Ron Unz summarizes commenters dissenting from the mainstream media account of the Iran war
I pick it up where Unz summarizes the many bloggers and commenters saying that the war is not going well, some of which I have already posted. A major concern is that the U.S. and Israel will resort to nuclear weapons if they see no other way to acheive the destruction of Iran. Unz’s entire article is here.
Col. Daniel Davis and Commodore Steven Jermy are experienced military analysts, and I watched Prof. Glenn Diesen interviews them on his channel. In those discussions, they both made numerous excellent points, and neither of them seemed to think that the war was going very well for the Americans.
Alastair Crooke was a former senior MI6 officer who had spent decades in the Middle East and that same day he also provided a perspective on the war quite different from that presented in our media.
Those early interviews left me suspicious, but the crucial turning point in my military evaluation came a couple of days later when I watched one of Tucker Carlson’s shows on the conflict, a segment that I’d strongly recommend to everyone.
The first half provided a very interesting, crucial perspective on the origins and motives behind the war, a war that Carlson greatly feared might spiral out of control, becoming a global religious conflict pitting more than two billion Christians against a comparable number of Muslims.
But he devoted the second half of show to an his interview with a military analyst named Brandon J. Weichert, whom he considered quite knowledgeable and objective. Although very much a right-wing Trump supporter, Weichert was extremely concerned about the course that the war was taking.
According to Weichert, all the public warnings of our generals had been entirely correct. We’d apparently burned through our available supply of stand-off munitions and thus had gotten ourselves into a serious fix.
Although rather elderly and slow, the Tomahawk cruise missiles constitute the bulk of that arsenal, and in just the first four days of combat we’d already expended some 10% of our entire stockpile, representing an astonishing eight years of new production. Indeed, according to some other estimates I later heard, we’d actually now fired off something closer to 20% of our entire global Tomahawk inventory. So in some sense, America was undergoing something approaching involuntary unilateral disarmament as a consequence of our needless Iran War.
Meanwhile, the Iranians were successfully holding out, destroying all our military bases in the Gulf States and bombarding Israel, leaving us fewer and fewer options for achieving any sort of military victory.
Indeed, Weichert seemed quite concerned that there might be growing pressure on Trump or on the Israelis to use nuclear weapons as their only hope of achieving a military victory. This would be the first and only use of nuclear arms on the battlefield since Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than eighty years ago, and would obviously take the entire world in a very dark and dangerous direction.
The next day, a well-regarded military affairs blogger calling himself Simplicius revealed that the Iranians had effectively blinded our forces by destroying most of our strategic radars in the region. These ultra-high-end radar systems had a price-tag of around a billion dollars each and we could only build one or two per year. Yet in just the first few days, Iranian drone attacks had destroyed nearly half of our entire global inventory:
In particular, NYT and other outlets have now confirmed total attrition of US’s irreplaceable AN/TPY-2 radars meant for THAAD and other high end systems. This radar has an upwards of $1 billion dollar price tag and numbers only in the dozen range total. Only one or two units of these can be built per year at the very most. Iran just potentially destroyed 50% or more of the US’s entire global stock of this rare and irreplaceable system…
Some analysts have the count as follows:
Iran has managed to hit multiple high ended US radars worth more than $3 Bn which form critical core of US BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense) in Middle East:
Muwaffaq Salti Air Base: AN/TPY-2
Umm Dahal: AN-FPS-132
Prince Sultan Air Base: AN/TPY-2
Al Ruwais & Al Sader Air Bases: 2x AN/TPY-2
Even heavily pro-American propaganda OSINT accounts are forced to concede the losses:
The shock of the outcome cannot be understated: Iran is literally blinding the US in the region. And following that, it is launching its most advanced hypersonic Khorramshahr-4—also known as the Kheybar—ballistic missiles at Israel, which are now impervious to interdiction. They are said to release upwards of 80 submunitions in a tight pattern.
Thus, according to Simplicius, the Iranians were doing much, much better than he or anyone else had ever expected.
- Iran Blinds US With Unprecedented Campaign of Strikes on Region’s Strategic Radars
Simplicius • Substack • March 5, 2026 • 1,400 Words
The following day, another lengthy podcast interview confirmed these same claims and painted an equally bleak picture for the ongoing American war effort.
