We can never know about the days to come
but we think about them anyway.
And I wonder if I’m really with you now
or just chasing after some finer day.
1971 was when Carly Simon introduced her song about the agony of waiting around for something good to come. The song was a top 15 hit for her that year, but it wasn’t until six years later when the folks on Madison Avenue took the music from that song and applied it to the anxious salivation that happens when you’re trying to pour ketchup out of a Heinz bottle. For most of the next ten years, Anticipation, the song, became synonymous with a condiment.
As we head to the end of the first full week of Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, the stunningly successful campaign to disabuse the theocratic regime in Tehran from being able to pursue nuclear weapons now or at any time in the near future, continues to shock and awe the world. After six days, unless you’re an antisemitic fool, you should have concluded by now never to underestimate the capabilities of the Jewish state.
Tuesday night, the rhetorical intensity between Iran and Israel were followed by volleys of rockets countered by airstrikes that actually expanded the path of destruction in the country formerly known as Persia.
Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, set a very ominous tone leading into the evening hours, promising something big was coming.
Shortly thereafter, a couple rounds of missiles were sent to central Israel. Instead of being counted in the hundreds like the first night, Iranian strikes are dwindling in size and effectiveness. Iran’s latest strikes were intercepted by Israeli air defenses, along with American help. If there was a big surprise, it might have been this one.
Do the Iranians have a long-range missile system that’s now actually functional? If it can be equipped with a nuclear warhead, does that mean they can reach anywhere? Or were they aiming for the Jewish space lasers again? No matter. They got broken.
It seems Iranian missiles can be intercepted while breaching the outer edge of the atmosphere, too.
As dawn spread across the Middle East, many people around the world were curious as to what Khamenei would say about his centuries-changing surprise that didn’t happen. While we wait, AI stepped in.
A murderous, brutal, thuggish regime that maintains power solely through the use of force over its own citizenry cannot stand when one or both of the following occurs – the people within, or in combination with outside forces, impose their will over the regime by killing off the oppressors, and second, open societal and/or international mockery. When regimes conduct terrorism internally and externally, it’s the fear of the regime that keeps it in power. If no one fears them anymore and they’re openly mocked, the end is certainly near.
Those aren’t love letters for the mullahs being sent into a sacrificial fire. They don’t seem too pleased with things. Then there’s this.
She was almost immediately backed up by something that happened to every Iranian television station.
Just a day after knocking off Iranian state TV off the air by an airstrike, the rest of Iranian media – not one, mind you, but every channel – was hacked by the Israelis, and a loop of Iran back in the good ol’ days when women weren’t persecuted and imprisoned in burqas began to play.
Catholic humor was pretty widespread throughout the day as wave after wave of Israeli fighter jets found their targets and obliterated them.
Followed by, naturally, the white smoke.
But when you see smoke this color, that’s no longer funny. That’s the time to hold your breath and turn around in a hurry.
That’s a chemical fire you’re not going to want to play around with.
Police headquarters in Tehran, aka the IRGC, is toast.
The only two nuclear sites in Iran that hadn’t received personal attention from either the Israelis or the Americans, were Fordow, which we’ll come to in a bit, and Arak, the heavy water reactor. By late Wednesday afternoon, Iranians in the area of Arak were warned to get out while the getting was good.
Iran, quite simply can do absolutely nothing to stop it from being hit. Every stitch of air defense, and most of the people that would man the anti-aircraft weapons, have ceased to be. They’re ex-Iranians. They’re pining for the fjords. They’re bereft of life.
Iran’s ambassador to Russia warned their brethren and partners that the regime would be taking notes on who came to their aid in this time of brief distress.
Vladimir Putin, a day after playing the Reverend Johnson card from Blazing Saddles, saying, “Son, you’re on your own,” followed it up by pointing to the contract.
It would appear that the pact between Russia and Iran isn’t exactly NATO-esque, and there’s certainly not an Article V commitment on paper. China has been as silent over the last week as Simone Biles after her unfortunate faceplant into trans males playing in women’s sports.
As for Iran’s missile capabilities, it grows weaker by the hour. Israel has such supremacy over Iranian skies that they can literally pick off mobile missile launchers while they’re trying to spin them up and prepare them for launch.
In another amazing show of Israeli capabilities, pilots have the ability to track trucks with missiles on them, and wait for them to clear away from other traffic that would otherwise be caught up in collateral damage before sending them off to see their 72 virgins.
With regards to the big enchilada, the Fordow nuclear complex under the mountains east of Tehran, that’s really the only remaining thing of substance still holding this evil regime in power. The entire world is on the edge of their seat, going through the agonizing waiting game of when or if the United States is going to take the easiest military shot in modern history, destroying the complex with a couple 30,000-pound bunker busters dropped from our stealth B-2’s. There is growing consensus that the Israelis have a plan with which to rid the world of Fordow, but on the ground in a Mission Impossible manner. If the Americans come to play, it’s literally point and click a couple times, and then it’s Beer Thirty once they land back home.
Donald Trump has been excruciatingly opaque about whether he’ll do it or not. And in the meantime, it’s allowing the Israelis not just to take a couple more pieces off Iran’s chessboard, but do it in Harry Potter Wizard’s Chess fashion – smashing everything that is remotely a sensitive target to bits.
Trump on the White House lawn Wednesday, inviting the world to admire his beautiful new pole, flagpole, that is, changed his demands of the Iranian regime. It was recently only to destroy their nuclear program and walk away from it. It’s now unconditional surrender.
Later in the Oval Office, Trump still wouldn’t commit one way or the other as to if, or when, he’d act.
While Trump mulls the mullah problem over, it ices everyone except the Israelis. Hamas either can’t or won’t get involved. Hezbollah has been eerily silent. Syria doesn’t quite know what Syria is going to be right now, but the one thing they seem pretty certain of is that they’re tired of being a proxy to Iran. And the Houthis, as well as Yemen, do not seem too terribly interesting in provocative moves right now, especially with the Nimitz carrier group coming on station in the region by later today.
Trump said earlier that he talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu daily, sometimes twice a day, and has said publicly that he told Bibi to, “Keep going.” And they are. Bloomberg, who got their start as a media group reporting on the markets and business world, reported Wednesday night that Trump was only hesitating because he wasn’t convinced that our biggest bunker buster was enough to penetrate the Fordow complex, and he didn’t want to have egg on his face if it didn’t do the job. Being that Bloomberg often has a hard time trying to explain what the market did last week, I’m skeptical of their reportage into the mind of Trump.
But if you, like me, are fascinated by reading the tea leaves into Trump’s decision making, here’s the stat of the night.
If they’re ordering pizza in at MacDill, as Emmett Doc Brown would say, “You’re about to see some serious [stuff]!”
By the way, that Bloomberg piece about Trump’s concerns using the B-2’s and bunker busters? The same report says most people in the know within the national security and Defense apparatus expect the call to be made this weekend.
Of course, the best outcome here would be that Ali Khamenei, one of the world’s most evil men of his era, lives long enough to see his dream of a nuclear Iran literally go up in a fireball, right before the Israelis turn out his lights for good.
I’m not like Willy Wonka. I don’t like the suspense. I don’t hope it will last. Drop those bombs, Mr. President. We’ll make more, right here in America.
