From Mark Wauck’s “The LARP before the TACO?”
No one that I take seriously believes that there are actually any talks between the U.S. and Iran. Trump as usual wants to make the markets happy and buy some time, but it’s hard to believe it will have lasting implications. The fact is that to really get an offramp Trump would have to bulldoze the Israelis and they want nothing short of regime change. And given Trump’s subservience to Israel and its American Lobby, that won’t happen unless Trump grows a pair and decides to live with the inevitable blackmail fallout.
Judge Nap: Before we get into the issue of Iranian missile missile dominance over Israel, do you think Trump believes his own propaganda [larp]?
Alistair Crooke: There are new headlines just now, breaking headlines that say that Trump has decided in the light of “productive conversations” that are taking place with Iran to postpone the energy strikes for 5 days while he pursues talks with Iran. However, this is just lying. It’s not true. The Iranians have said very clearly: There are no direct or indirect talks taking place with Trump. The five-day pause, essentially, I sent this one word to someone in Tehran and they came back and said: TACO. That’s what has happened. TACO. So that’s where we are.
I guess it’s Monday. The markets are down and I expect Trump wants to get them up again quickly. So we now have the talks taking place–which are not taking place–and we have a 5-day pause. Probably also because it was a dangerous game of chicken that was developing between Washington and Tehran in terms of the nuclear side of it, but also in terms of the ultimatum that the Supreme Leader had given to America, saying: If you don’t do what I ask you, then there will be major escalation across the entire Gulf.
Judge: How did the Americans so radically–drastically–miscalculate the shrewdness and the potency of the Iranian response?
Crooke: I think partly, first of all, they believed Mossad–and Mossad have got this completely wrong. They don’t understand the nature of Iran. They don’t understand the nature of the Iranian system and structure. I know this sounds incredible, because we regard Mossad as this sort of extraordinary intelligence service. It is a major failure and one which they’ve passed on to America.
Two things.
First, with regard to Mossad—or perhaps with regard to the Israeli intel apparatus that sorts and synthesizes the information coming in. I wouldn’t want to discount Mossad’s capabilities—we’ve seen that Mossad has repeatedly been able to recruit high level sources in targeted countries and organizations. I suspect that what has happened is that the Israeli intel apparatus has become heavily politicized and ideologized, just as has happened in the US. They say what they want to believe, regardless of what the intel really says and regardless of operational successes—indeed, the operational successes, rather than being as such, are used to feed the larger narrative. So, for example, there are Israelis who do ‘get’ Iran. But they’re ignored. Just last night we quoted one:
Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz ,داني سيترينوفيتش @citrinowicz
Iran has publicly admitted that.
The Iranian strike on Dimona and the Haifa refinery following the Israeli attack on the South Pars gas field highlights a clear and consistent pattern: escalation managed through deliberate signaling.
In both cases, we see effective command and control, with strategic guidance translating into precise operational execution at the tactical level.
More importantly, Iran is working to preserve a response equation: whatever you do to us, we will do to you — and more.
This is not random retaliation. It is structured deterrence, designed to shape behavior and impose costs.
Any strategy that ignores this dynamic risks fundamentally misunderstanding how Iran calibrates escalation.
That very specific evaluation points to larger and basic misunderstandings. Perhaps Israelis have come to paint Arabs and Iranians with the same brush—a big mistake.
Second, with regard to miscalculating Iran, it’s not just the Jewish Nationalists and their American proxies who have drastically miscalculated. You might have expected that the Gulf Arabs—having lived in the shadow of Iran for many centuries—would have known better. They did not.
Patricia Marins @pati_marins64
1h
A few days ago, I said that the Gulf countries made a bet, believing in the US-Israeli outlook that a victory over Iran would be quick and triumphant.
These countries took a side, not only by allowing their territory to be used for attacks, but Saudi Arabia even used a tanker to provide mid-air refueling for planes on their way to strike Iran.
All these countries chose a side and are collaborating with the war, but the Iranian reaction has been so strong that it has left them stunned, and now all they do is deny having any knowledge of it.
The only certainty is that this war has ruined any normalization of relations between the GCC and Iran.
