The other day I saw an interview of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament and the lead interlocutor from the Iranian side in its negotiations with the Americans. In that interview, Ghalibaf says that when he first saw JD Vance, he told him how he (and by implication, the Iranians) did not trust Vance, or the Americans. He said he told Vance that the first step towards any suitable outcome has to be the rebuilding of trust. He then said that whilst he was saying this, the American president was signaling that if a deal wasn’t made, the Iranian negotiators would be killed on their way back to Iran. No wonder the Pakistanis had to run a full fledged international air combat operation to transport the Iranians back.

The last week has been tumultuous. The Islamabad Talks which were supposed to turn into the Islamabad Accord lay dead and rotting. But the Pakistani Supreme Commander of Everything, Field Marshal Munir through sheer brute force of his will, has resurrected them from the dead. He took a three day visit to Iran to extract as many concessions from the Iranians as possible, so that they could then be presented to the Americans and the CPR process on the Islamabad Talks could be performed. It worked. The Iranian Foreign Minister tweeted that the Strait of Hormuz was open, and there was real forward moment, before it all began to unravel again. The Iranians had been informed (or had assumed — I guess we will find out one day, and eventually) that once they publicly signal that the Strait was open for business, the Americans would reciprocate and also end the naval blockade of the Strait. But here’s the thing about the American deep state; it’s a supremacist organization with self aggrandizement bordering on the insane. Instead of taking the Iranian gesture and extending it back to them, it turned around and said we’re in charge and we will stay in charge. The blockade on the Strait will remain in place. So the Iranians could do the only thing that they can, and they reinitiated the closure of the Strait.

While the diplomacy seesaws, the Americans are quietly running a massive airlift operation between Europe and the Middle East. What they’re doing is reinforcing their forces, resupplying their stocks, replenishing their armaments. They’re preparing to go scorched earth on Iran if the order comes. And the order might yet come. It’s called “Coercive Diplomacy” and it goes something like this: Trump gets on his social media platform, and tells the Iranians to make a deal; and if they don’t, he will destroy their country. And this time, he will absolutely destroy their country.

So the Iranians are stuck between the Strait, the demon and the Pakistanis. This coercion is the crack that Field Marshal Munir is exploiting. Iran might want to fight back; Iran might even believe that it’s getting the short end of the stick; but Iran also recognizes that it is a choice between life and death, between living to fight another day, or dying in ruins as embers rain from the sky. Martyrdom is a romantic concept, but it’s not a practical or realistic one. The Americans are waving the stick, and Munir’s telling the Iranians to take whatever baby carrot they can take before the stick comes whooshing down on them.

Here’s the biggest impediment to Iran acquiescing to Trump’s every desire: they’ve been burned before. And they’re wary of being burned again. And that’s why they’re unable to move forward in a rational manner. I don’t blame them. I blame the ethnosupremacist colony in the Middle East, and the Imperial Core in North America for the lack of trust. The only thing the Iranians have going for them is that Pakistan’s willing to do the heavy lifting on their behalf, except that Pakistan’s not doing this for the Iranians at all; Pakistan’s doing it all for itself because it too is stuck between the Strait, the demon and the Saudis. If this war drags on for much longer, Pakistan’s capacity to absorb the economic shock will absolutely crater into a giant hole from which there is no coming back.

So what’s next then?

Well, if all goes to plan (and plans are subject to change — as we’ve seen all too clearly this past week), Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and JD Vance (yes, as per my information JD Vance too is part of the entourage) are headed to Pakistan. Pakistan has initiated a lockdown of their capital city the likes of which we’ve seldom seen before. This is a signal that this time, someone bigger and more important than even JD Vance is expected. The Iranians too will show up in Islamabad. And then, they will all agree, and something will be announced. And between Wednesday and Friday, Trump will be on Air Force 1 on his way to Pakistan to take credit for stopping a war, that he started, and for which the Pakistanis will shower him with heretofore unseen platitudes and accolades. The world will breathe a sigh of relief. Columns will be written about Trump, and Iran, and the diplomacy that has taken place.

But there’s one man who will smile and quietly stand in the background; the man who actually pulled the world back from the brink. He will make sure the limelight never finds him. This man is Field Marshal Munir of Pakistan. And if he pulls this off, history will record that the most consequential actor in the most dangerous crisis of the 21st century was a Pakistani general that most of the world couldn’t pick out of a lineup.

It is with a heavy heart and lament that I write this post today. The negotiations between the US and Iran — eventually styled as the Islamabad Talks — have failed. They say hindsight is 20/20, and it is indeed with this hindsight that I can say that perhaps my hope and sense of complacency were unfounded. That perhaps the better thing to do would’ve been to be more cautious rather than optimistic, and to hope for the best, instead of prepare for it.

The two warring sides have issued contradictory statements about why the talks eventually failed, but some things can be gleaned from their words regardless. It would appear that the Americans had maximalist demands (and their president certainly thinks that as Lord Emperor of the world, he has every right to make them), and the Iranians were unwilling to cede gains that they had made, and release the pressure that they have finally succeeded in applying to the American pulse in the Middle East. These positions are untenable. They were bound to be confrontational, but the hope always was that when the two sides sat around the table, they would be willing to make concessions and be more amenable and conciliatory. But there is nearly 50 years of animosity and lack of trust between the two; perhaps it was unwise to expect anything would, or could, possibly come from these “Talks.”

The real truth of the matter is that the stumbling block from which all this diplomacy began to unravel was Iran’s unwillingness to cede that the Strait of Hormuz is Iranian sovereign territory. Strictly speaking, the Strait of Hormuz is shared sovereign territory between Iran and Oman, and just because it has never been tolled before does not mean that Iran is not part owner of it. This failure to cede to the American demand on the Strait of Hormuz made the Americans go hardline on their zero enrichment demand of the Iranians. The Iranians refused zero enrichment too, and this is how the Americans concluded that that must therefore mean that the Iranians are unwilling to give up the idea of building a nuke. This compounded the stress on the fragile diplomacy that was taking place, and it completely fell apart when the Americans informed the Iranians that the Lebanese onslaught by the Israelis was not, and should not be a cause of concern for the Iranians. This too was unacceptable to the Iranians who responded that they were negotiating on behalf of all victims in the region, and not just themselves.

And then there’s that other question, the big one that nobody seems to have caught on (and one that I dismissed at the start of these negotiations) that the lead negotiators from the American side included Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, in addition to JD Vance. The two men who have failed at diplomacy with Iran thrice now, and have caused so much turmoil and horror. Perhaps one should question why these two keep popping up, and whether they’re even interested in a resolution of the issue between Iran and the US.

There’s also that other fact, that while JD Vance did call Trump more than twenty times during these negotiations, it is is also true that Vance spoke with the self styled leader of the ethnosupremacist colony of the Middle East, the parasite from Poland. Yes, Netanyahu was part of that negotiating package, and I can surmise that it was perhaps him more than anyone else, who cratered these talks by refusing to budge on Lebanon. Vance seems to have been quite pissed by the end of the negotiations and left in a visibly angry and upset state. And he should be angry; this whole, very visible debacle now lays at his feet. He could’ve gone scorched earth on his buddy negotiators and perhaps overruled them, but the reality is that he still needed sign off from the spray tanned, unhinged loon, who most likely would’ve discussed it with the parasite from Poland before saying yes or no. So Vance was parachuted in, to become the face of whatever happens next. And Witkoff and Kushner? They’re chummy with the Pakistanis — and have been for a while — but I doubt they have any desire to see peace prevail in the Middle East. At least not a peace that can be achieved without Israel.

So out of the burning wreckage of these negotiations, have emerged winners and losers. The losers are JD Vance, the Iranians, and the Americans. The winners are the Israelis, Witkoff and Kushner, the Emiratis, the Pakistanis and Marco Rubio. Allow me to explain.

The Losers

• Come 2028, there will be a new presidential election in the US. And while Trump may have mentally checked out of what that entails, his two touts — Marco Rubio and JD Vance — have not. They will go head to head, and Little Marco, the Secretary of State of the United States — gleefully sitting alongside the spray tanned orangutan at a UFC fight the same night that the negotiations between the US and Iran crashed and burned, instead of leading or being actively involved in them — should tell you all you need to know about what he thinks about this war in Iran. He doesn’t want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. He got his win. He wanted Nicolas Maduro and he got him in a manner befitting an action Hollywood film. And JD Vance, who apparently, was never interested in the war in Iran in the first place, is now left holding the bag containing this flaming pile of excrement.

• The Americans lose because the world economy will continue to crater. Gas prices will rise. Inflation will rise. Eventually, it will come full circle. The apathy of the American public will come home to roost. They have been the biggest losers of neoliberalism, and spectacularly, they have never realized it. Perhaps they’ll recognize it this time. Perhaps they won’t. But they will lose. They already have.

• The Iranians lose because they will continue to be martyred through a systematic campaign of torture and brutality that rains on them from the sky. Nothing’s really changed for them.

The Winners

• The Israelis. Of course the Israelis. They have wanted to decapitate and destroy Iran for 40 years. That’s not me saying it. That’s the parasite of Poland saying it, with his own mouth. He has bloodlust. Whether he’s doing it for some grand holy cause, or whether he believes that destroying the Middle East is some pragmatic, logical act, he is getting his wish. The Imperial Empire at his disposal, finally aligned with his wishes, and doing what he has wanted for a long time. He is a winner.

• Kushner and Witkoff deliberately and willfully tanked the last negotiations, that led to the Israelis and the Americans assassinating the elected leadership of Iran. They are demons. And if their actions are anything to go by, they too must be happy because they also don’t want peace to prevail.

• The Emiratis have been seething with rage at this idea of Pakistan bypassing them, and trying to broker peace in the region. The Emiratis have become a proxy Zionist colony, and therefore they are opposed to any process that might lead to resolution that bypasses Israel. The Emiratis were so incensed at the thought of peace prevailing between the Americans and the Iranians, that they’ve tried to get the United Nations to vote on a resolution that would allow them to “legally” engage in kinetic action against Iran. What is stopping them right now, or what they can hope to achieve by bombing Iran, is up for debate. There’s no “international law” left to speak of. Its last embers are fleeting as we speak.

