I have a longer statement below in spoiler tags, but for those who just want to get into the megathread itself, the very short version of my take is: things are going about as well as they realistically could go for Iran as of me writing this on March 2nd; the US and Zionists have clearly misplayed their hand; there's so much propaganda it's hard to get a good perspective of the overall conflict; I think if Iran is still fighting on at approximately the same pace as the end of this week then things are looking VERY bad for the West; I am unsure what the ultimate result of this conflict will be now that the new crop of Iranian leadership are in charge after Khamenei's assassination but am hopeful that anti-American sentiment has been yet further cemented and those in Iran who seek repproachment with the West will be further discredited in favor of those who wish to look East.
My Idle Ramblings
As we are now past the initial 48 hours of the war, what can be said with confidence is that the Iran of today is in a considerably more organized position than they were during the Twelve Days War, as the initial delay on meaningfully responding to enemy attacks was brought from something like 10 hours to about 1 hour. Unfortunately, given the not-insignificant number of Iranian top figures killed, Iran still has considerable opsec problems; whatever the hell Sinwar was doing to stay alive for over a year in the most bombed territory on the planet obviously hasn't reached Iran yet. However, to Iran's credit, the recovery was fast and effective, Khamenei had already drawn up detailed plans for the succession chain in the event of his death, and the new figures were clearly in position to take control of the situation within the hour. The name of the game appears to be greater decentralization of the military, making Zionist narratives about "decapitation" essentially meaningless - the hydra has a thousand heads.
This time around, there are fewer direct critiques to level at Russia and China. In an abstract sense, they could certainly "do more" (Xi, donate one million Chinese drones and let Iran and Yemen blot out the sun!), but to be geopolitically serious, it appears that the Twelve Days War delivered a swift kick up the ass of both Iran and China to start working more closely together, and so Iran now has access to Chinese intelligence and satellite tools, has been receiving certain military equipment like much better radars, and, one hopes, will provide greater economic assistance during and after this war's conclusion.
The overall impacts of the US's and Zionists' strikes on Iran, and vice versa, have been very hard to assess due to the customary tsunami of misinformation and comical exaggerations. Clearly, the most sensational claims - that Western aircraft feel safe enough to fly directly over Iranian territory (let alone that they have air superiority, let alone that they have air supremacy); that Iran's leadership have been killed in meaningful numbers; that Iran is on the verge of collapse or giving in; that Western losses are insignificant; that things are going well or better than expected; etc, are obviously for the general population and peanut gallery, and the situation looks very different from within the halls of power. Nonetheless, stitching every individual missile/drone strike together from both sides into a cohesive picture from which we can draw conclusions has always been a major challenge of present-day warfare, and is certainly challenging here. What can be generally gathered is that Iran does not seem to fear striking Occupied Palestine or American bases directly and with pretty significant firepower, but either is deliberately not focussing on the fleet or does not have the capability to focus on it, leaving American warships intact. And from the highest perspective, it's unclear whether Iran is only beginning a long term war of attrition, or whether they hope to not overly anger the US and Zionists so that an offramp later is possible, or indeed, that the West is succeeding in attriting Iran's offensive capabilities faster than Iran can attrit the West's (or a mixture of all three).
The assassination of Khamenei and other figures is a symbolic victory for the West, as he was one of the last remaining pre-October 7th Resistance leaders alive or in power. Reports are that he stayed at his compound despite being advised in the days before the attack that he should leave, knowing that he would likely very soon die, as he did not want to flee to Russia or hide in bunkers. It's currently unclear to me how impactful his death will be in the end. On the one hand, it is obvious to every serious analyst that his death will not negatively impact Iran's military operations, nor will it lead to regime change in the short or medium term - Iran's government is not a strongman regime (few governments truly are), and the current government is both very durable and has very widespread legitimacy. His replacements and subordinates are already in charge, and from what I can tell, effectively were in charge long before his death.
