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I would very much like to disagree with this, but I am struggling.

Look folks, reality can sometimes be hard to accept.

We all want freedom for Iran. The regime was a horrible, nasty pack of religious zealots for whom terrorism & murder was always the first option. Their revolution started by killing 400 people in a theater with arson & chained exit doors. They sent thousand of kids to their deaths with toy keys around their necks promising entry to heaven if they just walk in to Iraqi minefields.

I’ve tracked IRGC terrorism across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria & Yemen and even fought them in the PG, They almost killed me in 1988. The Islamic regime needed/still needs to be destroyed … that said:

People are getting upset with why I assess this war will likely fail to topple the regime.

Because it is a fantasy based in Trump’s head using lethal tools we prepared for 47 years for the right moment. That moment likely has passed.

Trump has no idea what he’s doing. Because he has contempt for the people who know what they’re doing & the history of what came before him.

If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires then Iran is the funeral home of empires. It dresses you up and lays you into the coffin neatly. Then closes the lid.

Trump cannot understand why Iran hasn’t surrendered … “Lookit all them bombs,” he shouts “They should all love Trump!”

That’s it. That’s the Iran-War strategy. He does not care about the people of Iran. It a score settling grudge match egged on by Netanyahu’s 40 years of promises that war will change the regime if we just drop enough bombs & assassinate its leaders.

So If you want to live in a fantasy world where we are suddenly being greeted as liberators by the 93 million Iranians … feel free.

You are now set up for earth shattering disappointment.

You have to account for the fact that Trump could have attacked in support of the protesters in January. He didn’t & he let them be killed. He was completely indifferent. The 30k dead were a one-day talking point.

Right now, none of these attacks will liberate Iran without a populist uprising or invading ground forces. Worse case is a sectarian Civil war. If that happens the only outcome is that it will kill a lot of people, splinter the country & take down the global economy. Trump will sleep soundly & demand he be made Ayatollah.

This is literally his mental illness masked as foreign policy

This war may give some Iranians hope but it’s a false one. Gird for a horrible chain of dramatic events but rest assured Trump doesn’t care about the people of Iran.

He only want its oil. He said so.

I’m sorry folks, but my job is to deliver reality based assessments, not promise you sunshine in a swirling hurricane of flying bullets, bombs, excrement & razor wire.
https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/2030572269898998102

That’s pretty much it. The only bit I'd dispute is it's about the oil. As far as Donald Trump goes this overstates the thinking behind it. The objective of the attack is the attack itself. The thrill and spectacle of it. The buzz of being able to order something like this. A perk of the presidency which he isn't about to deny himself. He's about the abuse of power and this - treating the awesome capabilities of the US military as a personal toy - is the ultimate in that. He's doing it because he can. And the same lack of rationale will apply to the exit. He'll stop not based on any particular criteria but simply when he feels like it. Same applies to all his foreign policy 'initiatives'. Ridiculous, absurd, scary, but true.

He will stop when he gets bored. Trump is like a toddler on a sugar-rush. He trashes the place, then moves on to trash another place.

The surest way to destroy Iran would be to make him leader...

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Fieldwork 4th to 6th March

Badenoch working her magic touch.

She's been too gungho, especially given Trump's latest nonsense. Why send an aircraft carrier with all the cost and risk involved? Let him fight his own war.

Nonsense. We should have sent in our carrier right from the start.

We'd have a sunker Carrier and Body Bags returning home now if we had and who would YOU have been blaming.

NOT OUR WAR!

Stay Out!

Our ex pats in the region are exactly that ex-pats , many of them there to slag off our Country , how great they are and how crap the UK is, they made their bed, tough shit. The genuine majority should be helped and supported and it;s up to Gulf States to protect them. We should offer support no more. NON aggressive support.

Holidaymakers should and are being helped and slowly getting out!

Lets remind everyone of one FACT!

One drone has fallen on a soverign UK air base. The most accurate reports suggest it was Russian made, fired by Hezbollah probably from remote Labanon area!

