The Iran War (was Nuclear Program) thread
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This guy keeps churning stuff out. I don’t know if he is reliable but the read is very compelling. This one about Tucker.
@shanaka86
Iran watched Tucker Carlson argue against the war in the Oval Office three times. Then it watched the war arrive anyway.
ABC News & Reuters confirm Carlson met with Trump approximately 3 times in Feb 2026, sessions lasting roughly 90 minutes each, the last around 23 Feb, five days before the strikes. His message was consistent: do not attack Iran. After 28 Feb, he called the operation “disgusting and evil.” Trump responded publicly: “Tucker has lost his way. He’s not MAGA.”
Iranian state TV did not treat Carlson as a dissident. It treated him as evidence. His 2025 interview with President Pezeshkian was broadcast repeatedly on IRIB. His anti-war advocacy was amplified across Iranian state media as proof that America was divided, that the political will for a strike did not exist, and that the domestic opposition Trump faced made military action against Iran unlikely. The IRGC’s info apparatus did not merely observe American debate. It consumed it, rebroadcast it, and built its threat assessment on it.
This is the information warfare misjudgment that may have enabled the decapitation.
Authoritarian regimes make a specific analytical error when reading open democracies: they interpret domestic dissent as strategic hesitation. In closed systems, public opposition to a policy signals weakness at the top. In open systems, public opposition is the noise floor of governance. Tucker Carlson sitting in the Oval Office arguing against war does not mean war will not happen. It means democracy is functioning. The IRGC watched the noise and mistook it for the signal.
Khamenei was at a known location on 28 Feb. 7 top security officials were with him. Twelve family members were present. The strike took 60 seconds. The coordination required months of intelligence preparation that occurred while Tucker was in the Oval Office arguing it should not happen and Iranian state television was broadcasting his arguments as evidence it would not. The regime that amplified the voice of American dissent to reassure itself was destroyed by an operation planned in parallel with the dissent it was amplifying.
On 14 March, Carlson posted a video claiming the CIA accessed his pre-war text messages with Iranian contacts and was preparing a FARA criminal referral. No CIA or DOJ confirmation exists. No referral has been filed. Carlson denies payment or direction from Iranian entities. But the timing has produced a theory, circulating on X, that his documented contacts were monitored and his advocacy inadvertently reinforced the false signal that enabled the decapitation by convincing Tehran that American resolve was weaker than it was.
The theory is unverified. The mechanism it describes is real.
Intelligence services in every major conflict have exploited the gap between what an adversary’s media says and what its military plans. The IRGC consumed open-source American debate, weighted it as strategic intelligence, and reached a threat assessment that was fatally wrong. Carlson did not cause the miscalculation. He is not an agent. He is a journalist who argued his position in the most powerful office on Earth and had it rebroadcast by the state media of a country six days from annihilation. The IRGC chose to believe him. That choice is the misjudgment.
The post-strike IRGC, now a Habib Ring junta operating behind a wounded figurehead whose father considered him unfit, has compensated for the intelligence failure with the only doctrine it has left: $20,000 Shaheds aimed at the data centres that processed the targeting intelligence the misjudgment failed to prevent. The regime that misread American dissent as weakness is now striking the AI infrastructure that turned American intelligence into 1,000 targets in 24 hrs. The information warfare failed. The compute warfare is the fallback. And the $35,000 drone aimed at a Gulf server farm is the final expression of a regime that mistook Tucker Carlson for American foreign policy.
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I am not sure why I still shake my head at some of these things.
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Trump is now trying to extricate himself from this impending debacle through his preferred tool of persuasion, that is to say, extortion. G W Bush at least brought a fig leaf of legitimacy to his war on Iraq through the UNSC and building the so called “Coalition of the Willing” or as Shantinik described it at the time, The Coalition of the Small and Obscure. This moron in the WH instead is relying on extortionist rhetoric to cobble together a “coalition of the coerced” now that he realises he has embarked on a bloody folly and finds himself way in over his empty head.
The money quote:
“We have a thing called Nato,” said Trump, who has often criticised the alliance. “We’ve been very sweet. We didn’t have to help them with Ukraine. Ukraine is thousands of miles away from us . . . But we helped them. Now we’ll see if they help us. Because I’ve long said that we’ll be there for them but they won’t be there for us. And I’m not sure that they’d be there.”
Let’s just all go bang our heads against the wall.
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Putting Trump’s transactional foreign policy actually, extortionist foreign policy, into perspective:
"Take unilateral actions without including allies, then bully them into supporting that action," — this is how Trump's approach was described by Daniel Hamilton, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution.
Adding to the irony, Trump has dismissed the one partner who rushed to offer assistance with shoring up drone defenses against Iranian attacks — Ukraine.
