Typical trait of a highly arrogant official who floats and swims in pool of insane wealth, powers and delusional sense of ability to exercise control over any kind of situation in crushing any challenge to authority, the lessons of the phenomenon of the impossible sudden hard fall of dictators throughout the long and recent history always get lost in calculations of authoritarian leaders including in a late time period of paranoid thinking that leads to imperialistic desire believing political and military muscle-flexing ensures continued strong grip on power and control of their subjects
16Mar26 – 355am Manila/Taipei time
Version 1st draft and no editing, as the time and my state of mind at this time suggests
As I type this article, the many paragraphs below I composed many days ago in a small mobile phone, the IRGC operationally-fractious scattered units that remain somewhat still functional in Iran, most of them have now lost their will to fight, their sense of reason and purpose, and some are now rather simply mechanical in their movements.
But beyond disorientation, desperation has long (in the case of this kind of war, and relentless attacks by the Israeli and American forces, could mean mere hours or few days) set in does, but that does not mean easy capitulation by any large number of them remaining, many are willing to die for their own beliefs and their kind of sense of patriotism and loyalty to their leaders and country. War is as always ugly, messy and deadly, no matter the now 2-weeks long day after day of unbelievable success of the American and Israeli militaries in their campaign of precision strikes of only military and their support infrastructures as targets, in addition to top elements of the regime involved in war planning and operations and those involved in the research and management of defense-industrial and nuclear program complexes inside Iran. We can only wish they don’t get to accomplish any surprise but lucky and successful attacks that result in widespread destruction and deaths not yet seen in any of their hits in the target countries in the Middle east. And that no civil war erupts inside Iran, no strife that bedeviled Syria under Assad for many years.
I wish to convey my deppest sympathies to the families of more than 30-40,000 Iranians who have been murdered by their own security forces, in this time period of Ramadan. It’s an unspeakable unimaginable horror for state “security” personnel to kill the people they’re obliged, and supposed to protect as their fellow citizens. More than any other entities, it’s the responsibility of the state to protect its own citizens, even from simple crimes. Imagine this state atrocity against its very own people, children, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, breadwinners, students, economically struggling simple folks, the elderly, the believers in the same faith in the name of its leaders the IRGC and the (supposedly moral police) Basij armed men are violently killing their brethren and fellow citizens since many years ago.
Not as any less frustrating, disgusting in fact, and I can express my righteous indignation here and now, after witnessing the same horrors that happened in this country where we are now not so long ago, and also the lack of loud and active protests here by the always loud communist movement, is the selective activism of always very loud supposed human rights activists and key public figures across the Western societies (not so many of them, in proportion to mainstream population, for perspective, to correct impressions from TV clips of their protests by mainstream media).
Would Trump haters, or those who envy him and his and admin’s successes, not do intense and widespread protests against killing of protesters by oppressed people even if a million of them would perish from the violent acts of lunatic-terrorist-state-goons just because President Trump might successfully resolve such situation and stop the mayhem? That is the very kind of blind hatred, absence of rationality amidst hate, radical thinking, and obsession with the downfall of political adversary that drove the IRGC to mad missions and ultimate goal of complete annihilation of entire societies and races they perceive as enemies.
===
===
If the Iranian-regime-IRGC leaders did not perceive the Western media and most of Western political establishments (at least in their public statements) as being blindly against President Trump and his administration, could the Iranian top religious leaders and the IRGC softened on their hard-line seemingly non-negotiable stand on their missile development and production, nuclear weapons development program and their sustainment of proxy group — would they have made adjustments and make sufficient concessions to demands by the U.S. and Israel and so avoiding the fate that befell them and this on-going war?
In hindsight, anyone can claim their preferred probabilities prevailing if only so and so, rather than the present and developing realities that seem inconvenient, especially with present situations that’s far less neat than what’s ideal.
But let me indulge in my thoughts here, as this is my / our website.
After the 7Oct brutal massacre of civilians in Israel — if extrapolated in the U.S. would have killed 40,000+ American and other civilians thus roughly 10x that of the deaths in the 11Sep attacks in New York City, the Pentagon and the White House — the world, the mainstream media at least, and most activist groups initiated influence attacks on anything Jew, Israeli, President Trump and his admin, PM Netanyahu, the IDF and Israeli operations in Gaza.
This emboldened the Iranian-regime-IRGC, and gave them much confidence that America and President Trump would unlikely embark on a politically, militarily and economically risky war operations against the regime in Iran, especially with the looming mid-term elections in the United States with historical statistics not favorable to the ruling party (Trump has a long history of defying overwhelming odds). After all, they knew that Iranian-regime-IRGC has, had conventional military and diplomatic power and clout more than a hundred times that of Maduro-led Venezuela, and war and terror operations in many parts of the world with depth and length of experiences spanning many decades, to add the fact that IRGC being once a revolutionary and guerilla force too before 1979 (thus the confidence in suppressing local opposition and regime-change initiatives both from within its borders and catalyzed from outside of its direct spheres of influence abroad).
