Tag Archives: #Iran

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World War III Watch: Maybe this wasn’t the best idea

No, I don’t think this will result in World War III, despite my headline and stock illustration, but wars do not always turn out quite the way you expect. Der Führer certainly didn’t expect Germany to have been virtually destroyed, Hideki Tojo did not expect Japan to be utterly defeated and bombed to smoking ruins, and Vladimir Putin is still shaking his ugly head over the fact that Ukraine wasn’t conquered in four short weeks.

Did our campaign in Vietnam save the South from the scourges of Communism? Saddam Hussein was sent to Jahannam, but is Iraq the liberal democracy that the younger President Bush envisioned? The war in Afghanistan was necessary, to go after Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but, after twenty years of fighting, while al Qaeda was virtually destroyed, the Taliban still run that country.

Two things can be true at the same time:

  1. The Iranian government is a cabal of scum and a plague against the civilized world; and
  2. The United States should not have attacked Iran to depose that government.

The people of Iran were already revolting, and though we cannot know whether they would have succeeded, the United States and Israel striking Iran can only lend credence to the claims of the mad mullahs that the uprisings in Iran were created and coordinated by the Great Satan. While the attacks might destroy the government, they are less likely to create a new government which will be that friendly toward Western civilization.

Iran was already suffering through real poverty, and a crippling drought. The very strained water systems in Iran could easily be damaged or destroyed in military strikes, possibly leading to the very civilians we support dying of thirst.

Though there are times when war is necessary, it is still a very bad thing.

We in the United States have too antiseptic a view of war. Even the wars we lost or in which we were stalemated, while we lost men and machines, there were no strikes on the United States itself. We have two very broad oceans which have protected us from war coming to American soil itself, while we have the ability to strike nations half a world away. We lost 58,220 soldiers in Vietnam, a tragedy for their families and them, but the United States wasn’t struck by the Viet Cong, because they couldn’t. The last war on our soil was our own Civil War, which ended 161 years ago; no one alive today remembers that war.

But wars are not antiseptic for those countries in which war rages. Ukraine has not yet been defeated, but has suffered tremendous losses in not only soldiers and civilians, but in the infrastructure which enables a country to survive and prosper. The damage to Israel has been slight, due in significant part to their defensive technology, bit some has occurred. For the Palestinians, I do not know just what they expected after the October 7th attack, but surely they did not expect the Hell they received.

We need to look at what happens to other nations when war happens on their soil, and realize that eventually it could happen to us.

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Elon Musk helps get information out of Iran and to the rest of the world

The New York Times is finally paying real attention to the situation in Iran. THis is a screen capture from their website front page on January 13, 2026. Click to enlarge>.

As we have previously noted, the credentialed media has been publishing rather little on the popular uprisings in Iran. Slightly more has been coming out, but information has still been sparse. More information has been coming out over social media, though, interestingly enough, far less on Bluesky than on Twitter, at least as far as I’ve personally seen. Iran has been fighting that, with a curious number of accounts, including some which were pro-‘Palestinian,’ supporting the theocratic regime over the human rights of the Persian people rising against that tyranny.

Now, Elon Musk is helping the protesters. From The Wall Street Journal:

Iran Is Hunting Down Starlink Users to Stop Protest Videos From Going Global

Video from the streets is one of the few ways of getting information out about the scale of the protests and authorities’ actions

By Benoit Faucon | Monday, January 12, 2026 | 11:00 AM EST

With the government shutting down the internet and throttling phone services, Iranians are leaning heavily on Elon Musk’s Starlink service to share videos of growing protests and the regime’s escalating crackdown with the world.

But Iran has intensified efforts to jam the service, which is banned in the country, and users are being hunted.

If the Journal‘s paywall is stopping you from reading the original, it can be read here for free.

Over the weekend, authorities began searching for and confiscating Starlink dishes in western Tehran, said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, a U.S. nonprofit opposed to internet censorship.

“It’s electronic warfare,” Rashidi said. He said disruptions are worst in parts of Tehran where protests are taking place and in the evening, when the demonstrators gather.

The battle over information—while secondary to the confrontations taking place nightly in dozens of cities across Iran—has potentially serious consequences. President Trump has threatened to intervene in response to a crackdown by the regime.