• And the Pakistanis. Because they rigged the game from the start. As I have maintained over and over, Pakistan’s involvement in this entire process has been due to self preservation, and not due to some grand epoch defining legacy. Pakistan found itself stuck in an impossible position. It is obligated to defend Saudi Arabia under its NATO style defense agreement, and the Saudis have paid their dues for that agreement. It is time to collect. Pakistan also has the world’s second largest Shia Muslim population; and they also have a population that overwhelmingly sides with the Iranians in this conflict. So Pakistan had to create a tenable solution out of an impossible situation, and it did exactly that. It reined in the Saudis, and got a ceasefire. And under the garb of that ceasefire, it deployed military strike assets to Saudi Arabia, as if it was routine and unrelated to what was happening. Between 10,000 and 13,000 personnel deployed, a full squadron of cutting edge fighter jets that create parity with the Israelis when it comes to BVR conflict in the region (for the first time in history), and also sends a clear signal to the Iranians that if they attempt to strike Saudi now, the response will come from Pakistan before it comes from Saudi Arabia. A masterful gambit.

So what happens next? It seems likely that Israel will restart its war on Iran, even though technically there’s a ceasefire for 2 weeks. In any case Trump will follow. He’s most likely going to deploy heavier weapons and might upgrade his bridge and power plant day to armageddon day. He cannot win the war. He can only destroy Iran. He will attempt to do so with willful, and wanton brute force.

And Iran? Well Iran has some hard choices to make. It cannot keep playing ping pong with its nuclear program. It needs to either step up and commit to getting the bomb, or give up its nuclear program all together. This insistence on keeping the program but also using it for civilian purposes has done more harm to it and its people than anything else. Iran has oodles of oil and gas, and maybe they can use those to power their country while a more placable and amenable American administration comes along. Maybe Iran can normalize relations with the Americans by giving up their nuclear power and one day, when the world is peaceful and quiet, it can build its nuclear program back up again. But right now, this insistence on its program without leveraging it to get real deterrence is a folly. In the meantime, Iran will only have to squeeze the Strait for a bit longer to cause the world economy to sputter and choke.

And while the high lords play their games of bloodlust, the people of Iran and the Middle East will continue to be fed into the machine — not really as casualties of war, because that would be too clinical — but as fuel for it. The ethnosupremacists have an appetite that diplomacy was, in hindsight, never going to satisfy; neither was some type of Islamabad Accord, nor the ceasefire, nor the twenty phone calls Vance made to his president from the negotiating table at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad.

After all, there are no negotiations with an empire that has already decided.

On Tuesday evening, the Americans and the Iranians agreed to a ceasefire at the behest of Pakistan two hours before armageddon. The Pakistani Prime Minister conveniently requested that Donald Trump postpone his “civilization destroying” attack on Iran for two weeks, and Donald Trump being the ever gracious scion of decency, agreed. Unbeknownst, and yet knownst to all, this whole dance was choreographed to perfection. There are however, rumors that it was extremely high stakes, and the Pakistanis produced a miracle right at the eleventh hour.

But as the day melted into night, it became clear that the ethnosupremacist colony in the Middle East was not happy about this so called ceasefire. And so it did what it always does: it went berserk. The next day, it butchered more than 250 people in Beirut and then bragged about it. Yep. They bragged about it. And then, they turned around and said that Lebanon was not part of the ceasefire agreement between the Americans and the Iranians. Only, they lied, because the proof is there in black and white and all the colors of the rainbow, on the Pakistani Prime Minister’s Twitter/X profile. But the Israelis have never cared for the truth, so what does it matter anyway?

As I wrote last night, despite the unhinged and dramatic escalation from the Israelis, neither the US nor Iran have walked away from the ceasefire agreement, almost broken and fragile as it is. But it did come very close to falling apart last night after the unleashing of this wave of violence by the Israelis. According to Iranian sources, it was the Pakistanis who picked up the phone and told the Americans to rein in the rabid, diseased dog that has been let loose on Lebanon, and then called the Iranians to hold their horses, lest this opportunity be wasted away into another “what could’ve been?” They were successful. Trump seems to have finally reined in Netanyahu, and now the Iranians and the Americans both sit in Islamabad, waiting for the morrow to surface so they can indulge in yet more talks with Pakistan mediating.

So, you’re here to know what happens after the Americans and the Iranians sit down to talk. Let me give you my insight on this. I foresee three possible outcomes of these talks: 1) the talks are successful, meaning the can has been kicked down the road, and everyone goes home; 2) the talks are partially successful, meaning Iran and Israel go back to war, but the Americans and the GCC refrain from direct participation (but you can bet there will continue to be indirect participation by them); 3) the talks break down and there is resumption of war, but this time the Americans go berserk, and the GCC gets the green light it was waiting for to engage in direct kinetic action against Iran (this would in my estimation, be the beginning of the next World War).

Possibility Number 1: The talks are successful, but what does that mean?

The kicking the can down the road stems from my assessment of the situation that Iran will not acquiesce to maximalist demands of the US, and accepting the maximalist demands of the US are the only thing that would guarantee that the Americans won’t come back in another ten years’ time. Iran has learned from this conflict that it is in an existential crisis. Therefore, they cannot surrender their leverage in case the Americans and the Israelis decide to return later.

This is reflected in their initial response to the American 15 point ask, and the statements that have come from the Iranian government about how there will be no return to the pre-war status quo. Iran has accepted that there is no living in peace with the Americans and their ethnosupremacist attack dog, so the only card that they have is to cause maximum pain to everyone to force the Americans and the ethnosupremacists to stay away from Iran. However, since there is already war fatigue, and both sides are looking for a way out, they will make some concessions to one another. Iran might give up the enriched uranium stockpile, but might insist on tolling ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz; America might concede that point in exchange for Iran’s uranium and perhaps a moratorium on how much uranium Iran might be able to enrich.

But like I said, this only kicks the can down the road, because the ethnosupremacist party who’s not been invited to the meeting room in Islamabad, wants to see a broken, subservient, perhaps even balkanized, Iran. So in another ten years, with a new president at the helm, and a new leader of the ethnosupremacist colony, they return and try to once again slap Iran around.

Possibility Number 2: The talks are partially successful, and maybe this is the outcome everyone is secretly hoping for

A possible second outcome of these talks is the US and Iran agreeing to end their fighting, with concessions made on both sides. American forces withdraw and retreat from the war theater, and Iran stops bombing and attacking American assets. This would however, cause upheaval between the American and Israeli establishments because Israel’s objectives in this war are to completely destroy Iran, and America backing out of the war will make Israel very unhappy.

This war is massively unpopular across the spectrum, and therefore the Americans are most likely looking for an exit from it. But, they can’t exit it by appearing to lose. So they will push and cajole the Iranians into making concessions that they can spin as wins, and they will share these “wins” with Israel. But while they might offer to stop the fight on the face of it, they will continue to back and support Israel and this is how they will try to placate the Israelis. But the intended (or unintended?) consequence of this action will be to force the Israelis to stop their own direct kinetic action in Iran, because Israel does not have the capacity or the capability to mount a direct war against Iran without America’s involvement. The Israelis will continue their onslaught against Lebanon, Gaza and the Palestinians in the West Bank, under the garb of fighting Hamas or Hezbollah or a new boogeyman, which they’ll say is being directly backed and funded by Iran. This culminates in a continued proxy war between Iran and Israel.

Possibility Number 3: The talks break down and the war restarts

If the talks break down because the Americans cannot rein in the Israelis, or because JD Vance continues to fib and bluster like he’s John Rambo and insists on America’s maximalist demands, or if the Iranians refuse to budge from their hard stances, all parties will go back home, and the world will descend into chaos.

Consider the fact that Donald Trump has threatened NATO directly by stating that they need to contribute forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Why would he threaten his most important alliance? And right before sitting down at the negotiating table with the party that controls that same strait? It is because if the talks break down, Donald Trump intends to unleash hell and fury like never before. If NATO acquiesces — which let’s be honest, they will because they’ve not got even the hint of a spine — the world will be at war with Iran.

The break down of the talks would also signal to the GCC that there’s no diplomatic path to peace left, and therefore their restraint now does not matter. So they (already itching to get involved in kinetic action against the Iranians) will get involved. And the Pakistanis, the peacemakers and the brokers — who just a few hours before the announcement of the ceasefire on Tuesday, made it very clear to the Iranians that their patience with Iran was running out, and if push came to shove, the Pakistanis would stand with the Saudis — also get called into the action. It would be an irony of epic proportions.

Even though this might not be ultimately what Trump and America wants, this might be exactly what it comes down to. Trump’s largest and most vocal allies have already turned on him with remarkable anger and hostility, and with no resolute option left out of the war, Trump will have to make a show of force so that he can then declare victory. And in that vanity, the world will suffer a catastrophic horror of epic proportions.

My money is on Possibility Number 2 with some elements of Possibility Number 1 thrown in for good measure, being the outcome. Not because it’s good; it’s just the least catastrophic off ramp available to everyone meeting in that room in Islamabad. The status quo will change; Iran will come out with some concessions; the Americans will be able to spin it as a victory, and the Israelis will be able to go back and lick their wounds before they retry their games again. Meanwhile, more death and destruction await the people in the immediate vicinity of the ethnosupremacist colony known as Israel; because that is the reality of their existence and in before we forget, no one at that table in Islamabad is there for them.

There’s this common conception amongst the public that Israel — and by extension Benjamin Netanyahu — have hijacked the American establishment, and are at the center of all of its decision making. Orders and decisions are dictated to Washington from Tel Aviv. The Israelis have extreme leverage over the Americans, and that’s why the US does what it does. I am here to tell you that this thesis is completely and utterly wrong. The Americans are not being blackmailed by the Israelis; they are part of the same cabal. There’s no need to blackmail anyone, because they all believe and want the same thing: an unchallenged imperial order with Israel as the regional enforcer.

