Scott Ritter: The Consequences of Incompetence
The Consequences of Incompetence
The US lost the first round of the war with Iran decisively. If Trump decides to go a second round, the results will be disastrous for American and its allies.
For nearly 40 days, Israel and the United States carried out an extensive aerial campaign against Iran designed to topple the government and suppress Iran’s ability to defend itself. This campaign failed to achieve any of its stated objectives. Instead, it devolved into a numbers game where inflated outcomes were sold to an unquestioning public by military professionals and politicians alike. The Iranian government not only withstood the efforts at decapitation-induced regime change, but actually strengthened its hold on power when the people of Iran, instead of turning on the Islamic Republic, rallied to its cause. Moreover, rather than suppressing Iran’s ability to launch ballistic missiles and drones against US military bases, critical infrastructure in the Gulf Arab States, and Israel, Iran not only sustained its ability to strike, but deployed new generations of weapons that readily defeated all missile defense systems while, using intelligence information that permitted accurate targeting, destroyed critical military infrastructure worth tens of billions of dollars.
Regional experts had long warned about the consequences of entering an existential conflict with Iran, noting that Iran would not simply allow itself to be erased as a viable nation state without ensuring that the other nations of the region were subjected to similar existential threats to their survival, and that global energy security would be disrupted in such a manner as to trigger a world economic crisis. These assessments were backed up by a belied that Iran would not only be able to shut down shipping transiting the Strait of Hormuz, but also effectively target and destroy the major energy production potential of the Gulf Arab States.
It wasn’t that the politicians and military planners in the US and Israel doubted Iran’s ability to impact global energy markets or strike targets in Israel and the Gulf region.
They knew Iran had the potential. They just believed that they would be able to achieve regime change in Tehran in relatively short order, thereby mooting any threat Iran might pose to energy supplies and infrastructure.
They were wrong, which is why the US was looking for an offramp from the war soon after it started.
The end result was this current ceasefire, which was ostensibly entered into to buy time for US and Iranian negotiators to hammer out a lasting peace plan.
There is a fundamental problem, however.
While Iran has approached the current negotiations from a practical, reality-based posture predicated on resolving the actual major points of difference between the US and Iran, the US is being held hostage by the politicized whim of an American President who needs to shape domestic public opinion in a way which transforms the reality of a humiliating defeat into the perception of a bold victory.
Just watched on a Russian server a few scenes from a pretty ridiculous movie by a lousy Turkish director, staged in today’s “anti-fascist” vein. Utter nonsense.
https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/movies/amrum-review-fatih-akin-1235189194/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amrum_(film)
https://archive.is/lumPM
Perhaps the director should have consulted his compatriot and director of “Fack ju Göhte” [sic]; then at least it would have been more in keeping with that idiotic youth subculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fack_ju_G%C3%B6hte
Instead of portraying their evil Nazi ancestors, they could have made a film about the good Jews of Juist; at least that would have been less historically controversial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schule_am_Meer
I, on the other hand, am currently reading this wonderful book, though I haven’t been able to find a free English version of it online.
https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/letters-german-american-farmer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gillhoff
This daily barrage of Jewish lie propaganda, which the “mainstreram media” is saturated with, has reached a level that is simply unbearable. You wake up in the morning, and the moment you look online, you’re already being bombarded with this stinking slurry.
https://rumble.com/v78bmdo-roy-cohn-and-the-orange-colored-con-man.html
Any alternative perspectives are completely absent, unwelcome, censored, stigmatized and defamed. https://archive.ph/sjSAj
“The musician called investigative journalist and director John Ware a “lying, conniving Zionist mouthpiece'”. How could that vile anti-Semite Waters come up with such absurd nonsense? It’s outrageous! https://archive.ph/TEvxp
“Ware was married to Helena (née Keele), and had three children with her – the actress Hannah Ware, singer-songwriter Jessie Ware and doctor Alex, all of whom were raised in the Jewish faith. Ware now lives in north-west London with his wife, the television producer Wendy Robbins, who is also Jewish, and their three children.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ware_(TV_journalist)#Personal_life
The fact that even a single mentally sane person would still “voluntarily” subject themselves to this malicious brainwashing is beyond belief. The internet is a sickening madhouse of delusional ideology.
https://www.unz.com/article/the-moon-landing-a-giant-hoax-for-mankind/
Perhaps it is not only the “moon landing”—which supposedly took place over 50 years ago without any serious incidents (and the supposedly successful manned lunar orbit, achieved using a green screen in a VR studio, which is no problem given NASA’s budget)—that is a hoax, but even the “atomic bomb” devised by the Jews, with which they have been threatening the world ever since?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_n8iiiQmc0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhOBeGxX0FM
https://rumble.com/v78nnue-nightnation.live-the-simulation-hypothesis-various-topics.html
During the stream, Nick was told about the “simulation theorist’s” possible Jewish background, but he was unable to find any evidence of this on the spot and ultimately dismissed it as irrelevant. Here is the proof of his viewers’ assumption: “Russian-born former mandatory-service Israeli soldier” https://www.vice.com/en/article/danny-goler-dmt-vape-laser-simulation/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlLTLIGDZp8
The Department of Reality
On the first Monday of the new year, Calvin Vance decided to become a truthful man.
This decision, according to his own later account, was inspired by three things: a dead marriage, a failed career in branding, and a television interview in which a man with perfect teeth explained that nothing was real unless it had been optimized.
Calvin found that persuasive.
He made a list.