Let me stress at this point that I do not support any American military action to support the protesters. Yes, I want them to succeed, I want the whole Iranian government to fall, but this needs to be done by the Iranian people themselves, and not something which the Islamists can say was pushed by the United States. Iranians themselves need to Make Iran Great Again!

Video from the streets is one of the few ways of getting information out about the scale of the protests and the actions of Iranian authorities.

That has always been a problem: with the cutoff of communications by the Iranian government, the credentialed media have far fewer ways to verify stories which come from a single source.

More than 500 people have been killed in the unrest, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran. Another rights group, Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, circulated video footage Sunday showing a large number of bodies at a morgue in south Tehran.

Trump is scheduled to be briefed Tuesday on his options. One under discussion is to send in more Starlink terminals. Trump said he would ask Musk about the possibility.

“We may get the internet going if that’s possible,” Trump told the reporters.

Iran shut down most internet connections for the country’s 90 million inhabitants late last week, after protests over a crippling economic crisis exploded into large-scale unrest with demonstrators chanting for an end to the regime. The government has also made it difficult to connect calls or send text messages.

The only exceptions are the government itself, its media services and regime loyalists who are registered on a “whitelist” of internet addresses, said diplomats and others communicating with some of those with uninterrupted access.

Well, of course, and I’m seeing that junk on Twitter, gobs of it. The Iranian government and their propagandists have been blaming the uprisings not on the collapsing economy or severe water shortages, but on the United States and Israel; the Great Satan and the Jooooos are always the ones responsible! To the leaders of the Islamic Republic, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have diverted rain clouds, and the US and Israel have manipulated the weather.

We don’t know yet how this will turn out. It’s clear that huge numbers of Iranians are displeased with their government, but the government has guns, and has not been afraid to use them. We can all hope that the theocratic regime will be overthrown, though there’s no way of telling how that will work out for a new government.

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Why are we getting so little news on the Iranian uprisings?

Social media has been full of information about the anti-government demonstrations in Iran, and one of the biggest complaints is that the credentialed media are not seriously covering it, something I have pointed out as well.

And on Thursday, January 8, 2026, at 12:30 PM EST, our nation’s greatest and most respected newspaper, The New York Times, had exactly zero stories on the subject visible on their website main page. Fortunately, I had looked earlier this morning, and there was one, and only one article:

Protests Spread in Iran, and Crackdowns Escalate

Bazaars were shuttered and demonstrators met with violence from security forces amid rising anger about the country’s dire economic situation.

By Farnaz Fassihi | Wednesday, January 7, 2026

As strikes and protests spread to several major cities across Iran on Wednesday, the head of the judiciary threatened to intensify crackdowns and prosecute protesters.

Merchants and business owners in the traditional bazaars in the cities of Tabriz, Isfahan, Mashhad and Kerman closed to protest the dire state of the economy and the plunging currency, according to videos on social media, interviews with witnesses and Iranian media reports. The bazaars of Iran have both practical and symbolic significance — not just where people buy things, but also an emblem of the economy, like stock markets in the West.

In Tehran, shops in the traditional bazaar, where the recent wave of protests began, remained shuttered for an 11th day. Inside its labyrinth of passages, security forces deployed tear gas and beat some in the crowd of shopkeepers and workers gathered there, according to interviews with two shop owners who asked that their names not be published because they feared retribution.

The two shopkeepers, who are members of trade unions, said in telephone interviews that the government’s efforts to mediate with trade representatives so far had failed. One of the shopkeepers said that despite fears of financial losses, solidarity had prevailed to keep shops closed and pressure on. It was unclear how long this could last.

There’s more at the original.

Reporter Farnaz Fassihi, about whom the Times> told us, “has covered Iran for three decades and has lived and traveled extensively in the country,” was pretty circumspect in her journalism. From what she wrote, a reasonable reader could not conclude which ‘side’ was winning, and perhaps that was exactly the message she was attempting to convey. We are not told whether Miss Fassihi was reporting from inside Iran, so we do not know if her safety is compromised.

The impression one gets from seeing the social media reports is that the government of the mad mullahs is about to fall, and maybe it is, but it is at least as likely that the government, engaged in serious measures to stifle dissent, will survive.

Anti-riot police officers have taken to the streets of Tehran and other cities on motorcycles, chasing crowds and beating demonstrators, according to videos on BBC Persian and social media. Some videos show security forces firing shots at the crowd; in other videos, gunshots can be heard. In Shiraz, military roadblocks were set up on a tree-lined boulevard with military vehicles patrolling.