….”The last person we need help from is Zelensky," he said separately, instead accusing the Ukrainian leader of stalling peace talks with Russia, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin is "willing to make a deal."
Moscow, which has repeatedly rejected a ceasefire in Ukraine and continues to push its territorial demands, promptly supported Trump's criticism of Zelensky.
https://kyivindependent.com/trump-demands-aid-from-partners-snubs-the-one-offering-it/
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A rather optimistic take on the war from an unexpected source. (Use the ‘reader’ view to get rid of the annoying page artifacts)
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A rather optimistic take on the war from an unexpected source. (Use the ‘reader’ view to get rid of the annoying page artifacts)
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Wasn’t sure whether to put this here or the Iran meme section or the funny pics. All fitting.
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Oh and by the way I think we killed Larijani and the commander of the basij
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Wasn’t sure whether to put this here or the Iran meme section or the funny pics. All fitting.
Wasn’t sure whether to put this here or the Iran meme section or the funny pics. All fitting.
Why not? After all over on this side of the world we now have Golfo del loco Gringo.
Over there it’s now only fitting to rename the strait something to effect, such as: مضيق اليانكي المجنون (madiq alyanki almajnun).
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And self styled American Caesar, Trump, berates Nato and the rest of the civilised world because no one wants to be part of his war with Iran:
Kushner and Witkoff had invited Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to the Geneva talks, to provide technical expertise, though Kushner would later claim that he and Witkoff had “a pretty deep understanding of the issues that matter in this”.
Nuclear experts would later say that Witkoff’s pronouncements on the Iran nuclear programme were riddled with basic errors.
Powell has long experience as a mediator, and one source said Powell brought an expert from the UK Cabinet Office with him. One western diplomat said: “Jonathan thought there was a deal to be done, but Iran were not quite there yet, especially on the issue of UN inspections of its nuclear sites.”
A former official who was briefed on the Geneva talks by some of the participants said: “Witkoff and Kushner did not bring a US technical team with them. They used Grossi as their technical expert, but that is not his job. So Jonathan Powell took his own team.
“The UK team were surprised by what the Iranians put on the table,” the former official added.
”It was not a complete deal, but it was progress and was unlikely to be the Iranians’ final offer. The British team expected the next round of negotiations to go ahead on the basis of the progress in Geneva.”
That next round of talks was due to take place in Vienna on Monday 2 March, but never happened. The US and Israel had launched their all-out attack two days earlier.
Meanwhile…..
Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev on March 17 accused European leaders of being "anti-Trump" after they declined to support U.S. efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz during the conflict with Iran.
In a post on X responding to media reports about Europe's stance, Dmitriev said that those he called "EU warmongers" had revealed their true position by refusing to join U.S. President Donald Trump's push for allied naval deployments in the region.
"The masks are off," Dmitriev wrote. "U.K. and EU warmongers are showing how deeply anti-Trump they really are. They tried to hide it for a long time, but now everyone can see it."
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-slams-eu-warmongers-for-not-backing-trumps-war/
Is it just me or is anyone else sensing an even more disturbing and ominous pattern of political behaviour emerging here?
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Russia's doing what Russia does, playing both ends against the middle. Shamelessly I might add, but then no one ever lost by flattering Trump.
My biggest concern would be that Putin's "traditional social values" stance might be attractive enough to some more extreme MAGA followers and influencers to cozy up.
"You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible." — Thomas Sowell
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Russia's doing what Russia does, playing both ends against the middle. Shamelessly I might add, but then no one ever lost by flattering Trump.
My biggest concern would be that Putin's "traditional social values" stance might be attractive enough to some more extreme MAGA followers and influencers to cozy up.
Russia's doing what Russia does, playing both ends against the middle. Shamelessly I might add, but then no one ever lost by flattering Trump.
I get that. What I don’t get is Washington’s ongoing folly to fall into every trap the Kremlin sets for it. Washington does not anppear to grasp that Iran is nothing to Putin whereas undisputed Russian hegemony in Europe is everything.
But then what can you expect when your chief diplomatic envoys are a financial bagman and a real estate hustler with little to no understanding of foreign policy let alone, diplomacy at any level. As the Brits pointed out they didn’t show up at the nuclear talks with a technical team. No surprise though, Witkoff didn’t show up with his own vetted interpreter last spring when he met Putin in the Kremlin. You would think he might have learned something since then. Apparently not.
My biggest concern would be that Putin's "traditional social values" stance might be attractive enough to some more extreme MAGA followers and influencers to cozy up.
That’s a valid observation and an internal problem that only the US itself can address.
My biggest concern is this latest round of chaos and mayhem appears to have been orchestrated in advance.
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