Iran Crisis & the 2026 War between Iran and the United States, Gulf States, and Israel - Please focus on news and coverage, not argumentation.

[geckogoy]

The B-2 actually lacks nuclear standoff capability IIRC, it can only carry nuclear gravity bombs.

Afaik that was somewhat de-escalatory towards nuclear tension at the time, rather than no possible way to get an ALCM onto the rotary launcher

 

[AN/ALR56]

US intelligence does not see signs of an imminent collapse of power in Iran, despite nearly two weeks of strikes, Reuters reports, citing intelligence reports.

According to the agency's sources, most analytical assessments agree that the country's leadership maintains control over the situation and the population. One source noted that intelligence reports contain "consistent analysis indicating that the regime is not facing collapse".

Therefore, Reuters notes, finding an acceptable exit from the war could be difficult if Iranian leaders remain in power.

Sources also indicate that the Iranian leadership maintains cohesion even after the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Israeli officials at closed meetings also admitted that there is no certainty that the war will lead to the fall of the Ayatollahs' regime.

This is fantastical cope, how the fuck a already bankrupted government with massive inflation, drought and no money reserves, with drones bombing their banks and assets will survive after this shit?

Especially since they burned all remaining goodwill left when they basically nuked every neighbors oil industry and even started to hit their water.

The longer the war gets, the more Venezuela and Russia fill the gap for the west and the world respectively, the more oil will be loaded in the red sea and shipped to Asia, I can't see this shit ending in a Iranian strategy victory.
Even if Trump is impeached tomorrow and every single us soldiers and his McDonald's burger wrap is sent home, they are still immensely fucked beyond repair, it's like expecting Hitler to keep running Germany if the allies retreated back home when they are 200 yards from the führerbunker.

 

[TheClappening]

Apologies if this has been covered already, but I didn't find any recent mentions of us bombing the Parchin missile plant in Iran, and likely a nuclear weapon site. We seem to have hit it with B-2s.

I know the name of the game is now sanitary, precision bombings, but man I wish for some modern footage of B52s carpet bombing the shit out of something.

 

[Ghostse]

The Israel Logo all rights reserved

All isreal needs to do is flip their current symbol/flag backwards. Iran will never know.

Iran non stop burning the Omani and Qatari ports and refineries, the countries which did the most in their behalf on the international arena since 1979.

Expecting gratitude from a Muslim is never a good idea.

"It is in my nature" said the scorpion Muslim

---

Before the invasion, we wanted the Taliban to hand over top members of Al Qaeda, especially Bin Laden, they declined to do so (Al-Qaeda exerted great influence on the Taliban in the late 90s)

It is more than just that. Per the Taliban's leadership aftewards:
In Afghanistan is a requirement that if someone comes to your house and asks for protection, you must give it unless you have a good reason not to. If someone is taken into your house/protection, you are expected to defend them even at the cost of your own life.
This how you farm Afghani Izzat.

Now there are a BUNCH of loopholes to this custom. The most important is the person must remain "a good guest" or you are allowed to kick them out. That is, if there is an angry mob of 200 people with torches and AKs outside, a "good guest" will not expect his host & family to be slaughtered, a "good guest" will leave. if the guest will not leave, he can then be expelled from the family compound without Izzat loss.

So the Taliban, who had some relations with the US via DEA for their crackdown (read: wholesale slaughter) of poppy farmers, did the Afghani thing:
the US asked them to turn over bin Laden, they refused because it would me the loss of Afghani Izzat.
The Taliban expected the US to make a firmer request with a show of force of bombing some unimportant targets, allowing them to force bin Laden (who they didn't particularly like) to leave; they wouldn't turn him over, but they could have forced him to leave Afghanistan with zero loss of Afghani Izzat and if the US happened to watch with glow nigger sats and gank him 3 inches over the Afghani border, oh well these things happen.
Instead Shock and Awe and working with the Northen Alliance happened.

Which might just be monday morning mudpeope cope but the requirement to shelter someone was a real thing.

Pakistan in particular was trusted too much which played a significant role in us staying in Afghanistan for so long. They held leverage over us since we had to use their airspace to get into Afghanistan, which in return we couldn't apply the needed pressure on them to maintain and dislodge the Taliban and Al-Qaeda training camps within their borders. It's still up for debate whether or not if the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) was extremely incompetent or had senior members that knew the location of Bin Laden yet refused to lend this info at an earlier time.