Yet the government of President Masoud Pezeshkian struck a conciliatory tone, with Fatemeh Mohajeran, a spokeswoman, saying on social media on Wednesday that “all protesters are our children and every blood spilled pains us.”

By contrast, the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and the country’s chief of security forces, Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan, told Iranian media that stern measures would be taken against protesters.

“We promise the Iranian nation that these people will be identified at any time and in any place, and will be prosecuted and punished until the last person is arrested,” said General Radan, according to Iranian state media.

There have been uprisings against the theocratic government before, uprisings which faltered and failed, and as much as I would like to be optimistic that the Iranian government will fall, the realist in me says to hold back, to wait, to see what actually happens.

But part of waiting to see what actually happens is restricted by the serious lack of journalistic coverage on the uprising. In 1979, as the Iranian Revolution which deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was unfolding, it seemed though we got far more news about it the in the United States, with just three television networks playing 30-minute-long evening news shows — even CNN was not formed until a year later — and newspapers to cover the story, newspapers which did not have instant, 24-hour availability over that internet thingy Al Gore invented. In 1979, I could read about the Iranian Revolution in the Lexington Herald-Leader, a decent-sized newspaper for a city of 220,000 people[1]That was then. In 2026, it’s just junk, a failing McClatchy newspaper that only publishes thrice a week, and delivered by mail now, is always a day late., but The New York Times? That was something that people could get at the Joseph A Best Bookstore across Reynolds Road from Fayette Mall . . . a day later. Students could go to the Margaret King Library on the University of Kentucky campus, and read the Times, or The Washington Post, again a day late.

Yet we still seemed to get more news about the Iranian Revolution from those limited and delayed sources than we are now seeing in a world with near instantaneous internet connections, the major television networks, CNN, Fox, MS Now, News Nation, and the websites of multiple television stations as well as newspapers.

Why is that?

Chris Freiman tweeted:

An uncharitable view that I can’t shake: the left is silent on Iran simply because it can’t bring itself to criticize any regime that’s opposed to the US

A lot of our friends across the pond have been extremely critical of the BBC’s lack of reporting. Saul Sadka wrote:

NEW LOW FOR THE BBC: This is the current state of its homepage. There is happy news about the birth of twin mountain gorillas, and about Prince Harry meeting his father, the King, but nothing—not a single word—about the protests in Iran that threaten to bring down the IRGC.

Me? I have snarked that the credentialed media are worried that if the uprising does oust the Islamist government, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might get some of the credit, and they can’t have that! on the other hand, if the uprising fails, and the government kills a bunch of the protesters, the media will give Messrs Trump and Netanyahu the blame!

References

References
↑1 That was then. In 2026, it’s just junk, a failing McClatchy newspaper that only publishes thrice a week, and delivered by mail now, is always a day late.
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Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran?

Former Ambassador John Bolton seems to have never met a war in which he didn’t want the United States involved, but Wikipedia noted his opinions during the War in Vietnam:

Bolton was a supporter of the Vietnam War, but avoided combat through a student deferment followed by enlistment in the Maryland Air National Guard. During the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, Bolton drew number 185. (Draft numbers were assigned by birth date. Numbers 1 to 195 were eventually called up.) As a result of the Johnson and Nixon administrations’ decisions to rely largely on the draft rather than on the reserve forces, joining a Guard or Reserve unit became a way to reduce the chances of service in Vietnam. Continue reading →

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Mustn’t ‘peace’ mean more than just the absence of war?

People have been crying for peace, peace, more loudly in the civilized West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. We good Westerners have tended to ignore conflicts in other parts of the world.

In our religion studies after Mass on Sunday, we were going over the meaning of the word “peace.” The Gospel reading for next Sunday is Luke 10:1-12, which includes:

3 Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. 4 Carry no money belt, no bag, no shoes; and greet no one on the way. 5 Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’ 6 If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you. 7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking what they give you; for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not keep moving from house to house. 8 Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you; 9 and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

The commentary in the study guides brought up the definition of shalom as it is used in Hebrew.

The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was “to make something whole”. Not just regarding practical restoration of things that were lost or stolen. But with an overall sense of fulness and completeness in mind, body and estate.

