allegation appeared as the US imposed severe sanctions on Iran and labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist organization (the first time the US government designated a government or a military as a terrorist organization). These actions, following the unilateral abrogation of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran by the US, led to year-long tensions that culminated in the US assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who the American government and press labeled as having “American blood on his hands”, and retaliatory Iranian missile attacks on US forces in Iraq.

To begin with, the majority of US service members killed and wounded in the occupation of Iraq were killed by Sunni resistance groups, NOT Shia resistance groups. Sunni groups accounted for more than 80% of American deaths. These Sunni groups did not receive any support from Iran. These Sunni groups, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, did get a great deal of support from persons and institutions throughout Sunni countries in the Middle East, especially from the Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia chief among them. Yet, in Washington, DC’s calculus, these states don’t have the blood on their hands that Iran does, even as 4 out of 5 Americans were killed by Iraqi Sunni groups.

Sunni groups did fight against Shia groups that may have had a relationship with Iran. The Shia groups also fought against each other. Some Shia groups fought against the Americans. The Americans killed and wounded by Shia groups using IEDs were killed and wounded by Iraqis, not Iranians. Yes, there was a small Iranian presence in Iraq, acting as advisors to the Shia groups. However, the Iranian role was dwarfed by organic Iraqi resistance to occupation and sectarian commitments to one side or the other in intra-Iraqi fighting.

Keep reading