Wednesday Morning Pre-War Roundup

But will there be a war? Will the polling give the pols cold feet? Will hard military truths make a difference?

Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW

14h

Trump calls what was doubtless a contentious National Security Council meeting after literal casus belli-level rage-tweeting all day on the flight back from Europe, then calls Netanyahu after he gets out and turns in for the night.

...did they actually threaten to 25th him?

Quote

Disclose.tv @disclosetv

14h

JUST IN - Trump not expected to speak tonight, White House calls a lid.

I’m only surprised that Netanyahu didn’t participate by Zoom or something. And maybe he actually did. Will the polling make a difference, or will GOPe embrace destruction of the MAGA coalition? All Trump’s rage tweeting and juvenile personal attacks on respected conservative figures don’t appear to have moved the dial of public opinion. The fact that Trump, uncharacteristically, kept his mouth shut after the meeting could be an indication that the meeting really was contentious.

I was listening to Danny Davis and Larry Johnson yesterday. At one point DD recounted his experience serving in Doug Mac’s armored unit in Desert Storm. As I recall, DD said that they didn’t go in after the Republican Guard until the USAF had spent 38 days, with airstrikes every 10 hours, eliminating the RG as a fighting force. DD says when they did actually go in, they found that all that bombing had destroyed something like three tanks. Now, the RG was overmatched by US armor at the time, but he recounted that experience to illustrate the very real limitations of air power.

The weapons available—especially stand off missiles—available to the USAF are very diffferent from those times. But guess what? So are the weapons available to Iran. The USAF will be operating from bases within range of highly capable Iranian ballistic missiles, missiles that will be more advanced than those that have been blowing through the best air defenses the Anglo-Zionists can muster. Count on this: The Iranians have held back their best for just this contingency. Prince Sultan air base, Akrotiri, Diego Garcia? All within range. And Iran has anti-ship hypersonics dug into the mountains that stretch along its coastline all the way to Pakistan.

Yes, warfare has changed. It has leveled the playing field—not entirely, but to a degree that Trump’s rage tweeting doesn’t reflect. This is exactly the point that Khameini has been making in his recent, and measured, public statements. The polling data seems to show that the American people have a bit better handle on things. Hopefully our corrupt politicians will listen.

Ian Proud @proud_diplomat

In case anyone needed a reminder, the first Gulf War involved over 3/4 million troops, 3000 tanks and almost 2000 aircraft.

And a six month build up....

War on a whim in #Iran won't go well for the #USA.

It will however, mean endgame #Ukraine

11:22 AM · Jun 17, 2025

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

First as tragedy, then as farce.

Proud’s reference to “war on a whim” accurately reflects the difference between recent US wars—initiated without meaningful debate—and what the constitutional order and our republican values are supposed to be.

Now, what are the political stakes? It’s difficult to say, in part because it’s so difficult to say whether the Dems could possibly get their act together in a way that would appeal to the American people. You don’t have to accept these prognostications to still wonder what might come of this:

Philip Pilkington @philippilk

If there’s a war in the Middle East a lot of Trump supporters will switch to a Democrat antiwar candidate - these will be core supporters that prop up many MAGA institutions. It’s incredibly obvious.

Sohrab Ahmari @SohrabAhmari

2h

Yes, especially the Obama-to-Trump working-class voters, who aren't deep MAGA---but crucial to places like Pennsylvania.

Those are the Trump voters who won’t forget a betrayal of this maginitude:

Cassandra MacDonald @CassandraRules

17h

Donald Trump's Recent Promises of No New Wars

November 6, 2024 (Election Night)

"I'm not going to start wars... I'm going to stop wars."

January 20, 2025 (Farewell Address)

"I am especially proud to be the first President in decades who has started no new wars."

January 2025 (Campaign Messaging)

"Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity..."

Various Speeches (During Campaign)

"We had no wars, for four years we had no wars. Except we defeated ISIS.... I'm not going to start a war, I'm going to stop the wars."

Again, Trump’s juvenile personal attacks on figures who are respected by his core MAGA voters will not help hold anything resembling a conservative coalition together. Nor will the performance of Jewish Nationalist-owned buffoons like Ted Cruz:

DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics

13h

Watch as Tucker Carlson mops the floor with Senator Ted Cruz.

America is not a serious country.

Will Schryver addresses one of the Neocon talking points that DD focused on yesterday:

Will Schryver @imetatronink

 The Late '70s Iranian "Hostage Crisis" and the 2025 Iran War

A longstanding narrative is that the United States still "owes" Iran a proper comeuppance for the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis.

That narrative has been circulating ubiquitously in recent days, as attested in the X post cited below.