There was an article published in the New York Times today that detailed how Trump made the decision to strike Iran. It reports that Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington and was led down to the Situation Room. Not withstanding the symbolism of having the leader of a foreign country enter one of your most top secret zones, it is odd that Netanyahu was led to it so that he could give a top secret briefing to Trump on what the American plans for Iran should be. At this meeting, it was Netanyahu who sat at the head of the table and not Trump, as one might expect. This is being spun in the casual media space as proof that it is in fact Benjamin Netanyahu who is the de facto leader of the imperial empire. We’ll circle back to that in just a moment.

At this meeting, Netanyahu made bombastic claims about how Iran will fall, and the government would be so weakened that they wouldn’t be able to do anything about the Strait of Hormuz. Netanyahu kept going and said Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks, and that Iranian blows against US interests in the region would be minimal. At this same meeting, the head of Mossad, David Barnea, indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again, with impetus from Mossad helping to foment riots and rebellion. He further impressed upon Trump that an intense bombing campaign against Iran would foster the conditions that would allow the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.

This presentation was for the benefit of one man: Donald Trump, the president of the United States. It seems to have had its desired effect, because he is reported to have said “sounds good to me.” However, the American establishment’s assessment of the Israeli embellishments can be surmised through just one word, uttered by John Ratcliffe, the Director of CIA: “farcical.” Note however, that despite the American establishment warning Trump about the pitfalls of this folly, and warning him that the Israelis love to exaggerate because the Israelis need the Americans, Trump did not listen to his own team. He went with what the Israelis were selling. And that’s not because Trump is compromised, or because the Israelis have kompromat they can leverage. No. He went with the Israelis because he is part of that elite cabal that is in charge and in power across the world. Which, inevitably, brings us to Jeffrey Epstein.

For a long time, Jeffrey Epstein was understood as a convicted pedophile. And he was that. But that’s the least interesting thing about him. The next theory was blackmail, that he had kompromat on the powerful and was pulling strings from behind it. That’s also wrong. Epstein wasn’t the boss. He was a hub. A central access point between multiple parties, and he wasn’t running a blackmail operation. Everyone who ended up in his orbit was a willing participant. The names tell you everything: Mohammad Bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia; Ahmed Bin Sulayem, president of DP World, who apparently recorded torture videos and shared them with Epstein; the Rothschilds, whose financial institutions Epstein claimed to represent; and Donald Trump, his best friend. You know what happened when all of this came out? Nothing. It’s as if those dropping the files, and those who’re supposed to do something about them, are one and the same. The child raping just seems to have been some kind of cherry on top, not the actual fruit of the poison. There was no blackmail operation. They were all there because they wanted to be. Just because Epstein’s been removed from the picture doesn’t mean the systems stopped functioning. They didn’t. They’re functioning right now.

And it is in light of this paradigm that we see Trump bombing Iran. The Israelis did not blackmail him into it. He did it because that’s what he believes and wants, and it is what the Israelis believe and want. They’re on the same side. They always have been. And they want to destroy Iran because whatever Iran’s shortcomings, it has always refused to become a willing participant in the debauchery of the ethnosupremacist project. Even those other entities out there baying for blood right now — the Saudis, the Emiratis — want to see Iran decapitated because they too are part of that same cabal. They always have been.

I understand why our instinct is to outsource the cause of the pain and suffering onto some hypothetical force of doom, that’s dictating the course of actions from the Imperial Core. But unfortunately, the evidence does not bear that out. The Imperial Core is doing what it’s doing because it chooses to do so. Iran is being bombed right now, not because Netanyahu twisted Trump’s arm; there’s no twisting needed here. You don’t blackmail your allies. You just coordinate.

Pakistan named the deal after itself. A deal that incidentally, does not exist, and by the looks of it, will never exist. If it seems like an act of hubris, it is because it is an act of hubris. Pakistan named a deal, that has yet to be framed, after itself. And now, it owns everything that follows. And yet, Pakistan owns nothing in this entire process. There may be an explanation here, but let me first approach this from the lens of a casual observer.

Since this illegal war of no reason has been imposed on Iran, Pakistan has thought itself important. It has believed that because it shares a border with Iran, because it has great relations with Uncle Sam, and with the Saudis, and with the Chinese, that it somehow has a role to play in this quagmire. The reality of course, is that ideally Pakistan would like to stay away from this mess. But, alas, it cannot. Its economic fragility, and its Shia population make it a powder keg ripe for an explosion. So, the high lords of the country are forced to confront with a situation where even the mere hint of putting a foot wrong, would set it alight. And Pakistan exploding into chaos, will create repercussions that will reverberate throughout the region. So, in light of its precarious situation, Pakistan has to do something. Pakistan, has to at least pretend, like it’s doing something. So what does it choose to do? It chooses to become the errand boy. The delivery boy. The whipping boy.

You see in order for an entity to mediate between two warring parties, the entity must possess leverage over at least one of those parties. In Pakistan’s case, it possesses no such leverage. It only has goodwill that it is willing to expend on this fruitless exercise. And goodwill alone, cannot guarantee any outcomes. Pakistan’s got good strategic relationships with the US, with China, with Saudi Arabia, with Iran. But that’s just it. There’s nothing more to those relationships. But it is precisely because of those relationships that Pakistan is forced to move and shake and bend over backwards to try to get this war moving in some direction. It went to China, in the hopes of securing a guarantee for the peace process at the behest of Iran. Instead, the Pakistani Foreign Minister returned home with a piece of paper littered with platitudes. It called the Americans and asked them what they wanted, and the Americans came back with maximalist demands that should’ve been thrown in a paper bin before the receiver had been put down. It called the Iranians, and they said the Americans aren’t worth negotiating with anyway. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s energy crisis is deepening, its government is imposing emergency measures, and its national flag carrier — which was privatized only in December — says it might not survive this crisis.

And while all of this unfurling, the President of the United States is going on increasingly insane and unhinged rants where nothing is off the table, and he says he doesn’t care if the actions he wants are considered war crimes. He’s becoming publicly profane and vulgar, and he mocks the God of Muslims in the same breath. His administration is taking direction and dictation from the likes of that insane witch Laura Loomer, and it would seem like that’s where the warmongering stratagem is also coming from. It’s like Donald Trump opens Twitter/X at 3am every night, has Grok summarize the neocon talking points of the day, and then decides to regurgitate them in a presidential action plan at 4am. He went from wanting to “save” the Iranian people, to calling them all “animals” today. It’s the same rhetoric playbook that the ethnosupremacists have deployed against the Palestinians forever. That’s not a negotiating posture. That’s a precursor of something much uglier that is to come. And Pakistan? Pakistan’s standing there, waving a piece of paper with its own name on it. I mean, there’s hubris. And then there is whatever the fuck this is.

The only way Pakistan’s position makes sense in this entire saga is this: Pakistan desperately wants to avoid the Saudis getting involved in kinetic action in this US-Israeli war that has been imposed on Iran. Because the Saudis getting involved means that they can then invoke the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement that they have with Pakistan, and force Pakistan into kinetic action against the Iranians, no matter how much Pakistan wants to avoid it. The over the top diplomacy, the hubris, the back and forth, the phone calls, the pretending to be doing something — when it’s simply shuffling papers from one side to the other — is all so that the Pakistanis can say to the Saudis that they’re attempting a peace plan, and that the Saudis need to wait. It seems to have worked out well so far. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it’s worked out better than well; the Iranian attacks on Saudi soil have largely stopped after the salvos of the initial days of the war. So Pakistan has to keep pretending; for now at least.

America and Trump want Iran’s back broken, and for it to beg and crawl for mercy. Iran wants the US to suffer such pain and loss that it dare not come back to poke Iran again. These are maximalist demands and they are exceptionally incompatible with each other. Pakistan has nothing to offer this peace process. Like always, it is trying to save its own skin, by whichever means necessary. So, when the bombs will fall — and they will fall — history won’t record that America and Iran went to war, even though they have. It’ll record that the Islamabad Accord failed. The only thing that Pakistan did, was hand the world a return address.

There’s this idea that’s gained reverence amongst the masses about Trump playing some kind of 14D chess. There are entire discussion forums full of people running psych evals on Trump to “predict” his next move. This of course, is all utter nonsense. Because Trump is incapable of playing 1D chess, much less multiple dimensional chess. What Trump really is, is a vapid, vain, orange donkey, and he’s as simple as a lazy, jungle-top dwelling buffoon. And much like buffoons, Trump is always looking out for his preservation, at the expense of anyone and everyone else.

The other day there was quite an article that was published in Time magazine that sheds light on the internal machinations of the Trump administration. But scratch the surface just a teeny bit, and you’ll get a raw insight into the mind of Trump. Apparently, Trump’s aides have been telling him the war that he’s pushed the United States into was going fantastically — not withstanding the tens of $100M+ fighter jets that have been lost, the more than sixteen $30M+ drones that have been lost, the more than 7 $1B+ radars that have been lost, the more than 13 soldiers that have officially been confirmed killed, the loss of almost all US bases in the Middle East. Other than these losses of course, the war’s going swimmingly well. But at some point, the rose tinted glasses have to come off because reality has this uncanny knack of biting one in one’s ass. And this is what Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, is now reportedly attempting to do. She’s telling his aides to stop mollycoddling the dithering buffoon, and start giving him some abject lessons in the reality of warfare.

The problem of course, is that this is easier said than done (although this does explain why Trump keeps saying he’s won the war, but also that he needs to win the war, and further still, that he’s going to win the war even though he’s already won it). Trump, the second time around, has surrounded himself with sycophants and the thing about sycophants is that they only exist to leech off of the big daddy at the expense of every moral, intellectual, ethical principle. Consider how he fired Pam Bondi the other day. He got her into his limo, and told her she’s fired because she didn’t sycophant up to him the way that he expected her to. And she, having sold her soul to be in his orbit, begged him to let her stay on till the summer — to give her the opportunity to spin this firing as a choice, rather than a declaration — only for him to tell her that that’s not going to happen. See, Trump doesn’t care for people who can do their jobs. He cares about the surface, the way things look and feel, instead of how they are.