Pakistan was extremely fucked up situation. The INI supported the Taliban not to antagonize America (directly) but to distract the retarded & extra inbred mountain people, to force them into a fight with the US, and to get them to commit massed suicide-by-cop.
The mountain people (I believe pashtuns) are different from the rest of Pakistan and have been a thorn in the side of the Paki government for a long time. They cannot be crushed, and the more retardedly muslim portion of the main Paki population would riot if Pakistan started killing muslims, so they were stuck in how to deal with these people they want nothing more than to genocide (except keeping a few around for over-border fucking with their neighbors, that is)

So Pakistan decided rather than trigger civil war, they would play both sides.
This why you have the utterly bipolar actions by the INI during the time of both allowing the Taliban to set up bases on their side of the border, but then also providing the US intel about their cross-boarder movements. This is also why you saw only the weakest protests when the US did hit over the border or even after the bin Laden raid.

The INI knew and permitted bin Laden to reside in country because of how utterly neutered he was. And they knew as long as he was there, the US would continue to take care of their problem to the north.

Also, Airspace nothing. Pakistani ports/roads was how we moved bulk cargo to Afghanistan.

This doens't meant they weren't slimy fucks and my hate of them is matched only by the hate for Iran, but they were playing their own game vs. trying to cause the US to collapse.

You can see this friction playing out now as Pakistan and Afghanistan are in a state of conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Afghanistan%E2%80%93Pakistan_war

They were also in Pakistan and had the INI's support for the better part of two decades and the government and army we were trying to prop up simply couldn't convert a premodern tribal people into a modern national people.

Without trying to PL too much:
Our "allies" in afghanistan were absolutely terrible, so was the ROE. We needed to go full Genghis on that country, that is the only way you unfuck it. Instead you could see taliban guys go into someone's house, have video of it, send that video to command, and be unable to do anything about it because the village leader was an "ally" and murdering guys stockpiling weapons and IEDs for you to encounter later was "detrimental to efforts to peacefully move the country to democracy" becasue it would deplete the village leader's izzat to the point he might not be able to fuck any more 8 year old boys and then would be mad at us.

This is why iran is different from North Korea when it comes to having nukes. Koreans have realistic demands, they are evil as shit but they are rational in the sense that they're not trying to usher in some apocalypse based on some drowned well boy who loves death.

THe kims are evil shits who should be thrown into lava but externally kim's demands are very straightforward and doable: let him keep larping to his populace about how they defeated america, let him keep stuffing his face with cheese and fucking his harem, and leave them alone and they won't fuck with anybody. There is no such appeasement you can offer muslims other than your own severed head.

Current Kim also doesn't try to export the revolution to other countries. Kim Jong Sun did a lot of that, but Il and Un don't abduct Japanese people or supply arms to Syria or any of the ComIntern shit. Thus, sort of like Hezbollah before The Great Jew Hunt they are viewed as a thorn not worth the trouble to remove.

That's an easy fix, Israel should just change its name to the Star of David symbol and go to the next negotiation as The Entity formerly known as Israel.

Of topic, but the Prince Symbol was due to Prince being a very clever man.

Spoiler

Basically his record label in their contract forbid Prince from using "Prince" or his real name in any sort of musical professional capacity for like 10 years if he left them. Prince knew that no one would know who he was, and that he'd be in non-stop legal battles if it was even obliquely referred to. So he chose a symbol with no pronounciation causing everyone to say "The artist formerly known as Prince" on their own.
Once the mortatorium expired he went back to being Prince.

how the fuck a already bankrupted government with massive inflation, drought and no money reserves, with drones bombing their banks and assets will survive after this shit?

But enough about Biden's term in office. /sneed

 

[cowbells]

It's wild people are disputing this. America and Israel both said it was all destroyed 8 months ago. They have no fucking idea what they are doing.

We plantrust and circlejerk here, sir.

 

[AN/ALR56]

Insane news if true, if they don't join the war they should be killed by their own mobs:

The Kuwaiti Ministry of Energy states that blackouts should be expected by the denizens as 6 main power lines have been damaged or disabled due to Iranian strikes.

@medmannews

 

[Myrtle the Turtle]

was recently rebuilt and hardened after it was hit in '24.

Iran was really counting on distance to be a limiting factor for both Israel and the US and have their proxies act as a buffer. Once that collapsed it became easy to obliterate their SAM sites once tankers could fly effortlessly over Syria and Iraq and extend the range of the IAF. The Iranians didn't consider the fact that extra range meant more heavy ordinances to penetrate deep inside the country on their poorly shielded labs. They thought they just needed to built their shit far enough away, compartmentalize and relax about the enrichment mountain.

