In 21 days of fighting, Iran’s assets have yielded: three damaged refuelers on the ground, an early warning radar for ballistic lift-off, an AWACS aircraft on the ground, a dozen killed, a damaged F-35, and 25 large UAVs shot down.
Now the list of affected factories: 4000 hits from the USA and 4000 from Israel. That’s from 250 kg to a ton in the head. The list of targets is several A4 pages in small print.
The production of engines, electronics was knocked out, all leadership and heavy water factories destroyed, chemical plants and solid fuel mixing workshops burned. The much-hyped underground bunkers of Natanz and Fordow, where centrifuge cascades were spinning, were pierced through. The Shahed assembly lines and heavy ballistic assembly workshops were leveled, dry docks and port terminals through which contraband oil was smuggled were nullified.
They thought mountains and concrete would hide them, but the heavy bunker-buster GBU simply doesn’t care.
The country now has a 10 million rial banknote. That’s 8 bucks. The salaries of officials and IRGC officers in Iran now hover around 150-200 dollars in real purchasing power, if they’re very lucky. Air defense — Chinese, bought for crazy money, Russian S-300s, and their own much-promoted “S-400 analogues” (Bavar-373) — just wiped off the face of the earth.
Now chicken will definitely be a weekly ordeal there. The country has hundreds of thousands of people whose regime killed a grandson, nephew, daughter, son-in-law, or acquaintance during protests. They won’t forget this.
The US fleet can easily close the Hormuz choke point. They can slow tankers there for weeks and scrutinize them under a magnifying glass to identify which is Iranian and which is not. Will there be a global crisis? Well, it’ll be spread across the planet, affecting everyone in the dollar zone. The US is an oil and fuel producer itself; price increases are unpleasant before elections but not critical.
Reminder, for Trump, the next term is his swan song. He’s not running anymore. After that, he’s just writing books about how he handed out beatings, playing golf, and sucking his thumb in a retirement home. He doesn’t care about ratings.
For Israel, this is also a unique window of opportunity. When will Yemen sit quietly again after months of harsh beatings, Syria has disintegrated, Lebanon has banned Hezbollah, and in Iran itself, protests rage while in the US sits a man who recognized Jerusalem and wants to forcefully write his name into history?
That’s the situation. It’s funny how the Russians are cheering for Iran, eating this brown goo, and spouting their nonsense about the “Global South.” Now all the zealots are watching how quickly the West is taking over the air and are horrified at the thought that they might methotically unite against Russia in the same way. Their kokoshnik fell off near Ust-Luga, and she groans and squeaks, talking about “tiered air defenses” and “no analogues.”
But reality is a stubborn little thing. Iranians have been pushed back a generation in terms of living. From the era of drones and near-nuclear status—back to industrialization, right to the very beginning. Minus nuclear physicists, minus players with hardware weight, minus logistics across the Middle East, minus proxies. And all this — the price for 25 downed drones and a sliced-up AWACS plane they managed to get.
Their main prize now is simply to preserve the regime. Without its ideologists and levers of governance. To survive as a closed theocracy that tyrannizes its own youth for the ambitions of a bunch of old men. Torture chambers, finishing off the wounded, executions of bloggers, flogging for a bottle of vodka or a missing scarf. Stephen King stands aside; horror as it is. They are ready to munch on bark, hide in caves, and kill their own children just not to admit that their path is an evolutionary dead end.
It looks like a natural death cult that pushes its own country into a concrete Middle Ages solely to spite the West.
And the joyful idiots from RF clap their hands: “Hurray, we’re for this!” They clap without even realizing they’re looking in the mirror.
They so eagerly root for the bearded cannibals just because they subconciously prepare for the same fate — to sit in isolation and ruins, without technology, without a fleet, and without a future, but with a proudly raised head and cries about their own greatness.
