re: Official US/Israel vs Iran war thread

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If you’d told me a few years ago this is where we’d be on Iran, I’d have said you were high:

1. Nuke program set back years. Enrichment and reprocessing gutted, weaponization sites destroyed, Fordow inoperable, Natanz in ruins, a generation of senior nuclear scientists eliminated.

2. Ballistic missile program crippled. Monthly production down from 100 to near zero. Roughly half the regime’s missiles and launchers destroyed. The IRGC Aerospace Force commander who ran the missile enterprise dead.

3. Air defenses devastated. American and Israeli airpower dominating Iranian skies, with strike aircraft operating over the country with near impunity.

4. Full economic warfare. Not just OFAC sanctions anymore, but military pressure layered on top: naval blockade, near-zero oil exports, choked imports, wrecked steel and petrochemical sectors, triple-digit inflation, and a currency that is effectively worthless.

5. Regime decapitation. Khamenei dead. Larijani dead. Hundreds of senior IRGC, intelligence, military, and Basij commanders dead including the IRGC commander-in-chief, the armed forces chief of staff, and the Aerospace Force commander. Mojtaba Khamenei inheriting a hollowed-out regime with no supreme authority and a gutted command structure.

6. The region turning on Tehran. Gulf states shutting down the sanctions-busting, money-laundering, and financial escape routes the regime has relied on for years. No Arab capital willing to throw Iran a lifeline. China and Russia providing limited support.

7. Proxy network shattered. Hezbollah and Hamas heavily degraded. Houthi political leadership taking direct Israeli strikes. The “Axis of Resistance” and “ring of fire” are now more slogans than real threats.

8. Syrian corridor severed. Assad is gone. The new government in Damascus is actively blocking Iranian arms transfers to Hezbollah: arresting smugglers and publicly declaring Syria will no longer serve as a transit corridor for Tehran’s terrorists. The land bridge to the Mediterranean that took decades to build is effectively closed.

9. Lebanon pivoting west. With Hezbollah battered and resupply choked, Israel and Lebanon have opened direct peace talks for the first time since 1983, aimed at a permanent agreement and Hezbollah’s disarmament. Beirut now asserting that the Lebanese armed forces alone are responsible for national defense. This is a direct repudiation of Hezbollah’s “resistance” claim. TBD.

10. Deterrence exposed as a bluff. Four direct attacks on Israel — April 2024, October 2024, June 2025, March 2026 — failed to impose strategic cost and instead triggered heavy retaliation. Iran couldn’t even use Syria as a launchpad.

11.Economy hollowed out from within. Power shortages, water crises, factory shutdowns, pension unrest, and mass protests. Nationwide demonstrations erupted in December 2025 after a year of economic freefall, with bazaaris, oil workers, and truckers, the regime’s traditional support base, joining strikes across all 31 provinces. Running out of oil storage space. Fuel shortages. The worst crisis since 1979.

12. Scientific and technical brain drain. Beyond the nuclear experts, Iran has lost a generation of irreplaceable expertise in missile design, centrifuge engineering, and weapons development. The survivors are harder to recruit and easier to deter.

13. Naval power decimated. The regular navy shattered, IRGC navy taking growing losses as CENTCOM moves to reopen Hormuz.

And against all of this: the regime forced to play its Hormuz card at its weakest possible moment when the U.S. has options instead of when we didn’t: namely, Tehran with nuclear-armed ICBMs, 10,000 ballistic missiles, a Chinese- and Russian-built military, hundreds of thousands of attack drones, a fully operational terror network, and hundreds of billions of dollars to harden its economy.

That’s the strategic picture. It’s extraordinary. Much more to do but I can’t comprehend how much has been achieved.

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Still many challenges ahead:

1. Battle of Hormuz
2. Red Sea/Houthis
3. Enriched material
4. PickAxe Mountain
5. Internal repression of Iranians
6. Reconstitution — nuclear, missile, proxies
7. American political calendar including POTUS 2029 who gives up
8. Negotiations leading to fatally flawed deal.
9. Success leads us to abandon Iranians.
10. Replacing depleted war materials

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Not a crude oil refiner also you don't know much about refining.

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They won't be buying oil from Iran or Venezuela with the yuan (Chinese dollar, and you are acting like an expert), anymore. China is not getting oil from Iran currently. Quit getting your propaganda from tik tok

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My Working Theory of The Iran War.