Before leaving the military to become a very popular history podcaster, Darryl Cooper had spent his long service career working with missiles and air-defense systems, and he was very much a Trump supporter, voting for him all three times he had been on the ballot. But he regarded our current military effort as a disastrous failure, and said so.
According to Cooper, the reason that the waves of Iranian missiles had so greatly decreased was that there wasn’t much left to shoot at. Most of the American bases in the region had been almost totally destroyed, and we might never bother returning to any of them.
Our stockpiles of munitions and air-defense interceptors had been exhausted, and we had abandoned all of our Arab allies, letting them get hit as we shifted our remaining defensive systems to Israel, something that they will certainly remember.
The Iranians had achieved complete escalation dominance. Given the total military disaster and lack of options we faced, Cooper joined Weichert in hinting at the danger that Trump or Israel would turn to the use of nuclear weapons in the desperate hope of salvaging some sort of victory.
Rather than fighting a war of choice, our attack on Iran had been a war of whim, and we had lost any shred of our military honor in the way we had fought it, doing so totally outside the Western tradition. While the Iranians were still honorable, we had fought in the most craven way imaginable.
Cooper’s extremely harsh verdict was summarized in stinging fashion by Australian blogger Caitline Johnstone, who characterized Trump’s attack on Iran as “Even dumber and crazier than the Iran War” in a post of that title., a sentiment also Tweeted out by journalist Mehdi Hasan:
And a commenter ridiculed Trump and his misbegotten war against Iran in similar fashion:
In this case one thing has to be said of Trump; he’s not afraid of trying for the impossible and actually succeeding where everyone thought such a goal was unreachable and just given up.
It’s kind of admirable in a bizarre “little engine that could” way.
In the future, grade one teachers could inspire their naive charges by telling them about a dolt President who was so stupid that everyone though he was so stupidest man in all of history until another President step up to the plate and proved himself even more stupider.
It will give the young’uns self-confidence and patriotic pride.
Both Weichert and Cooper seemed quite knowledgeable about all these military matters, and the same was true for the Simplicius blogger. Everything that they were saying appeared correct or at least reasonable based upon existing evidence. But none of these individuals possessed the credentials that might impress skeptical third parties, so I was very glad to hear the views of a renowned academic who certainly had those in spades.
For decades MIT Prof. Ted Postol has ranked as one of our foremost experts on military technology especially on matters involving missile systems, and during his long career he had regularly dealt with groups of three- and four-star flag officers on terms of full equality or better. But he also frequently attracted the enmity of corporate lobbyists for his candid and often less than flattering evaluations of the extremely pricey weapons systems that they marketed to our gullible government.
Although he retired from from his academic post about eight years ago, he has maintained strong interest in his technical specialty. So while his past briefings would have been restricted to the topmost ranks of our military services, they are now available to anyone who bothers watching one of his interviews on YouTube. I found his March 5th discussion with Col. Daniel Davis particularly enlightening.
As Postol explained, the widespread media claims that our air defense interceptors had been successful against Iranian ballistic missiles seemed utterly fallacious. In fact, these false claims were easily disproven by numerous videos circulating on the Internet that instead revealed the utter ineffectiveness of those defensive systems.
I had promoted his interview in a comment in which I noted his conclusions:
In the videos he’s showing, almost none of the Israeli or American anti-missile systems ever hit their target.
The Israelis fire three Patriot interceptors at an incoming Iranian missile—all of them miss.
The Israelis fire a dozen Iron Dome interceptors at an incoming Iranian missile—all of them miss.
The anti-missile intercept success rate seems somewhere between 0% and 5%.
Pretty soon the Israelis and Americans will be out of interceptors and totally defenseless. But since the interceptors anyway don’t really work, maybe that not such a big deal.
Meanwhile, the dishonest MSM declares that almost all the Iranian missiles are being successfully intercepted and shot down. And Trump has demanded UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!!!