The ballistic missiles were an insurance policy. If just the US attacked, the could fire them at our bases, partners, or Israel and that would be enough of a deterrent. The oil crisis too would be perceived as a gamble to most US presidents. Same goes for the US and the Gulf states unity. Had relations not been as good, it may have been harder to form and get everyone on the same page.

Pre 2024, they still had Syria in their control which meant free Russian aid with S300s and S400s scanning the skies and giving Iran a proxy early warning defense to tell them if Israel was coming. After Assad was out and Al Nusra brokered a deal with the US, it became a whole new ballgame. Iraq has its insurgents, but they're technicals and shoulder launched munitions.

The lesson turdworlders should take away is that air power and guided standoff weapons win in the early 21st century, the US has a ton, Europe can spare some and they're prohibitively expensive. Another lesson is that allies and partnerships do work. We have early warning radars in countries and air bases that are not our own. Iran just had shitty IRGC jihadis on technicals spamming Israel with rockets.
___________
I have a theory that the Ayatollah went for the Kim Jong Il method of getting a nuclear weapon. Kim Jong Il had a huge crisis on in the 1990s, people starved by the thousands, but he pressed on with his nuclear plan and played victim to the west. There were sanctions slapped on them but NK didn't care about their population and just made them wait it out while getting better at illicit activities like counterfeit money. Eventually they got the nuclear weapon. Like the Hermit Kingdom, The ayatollah was trying to make Iran his own Islamic kingdom where theres total control but thats hard to do when your country is educated, developed and has a massive area to control with issues on every side of the border.

 

[Ghostse]

I have a theory that the Ayatollah went for the Kim Jong Il method of getting a nuclear weapon. Kim Jong Il had a huge crisis on in the 1990s, people starved by the thousands, but he pressed on with his nuclear plan and played victim to the west. There were sanctions slapped on them but NK didn't care about their population and just made them wait it out while getting better at illicit activities like counterfeit money. Eventually they got the nuclear weapon. Like the Hermit Kingdom, The ayatollah was trying to make Iran his own Islamic kingdom where theres total control but thats hard to do when your country is educated, developed and has a massive area to control with issues on every side of the border.

I am going to try to compress this spergy drivel and likely not do a good job, and hopefully someone will come to make my point better and less austistically.

But you are like 70% correct.
The Iranian powers that be cared more about self-enrichment than "Owning da Joos". Their actions are dangerous and there are some hard-core true believers, but mostly it as about Orwellian control of the population via the hour of hate.

Iranian wanted the leverage in negotiations that nukes would provide. Very likely there is some element of the Iranian leadership mind that wants the global caliphate, but they want the appearance of power vs. actual power. The October Jew Hunt showed what Hamas/Hezbollah COULD be capable of (and the afteramth shows what would have happend if they'd tried it before) but Iran was more interested in keeping them at "annoyance" levels for Israel, so long as they did rocket attacks and Iran could boast "Pwning the Jews" to justify internal controlls on the population, and to justify them hiding their corruption and grifting.

I am certain to not explain this properly, but they didn't fight Israel to fight Israel. As is pointed out, Israel was not a direct threat to Iran. Israel has a pop of 10 million vs Iran's 90 million. They couldn't provide an existential threat to Iran. Even if we go into a magic land of Tom Clancy-esque hopium and Iraq said "You know what? Fuck it we're with the Jews on this. 80s retro is cool again, so time to go stomp Iran. Totally rad." that is still only about 50 million vs Iran's 90 with Iran playing defense.
But, leveraging on Arab outrage post Yom Kippur war, Iran gave the Iranian people something to hate but more importantly a foreign force to control. It didn't matter if Hezbollah was incompetent, they were projecting their will outside their borders.

But the leadership was monstrously wasteful with state spending in the name of grifting a small portion to their personal accounts. That means grifting from infrastruture projects, from weapons shipments... everything.
Its like the Haliburton "burn pits" during OIF. They were getting replacement cost + 10% so it was in their financial interest to destroy anything that they could remotely justify. So for IRGC elites, it didn't matter than Iran's weapon shipments to Hezbollah cost $400 million and accomplished nothing so long as that meant $4 million dollars ended up in their personal account because they owned the company that made the weapons.