They failed to take into consideration facts that disfavored, or at least not support their bottomline assumptions. President Trump is not a candidate in the 2028 presidential elections in the U.S., and that election is quite far away, roughly 3 years, eons in relative time period given the rapid pace of the Trump administration’s successful pursuit of both of its Make-America-Great-Again and other domestic and foreign policy goals and agendas across the economic and military realms. So there’s far less threats to the politics and election prospects for the Republican Party and President Trump as it was in 2016-2022.
The Iranian-regime-IRGC expected a friendly treatment from the mainstream Western media, and fear of public uproar in Western societies among politicians including top officials of the Trump administration and the Republican Party. They must have expected aversion — among Israeli and American leaders, including those in the National Security establishments — of the kind of treatment by the international and domestic media, of Prime Minister Netanyahu, the IDF, President Trump and his administration, even of ordinary Israeli citizens when travelling abroad, in the war in Gaza. They expected international pressure, or rather public uproar or rather noise, to discourage President Trump, to cause hesitation to PM Netanyahu, in launching military operations against the oppressive Iranian regime.
The IRGC must have advised the Ayatollahs of the overwhelming superiority (numeric, and in ability to penetrate adversaries with their kinds of missiles and drones) of conventional weapons of Iran as some kind of effective deterrence against broad military operations against Iran thinking U.S. and Israeli military would not find the sufficient rationale, justifications and projected gains to risk igniting a regional war and bringing about widespread destruction across the Middle east so as to ignore (in their estimations) pressure from the Gulf and other Mideastern countries, on top of Hezbollah and Houthis they thought would wreak havoc in Israel firing salvos of missiles and rockets in great numbers.
Widespread reports (relatively speaking, among those who are broadly informed) of ammunition stockpiles, and still slow pace (Ukraine-Russia war) of replenishment and overall production (though President Trump effectively pushed for acceleration) of weapons in the American military-industrial complex, gave them the confidence or false belief that America would not risk low-level stockpiles of ammunition, weapons, weakening its deterrence against China’s plans and intentions against Taiwan, with American and European firms racing against China in the field of AI having overwhelming dependence on TSMC and related industry players in Taiwan. Yes the United States and President Trump would never risk this decisive advantage in the field of AI and related chips production, but the military, economic and diplomatic might of the U.S. is sufficient to effectively address this complex situation and the militaries of Australia, Japan, Taiwan, infrastructures of South Korea, the geography of the Philippines and kinship of its people to the Americans, proximity of Guam to China, combined, is of course more than enough to mitigate any weeks-long reduction in American firepower capabilities in Guam, East Asia and Western Pacific.
Then again, Iranian war planners failed to take into account, or give appropriate weight, to the crisis in the military leadership of the PLA of CPP-China, giving a window for American war planners to shift some resources to the operations in Iran and the Middle east.
The case of Venezuela gave the dictators, foreign policy experts and war planners of Iran-IRGC the wrong impression that President Trump, his top diplomats, his National Security policy makers and war planners would only be interested in conducting large-scale military operations against a regime for clear-cut material gains especially in stemming state-sponsored large-scale illegal immigration to the U.S., flows of large-scale illegal drugs into the U.S., control of much higher percentage of global oil reserves and production and opportunities for Texas oil firms, hemispheric geopolitical positioning and influence.
They probably believed that Iran in terms of relative hard power and influence in the Mideast and other parts of the world including segments of populations in the West; its vastly greater oil production and logistics facilities; its mighty ability to initiate, catalyze and direct acts of terror and mass violence directly and through proxies, ability to choke-off the Gulf of Hormuz thus disrupting global trade from and to very large swaths of the Middle East; Iran’s utilitarian and practical value to Russia and China; its population roughly 3x that of Venezuela; its strategic value in the geopolitics and global trade (in particular China and Russia); lack of organized and structured opposition political movement and its ability to crush dissent at extent CCP-China can; extent the Iranian-regime-Ayatollahs-IRGC controls the narratives and beliefs of its mainstream population; that Israel mainstream population is now war-weary and that the Israeli economy and government resources could hardly risk any more tens of billions in large-scale military operations against Iran with the situation in Gaza not yet permanently settling; that the U.S. and President Trump is still in the complex dilemma of ending the war in Ukraine (not realizing that the elimination of the Iranian regime would contribute to the efforts for the cessation of active hostilities there); that the 12-Day war in June of 2025 gave a boost to perception of victory in the leadership of both the United States and Israel; that the American and West’s, as they perceive, lack of support for the people of Iran being massacred by tens of thousands by their very own security forces, their very government — these among many others distorted their thinking as to the plausibility of any large-scale and decisive military actions by both Israel and the United States.
They could have thought that if the United States and E.U., and of course NATO as a whole, could hardly sufficiently sustain Ukraine with hard power and remedies, in the case of the United States for other reasons than in the NATO countries including priorities and foreign policy of the Trump administration, that they have their plates so full so as to ever think of conducting these on-going large-scale and record-breaking military operations against the Iranian-regime-IRGC.