The whole thing is like a Monty Python skit…
Postol went on to explain that many of the media reports of a 85-90% successful intercept rate had apparently come from the work of a Stanford political scientist named Scott Sagan, whom Postol ridiculed as an academic fraud:
TED POSTOL: Since I’ve been carrying on about academics and fraud — there’s this guy, Scott Sagan. He’s the head of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford. He just published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists where he claimed an 87% intercept rate for the Iron Dome. And we just saw what that intercept rate is — closer to well below 5%…
There you go, Mr. Great Guy. And he, incidentally, just banned me from going to seminars at Stanford. I’m now banned by Scott Sagan. What he likes to do is he goes behind your back and makes false claims.
DANIEL DAVIS: Well, come on, man. How can anyone claim an 87% success rate? In that one video you showed, that had a whole swarm of missiles coming down…
TED POSTOL: I mean, you just don’t understand it. He’s got more titles — I don’t know how he puts an article in because he’s got so many titles on his article, I don’t know where there’s space for the stuff. This is the kind of academic fraud that has now become the standard at Stanford University.
All of this demonstrated the transformative impact of technological changes and the powerful information channels that they have enabled. In past decades, Sagan’s exclusion of Postol from that Stanford seminar would have relegated the latter and his views to total obscurity. But now because of the Internet and its YouTube platform, Sagan might be speaking to 40 individuals or perhaps 400 while Postol’s contrary ideas were reaching a global audience of 400,000.
According to Postol’s analysis, the Iranians seem to be firing their ballistic missiles from individual underground locations all covered by thin layers of topsoil. Such firing positions could not possibly be detected by our satellites or even by overflying aircraft or drones, and therefore could not be targeted and destroyed. Other military experts have noted that many or most of the targets that we had allegedly hit were apparently just cardboard decoys, so these were probably the destroyed mobile missile launchers about which our government had apparently been bragging.
Furthermore, Postol explained that the more recent Iranian ballistic missiles were now often equipped with multiple decoys or with submunition warheads, with the latter able to produce a saturation bombing of a targeted area.
He emphasized that the Iranians had an enormous supply of large attack drones, each armed with a 200 pound warhead sufficiently powerful to destroy a radar system. So the American and Israeli defenders couldn’t ignore such attacks and were be forced to expend one or more $4 million interceptors on a drone that probably only cost $10,000 to $30,000.
Even worse for their opponents, the Iranians had equipped some of their drones with Iridium satellite communications systems able to broadcast video images back to their human controllers, thereby allowing the precise targeting of particular buildings or military sites.
All of these technological factors seemed to be giving the Iranians a major edge in the current state of combat.
Sunday evening Prof. Diesen released an additional hour-long interview with Postol, in which the latter refined and expanded his discussion of most of these same points.
Among other things, he explained that he had spent the last three decades regularly explaining to top Pentagon officials how easily their anti-missile defensive systems could be easily defeated by these counter-measures, and the Iranians were now demonstrating that this analysis had been entirely correct.
But even more importantly, he emphasized his huge concerns that the war with Iran might be about to go nuclear. He repeatedly described Netanyahu as “a homicidal maniac” who might be about to use nuclear weapons against Iran because Israel lacked any other option for coping with the relentless bombardment of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.
Worse still, the Iranians were themselves a nuclear threshold power, and if they were attacked with nuclear weapons, nothing could stop them from quickly assembling perhaps ten small atomic warheads and launching some of those against Israel in retaliation, thereby producing the sort of nightmare scenario that the world has dreaded for more than three generations.
Postol greatly feared that such a nuclear exchange would not remained confined to the Middle East and could easily lead to full-scale global nuclear war.
With Postol and others convinced that the world is facing a major risk of nuclear war, there seem to be few good options, so it may be worth exploring which might be the least bad ones.
Let us consider that Iran has now successfully imposed a tight blockade of the Strait of Hormuz without deploying a single naval vessel and without firing a single shot. In my article last week, I argued that China could impose an equally tight air/sea blockade of its own recognized province of Taiwan using very similar means.