The United States Intelligence Community, at the highest levels--if not with Trump himself--was working with Ghalibaf from what Trump described as "the beginning" just today.
That being the assassination of Soleimani. Something I've been postulating for a long time.
Ghalibaf has been an asset for years. It began well before Soleimani's death. It started small and got larger over time. That's how these things tend to go. Small favors become ultimate betrayals.
Over time, Ghalibaf has become a source in the US more valuable than anything MOSSAD has built on their own.
I believe Ghalibaf is ruthless enough to work with the distant US, but petty enough to reject any overtures from his near enemies (the Israelis.)
Public information being as limited as it is, I can see two major events where Ghalibaf's merits as an asset were tested.
The first being the betrayal of Soleimani's location.
The second being the Midnight Hammer strikes. I believe he betrayed just how close the IRGC was getting to a nuclear weapon.
I have no doubt that there were other events in which his intelligence was collected and tested for both timeliness and accuracy.
In all of these cases, Ghalibaf established his worth beyond all skepticism.
But his ultimate betrayal was supposed to occur during Operation: Epic Fury.
And perhaps it did. But it was his first mission that went imperfectly.
The initial strike went wrong. Mojtaba was not supposed to survive. Nobody who could reasonably contest Ghalibaf for the role of Supreme Leader was supposed to survive.
He was supposed to be Iran's Delcy Rodriguez.
If things went perfectly, the operation would've been over in 2 weeks. Tops.
But Mojtaba survived. And he found himself to the Supreme Leader chair.
Mojtaba was not involved in the betrayal.
How Mojtaba survived is unclear. Perhaps it was simple serendipity. He got a call at the right time. Excused himself from the immediate blast radius and sustained critical injuries but nevertheless survived.
Perhaps Ghalibaf himself grew cold feet. There's some indication the two of them are close. It could be the case that Ghalibaf warned Mojtaba at the last second.
Or maybe Ghalibaf's operational security was imperfect and someone else warned Mojtaba in the final available moments.
Whatever the case, Ghalibaf's path to the throne was blocked.
Worse, his viability as an asset was put in serious jeopardy.
It'd be almost impossible for him to hide his betrayal totally from everyone involved. Too many are dead. And he's one of the last remaining survivors.
I believe Ghalibaf's life hinges on his selling that he remains loyal to the cause of the IRGC, and that he was a ruthless opportunist who saw an opportunity to climb the social ladder and took it. Too many people are dead for him to possibly sell that he had nothing to do with anything.
The IRGC won't just kill Ghalibaf because if the US loses their inside man, they have no reason to hold back on any of the regime anymore. Besides, it almost makes more sense to try and turn him into a double agent. He has a direct line to the US.
As Trump says, the current power structure in Iran is seriously dysfunctional.
That instability seems to mostly be due to one man: Mojtaba.
I believe Mojtaba is mostly functional. Certainly, his injuries are grave by all indications.
But he's a king with no trusted advisors.
Who will his rule placate? A king always rules in service of a faction, or else the king would simply be killed by the next available enterprising backstabber.
The political class is ready to jump ship now.
The IRGC is ready to martyr themselves and hand the country to Marco Rubio.
Isolating the political class means losing the political apparatus of Iran and perhaps the Artesh.
Isolating the IRGC means losing the most loyal guns on your side and having them turned against you.
Mojtaba, rather than attempt to make an impossible choice, has done his best to placate both sides.
That's why the possibility of a deal remains tempting to the US. Really, all it requires is Ghalibaf and the political class successfully persuading Mojtaba.
And that's why we decided to engage in the Kayfabe Ceasefire. We needed to take a step back and observe. The dynamics couldn't metastasize until we stopped mercilessly obliterating them. A strategy I miss dearly, on a personal level.
The dynamics revealed themselves after the first iteration of the Pakistan talks.
The political class is still on the side of the Americans. Ghalibaf has secured his own faction, and therefore has a level of insulation within the regime.
But the IRGC remains intransigent.
Mojtaba doesn't have the political capital to fully ostracize one side or the other, as things stood.
The US assessed that the Naval Blockade would make the decision a lot easier.
At this point, it became possible for Ghalibaf to plead his case internally without coming off as a traitor. He could insist that they've simply been beaten here.
I believe his pleas fell on deaf ears. The IRGC has once again decided that they will hang on until the bitter end, and Mojtaba doesn't have the authority to stop them from doing just that.
When the blasting resumes, the Trump administration will have a decision to make as far as how to best salvage this operation.
It isn't impossible to simply go back to Plan A and install Ghalibaf as the new ruler who is totally beholden to the Americans. If they have the will to cut that deep and still have a level of trust in Ghalibaf, that path has its advantages.
However, a more surgical approach is what they're more likely to choose.
That approach would be to maintain the blockade while engaging in targeted assassinations of IRGC officials and the elimination of the last 22-25% of military targets from the original list. Those numbers being from Trump himself.
At that point, the IRGC will simply be too dead and too deprived of political clout to effectively insert themselves as an advisor to Mojtaba.
That'll insert Ghalibaf into the role of the "power behind the throne," and the US will have their man in Mojtaba's inner circle to ensure that the agreement they reach is effectuated.
Some time ago, I said the most likely end of this operation would occur between the end of April and the first two weeks of May.
We are on that precise path.
The operation was imperfect, but it was salvaged completely by the guile and political will of a transformational POTUS.
And most importantly, the bravery and unmatched killing power of the United States Armed Forces.

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