They are chimping out as we see now due to a combination of huffing the same BROOOOCS cope we see present in this thread, underestimating the seriousness of the resolve against them, and "Well, if we surrendered they'd send me to prison for life. My family is largely out of the country and set up with a lot of cash I grifted. Might as well go down swinging and hope for the best and that I'm still important". They don't care about Iran or the Iranian people, only about their own wealth and power. Their izzat if you will.

Which is why you see utterly detacted from reality statements like "We demand Israel disband and the US remove all military presence"; they read Trump's book but forgot that you can only negotiate like that from a position of strength. And if your bluff is called, you are fucked.

I could mald about procisely how much money Iran has wasted for no reason, often only only wasting money on worthless projects but those projects not only wasting their budget also destroying other parts of the country. But this is long, gay, and rambly enough.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

Daily reminder that Hitler hated all semites and knew that once the Jews were dealt with, cleansing the mideast of arab filth was going to be next, even though He wished he had access to a brainwashing tool as effective as Islam.

It's truly a blessing there wasn't anime back then.

 

[Ghost88]

The longer this goes, the bigger the joke America becomes. We're already going to stop using their dollar and ignore them so they can't borrow incessantly. ANYTHING else kick off now their entire country falls apart. They don't have the munitions for conflict.

 

[Rekeita's Kidneys]

Jokes on them. Trump doesn’t drink.

He’ll still make it into service in the sandbox before HMS Dragon leaves Portsmouth.

Even better, the Navy has finally found a mission and a use for those godawful LCS’s that they despise. Now they’re minesweepers. You gotta feel bad for those sailors stationed aboard the “Little Crappy Ships”.

In a minor shift into a vaguely related side topic. Apparently the B-21 Raiders are much further along than anybody realized.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=A0xSQE29SagAs if China’s week could get any worse?

Seeing a KC-135, a 60+ year old jet refueling a modern bomber is so fucking badass lol, I am eternally disappointed there is no KC-10's flying, at least within the Air Force

Love me Boeing Dash-80, and they look lovely with the CFM56's like with the DC-8 Super 70s

(I'm an aviation autist, and a student pilot now, so I will pop off whenever plane shit is brought up lmfao)

 

[Ghost88]

, The ayatollah was trying to make Iran his own Islamic kingdom where theres total control but thats hard to do when your country is educated, developed and has a massive area to control with issues on every side of the border.

This is how dumb Americans are.

They don't even know the rough power structure of the country they've wasted billions bombing. Ever heard of the IRGC? It ended for the Brits in Singapore and it's going to end for the yanks in one of these stupid foreign quagmires. IMAGINE losing your empire for Israel lol

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Maybe the shah can come out of exile some day.

Do the majority of the Iranians want him back?

 

[Crex Crex]

Do the majority of the Iranians want him back?

Considering he's managed to mobilize possibly millions of people just two months ago, quite likely. But the extent of his support is often downplayed or onfuscated by leftist media and closet regime apologists (the venn diagram between the two approaches a circle).

 

[ThisIsGonnaBeGood]

The longer this goes, the bigger the joke America becomes. We're already going to stop using their dollar and ignore them so they can't borrow incessantly. ANYTHING else kick off now their entire country falls apart. They don't have the munitions for conflict.

Who are you?

 

[CaptainAutism69]

More ships on fire in the Gulf now...Two ships hit in an Iraqi port, and explodededed. Oil back above $100.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

it's like expecting Hitler to keep running Germany if the allies retreated back home when they are 200 yards from the führerbunker.

after Hitler already shot himself.

 

[Fred Herbert]

This is how dumb Americans are.

They don't even know the rough power structure of the country they've wasted billions bombing. Ever heard of the IRGC? It ended for the Brits in Singapore and it's going to end for the yanks in one of these stupid foreign quagmires. IMAGINE losing your empire for Israel lol

What are you even talking about?

They knew exactly who to target. Iran lost loads of it's top leaders in the opening shots of the war. That's why they're parading around a cardboard cutout of the new Supreme Leader and not the guy himself.

 

[Gay Sex Enjoyer]

The cutout is fucking amazing, I'm still stunned that that's not AI.

Imagine being one of the retards not deserting and remaining loyal to the eternal regime inshallah, then when you go into the chamber to swear fealty to the new 'tolla they roll out a literal chunk of cardboard with the supreme leader's face on it because he's either hospitalized or dead 2 days into his term and can't make public appearances.

 

[Burnt Fish]