RAF and others are now intercepting drone, you CANNOT stop every drone and Badenoch and Farage cannot be allowed to ghoulishly cheer any drone that falls as some sort of sick excuse for their desperation to go to war!

Every drone that stops another Kuwait City tower from burning is a win - that will be appreciated in the region.

We didn't start the war. But we shouldn't sit on our hands either if we can help prevent damage.

Personally, I'd extend that to hunting down the launch sites within Iran too. But I appreciate that is further than some would go. Happy for that subject to be debated in Parliament.

If Kuwait wants to stop drones being launched at Kuwait, then Kuwait can bomb the launch sites. Likewise UAE, Qatar and Bahrain. We can sell them the hardware.

So, you'd let the shaheed drones slam into civilian infrastructure? Even though we could help stop that?

Noted.

Russian drones are slamming into civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and we’re not attacking Russia. Israeli and US missiles are slamming into civilian infrastructure in Iran and we’re not attacking them. Life is somewhat more complicated than you’re painting it.

We have done what we can to assist Ukraine. We have sent them the DragonFire laser system to shoot down drones. Unlike the US, the UK isn't giving Russia an easy ride for giving up on democracy and committing war crimes on an industrial scale - 300,000 logged incidents and counting.

Great. So we can do the same for the Gulf states. We don’t have to start bombing Iran.

We have provided Ukraine with StormShadow cruise missiles. That thy use to bomb Russian command and control centres and weapons caches. Within Russia.

Would you not use our StormShadow cruise missiles to bomb known Iranian shaheed drone caches in Iran? Do you not see how inconsistent you appear?

We can sell Storm Shadow to UAE.

IIRC the Storm Shadow problem is that we don’t have enough and the production line is still closed.

Do a deal that UAE can get immediately from UK stocks at double the usual price, which funds production starting up again for UK and Ukraine.

There's likely to be a lot of this sort of pragmatism falling out in coming weeks and months.

Right wing in slight retreat in polling
Reform now sub 30 with all but 5 pollsters (JLP, Techne, Ipsos, Freshwater and Deltapoll but they havent reported since December)
Tories off a point or two to just under 20 with most pollsters
Labour picture is very varied, some tentative evidence of a no bases bounce but not conclusive yet
Lib Dems in slight decline from last year and may see the odd single figure in the near term
Greens on the march but still have not broken through 15% with any BPC pollsters except YG and Find Out Now

If Trump and Bibi win this (doubtful) don't you think Kemi and Nigel will be vindicated and Starmer will be left looking weak. This is why he will bottle it and join an Iraq style war with Iran.

I'm not going to guess. The electorate act in ways that amaze me in times like this

I would very much like to disagree with this, but I am struggling.

Look folks, reality can sometimes be hard to accept.

We all want freedom for Iran. The regime was a horrible, nasty pack of religious zealots for whom terrorism & murder was always the first option. Their revolution started by killing 400 people in a theater with arson & chained exit doors. They sent thousand of kids to their deaths with toy keys around their necks promising entry to heaven if they just walk in to Iraqi minefields.

I’ve tracked IRGC terrorism across Iraq, Lebanon, Syria & Yemen and even fought them in the PG, They almost killed me in 1988. The Islamic regime needed/still needs to be destroyed … that said:

People are getting upset with why I assess this war will likely fail to topple the regime.

Because it is a fantasy based in Trump’s head using lethal tools we prepared for 47 years for the right moment. That moment likely has passed.

Trump has no idea what he’s doing. Because he has contempt for the people who know what they’re doing & the history of what came before him.

If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires then Iran is the funeral home of empires. It dresses you up and lays you into the coffin neatly. Then closes the lid.

Trump cannot understand why Iran hasn’t surrendered … “Lookit all them bombs,” he shouts “They should all love Trump!”

That’s it. That’s the Iran-War strategy. He does not care about the people of Iran. It a score settling grudge match egged on by Netanyahu’s 40 years of promises that war will change the regime if we just drop enough bombs & assassinate its leaders.