Too often in English, we see the word ‘peace’ as meaning the absence of direct violence or war. Thus, when people call for peace between Russia and Ukraine, or between Israel and the Arabs, they too often mean just a ceasefire. A ceasefire in itself is a very basic good, but mustn’t peace actually mean more than that? Mustn’t peace mean more than “I am not trying to kill anyone, and no one is trying to kill me”, but also mean “I don’t want to kill anyone, and no one wants to kill me”? Continue reading →

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There is only one crime in war, and that’s the losing of it

One of the most controversial episodes of the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is “In the Pale Moonlight,” in which Captain Benjamin Sisko, plagued by the mounting casualty lists in the interstellar war between the United Federation of Planets and Klingon Empire against the Cardassian Union and the Dominion, concocts a plan to bring the Romulans, then technically neutral, into the war on the side of the Federation. The plan involves lying, forgery, deception, and in the end, murder. The story is told in a series of flashbacks, in which Captain Sisko confronts his series of moral choices, and in the end, he confronts the violations of his fundamental principles, and concludes that, with the goal of bringing the Romulans into the war changing the power dynamic, and helping the Federation to reverse the losses it had been sustaining, he can live with his actions.

Curtis LeMay was put in charge of our strategic bombing command, and he was the one who switched much of our bombing attacks on Japan from some relatively ineffective high-altitude bombing to the incendiary night attacks which devastated the island nation’s highly combustible cities. From Wikipedia: Continue reading →

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World War III Watch The nukes make all the difference

Trudy Rubin, who writes the ‘Worldview’ column for The Philadelphia Inquirer, states in her bio that she “tries to make sense of the world’s chaos and conflicts,” but, alas! sense is the one thing she doesn’t seem to have. In her column of Saturday, published before news of the United States strike on Iranian nuclear weapons sites, she wonders why the United States doesn’t want to fight against Russia for Ukraine, but seemed willing to fight for Israel against Iran: Continue reading →

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World War III Watch Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

9:36 PM EDT — As we noted yesterday, the potential of launching an air attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran was something which had to be based on intelligence estimates, and sometimes intelligence estimates are wrong. As William Teach noted on the 20th, President Donald Trump had set a two-week window for negotiations with Iran to produce an acceptable result, but the President loves misdirection, and like the monitored communications between Captain Spock and Admiral Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when hours could seem like days, apparently days could seem like weeks . . . or vice versa.

I cannot say that I am unhappy that the United States attempted to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons sites, because, in the end, Iran simply cannot be allowed to develop and possess nuclear weapons. But I certainly am concerned, because we have, in effect, entered yet another foreign war. The President is scheduled to address the nation at 10:00 PM EDT, and I very much hope that he will tell us that this was one-and-done, that we are now staying out of the war between Israel and Iraq. But, of course, one nation cannot simply call off a war; there is the little matter of the enemy, and whether he will consider it called off. Iran will certainly talk big, and the Houthis will threaten American shipping, but only the Lord knows how this will play out.

I guess that I have to add the video Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran! Continue reading →

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Midnight Oil Blogging

Burning the midnight oil

The specter of war with Iran is giving everyone pause, most certainly including me. Israel launched air strikes against the Islamic Republic a few days ago, supposedly with foreknowledge communicated to President Trump. The G7 group, many of the members of which don’t particularly like either President Trump or Israeli Prime Minister, nevertheless agreed that:

“Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” the statement added and said the G7 was “clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”

One reason for writing around midnight is that morning has broken over Tehran, which is an odd 7hours and 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Daylight Time in the United States. Iran issued the statement before Wednesday night, “tonight we’ll deliver a surprise the world will remember for centuries,” but in fact the Islamic Republic did nothing. Someone, presumably Israel, hacked Iranian television, pushing messages that civilians should take to the streets and overthrown the government of the mad mullahs. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly rejected negotiations, but Iran has sent out mixed mesages from other sources.

At least as of this writing, there are no reports of belligerent action between Israel and Iran, but while Israel has, reportedly, significantly damaged Iran’s ability to produce weapons-grade uranium, the job of completely ending the country’s nuclear weapons program has not been completed.

The New York Times reported, at 12:14 AM EDT:

The Israeli military said on Thursday morning that missiles had been launched from Iran toward Israel. It called on the public to enter protected spaces such as communal shelters or safe rooms until further notice.

What will happen? We honestly don’t know.

Overnight, an Iranian missile that got through struck a hospital in Tel Aviv.