This is precisely why he hired Pete Hegseth, a fanatic zealot from the Order of the Holy Wars of the 21st Century, because he looks like what a made for TV “War Secretary” should look like, and exactly nothing else. That’s why Pete Hegseth will also get on the chopping block sooner or later. He’s got no substance (I mean, he’s got a substance abuse thing with alcohol of course) and that is why he’s got no legitimacy. He looked at Trump and thought the orange buffoon is attracted to machismo, and that’s the persona he gave to him. And that worked when it came time to dole and divvy out cabinet positions, but it doesn’t work when it comes to the real world, with consequences and pitfalls. Apparently, he was quite taken aback at the ferocity of Iran’s response to this imposed holy war, because he was under the impression that given Iran’s lack of bite in previous encounters (you know, when the Imperialists decided to pound on it like the 12 day war, or when they kept murdering their leaders in the past), this would be more of the same. Again, tailor made for TV. He would go stand in front of a camera, huff and puff, bluster and strut, like some goddam peacock, say he’ll commit war crimes because that’s macho, and Trump would look at him and say “uwu.” Only, that is exactly what didn’t happen, because as I’ve said before, the real world comes with consequences. And those consequences are now beginning to bite these good for nothing, hot headed, low brow morons.

Those that have figured this out, have been able to get him to do their bidding. This is why he was pushed into action in Venezuela, and into the Iran war. It worked out great for Marco Rubio in the Venezuela action; the Imperialist army was able to run a full commando setup where they kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the president of the country, before shuttling him off to rot in a prison cell. Everyone came out of that operation looking and smelling like a hero. But the problem is that the other parties that figured how to play Trump like a fiddle, are also smart enough to realize that he is as disposable as a wet wipe. Netanyahu and MBS of Saudi Arabia wanted Trump to attack Iran. They don’t care that Trump would be left holding the bag, or drag America into a war from which it would emerge either badly broken, or completely dead. They only care that their objectives — a weakened, destroyed, decimated, Iran — are achieved. And that is exactly what they’re going to get. They also fawned over Trump and sold him great dreams about his legacy, and Trump, being the vain, vapid, stupid moron that he is, could see the shiny silver coin in the distance. He wanted a Nobel Peace Prize so bad and didn’t get it, so this would be the next big thing: a legacy of ensuring Iran never gets a nuclear bomb. Only, that’s not what the war on Iran is about. At all. But Trump is genuinely too stupid to realize it.

Here’s the rub of it all however: everyone around Trump is auditioning for a loyalty that cannot be earned, only temporarily held. That goes for people in his orbit. For people outside his orbit? They’re not interested in earning his loyalty. They’re only interested in getting him to do the things that they would like to happen, and so they grovel at his feet, and show him Utopian visions where Trump’s statues are erected and people pray at his altar.

So that’s what understanding the mind of Trump actually gets you. There’s no hope, no roadmap, no way out, no ambition for something better (and we still have three more years of this circus to go). There’s only the grim realization that the American masses, apathetic, deluded, brainwashed by the podcast bros’ constituency (they’re trying to deflect blame for their colossal fuckup now, but that’s a diatribe for another time), have elected an incompetent moron — who can be flattered into anything — to the most powerful office in the world. A man who can be bought with the promise of a legacy, that he will never earn. The rest of us are just living in the wreckage of that vanity.

Sometimes, there are things that happen during the course of an atrocity that seem to affect you more than usual. The atrocity itself is heinous and your brain and your soul is already reeling from its effects, but there’s usually something that breaks through the suppression. It was the audio of Hind Rajab in Gaza, and today it’s the bombing of the Pasteur Institute in Tehran.

They call themselves the enlightened civilization, the learned civilization. But they prove they are nothing more than neo-age barbarians. What purpose could bombing a 105 year old medical research institute have served? Were they threatened by the notion of vaccines being exported to the world? To Iranians? I look at the smoldering ruins of that institute and I cannot stop myself from a steeling sense of helplessness settling into my bones. We’ve seen them do this before, but this is just so stark and sinister. They want to ruin Iran and its people. They want to turn Iranians from well dressed, learned, educated, soft spoken people, to impoverished, shoeless, dirty, ragged victims who are forced to live in plastic tents and beg for the mercy of their decapitators.

It is small wonder then that the world looks at these beacons of the western, “enlightened” civilizations, and sees only ghouls and savages. Bloodthirsty. Warmongering. Feral. Reactionary. Driven by impulse rather than principle. They say the ayatollahs shouted “death to America!” and thus, deserved to die. Their compatriots deserve to die. The irony is lost on these vicious, vindictive charlatans because they themselves are the reason why the Iranian ayatollahs shouted death to America; because look at what America and its little ethnosupremacist lackey does with the world. They demonize, pillage, pervert, attack, kill, maim, and then stand back and feel proud of themselves. They throw unironic Great Gatsby style parties with Eyes Wide Shut vibes. There’s a stench of something so profoundly immoral and wicked about them all.

The myth of the western enlightenment, of the superiority and supremacy of the western civilization, lies dead and unmoving in the ruins of Gaza and Tehran. As Khatoun wrote earlier today, “All legitimacy the West had is gone, done, dead.”

China and Pakistan came out today with a joint 5-point statement that can be summed up in one sentence: China threw Iran under the bus. That China — who the world expects is the grown up at the table — isn’t even in the dining room, much less at the table. And while the world keeps expecting China to turn up, China refuses to show.

These five points that China has crafted is an insult to Iran, and to the notion that China has a stake in the process. China could have a stake in the process if it wanted to, but it’s deliberately staying out of it and leaving Iran to fend for itself. That’s not the mark of a great power that could determine the hierarchy of rational players in the world; it’s the mark of a passive player that — excuse the crudeness — only wants to be the world’s factory and nothing more.

China could leverage this moment to reorient the world. It could flex its muscles and show the world a different vision of the future, one where the US no longer behaves like an antagonistic, out of control policeman, who’s receiving orders from the Israelis. China could force the US into a confrontation — not necessarily a military one — where it could demonstrate that when it comes to diplomacy, statecraft, rules based order and enforcement, China is the new global hegemon. Instead, what does it choose to do? Behave like a neutered pet that doesn’t even have the guts to mention the US or Israel by name.

The five points that the Chinese and the Pakistanis have come up with completely and unapologetically negate everything that the Iranians are asking for. Let me explain.

• The first point calls for immediate cessation of hostilities; what the Chinese and Pakistanis are signaling here is that they do not believe that this is an asymmetric war. They are saying that the Iranians are an equal blame party in this conflict.

• Next they’re saying that the territorial integrity, sovereignty, security and national independence of “Iran and the Gulf States” should be safeguarded. Once again, they’re signaling that they’re not sympathetic to the Iranian argument that it’s firing ballistic missiles in self defense at American/Israeli launchpads. What they’re saying is that Iran needs to chill the fuck out, because they’re not buying what Iran’s selling.

• Next, the Chinese and Pakistanis call upon “all parties” to stop targeting non military infrastructure. Again, this disproportionately favors the perpetrators of violence and aggression against Iran, because they are the ones who started the war, and have escalated the war to non military targets forcing Iran to respond.

• The big one: China and Pakistan flat out reject the Iranian claim that it has sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. They mention that it is an important “global” shipping route. They don’t mention that Iran has any claim on controlling it.

• And the final point, the cliche participation point that students at Model United Nations conferences all over the world have been saying for decades now: let’s all practice peace and multilateralism.

These five points are a goddam joke. Think of the things that are missing from this joint statement. E.g., condemnation of the brutal assassination and outright murder of Iran’s head of state. The killing and murder of Iranian leadership. The killing and murder of the 160 girls at Minab. The deliberate targeting of Iranian energy infrastructure, civil infrastructure, social order infrastructure. The forced displacement of the populations of Iranian cities.

You know, there are people in the American establishment who throw disdains about China in that it has no ambition, and therefore will never be able to challenge the US or the footprint of the global American doctrine. I used to think that wasn’t true, because I used to believe that there are limits to what the Chinese will tolerate. But clearly I was wrong, because apparently the Chinese will tolerate any and everything as long as they are getting paid. The American establishment’s calculus on this assumption is completely vindicated by the five point nonsense that the Chinese have come up with and delivered via the delivery boy (Pakistan). They have abandoned Iran, and the reason isn’t hard to find: with Trump’s upcoming visit to China in May, Beijing has decided its bilateral equities with Washington are worth more than cashing in its Iranian chips. But that calculation makes it all the more damning that China would give up this opportunity to establish itself as the only power capable of saying no to America, and making it stick.

The Chinese have decided that the price of American goodwill is worth more than Iranian survival. That’s a choice. And it’s a damning one. China has — or maybe had — a once in a generation opportunity to demonstrate an alternative to the American led world order, and it chose a 5-point pamphlet instead. Every country in the world that has quietly told itself that China represents an alternative, a check, a different vision of how power operates in the world, got a reality check today: China will not show up when it costs something.

The other day I was driving along some highway listening to Rania Khalek put Piers Morgan in his goddam place, and I wondered to myself why Trump et al decided to bomb the ever living fucking daylights out of the Iranians. I mean, what is the fucking point of this war? And then it came to me, not unlike an epiphany, but unlike my epiphanies, you lot get to read all about it.

Here’s the TL;DR version (the crux, if you will) of the argument: There are three competing objectives architected by three different parties, who came together because it serves their singular objective of bombing Iran/getting rid of the Iranian leadership. The three parties are the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Allow me to take this logic apart beginning with Trump.

The United States

On January 3, 2026, Trump (fancying himself Nero) and his Sardaukar (those are the Emperor’s royal forces in Dune for you uncultured swines) executed an operation called “Absolute Resolve”, where he kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the sitting president of a sovereign country, and Maduro’s wife (because that’s just what mad Roman style emperors who’re ready to burn the world to the ground do). The Sardaukar put Maduro in handcuffs, put him in a chopper, flew that chopper onto a big boat, and from that big boat, flew him all the way to NYC, where this president of Venezuela was put in a jail cell. The Nero vibes thus, were strong.

Trump gloated about this operation up and down, and was apparently utterly mesmerized and impressed with how spectacularly the whole thing had gone. Just like a video game. Call of Duty, maybe. Once Maduro had been kidnapped, the Sardaukar went to Delcy Rodriguez (the vice president of Venezuela), and told her she had 15 minutes to decide if she wanted to be a servile tout of the empire, or be worm food, six feet in the ground. Rodriguez decided being a servile tout of the empire was preferable to being worm food, and really, who could or would blame her? Which brings us on to Iran.