So If you want to live in a fantasy world where we are suddenly being greeted as liberators by the 93 million Iranians … feel free.

You are now set up for earth shattering disappointment.

You have to account for the fact that Trump could have attacked in support of the protesters in January. He didn’t & he let them be killed. He was completely indifferent. The 30k dead were a one-day talking point.

Right now, none of these attacks will liberate Iran without a populist uprising or invading ground forces. Worse case is a sectarian Civil war. If that happens the only outcome is that it will kill a lot of people, splinter the country & take down the global economy. Trump will sleep soundly & demand he be made Ayatollah.

This is literally his mental illness masked as foreign policy

This war may give some Iranians hope but it’s a false one. Gird for a horrible chain of dramatic events but rest assured Trump doesn’t care about the people of Iran.

He only want its oil. He said so.

I’m sorry folks, but my job is to deliver reality based assessments, not promise you sunshine in a swirling hurricane of flying bullets, bombs, excrement & razor wire.
https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/2030572269898998102

He's not even Iranian. just a semi literate American. Unless you live in a country you don't know the people or even have a sense of them.It feels like that with this man. He could be right but when you start with dramatic openings like that you seldom are. Iran is one of the few places I haven't worked in in that region so my only knowledge is from Iranians abroad and they're not homogenous. I know ones I like and ones I don't. By contrast I know lots of Israelis nearly all English ex pats. I would be interested to know how they would fare if faced with the treatment their government meet out to their enemies? The answer I suspect is they would be back to their motherland before you could say Shabbat shalom

The murderous thuggery of the Iranian regime has been detailed for many decades. The regime gets off on violence and their narrow, vicious, interpretation of Islam.

There’s a reason they need to use such violence to keep control - you don’t turn every mosque in to a secret police station because the people love you.

Nearly all Iranians abroad are refugees from that or descendants of refugees from that. A diaspora of millions.

As the chap says, Trump is just making a murderous mess.

At university we had good fun with the Iranian Society being run by exiles - and regime supporters who were sponsored to do degrees in London getting violently angry that the anti-regime types weren’t suppressed by the university.

It rather reminded me of stories of the East bloc exiles in London and the various interactions with their regime supporters. There was that story from the 70s about a minor Polish government “trade envoy” guy who hung around a Polish exile club. Still missing, they say.

The Tories crime policy, I agree with most of. I particularly detest the smell of cannabis (aka dog shit) on the street. And littering - why? These are signs of a dysfunctional society.

I think the devil's in the detail though - they say 'back our police to take a zero tolerance approach' - how does that actually compell the police to have a zero tolerance approach? The Home Secretary has no operational control over the police force. So how are you going to do it? There's also nothing really here on justice, which is absolutely vital if there's a crime crackdown. How are courts going to handle the extra cases? How are prisons going to handle it?

That strikes me as a lack of a 'worked out policy' that Kemi places so much importance on.

Though tbf I've only seen the social media video, they could have answers to all this.

The thing is that it is pure bollocks.

Where are the increased funds for the police? The increased court space? The new prisons? The new secure mental illness places? The taxes or cuts elsewhere to fund the above?

It is just waffle and hot air.

2010 to 2024

What were the Tories doing, apart from destroying public services

Plotting against whoever was their leader at the time?

Arguing with each other about Brexit? And then thrusting its worst possible form upon us.

Bringing politics into disrepute with their behaviour?

I’m still completely lost as to what the end game of this Iran action is.

The regime still in place, but having agreed to end its nuclear ambitions? And ending all beligerant actions against its GCC neighbours?

Whether it extends to ending support for regional proxies is less certain.

It is going to need a lot of background displomacy. I can see Trump agreeing to let Putin persuade Tehran - and giving Putin what he wants on ending sanctions as the quid pro quo.

Which in turn will prolong the Ukrainian war.

I read your first two sentences and thought, yes, it would be good if Israel ended its nuclear ambitions and its belligerence against its neighbours… but then I realised you were talking about Iran. It would also be good for Iran to do those things.