On the other hand, succession is a bit of a risky process for nations today, in the short and long term. If whoever is left as his replacement at the end of this war - I cannot safely assume it will be Khamenei's immediate replacement in the current environment of Western strikes - ultimately leans even a little more reformist and towards reproachment with the West than Khamenei did, then this whole war may be worth it to the West regardless of the materiel losses. Alternatively, if this war causes a permanent shift away from repproachment and genuine, sustained, and hard-to-repair damage to America's foothold in the Middle East as well as the attrition of most of the US's interceptor missiles, we may indeed be looking at a region soon to be free of Zionist designs. It is much too early for me to distinguish which path we are on.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I... what? Where do you get this level of doomerism and American-5D-chessism from, genuinely?
Russia isn't "bogged down", they're fighting an attritional war, and winning it. You're literally doing this right now
Ukraine's rates of casualties cannot be sustained. Ukrainian air defense cannot be sustained (especially with all the interceptors burning up in the Middle East right now). Ukraine isn't gonna get a lot of new equipment, because there genuinely isn't much left to give.
Russia has also, very specifically, committed only a moderately-sized force to Ukraine, while reconstituting the rest of the military and keeping it in reserve. They have anticipated the exact scenario you're thinking of, and are keeping a massive military force available just in case things escalate and NATO goes in. Russia could stay in Ukraine for a decade, and they'd still have the capacity to wage a war elsewhere.
Russia has more armored vehicles now than in 2022. The math is ugly.
Europe is less armed than they were before the Ukraine war! The Brits barely have any artillery left! Most European militaries have at most 200-ish tanks, only some portion of which are actually operational (France Faces Tank Crisis - MGCS Not Ready Until 2040s, 200 Leclercs Breaking Down, Can't Make New Tanks, UK's Defence Crisis: Parliament Warns Britain Can Barely Protect Itself, Let Alone NATO). They also have absolutely no capacity to scale - now that they've given their older equipment to Ukraine, even if they could muster the political will to re-introduce conscription, they literally wouldn't have any equipment to actually give to all the new units they'd be forming - so what even a fully united Europe could commit wouldn't be a very impressive force.
And European rearmament isn't exactly going well. What exactly do you think's going to happen if energy prices go up even more? Like, here you're talking about the dangers to China from being cut off, but apparently this somehow doesn't affect the West at all, and their industry wouldn't grind down to a halt either? Importing LNG from the US isn't cheap - now, were the US actually the 5D-chess-playing genius empire you think they are, they'd do an oil/gas Marshall Plan, and sell it to Europe at a massive loss in order to let them rebuild their industries - except, you know, that's the exact opposite of what's actually happening, and the US is perfectly happy to destroy European industry for short-term profit.
... :tf2-scout: I don't even know where to start with you
"expeditionary warfare" I'm not sure why this is the 2nd time I'm seeing this "the US will force China into an island-hopping campaign" take, but uh, no, they fucking won't. American positions throughout the Pacific are incredibly vulnerable to being struck (like, come on, we're literally, right now, at this very moment, going through a war entirely revolving around overseas US bases being hit!), and resupply is hardly trivial.
Logistics is the Achilles’ heel of China deterrence
The Pentagon’s Missing China Strategy
Lack Of Hardened Aircraft Shelters Leaves U.S. Airbases Vulnerable To China New Report Warns
Should America’s military plan for a retreat from the Pacific?
Hahaha. No
The U.S. Military is Unequipped for High-Intensity Combat
US shiplift capacity has massively shrunk. There, quite simply, are not enough ships for the US to run WW2-style convoying operations. And, of course, those ships can be sunk. Like, it seems like this whole thing is based on the notion that China's just... going to sit there and do nothing? They don't have to "fight the US on the high seas" in the sense of doing WW2 Japan style setpiece naval battles - they have submarines, they can hit ships with missiles.
No, they wouldn't have.
Like, seriously, I don't wanna be a "this war will destabilize the entire mideast region vs. no it won’t" guy, but why are you convinced this re-armament is going to happen? What policy being carried out by the current Trump administration or European governments is, in your eyes, indicating that they'll pull such a thing off? We are supposed to be materialists at the end of the day - you can't just say "they'll rearm", we have to look at the actual material reality of their industry and access to resources.