Orange Nero thought he could rerun the Venezuela op, with Top Gun music blaring, only this time the geographic setting would be Iran, and not South America. The logic, was of course sound. Him and his Sardaukar would once again take out the leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamanei), and they would once again offer 15 minutes to the replacement servile tout of the empire to decide if he wanted the job. The only hitch in this otherwise masterful gambit was that the Israelis raised their hand up and said “O sage (orange?) one, let our hand be the one that brings you the chopped head of the Ayatollah.” Of course, Trump cannot resist the theatrical (I point you to the “Trump”-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts) and he acquiesced. But the Israelis are and have always been backstabbing poisonous toads, so they did what they always do: they bombed the living daylights out of the Ayatollah, and his replacement, and his replacement’s replacement, and even that guy’s replacement. Which means, there will be no Delcy Rodriguez style second coming of the American Empire in Tehran.

Which now conveniently brings us to Israel.

Israel

They have an eschatological affinity with wars. They are obsessed with their Greater Israel plan and have been working towards it ever since Netanyahu decided he was king of the world. He’s succeeded in breaking the Middle East in his image, and has destroyed countries in all four directions from where he’s located. Which is unfortunate, because if he had stayed in Poland, he wouldn’t have felt the need to break any countries around him (because the USSR broke apart on its own, without the need for any divine intervention). And those countries that he couldn’t break, he bought. With Uncle Sam’s money of course (looking at you Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan). The only country he couldn’t break or buy: Iran. And Iran refuses to accept the ethnosupremacist agenda that the Zionist colony wants to export to everywhere around it. So what does Netanyahu do then? He eggs anyone who will listen (since the 80s) that the iranians are an existential threat to... drum roll... the USA. That the Iranians are 2 weeks away from making a bomb. All of the time. Boy, the Iranians really fucking suck, don’t they? Because they’re always two weeks away from putting Netanyahu in his place, but then also always chicken the fuck out at the last minute and say, “not today Netanyahu; we want to keep playing”. Anyway, Israel does not care for a puppet in Iran. In fact, Israel does not care for Iran at all. It would prefer a balkanized, failed state instead of a cohesive, utilitarian state that Trump/America want. This is why every time there’s talk of Trump walking back from the ledge (saying the Empire won’t bomb energy infrastructure or civilian infrastructure etc.), you hear that Israel has bombed precisely those things 5 minutes later. The objective Israel has is clear: it wants to goad Iran into responding disproportionately against American assets in the region, which are located in Arab states around the place. Including Saudi Arabia. That forces the Arabs to then say well, maybe we want to bomb Iran too. And thus, Israel’s objectives are fulfilled, because the Middle East at war with itself allows Israel to go about ethnically cleansing everyone and their cat from everywhere.

Which brings us to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi has seen Iran as a rival regional power, and much like the Americans, there can only be one... one. And that one in the Middle East is Saudi. At least, that’s what they hope when they’re not cucking for America. The only problem is that the UAE formalized relations with the Zionist ethnosupremacist colony and got there first, and hence started playing the macho man before realizing you can’t just step up to the bully pulpit without dislodging the incumbent bully; that incumbent bully being Saudi Arabia. They’ve been having a go at each other everywhere, from Somalia to the Sudan, and in the economic realms from Dubai to Riyadh, and from Abu Dhabi to Neom. The butcher of Khashoggi (who is allegedly being forced to kiss Trump’s ass, as per Trump himself; oh the ironies doth write themselves lyrical, don’t they?) cannot abide by this notion. So what does he want? He wants a subservient Iran that recognizes that Saudi is top dog, but which also can put the UAE in its place if need be. A balkanized Iran, a failed state Iran (like Israel and by proxy, the UAE want) would lead to catastrophic attrition and bog the Saudis (and the Pakistanis by extension) down into a quagmire from which there is no escape. A compliant Iran on the other hand means that the UAE’s influence and threat can be neutralized. That obviously is completely misaligned with what the other two parties (America and Israel want). And thus, circle gets the square.

So then, what we have here is a mishmash of: 1) a vapid, vain, spray tanned orange donkey, fancying himself Nero, ruler of the worlds; 2) we have a messianic toad huffing dead babies’ blood to get his fix; 3) we have a butcher who thinks he’s a genius strategist. And because this collective of gnarly table top looking hacks can’t agree on whose might is actually right, we have death and destruction raining from the sky on a civilization that’s older than their religions combined. And that ladies and gents, is why Nero, the Toad and the Butcher went to war with Iran.

In 1204, Pope Innocent III launched the Fourth Crusade. A campaign ostensibly for the Holy Land that ended with Christian knights sacking Christian Constantinople. Holy wars have a habit of consuming everyone, including their architects. That history is worth keeping in mind when you listen to Pete Hegseth, the current United States Secretary of War (Defense?), speak.

This is what Hegseth said recently, speaking to US forces:

Our rights here in this great land come from a loving and benevolent God, not government. We are warriors armed with the arsenal of freedom — and ultimately armed with the arsenal of faith. You can only have peace through strength. And we have strength.

The Secretary of War of the world’s most powerful military (although one could argue that the moniker of the world’s most powerful military could be debated, given the pounding it’s received from Iran in the recent month) — a man with command over aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, and special operations forces — is framing his mission in the language of holy war. Not metaphorically. Literally. This is the arsenal of faith. This is God given purpose. This is crusade rhetoric dressed in a suit.

For decades, Western political discourse has operated on a simple premise: Muslims are the fundamentalists. Muslims export ideology. Muslims wage religious war. Marco Rubio said in 2015 that Iran was led by a radical cleric with an apocalyptic vision; a man determined to trigger civilizational conflict between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. What Rubio neglected to mention was that the same cleric had issued a binding religious edict forbidding Iran from possessing nuclear weapons back in 2003, and had spent the subsequent years doing precisely what the West asked in order to prove his intentions. The West’s response was to keep moving the goalposts and to keep amplifying voices who’d been predicting Iran was weeks away from a nuclear bomb since the 1980s.

Then there’s Lindsey Graham, who recently declared — without apparent embarrassment — that this is a religious war that will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years. He went further: “this is not a war between Iran, Israel, and the US,” he said. “It is a war between Islam and Judaism.” One does feel entitled to ask: what exactly does that have to do with a senator from South Carolina?

The mask has slipped. What was long presented as a secular, liberal, rules-based order — one that looked at religious conviction with suspicion, especially Muslim religious conviction — has revealed itself to be animated by its own theology. A specific, American evangelical theology in which the United States plays a providential role, in which Israel’s territorial expansion is a biblical mandate, and in which the current moment is understood not as geopolitics but as prophecy.

The framing never changes. The Muslims are the radicals. The Muslims are the fundamentalists. And yet, no Muslim country in the region has declared a divine mandate to expand its borders. No Muslim leader has stood at a podium and announced he is fulfilling a 5,000-year-old prophecy by taking someone else’s land. The projection here is stunning in its audacity.

What’s the end state? That’s the question nobody seems willing to ask. Because if you actually follow the eschatology — the evangelical vision of triggering the Second Coming, the settler vision of rebuilding the Temple — what you’re describing is not a foreign policy. It’s an apocalypse plan. And we’re all supposed to just watch while people with this framework in their heads control the most powerful military and diplomatic apparatus in human history.

We have the technology to feed everyone. We have the capacity to build a world that works. Instead, we have Pete Hegseth asking soldiers to go on bended knee and pray for conquest. We have Lindsey Graham declaring thousand-year religious wars from the Senate floor.

Call it what it is. The fundamentalists are in charge. They just aren’t Muslim.

Do you wonder why out of all countries in the world, Pakistan is the one that’s raised its hand and said “come to my drawing room and hash out this war please?” There are of course the obvious realities: Pakistan has great ties with the Americans and the Saudis, and it has good relations with the Iranians too. There’s the other fact that Pakistan and Iran are neighbors, and share quite a sizable border. But what if I told you that none of these reasons were good enough; what if I told you the real reason that Pakistan’s angling to be the center stage is because this war is becoming more and more untenable (read: existential) for Pakistan with every passing minute?

The Saudis forced Pakistan (or maybe Pakistan wanted to be willingly “forced” by the Saudis) into a NATO style security agreement, which basically says that an attack on one country will be considered an attack on the other as well. This was a formalization of the doctrine that has existed between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for a while. The Pakistani military has been entrenched in the Saudi security apparatus since 1982. But in 2015 during the Saudi-Yemen war, the Pakistanis decided to publicly declare that they were neutral and will not take sides. This, after the Saudis had demanded that Pakistan deploy the full armada of its capabilities in defense of Saudi territory (they demanded that Pakistan deploy JF-17 fighter jets, as well as special forces to fight alongside Saudi forces in the mountainous terrain of the Saudi-Yemeni border regions). The Pakistani military did end up providing some cover to the Saudis, only they called the maneuvering other forms of exercises, completely unrelated to the Saudi-Yemeni war.

The countdown clock had started ticking from that moment forth, because shakers and movers in the Saudi establishment recognized that Pakistan must be brought into the fold publicly and visibly, so that it could not back out if such a situation were to present itself again. Last year, the stars finally aligned and Pakistan signed this agreement — called the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) — with Saudi Arabia. And less than a year later, the full implications of this agreement have been brought upon the heads of the Pakistani establishment and have left them in a sinking swamp.

Pakistan’s population is made up of a sizable minority of Shias. An estimated 15 to 20 percent in fact. When the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamanei was announced, protestors stormed the US Consulate in Karachi and at least 10 people were killed in that rampage. Since then, unrest in the first week of war grew with at least 23 protestors being killed in the Gilgit-Baltistan region. On March 20, Field Marshal Munir (the de facto head of state of Pakistan) met with Shia clerics and told them:

Violence in Pakistan, based on incidents taking place in another country will not be tolerated.

So now you’ve gone from Saudi pressure (a trigger, waiting to be pulled) to sectarian pressure inside Pakistan that is bubbling just below the surface, ready to blow.