No exaggerations. No flattering lies. No polite nonsense. No saying he was “doing great” when he was not doing great at all. No pretending the weather was lovely when the weather was, in fact, a damp insult.
At 8:15 a.m., he stepped outside and said to the woman across the hall, “Good morning. Your plants look like they are losing their will to live.”
She stared at him for a second and then asked if he was on drugs.
“No,” Calvin said, “I’m trying honesty.”
She closed her door with the careful finality of a museum guard.
At 8:47, he stopped at the deli and told the owner, “This coffee tastes like something brewed from the memory of coffee.”
The owner looked at him over the counter and said, “And you look like someone who should buy a different coffee.”
By 9:30, Calvin had learned something essential: truth is not a community activity. It is a solo performance, usually followed by eviction.
Still, he persisted.
He went to his office downtown, a place decorated in the modern style known as “aspirational bankruptcy.” The lobby had white walls, a living tree in a stone box, and a screen displaying a loop of phrases like INNOVATION, AUTHENTICITY, and WE BELIEVE IN TRANSPARENCY, which was rich considering nobody there had seen a genuine thought in months.
Calvin worked in “strategic narrative alignment,” which meant he spent most of his day making things sound cleaner than they were. He had once described a layoffs announcement as a “realignment opportunity,” and had been praised for his tone.
That morning, however, he stood up in the middle of the weekly meeting and said, “This project is not groundbreaking. It is a slightly expensive rearrangement of something we already failed to improve last quarter.”
The room went still.
His manager, a woman named Janine who wore silver glasses and the expression of someone perpetually being photographed for a brochure, smiled tightly.
“That’s one interpretation,” she said.
“No,” Calvin said. “It’s the interpretation.”
Someone coughed. Someone else pretended to be taking notes.
Janine folded her hands. “Calvin, we encourage candor here, but perhaps with a little more… framing.”
“Framing is how paintings lie,” Calvin said.
That line, though he would deny it later, seemed to irritate everyone at once.
By lunch he had been invited into a “wellness conversation” with HR.
They asked him if he felt supported.
He said, “By gravity, yes. By this company, less so.”
They asked whether he understood the importance of respectful communication.
He said, “Respectful communication is what people call it when the truth arrives in good shoes.”
The HR representative blinked twice and wrote something down with alarming enthusiasm.
At 2:10, Calvin was escorted out of the building, though technically he left “in accordance with company values,” which later appeared in the email announcing his departure.
He stood on the sidewalk with his cardboard box and looked up at the office tower. Every floor reflected the afternoon sun so brightly that for a moment the whole building seemed less like architecture than a polished excuse.
That was when he noticed the billboard across the street.
It showed a woman with perfect skin, perfect teeth, and perfect weather. Below her face, in letters large enough to command obedience, it said:
BE YOURSELF.
Calvin laughed so hard he almost dropped the box.
A man beside him glanced over and said, “What’s funny?”
Calvin pointed at the billboard.
“That,” he said, “is either the best joke ever printed or the saddest confession in public space.”
The man squinted at the ad, then at Calvin.
“Depends,” he said. “Which part is the confession?”
Calvin was about to answer when he noticed something else: the woman on the billboard looked familiar.
Too familiar.
He stepped closer.
The face, the smile, the impossible lighting—yes, it was his ex-wife, Lena.
Or it might have been. Or someone who looked exactly like her. Or perhaps no one at all.
He had not seen Lena in eleven months, unless you counted the dream in March, in which she had returned to collect the blender and his dignity, both of which she said he had misplaced.
The billboard version of her now held a perfume bottle and tilted her head with the serene confidence of a saint who had been airbrushed into theology.
Calvin stared.
Then, in smaller print at the bottom, he read:
REAL PEOPLE. REAL EMOTIONS. REAL RESULTS.
That evening he found himself in a new restaurant called NATURAL, where everything was arranged to look accidental. The chairs were mismatched in a way that had clearly required a consultant. The lighting was dim in a way that suggested expensive decisions. The menu described the carrots as “earth-forward” and the fish as “humble.”
The waiter, who had the haunted expression of someone who had been trained to smile by force, asked whether Calvin wanted still or sparkling water.
“I’d like the truth,” Calvin said.
The waiter nodded solemnly and brought him sparkling water anyway.
At the next table sat a woman in a green dress speaking into her phone. “No, I’m being totally real right now,” she said, pausing for effect. “Like, fully real. I’m not even filtering this.”
She was, at that exact moment, applying a filter.
A man near the window was explaining to his date that he was “not into artificial things.”
He said this while adjusting the lighting on his watch.
Across the room, a family posed for dessert photos they would later claim were “spontaneous.”
Calvin watched them all and felt, for the first time that day, a strange calm.
Not because he had discovered some final truth, but because he had finally understood that the world was not divided between truth and lies.
It was divided between things that admitted they were fake and things that demanded to be taken seriously.
He ordered the steak, medium rare, and when it arrived he looked at it for a long time.
The meat was beautifully arranged. The garnish was decorative in a way that suggested a motive. The plate itself looked like it had opinions.
He cut into the steak and said, softly, “You know, this is all very human.”
The woman in the green dress turned and asked, “What does that mean?”
Calvin thought for a moment.
“It means,” he said, “that nature is what happens when nobody is editing. And civilization is what happens when everybody is.”
Nobody laughed.
Then, from somewhere near the kitchen, a voice called out, “Table six needs more authenticity!”
And everyone in the restaurant nodded as if that were a normal request.