There are only EIGHT large shipyards considered full active right now
No THAADs ’til 2027: Missile defense experts warn of interceptor ‘gap’
China’s nuclear submarine production rate surpasses that of US: Report
UK Aimed for 16× Output Boost in 155mm Shells for Ukraine — But BAE's New Plant Is Already Six Months Behind Schedule
Troubled Sentinel ICBM Program Still Being Restructured Nearly Two Years After Cost Breach
US Air Force may keep Minuteman III nukes operating until 2050: Report
Why Is the U.S. Navy Running Out of Tomahawk Cruise Missiles?
Choked By China, U.S. Relies On Abandoned French Factory Stockpile To Keep F-35s, Tomahawks Flying
US Navy nixes Constellation frigate program after two ships half-built
Air Force squadrons are closing — reversing it demands investment
Pentagon cuts back F-35 upgrades to slow schedule slips: Auditors
How Did Romania Not Even Start To Build a Gunpowder Plant With Rheinmetall After a Year
Except all indication is that NATO troops are completely refusing to actually learn lessons from Ukraine
"NATO's methods don't work anymore." Why weren't Ukrainian military trained to fight with drones at Polish training grounds?
Does China not have new weapons and systems? And "tested" systems are also systems which have had their capabilities revealed, and can now be planned around - the US deploying various missile and fancy artillery types to Ukraine hasn't led to those systems being proven as amazing, but to the Russians coming up with jamming countermeasures against them and making them less effective! Even if they haven't directly shared that information with the Chinese, the fact that it's been revealed as possible could help guide Chinese specialists in the right direction for how to implement such measures themselves.
The idea that militaries who've been at war recently are always better than ones who haven't isn't necessarily true. The Iraqi military came out of a nearly decade-long war against Iran, and yet all that military experience did nothing for them in '91 - because, for one thing, it was the wrong kind of experience which just wasn't applicable to a war with the US, and to make matters worse, the war had drained resources and manpower, not improved them!
Except, the US's growth is slowing as well! Like most of the GDP growth last year was fucking AI shit. This is another pattern of posting I'm seeing, of the "well, China's economy isn't growing as fast which somehow translates to them being defeated", and the whole thing is based on just completely closing your eyes and pretending the US still has its peak Cold War era economy, which it demonstrably doesn't! Sure, China's economy isn't going to grow at the same rate forever - so? Like, all neoliberal economies are also declining - if everyone's slowly withering away, the guy who withers the slowest still wins.
Thank you for that. That account regularly acts like the US is some kind of invincible undefeatable monster and it makes me question why they are even here if they think that is the case. If the heart of capitalism is undefeatable and undestroyable, it means leftist thought is incorrect on a material level and there is no point being a leftist beyond liberal doomer vibes. Revolutionary optimism isn't some sappy bullshit, it is mandatory. We understand the material conditions of capital, and we understand that capitalism is inherently unsustainable, not an immortal juggernaut.
Great comment, I only disagree with your take that Europe won't be rearming because the means of production to do that currently aren't there. Europe is spending enormous amounts of money on the military the comming years (5% of GDP). All Western-European countries are destroying there welfare states to be able to do this (and the political resentment against this will go to ultra-right parties who're also in favor of this), so those means of production are going to be built.
The Europeans are certainly trying, but I still don't believe there's sufficient indication that they'll succeed - and whatever capacity does get built, it's definitely not going to be within the next few years. See these couple of articles from above detailing some of the trouble, and there's way more issues going on beyond these.
UK Aimed for 16× Output Boost in 155mm Shells for Ukraine — But BAE's New Plant Is Already Six Months Behind Schedule
How Did Romania Not Even Start To Build a Gunpowder Plant With Rheinmetall After a Year
Some countries are also just blatantly using accounting tricks to get their spending up (Italy lines up fallback plan for freeing €12 billion defense spending)
And even if the factories are built, obviously it would take a while for the new production to actually add up to anything. European arsenals are so thoroughly depleted at this point that simply restoring them will be an effort, let alone substantially expanding them to greater levels.