The United States has its Congress as the world’s greatest deliberative body. It’s war planners, national security professionals and soldiers have vast experiences in both the 20th and this 21st centuries. The regeneration of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. under President Trump and his core team of top deputies and the on-going accelerating revolution in AI demonstrate America’s exceptional capabilities and still-dominant economic and military prowess, its extraordinary ability to craft novel solutions and rapidly adapt its arsenal to emerging new technologies and the developing shifts in the exercises of power across realms of modern and projected new kinds of near-future warfare — these should have factored in, in their calculations, in their calculus, as it is with the CCP-Chinese leadership and even in North Korean. Need not add, but for readers with scant knowledge of the bigger contexts, President Trump is a transformational leader, certainly decisive and with a long history of defying all kinds of vast array of odds even personal ones.
The energy, zest, passion, unity in their core beliefs and doctrines they both subscribe to and also now creating both deliberately and inadvertently, of his core team of National Security leaders, is exceptional, relatively young blood but most competitive and highly competent. No one underestimates the American soldiers when push comes to shove under any and all kinds of the most novel and difficult circumstances, and the support they would get in times of war from the American society and leaders across party lines. (The last sentence demonstrates my poor English construction, and same weakness brought me to the Speech and English writing lab of an elite university in this country in my 1st year in an engineering program. As an excuse, in this case now I say I rarely do outlines and just type according to the flow of my thoughts and in this case in this website I rarely do edits if at all. One thing, I’m not some intelligent and otherwise academically, supposedly formally qualified but compromised corrupt analyst getting or soliciting bribes from all kinds of organized crime operators.)
Iranian negotiators and their IRGC and foreign ministry strategists have thought so unrealistically very high of their ability to deceive and in drawing their American counterparts into a prolonged stalemate-stalling negotiation process as they tried to rush securing, hardening their nuclear weapons research, testing and development programs that they thought of never ever giving up. They were also maybe, by my speculation, of the fate that befell Ukraine now, and that recent history and present realities would have been so much better, completely different, for Ukraine had this nation not voluntarily given up on its nuclear weapons deterrence.
In all, even the most rationale of the most intelligent of the most formally educated of people could slide into the kind of arrogant, pseudo-rational thinking and reasoning, so as to remain consistent on its assumptions, thinking and past decisions, and not take the realistic adjustments and adaptations in their ways of thinking and decision-making.
Decades of a compliant population, a suppressed people — rather, of homogenous group-thinking among senior leadership, and long track record of effectively sowing chaos and conflicts in other societies, of controlling even capturing entire governments (Lebanon, Gaza and West Bank) emboldened the Iranian-regime-IRGC to try to defy developing realities not fitting their desired kind of an ideal local society and world. This afflicts communist dictators too, and history says that this brought the murder, the deaths of tens of millions of lives, as they try to create a world fitting their extreme interpretations of their doctrines, beliefs, and later on to simply maintain their very stranglehold of power and uncontested control of their own personal fate.
(I’ve been listening to the news, working on file transfers and computer software maintenance as I type this piece now, also minding about planned haircut early this evening.)
These are the benefits of President Trump’s, America’s war on the murderous Iranian-regime-IRGC:
- To be completed…
===
So what else can we expect, these I have in mind what’s not being widely discussed
- A more stable Iraq, with the Shiite majority expected to improve the kind of power sharing and proportionate representation in the government and strategic decision-making for the Sunni large minority, without an IRGC-Iran leading the way for Iraqi foreign and domestic policies, stand on issues, and influencing of the security establishment in Iraq
- No more sense of urgency for any war hawks in Saudi Arabia, to study a secret but broad approach towards developing nuclear weapons, same with Turkey
- The United States can now more than ever shift even greater focus to CCP-China and in containing its rise to global hegemony, energizing India, Southeast Asia, South and Central Asian nations to more effectively pressure CCP-China to minimize acts of aggression and harassments in its occupied foreign sovereign territories and disputed areas around its borders and the South China and West Philippine Seas with China’s relative military and economic powers versus the U.S. and allied nations no longer as alarming as in the recent past and now (except, let’s see how the world reacts with its accelerated build-up of its nuclear weapons)
- To be continued…
===
===
Next article
CCP-China’s windfall of intelligence on performance of U.S. weapon-systems and the conduct of war in Iran: To what extent will the frantic catch up, remedies to its sensor techs, updates, improvements in all of the PLA’s weapon systems in all the domains , and new designs, close the qualitative, perofmance, precision and lethality gaps with that of the United States, Japan, Israel (missile defense systems) and Europe?
CIA Director John Lee Ratcliffe
TidBits from CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate
“The Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies continue to export mayhem across the Middle East and Iran is closer to nuclear breakout than ever before.”
“And one in particular that I will discuss now, understand that the nation who wins the race of emerging technologies of today will dominate the world of tomorrow. Which brings me to the need for the CIA to continue and increase in intensity the focus on the threats posed by China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party.”
“As DNI, I dramatically increased the intelligence community’s resources devoted to China. I openly warned the American people that from my unique vantage point as an official who saw more intelligence than anyone else, I assessed that China was far and away our top national security threat. President Trump has been an incredible leader on this issue, and it is encouraging that a bipartisan consensus has emerged in recent years.”
“The recent creation of the CIA’s China Mission Center is an example of the good work that must continue.”