As I often note, Americans are the most easily and thoroughly propagandized people in human history.

And, more now than ever, they are almost universally ignorant of history.

Let's review a small selection of the salient facts of this "crisis" — all of which took place during my years living in Italy.

A group of young Iranians, with the support of the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, supreme leader of the revolution, took and held 52 American hostages.

In exchange, they demanded the release of Iranian sovereign gold, cash, and other securities frozen in the United States — a total of ~$30B in 2025 dollars.

In other words, they demanded nothing that was not legally and rightfully theirs.

The waning Jimmy Carter administration refused to submit to these maximalist demands, but the incoming administration of Ronald Reagan forked over the dough, and all the well-treated hostages were released.

If you ask me, the Ayatollah demonstrated some serious "art of the deal" in that episode.

Of course, the Americans then mounted (via Saddam Hussein's Iraq) an extremely costly (but ultimately failed) decade-long proxy war against Iran.

Ever since then — over three decades — the Iranians have been preparing against the exigency of one day having to fight the Americans again, only this time directly.

And here we are ...

Pivoting to the missile war, and bearing in mind that Iran has yet to deploy it’s most advanced missiles, saving them, perhaps, for US/NATO targets:

Will Schryver @imetatronink

13h

There is a pronounced qualitative difference between the top-shelf Iranian ballistic missiles and the THAAD / Arrow missiles attempting to intercept them.

And the US/Israel know it. That's why they fired off two launchers worth of interceptors against a single incoming.

Thomas Keith @iwasnevrhere_

11h

What you’re seeing in the footage is not a propulsion failure, nor a mechanical misfire. It’s the behavioral signature of a missile defense interceptor entering logic collapse. The thruster bursts, short, angular, and misaligned, reveal an internal guidance system attempting to reorient based on input it can’t validate. It’s the visible consequence of corrupted telemetry. The target either disappeared from the radar cross-section through ECM spoofing, or changed velocity and altitude so rapidly that the onboard prediction model could no longer converge on a viable intercept path. The result is a spiraling trajectory, what some call a “phantom arc”, where the interceptor is alive, but chasing ghosts.

In modern intercept systems like Arrow-3 or David’s Sling, the seeker head and command uplink must maintain a tightly synchronized picture. If that synchronization is broken, whether by signal injection, uplink jamming, or decoy saturation, the interceptor is effectively blinded mid-flight. Its remaining logic reverts to last-known vectors, which is why you see sudden lateral thrusting: it’s grasping for a re-lock that no longer exists. This kind of erratic drift usually ends with a fail-safe self-detonation or it burns out trying to correct a non-existent path.

In the context of this footage, the visible detonation is not a hit, it’s not impact, It’s a kill vehicle terminating itself after failing to verify a target. This is what a spoofed or outmaneuvered system looks like in real-time, no catastrophic boom, no direct collision, just the quiet unraveling of digital certainty at hypersonic speeds.

Lastly, because I’ve seen a fair amount of misinformed questioning along the lines of, Why hasn’t Russia come to Iran’s rescue?

DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics

 This needs to be addressed. Emotions are running high, and many people clearly haven’t followed the timeline of the Russia–Iran agreement.

Let’s get the facts straight: it was Iran that deliberately scaled back the scope of the agreement by refusing to include a full mutual defense clause. Ahead of the signing of the “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” on January 17, 2025, Iran’s ambassador to Moscow, Kazem Jalali, openly stated that Iran “is not interested in joining any defence blocs” and prefers to maintain its independence and self-reliance. As a result, this pact does not mirror the mutual defense provisions found in Russia’s agreements with Belarus or North Korea.

"The nature of this agreement is different. They (Belarus and North Korea) established partnership relations (with Moscow) in a number of areas that we did not particularly touch upon. Our country's independence and security, as well as self-reliance, are extremely important. We are not interested in joining any bloc,"

— Kazem Jalali, Iran's ambassador to Moscow, as cited by TASS

Since 2022, Russia has repeatedly signaled its readiness to form formal military alliances—even proposing a trilateral bloc with Iran and China. But Iran chose not to commit. Tehran wanted to leave the door open for talks with the West. That decision aligns with Iran’s longstanding policy since 1979 of avoiding entangling military alliances.

There was also justified concern that a formal alliance could trigger harsher Western sanctions—or even direct military confrontation.

Of course, things deteriorated further following the death of Raisi (and you’re free to ask yourself who really killed him—officially, Iranians say it was an accident).

So before rushing to the comments section to accuse Russia of "not helping," educate yourself on the timeline. Don’t fall for the "divide and conquer" narrative being actively pushed by the West and Zionists in recent days.