Two weeks ago, an important New York Times article reported the implications:
A Chinese blockade of Taiwan, the officials said, could choke the supply of computer chips made on the island and bring the U.S. tech industry to its knees…
“The single biggest threat to the world economy, the single biggest point of single failure, is that 97 percent of the high-end chips are made in Taiwan,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, slightly overstating industry estimates. “If that island were blockaded, that capacity were destroyed, it would be an economic apocalypse”…
A confidential report commissioned in 2022 by the Semiconductor Industry Association for its members, which include the largest U.S. chip companies, said cutting the supply of chips from Taiwan would lead to the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. U.S. economic output would plunge 11 percent, twice as much as the 2008 recession…
But now, more than ever, it has become clear that Taiwan is critical to America’s economic survival, especially as artificial intelligence — which is built using chips made in Taiwan — drives the U.S. stock market and fuels economic growth…
…the Semiconductor Industry Association hired McKinsey to take a look. They started with a basic question: What would happen if companies couldn’t get chips from the island?
A summary of the resulting report opened with a map of Taiwan detailing how integral the island is to the global economy. Taiwan enabled roughly $10 trillion of the world’s gross domestic product. It made chips for iPhones and more than half of so-called memory chips for cars, and it led in assembling A.I. chips…
Other reports, including one by Bloomberg Economics, a research service, estimate a conflict would cost the global economy more than $10 trillion.
Therefore, I argued that a simple Chinese declaration of an air/sea blockade of Taiwan would produce an immediate collapse in America’s current AI Bubble and its entire financial system:
Over the last few years, the gigantic AI boom has driven the market values of major tech companies to unprecedented heights. There have been very widespread claims that we are experiencing an obvious AI Bubble, with trillions of dollars being budgeted for capital expenditures in that sector. Indeed, by some estimates America would probably have already fallen into a recession during 2025 if not for the enormous spending on data centers and other AI related projects, with AI accounting for 40% of all American GDP growth last year. Our economy has also been propped up by the consumer “wealth effect” produced by the huge rise in Tech stocks, almost all of that driven by the AI boom.
The seven largest corporations by market value are all Tech companies, largely boosted by their AI prospects, and their total value is over $20 trillion. Other Tech companies, whether public or private, add many trillions of dollars in additional market value…
I could easily imagine the largest, most heavily over-valued Tech stocks dropping by 50% or more, erasing many, many trillions of dollars in investor wealth. Over-leveraged hedge funds would surely go under, worsening the pain. Wall Street might see one of the worst collapses in its entire history…
I think that every major Tech executive and wealthy investor would apply enormous pressure on the American and Taiwanese governments to surrender…
The American government would have no other possible options.
…at this particular moment in time, a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would amount to placing its hands around the windpipe of all the West’s leading technology companies, all of Wall Street’s wealthy investors, and to a considerable extent the entire American economy.
So now is the right time for China to strike and burst the bubble of President Donald Trump’s American Empire.
- How China Can Burst the Bubble of Donald Trump’s American Empire
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 19, 2026 • 10,100 Words
I think that the result would be the sort of American financial collapse that might produce a swift surrender, forcing the immediate end of the Iran War and saving the world from a looming nuclear disaster.
h**ps://headlineusa.com/biden-tells-majority-black-crowd-im-a-hell-of-a-lot-smarter-than-most-of-you/
Ron Unz’s deep-seated belief in the importance and legitimacy of Establishment acclaim is at least subliminally present in everything he writes, and in the sentence quoted above, this partiality of his—virtually an addiction to credentialism—appears in full view. It is very easy to picture him being skeptical of the utility of the wheel until he sees the prehistoric equivalent of Jeffrey Sachs announce on CBS News that a guy who understands the potential of that invention might make a lot of money from it.
The point, of course, is that awareness of what makes a person tick is a critical component of any sound evaluation of the merits of his opinions or forecasts. In the present instance, Unz’s doom-laden fears of what might happen to the US economy should the AI racket go bust tell an attentive reader rather more about what is keeping his fellow Jewish millionaires and billionaires awake than about what could well be the much less dramatic consequences for White Americans whose primary concerns are a sufficiency of food, shelter, and clothing.
Because of its openness to counter- and anti-Establishment voices, Unz’s site is certainly a valuable resource for all who don’t embrace the government’s and media’s dogma that subservience to the Jews is every American’s highest calling. Yet the site’s importance has unfortunately led many people to conclude that Unz himself is an equally important and original thinker and analyst. He isn’t.