But there’s more. You see Pakistan seems to have min-maxed its prowess in a very weird way. Its military capabilities are outstanding and extremely powerful, but its economic realities are equally as bleak and sorrowful. The Pakistanis have been relying on their Saudi big brother to bail them out time and time again from the pain that has come from economic mismanagement. Pakistan imports 80% of all its oil. When the Strait of Hormuz closed and the price of oil was shooting to the moon, the Finance and Petroleum Ministers announced a ₨55 per liter increase in the price of petrol. This is the single largest fuel hike in the history of the country. The spider web of consequences that follow increases in fuel prices are obvious for all to see.

In the backdrop of these three mountains that have suddenly popped up in front of Pakistan, it has become necessary for Pakistan to massage and cajole whoever and whatever they can to keep the war from spreading; to keep the war from continuing. So Pakistan’s offering a table, not out of the kindness of its heart, but out of fear and necessity because every day this war drags on, is another day when the rupture might occur and make things impossibly complicated for Pakistan. Pakistan’s not positioning itself as the deliverer of the end; it’s positioning itself as the delivery boy between the Americans and the Iranians.

For their part, the Iranians seem to be quite reserved about engaging at all (and why wouldn’t they be, after having been burned twice by the same adversary). Even the way the mere consideration of these “talks” has come about is derisive; Trump announcing negotiations, Iranians absolutely and vehemently denying them; Trump moving large special forces contingents to the Middle East whilst at the same time proclaiming negotiations and backchannel diplomacy is in full swing.

Pakistan’s table setting, then, is less diplomacy and more a last ditch attempt to buy time before a bill comes due that it cannot pay. If the Iranians — burned twice before, and maybe burned again by whatever follows — decide that no American led conversation is worth having, Pakistan has no move left. It cannot defy Saudi Arabia again. It cannot afford to. The entire architecture of Pakistani economic survival runs through Saudi goodwill, and the Saudis know it. The SMDA wasn’t just a defense agreement; it was a leash, dressed up in the language of partnership.

So watch Pakistan carefully. Not as a peacemaker. As a weathervane. The direction it’s forced to face will tell you everything about who’s actually winning this war.

As the hours went by however, rumors started circulating — before showing up in mainstream media — that Pakistan had put itself in the center of the maelstrom and was mediating a backchannel between Tehran and DC. There were reports of the Pakistani Supreme Commander of Everything Field Marshal Asim Munir talking to Trump on Sunday night, and of the Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif speaking to the Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian this morning. But the only real concrete evidence of an actual contact between Pakistan and Iran was confirmed via a readout between the Pakistani and Iranian Foreign Ministers. Whilst all of this was taking place, rumors swirled ever more that an American delegation comprising of Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and maybe even JD Vance would be en route to Pakistan to host high level talks with Iranians in Islamabad.

The only hitch with this otherwise grand plan? No one seems to know who in Iran the Americans and the Pakistanis are supposed to be negotiating with.

When Trump was asked about who he was negotiating with, he said he didn’t want to name that person because if he did, then that person could be killed. Blud’s dementia probably kicked in because the only entities that have killed Iranian negotiators so far have been the Israelis and the Americans. But then, that evergreen Mossad mouthpiece Barak Ravid got on social media and announced that the person who the Trump regime was negotiating with was the speaker of the Iranian assembly, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. When his name was publicly announced, Ghalibaf got on social media and said hell, no; he’s not talking to the Americans (and also wrote that the Americans are using fake news to manipulate the financial and oil markets). So, what are we to make of all this?

Well, drawing your attention once again to what I had written earlier today, it would appear that Trump created an untenable situation (out of which him, or someone close to him profited spectacularly), and then unwound the whole thing by playing make-believe. He cornered himself into a deadline, and then uncornered himself with the same stunning wisdom (by publicly signaling that he’s going to chill until market close on Friday). But here’s the thing: historical record shows blatantly that Trump is a liar. And it would be prudent to take his words with a whole mine of salt.

Here’s what I think’s really happened: the Americans and Israelis find themselves in the deep end of a quagmire, and are unable to extricate themselves as cleanly as they thought they could. So, they’re running psyops on the opposition to buy themselves time, and create a situation where they can back out without it seeming like they are. Ghalibaf might’ve been able to reach out to the Americans and signal that he’ll be sympathetic and compliant with the Americans’ request, but the fact remains that he’s not the largest fish in the pond. Iran has a new Ayatollah, and the Ayatollah is the supremo when it comes to decisions of such sort. It’s possible that the Americans could’ve worked with Ghalibaf to short circuit the Iranian ruling elite, but thanks to Barak Ravid, now everybody knows who it is that they need to target (given the duplicitous nature of the Israelis, it wouldn’t surprise me if they deliberately leaked the name of Ghalibaf to derail whatever plan Trump et al were cooking up).

The Iranians insist that they’re not talking back to the Americans (and really, why on earth would they talk to the snakes known as Witkoff and Kushner when those snakes have bitten them so hard in the recent past?), and that even though they’ve received messages from friendly third countries regarding the American desire to negotiate the end of war, they’re not interested. They maintain that their requirements are clear cut: the Americans vacate the region, and pay reparations for all the damage they’ve caused. Fat chance of any of that happening.

So where does that leave Pakistan?

It’s interesting, because as I’ve written before, Pakistan’s angling to become the de facto security provider and guarantor in the region. To that end, it has to establish itself as the lead regional superpower, but it cannot do so through kinetic action in Iran. Consider the implications of Pakistan attacking Iran via kinetic means, and then also saying it’ll be a security guarantor in the region. It would lead to a perpetual war on Pakistan’s southwest border. I think, as has been confirmed by the Iranians themselves, Pakistan’s positioned itself as the lead mediator between the Americans and the Iranians. It has outstanding relations with DC, and it has complicated but functional relations with Tehran (not to mention, it’s a rental enterprise of the royal Saudi clan). So it’s pushing for mediation in this conflict, and that’s why Islamabad’s ended up being ground zero in this whole saga.

Kushner and Witkoff may as well visit Islamabad, but whether or not the Iranians will show up, remains to be seen. Leaking Ghalibaf’s name seems to have been a major miscalculation (or sabotage) in my opinion, because he will have a target painted on his back now. I expect we shall find out the real story in the next three days or so.

When I say the name Jeffrey Epstein, what comes to your mind? Pedophile? Sex trafficker? Maybe, demon worshipper? What if I told you, that in addition to all of those things, you should add “spider at the center of the entire fucking web” to that list as well?

In some video games, there’s an option to play in “god mode”. In this mode, you are invincible, the entire map’s been revealed to you, and you cannot be defeated. Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been living life in god mode (until the developers decided to switch off his god mode). When the Epstein files were first made available to the public on the DOJ website, I came across a rather shocking email. In that email, Jeffrey Epstein talks about being in the city of Peshawar (Pakistan), and meeting representatives from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), government ministers of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and then heading to Islamabad for more meetings. He talks about a “Fixer” and how through that Fixer, he was able to even speak to “a senior Taliban guy” about the Taliban’s “position on polio”. One is inclined to wonder, why exactly was Jeffrey Epstein of all people in the world, inclined to talk to the Taliban about polio?

But it gets weirder. Because it turns out, Epstein’s all seeing eye had much larger visibility than just the Taliban and Pakistan. It also had direct line of sight straight into the heart of the Saudi-Pakistan security coalition.

There’s this person who worked at the UN (unclear if she still does) who is of Pakistani origin and goes by the name Nasra Hassan. She was filing field reports for the International Peace Institute (IPI), and the president of the IPI was then passing those field reports on to Jeffrey Epstein. It is unclear if Epstein and Hassan actually knew each other. There is one email that was made available recently that sheds enormous light on the Pakistan-Saudi security agreement. A memo Nasra Hassan wrote to the IPI contained specific operational detail that went beyond anything that might’ve been available in the public domain at the time (this in and of itself is a big deal; how was a senior adviser at the IPI able to glean this information in the first place?). This memo was then forwarded by IPI’s president to Jeffrey Epstein. It was written back in April 2015 when the Saudi-Yemen war was in full swing. The Saudis at the time had requested Pakistan military’s active involvement and engagement in the conflict against the Houthis, however the government of Pakistan publicly declared that Pakistan would not intervene and would maintain a neutral posture. However, the memo talks about a “covert” deal that was struck between the Saudis and the Pakistani military establishment that did allow for Pakistani military assets to be deployed in that conflict. This channel — IPI’s president forwarding Nasra Hassan’s field reports to Jeffrey Epstein — had been in full swing since 2013 (e.g., in August 2015 Nasra Hassan sent another detailed intelligence assessment of the Taliban’s succession following Mullah Omar’s death). All of these assessments went to Jeffrey Epstein, who had no role in the public health policies of Pakistan or Afghanistan, no official role in government, and absolutely no official role in Pakistani security policy. And yet, there he was, with clearer line of sight into the machinations of the Pakistani security establishment than the people of the country itself.

But here’s where it gets truly strange. Fast forward a decade from Epstein’s Peshawar visit, past his arrest, past his suspicious death in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, and you arrive at September 17, 2025. That’s the day Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed the Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement (SMDA) in Riyadh — what analysts breathlessly called “the most significant upgrade to Pakistan-Saudi defense relations in decades.” A historic pact. A new era. Except it wasn’t new at all.

The defense relationship is sixty years old. Pakistani pilots were flying Saudi jets in the 1960s. Pakistani special forces helped retake the Grand Mosque in 1979. Pakistani troops have been stationed in the Kingdom under a protocol signed in 1982 that no Pakistani parliament was ever properly briefed on. The SMDA didn’t create a relationship. It put a bow on one that had been running in the dark for generations. In return, Pakistan got the guarantee that Pakistan’s labor class will be prioritized by the Saudis; its financial and energy requirements will be backed by Saudi sovereign guarantees; and Pakistan’s long term ambition (as has become most evident after the ascent of Field Marshal Asim Munir) of becoming the de facto security guarantor and provider in the Middle East will be realized.

Which brings us back to Epstein. Because if a private individual with no official standing had detailed operational intelligence on covert Pakistani military deployments to Saudi Arabia in 2015 — intelligence that went beyond what any journalist had — you have to ask the obvious question: what exactly was he doing with it? And who else was receiving it?