Trump is left looking at the smoking ruins of American prestige and hegemony in the region:
— GEROMAN — time will tell –  — @GeromanAT
47m
only Erbil [Iraqi Kurdistan] remains partly under US regime control
US is out of Syria and most of Iraq – perhaps some dudes hangng around in the Green zone in Baghdad (as far as I know)
Holding on to isolated outposts isn’t a long term proposition.
The price of oil is the sexiest piece of information on the war, particularly for people who remember the 1973 oil embargo and consequent gas lines at pumps and surging prices. US workers travel 100 miles a day, mostly by car, say the experts.
However probably as important as ten dollar or more gasoline prices, is the larger economic problem of the Bond market’s destabilizing of the economy when the Treasury’s ten year bond interest rate goes soft and breaks the 5% standard theoretical ‘limit’ of what the Treasury has to pay to attract buyers of the bonds.
This is the alarm-bell sounding Danger. No economy can operate without stability. The US Treasury’s interest rate is what the whole economy bases its various local credit institutions on. Credit runs any economy, and without it economic activity starts to freeze up.
Recall the 1981 super high rates by Paul Volcker…21%…to fight inflation.
So between high inflation, uncertainty in markets, recession or worse, then there is the new Revolt of the Masses of third world wogs when their welfare is cut because of depression. Stir into this economic stew….the failing war for control of the Middle East as the next falling domino of mad-dog capitalism’s struggle with BRICS which is now 40 to 45% of world GDP.
This is as large a motivation for continuing the war as is Israel’s domination of the US. Trump’s insanity is another unknowable factor.
Wednesday, March 25th. Spent most of the day on line reading our many great notables on both the war and the economics of same. The rational conclusion, for me of course, is to stop before we get our Uncle Sam ass kicked so bad that we will never be the same, as a military and political power. On the other hand, getting a major defeat is very good for White Nationalism inasmuch as it discredits the dominant Uniparty system we are suffering under, and furthers the deconstruction of The Jewish Power. In other words, it exposes The Jew as a subverter of our own country, and as a killer of American soldiers for Israel. And it exposes the Muds as a parasitical class of useless niggers, etc.
Then there is Trump, the madman so many folks are starting to figure out. The GOP is going to get clobbered in the mid term election, unless Trumpstein launches a land invasion of Iran, for which he is now sending several thousand Marines to die. Trump also may be pursuing a bigger war per Jew blackmail (fucking little girls) and the Epstein Factor in general. Trump today remarked that he was negotiating with ‘an ayatollah or something, to run Hormuz straits along with himself.” Trump is insane. However he could try to wave the bloody shirt and urge his orphaned Magas to vote for him again. Sort of like the psychology of the battered wife syndrome.
Of course, he is assisting in the decomposition of the GOP/Jew Shit Stew. This is all very positive from the viewpoint of, um, Revolution. The GOP must die. Then the Dems will take over and unleash the niggers, etc on White folks.
Wake-up time for working and middle class Americans. The Dems will fuck it up too with their fiscal bribery payoffs to the wogs. There is not enough money to pay off 50 million illegals, 35 million niggers, and White liberal agitators.
As the depression deepens, and the petrol dollar evaporates (less US dollar denominated international trade/and US Treasury in trouble because of higher interest rates demanded by depositors and shrinking deposits because of the shortage of petrol dollars, which are being shoved aside by Chinese and other currencies looking for safe haven elsewhere. And not to be neglected, the depression and hyper inflation as well (called stagflation) hammering the working class and middle class too will contribute.
Trumpstein is thus contributing to his own political death, accelerating class/race conflict, and sharpening the contradictions, as marxists like to put it, of our foundering society of make-believe racial equality, gyno-supremacist
White hating liberals and cucked conservatives.
Crooke is so good. His remarks about how our enemies believe their own propaganda, is psychologically of note. Wishful thinking, power of positive thinking, etc. Forgive me for my next statement: At the zoo a few years ago, I was observing a gorilla when it , excuse me, shit a turd into its hand and ate it.
Why do I associate this with Crooke’s remarks about our enemy’s believing their own propaganda? Dunno. Then my brain somehow flips into Trump’s image.