The Pakistani establishment has not asked this question. The Pakistani media has largely not asked this question. The SMDA was signed, celebrated, and then locked away in a vault, with almost no one drawing the line back to the Epstein files sitting on the DOJ website, available to anyone willing to look. Maybe that’s a coincidence. But Epstein’s entire career suggests he didn’t accumulate information about nuclear-armed states and covert military arrangements out of idle curiosity.

I don’t know how these puzzle pieces fit together — if they do at all. There could be a simple explanation here, or there could be giant holes. Maybe the Pakistani Field Marshal is playing 4D chess, whilst us mortal beings are stuck in three dimensions. On the surface, it appears that Pakistan’s involvement in the Iran war would be a massive folly. But the mere presence of Pakistan’s operational security doctrines in the Epstein files raises so many more questions — questions that no one is even bothering to ask, much less finding the answers to. The ambiguity of the SMDA between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia can no longer pass muster. If Pakistan is to attack Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia (as both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan seem to be indicating), then the details of the SMDA cannot remain hidden. We must know what Pakistan’s about to get involved in, because the chances of this intervention spiraling spectacularly out of control are too great to ignore.

Allow me to borrow your sensibilities for a moment, and guide you on a journey through which we will discover how the next Great War of the world might begin. Some of the scenarios we discuss exist in reality. Some of them will be extrapolations based on reality. And some, might be fantastical. Nonetheless, I figure it is a worthwhile exercise to see how the cards might fall.

1. The Situation Now

Yesterday, the Supreme Commander of Everything in Pakistan Field Marshal Asim Munir1, met with Shia clerics. It was reported that the Field Marshal told the clerics that violence based on events taking place in other countries won’t be tolerated in Pakistan. It was a signal to the Shia clerics and the masses that if push came to shove, the Supreme Commander of Everything won’t hesitate to put the bullet where the protestor’s mouth is, and will force the protestor to bite it. Today, the Shia clerics have come out with the proverbial sledgehammer and slammed it right into the spine of the Field Marshal. They did not mince words and said that the Field Marshal was rude, insulting, and scornfully abusive. The Field Marshal went so far as to say that if the Shias loved Iran so much, they should move to it. To which, the clerics at their Friday sermons today unloaded a barrage of responses ranging from ‘if the Field Marshal loves Israel so much, he should move there’ to ‘we love the Palestinians too much, so maybe the Field Marshal can send us to Palestine.’

Yesterday, I had a debate with a friend of mine regarding the disposition of our dear Field Marshal to act as the security guarantor of the Middle East. My friend suggested that Pakistan is angling itself to become the de facto security guarantor and provider of the Middle East, and that this would be a great outcome for Pakistan. My position is that getting involved in the Gulf’s mess would be a folly of the highest imaginable proportions and would lead to devastating consequences for Pakistan (more on this below). My friend maintains that Iran’s not innocent and deserves what it’s getting. But if you’ve read my last missive on the topic of holding Iran responsible for its own destruction, you know that I vehemently and strongly disagree with this sentiment. I am now beginning to realize that those in power hold the same view that my friend does; they all think Iran is responsible for what it is getting.

But it is this insistence of the Pakistani establishment to get involved in the war against Iran, where I think the New Great War will begin.

2. What Seems Plausible

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have a NATO style defense agreement (which no one has seen, and no one knows what it actually says) which for all intents and purposes, was forced down Pakistan’s throat (but my current assessment is that Pakistan was a willing participant in this farce). We do however know the gist of this agreement: an attack on one country or territory, will be considered an attack on the other country or territory as well. So when the godless parasites decided to attack Iran, Pakistan’s foreign minister got on the bugle and flat out told the Iranians to be very careful because Pakistan’s obligations under this so called defense agreement with Saudi Arabia were sacrosanct. The Iranians acknowledged this and said they have no intention of attacking or targeting Saudi Arabia. They did caveat their way out of it by saying they will target launchpads of American forces (meaning American bases that are located in the countries surrounding Iran).

That seems to have worked for a while. The warmongers on the other hand were not impressed, and the whore of South Carolina — Lindsey Graham — tottered himself out like a stripper and told the Arabs to get a move on and get involved in attacking Iran. The neocons’ hope is that the Arabs will start to attack Iran and this will belay the pressure on the warmongers and give them some respite from Iran’s relentless retaliation. So what have they been up to? They’ve been trying to run false flag attacks on Saudi and Cyprus and Oman in the hopes that one of these countries will think Iran did it and then attack Iran. Which will allow other Arab countries to follow suit.

The most insidious push to this end came the other day when the Israelis attacked the Iranian gas fields in Pars and destroyed Iranian energy infrastructure in the region. They wanted to goad Iran into an infernal response that would lead to the destruction of all local energy infrastructure in the region and force all the Arab states into a direct and open conflict with Iran. This seems to not have been communicated to the upper echelons of the American establishment — or maybe it was and the Americans are lying about it (as per usual) — because the American president immediately recalibrated after the attacks on Pars. The Iranians said they were measured in their response (when they could’ve been much more vigorous) and have said that any further attack on their infrastructure will invite an escalatory tit for tat response. But, this opening salvo seems to have inched open conflict between the Arabs and the Persians ever so close to the breaking point now. You see, the Saudi foreign minister got up on stage and threatened Iran. But the Saudis threatening Iran is meaningless; what the Saudis are threatening Iran with... is Pakistan.

3. What Might Follow

The Supreme Commander of Everything in Pakistan has had a remarkable run of good fortune. Or maybe, he’s just that good. Either way, after the catastrophe that is Imran Khan was removed from the central processing center of Pakistan, the Field Marshal has taken a pragmatic view of the whole ideological situation of Pakistan. In so much that Khawaja Asif, the Defense Minister of Pakistan, has acknowledged in front of international media that Pakistan has a “hybrid model” of governance (meaning the security establishment and the political establishment co-run the country; but let’s not kid ourselves, what it really means is that the security establishment runs the country). This means that the decisioning power is concentrated in whatever seat the Field Marshal deigns fit to put his ass in. This has its pros and cons.

• Pros include: comprehensive defeat of India leading to international humiliation; putting the Afghan Taliban in their rightful place, at the bottom of one’s shoe; immediate retaliation when Pakistan’s borders are violated (such as when Iran bombed Pakistan in 2024, and Pakistan bombed the living daylights out of Iran the next day); maintaining outstanding security relationships with both China and the United States.

• The cons include: the fact that the Supreme Commander of Everything is in fact, the king, and therefore can do whatever the fuck he wants, whenever the fuck he wants. The cons also include the fact that Pakistan’s entire destiny is tied to one man’s ability to be correct all of the time. In this instance, the Supreme Commander wants to engage in a confrontation with Iran because he believes it will lead to long term good consequences for Pakistan. But he seems to not be taking into account the other consequences for Pakistan; the ones that might actually end up precluding Pakistan from ever reaching the long term itself, much less the good consequences that might eventually follow.

You see Pakistan is home to the second largest Shia population in the world. But more important than that, Pakistan’s population also identifies itself as 99% Muslim. Whether the Field Marshal realizes this or not, the vast majority of the Muslim public of Pakistan is siding with Iran over Israel and America. There are many reasons for this, but the chief amongst them is the fact that this is a war that has been foisted upon Iran without actually justifying a reason. And steadily, through the cracks, the Pakistani public is slowly waking up to the poisonous news that the Americans and Israelis — the ones in charge of everything — actually view this imposition as a holy war. So it’s gone from just attacking Iran for the sake of attacking Iran, to now attacking Iran because it’s a Crusade commanded upon by whatever gods the Israelis and the American Zionists worship.

And here I’ll give my friend his due: Iran is not innocent. Its proxy network across the region — Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Shia militias it has armed and directed across Iraq and Syria — has destabilized neighbors who might otherwise have been sympathetic. The very Shia political energy it has cultivated across Pakistan, Lebanon, and Iraq for decades has been as much about Iranian strategic interest as it has been about solidarity. Consider that it was Pakistan who offered nuclear tech to Iran back in the day, and Iran turned around and ratted Pakistan out to the IAEA. Consider also that Iran has allowed a deep anti-Pakistan component to fester within its borders (Indian investment in Chabahar port; allowing India’s intelligence agency to operate freely — Kulbhushan Jadhav being a living, breathing example of such; allowing safe havens to the terrorist Balochistan Liberation Army; and so on and so forth). Iran has spent forty years making itself easy to hate, narrowing its own options, and exhausting the patience of countries that had no particular quarrel with it. My friend is not wrong about this.

But here is where my friend and I part ways: the question of what Iran deserves is entirely separate from the question of what happens if you attack it. You can believe Iran has been a destabilizing force and still conclude that a war against it will be catastrophic. You can think the Field Marshal is right about Iran’s sins and still think he is catastrophically wrong about Pakistan’s ability to manage the consequences. The moral ledger and the strategic ledger are not the same document.

4. My Speculation

So what happens when the Pakistani Supreme Commander of Everything decides to attack Iran? The public perception goes something like this: you’re attacking a Muslim country — the only Muslim country that has materially stood on the side of the Palestinians — on behalf of ethnosupremacist genocidal maniacs who are suffering from mass delusion and deep psychosis, like a rental enterprise. Yes. The Saudis have rented you to do their bidding, and you believe that you’re so powerful that you can manage the fallout. You’ve already opened a front against the Afghan Taliban, who are supplied and backed by the Indian deep state, and the Indians are chomping at the bit waiting for you to overextend yourself anyway, ever since they suffered that epic humiliation in the 4-day war last year. So you start attacking Iran with the Arabs; the Iranians go berserk, and now attack you, the Arabs and everyone in the region without any restraints left. The global economic shock craters everything. India sees a once in a lifetime opportunity and opens a front against you as well. So now you’re engaged on three fronts: Afghanistan, Iran and India. Meanwhile Iran’s decided enough is enough, and decides to attack Turkey too because the last remaining L-band radar at Incirlik is still providing protective coverage to Israel’s air defenses, so the Turks now get involved, because they also want to see the Iranians defeated. The Azeris are already super chummy with the Israelis, and best friends with Pakistan and Turkey, so they also get in on the action because you know, Pakistan’s being pummeled from three different sides. So now you’ve gone from a war between Israel, America and Iran, to a war that’s enveloped the entirety of the Middle East, South Asia and Central Asia. Because the global economy is most likely fucked, the Chinese and Russians will have to get involved because the geopolitical calculus has changed. If they do nothing, they will lose. So Russia escalates its entry into Eastern Europe and finally increases its intensity in the Ukraine, and China sensing American distraction and weakness attempts to takeover Taiwan. This causes North Korea to join the war in favor of Russia and China against American Forces Korea, and causes strife with South Korea. And then there’s Japan which ends up with no choice but to go to war against China and North Korea when China puts its firepower on display in the South China Sea. Thus NATO, Eastern Europe, and the South China Sea will be dragged into war. And that in a nutshell, is how Pakistan involving itself in the war against Iran could spin spectacularly out of control.

Of course, this is all speculative. It could happen that the Trump administration would castrate India from so much as raising a peep against Pakistan when Pakistan gets involved. It could be that the authoritarian in charge of Pakistan would suppress dissent with remarkable brute force. It could happen that there would be no dissent in Pakistan; that the public of Pakistan, distracted with all the strains of everyday life and the perversions that are available to them, would be completely impervious to the machinations of the high lords of the world. It could be that Pakistan will moderate backchannel diplomacy thus allowing itself to achieve all of its aims including becoming the security guarantor of the Middle East, without firing a single bullet. Or it could be that Pakistan doesn’t get involved at all. The permutations are many, and the outcomes are equally as high. What is certain is only this: Pakistan’s involvement in this declarative holy war is a folly and a sin. If there’s only one thing I am certain of it is that if Pakistan is involved, the Field Marshal will not come out of it a winner. Authoritarianism can be tolerated when it is spun as saving yourself from external demons. When it turns inwards, it leads to extreme forms of resistance.

The sledgehammer that landed on the Field Marshal’s spine today was a warning. History is littered with men who confused concentrated power with invincibility, who mistook silence for consent and compliance for loyalty. The Field Marshal may yet pull back from the edge. He may yet read the room correctly. But if he doesn’t — if he commits Pakistan to this Crusade — he will have set in motion a sequence of events that no single man, no single army, no single nuclear arsenal can reverse. The world has been here before. It knows how these stories end. It just never believes it’s in one until it’s too late.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine who said to me that the “destruction of a country is a failure of policy ultimately” and that the survival of a country “shouldn’t come down to resolve.” Loathe as I am to disagree with friends (not), I find it ironic that we can be so dismissive of the hellscape Iran currently finds itself in. Now, I am not Iranian and it is not my job to present a defense of their choices. However, I am a global citizen and I do see the relentless hypocrisy and doublespeak on display that makes me acknowledge that Iran getting destroyed is not simply a matter of policy failure, and their fight back against an existential threat is not simply a matter of their resolve. As Piers Morgan loves to remind us every four minutes, when a country is attacked, it has a duty to its people to fight back.

After Iran’s retaliatory attacks across the Gulf’s energy infrastructure, the Saudi Foreign Minister stood up on a stage in Riyadh and said:

This is not something that is a reaction to an evolving circumstance where Iran is improvising. This has been built into their war planning: targeting their neighbours and using that to try and put pressure on the international community.

He also exclaimed that the patience that Saudi has is about to run out, and whether it runs out in a day, or two, or weeks will not be telegraphed. Of course the German born Prince Faisal of the House of Saud would decry the Iranian attacks on his family’s precious refineries, because as we all know, the Saudis have whored themselves out to the Israelis and the Americans. I am still to find a peep of condemnation from these same whores about Israel and America’s relentless killing of the Iranian leadership, civilians and the destruction and annihilation of Iranian infrastructure. One could argue that the mere expectation of a Saudi condemnation issued against their own pimps is an exercise in irony, but one’s hope doth persist. Lest we forget, while he publicly called for restraint, MBS — the de facto butcher of Jamal Khashoggi and ruler of the House of Saud — secretly lobbied Trump in favor of bombing the living daylights out of Iran.

So that is what we’re dealing with here. Duplicitous, demon worshipping snakes who say one thing, believe another, and do yet something else. Iran’s problem is not that it was a tyrannical dictatorship that needed to be cajoled or persecuted; its problem is that it is surrounded by bedouin villages run by spineless, gutless, godless worms who want to see it destroyed, because that would fulfill the grand aims of the ethnosupremacist parasite from Poland who has migrated next door. There’s this meme that keeps resurfacing every now and then that says something like this: it is entirely Iran’s fault for being an aggressor; after all look how close they put their country to American air bases in the region.

The war in Iran — as has been said so many times, and will be said so many more times — is an unnecessary war. The Omani Foreign Minister writing in The Economist said:

This is not America’s war, and there is no likely scenario in which both Israel and America will get what they want from it.

Of course, this is not America’s war. Because America never really fights its own wars. It usually fights wars on behalf of that ethnosupremacist colony in the Middle East that seems to have a chokehold on the American establishment. So when someone comes to me and says that it’s a matter of policy failure that Iran’s under attack, I look at that person’s recalcitrance as infernal stupidity. It’s the same as pretending that the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict started on October 7, 2023. Iran’s dogma and tortured existence did not start when King Trump took office the second time. It started long before, when the Imperialists in Langley and London worked with the Pahlavi family to bring back the monarchy whilst overthrowing the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. That small detail always seems to skip the minds of the defenders of the Wrath of Trump.

Look, I have no love lost for the ayatollahs of Iran. I do however find it precious that there are those who would defend what the current regimes in Washington and Jaffa are doing. You start a conflict, kill more than 2000 people (and let’s not even get started on what the ethnosupremacists are doing in Lebanon) and then turn around and pretend like you’re the victims, and that the country you’ve attacked is somehow responsible for getting fucked. The disingenuousness might make for some tasty Kool-Aid in your own kitchen, but it comes across as a shit cocktail to the rest of us. So no thanks. You can keep your prevarication to yourself.

As always, there will be more to say because my anger refuses to be satiated. But till then, take care.

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There, I’ve said it. To be honest, I wouldn’t have said it even six months ago. Because six months ago, I would’ve thought that uttering these words was irrational. That these words would only come out and gain an audience on the far fringes of the mentally insane. And yet, here I am, tapping away on my keyboard, fully believing in the premise of what these words herald. And what they herald, is an insanity that is hard to put into words.

There are several things that are happening and it is overwhelming and difficult to connect all of them together, even though they’re all interconnected. But here’s a few of them:

1. Today, the Israelis in connivance with the Americans, bombed the Iranian gas fields in Pars. What these megalomaniacs want to do, is force Iran into an attacking posture that will invite the Arabs in the Gulf to open their floodgates (metaphorical) and start pounding Iran too. Because that’s the end goal here: to have the Persians and the Arabs fighting each other, while these demon worshipping narcissists toast each other in the background. Game, set, match, mission accomplished. So far, the Iranians have resisted going berserk. I don’t know how much longer they’ll hold back. The fact of the matter is that Iran’s handed over the escalation ladder control to the invaders. They are unfortunately stuck between a rock, and demon worshipping parasites. Iran has been careful in targeting American or Israeli assets in the region. They have not gone out of their way to attack civilian infrastructure (yet). But the parasites attacking them harbor nary a worry about who they attack and kill. Consider that in their quest to assassinate Ali Larijani, they also martyred more or less a hundred civilians (the apartment building in which Larijani was located was completely annihilated by the invaders).

2. And speaking of the assassination of Ali Larijani, it boggles the mind that we have now returned full circle to the era of the Middle Ages where it was considered fashionable and in vogue to murder the heads of state and leaders of other nations. I was under the impression that the post war world order had evolved enough in sophistication to know that murdering the leader of a nation — much less multiple leaders of a nation; much less murdering all the leaders of a nation four layers deep — was a prissy pantomime of the past. Clearly, King Trump of the Imperial States of the American Empire disagrees. He kidnapped the head of state of one country, and fancied himself the head of another country. The only small hiccup in this otherwise supremely masterful proposal seems to have been the fact that the planners of the Ayatollah’s assassination forgot to take into account that some nations simply do not like it when foreign invaders come in and tell them how it’s going to be. Such nations, as history tells us, tend to resist. And sometimes, they resist violently. And this small detail seems to have caught the Imperialists just a little off guard. Which is why they’re trying with all their might to offload their grand failures on to the backstabbing Gulf Arab states, because there’s nothing that a little infighting between the Shias and Sunnis won’t fix. As Seyed Abbas Araghchi says: “What is unfolding before our eyes is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies shame. This is something colder: a calculated moral collapse-where rules exist only for adversaries, and impunity is reserved for allies.”

3. As I type this diatribe, the Iranians have retaliated with extreme force and have bombed Saudi refineries and Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial city with the Qataris claiming that Iran’s attack has done extensive damage. They have also, apparently, bombed the bridge connecting Bahrain to Saudi Arabia. What this means for the world is this: energy costs are about to go through the roof (they’ve been rising, but capitalist hopium was still tempering prices — but that’s a topic for another day), and if the Arabs choose to retaliate, we are about to go into a doom spiral from which nary a soul is going to be safe. The Saudis have been dangling their defense pact with Pakistan like some Scrooge McDuck type of untouchable cover, but the logistics of invoking that defense pact are going to cause extremely harmful ripple effects across the region (beginning with Pakistan). You see Pakistan has the second largest Shia population in the world, and just in case it wasn’t obvious, even the Sunnis in Pakistan are extremely anti Israel and Israel’s ethnosupremacist xenophobia. The leaders of Pakistan might hold different beliefs, but the public will not let them live it down.

So what’s the long and short of it then? Well, events are taking place too quickly and too rapidly to do any kind of deep dive. The casus belli of the war in Iran does not exist; the Imperialists waging this war themselves cannot articulate why they’ve gone to war (they did come close to admitting that they’re ruled by a parasitic overlord who can twist their nuts in a minute, but then quickly backtracked by doing amazing verbal gymnastics).

I will have more disjointed thoughts as I continue to monitor the situation. In the meantime, please stay safe.

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