Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Is The Felon Lying About Iran's Continued Military Strength

Anyone conscious and who hasn't had a lobotomy should at this point in time know, based on the Felon's past conduct and statements, that the safest approach to take is to assume that anything and everything the Felon says is a lie until documented otherwise. Based on new reporting by the New York Times, this pattern of endless lies extends to the Felon's war of choice in Iran where the Felon and his bootlicking Secretary of Defense have claimed that Iran's missile capabilities have been "decimated . . . and rendered  combat-ineffective for years to come.”  New intelligence reports show a different story with Iran still possessing large missile supplies and many missile sites restored to operational status and Iran still posing a threat to neighboring Gulf countries should open hostilities resume. Add to this some indications that Russia and China may be aiding Iran and the situation becomes even worse. Hence the recent post entitled "Checkmate in Iran."  Meanwhile, the Felon openly stated that he was not worried about the economic pain of average Americans even as he spouts more lies about dropping consumer and gasoline prices.  None of this should give Americans any sense that someone rational and responsible is in charge.  Here are highlights from the Times piece:

The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities.

Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.

People with knowledge of the assessments said they show — to varying degrees, depending on the level of damage incurred at the different sites — that the Iranians can use mobile launchers that are inside the sites to move missiles to other locations. In some cases they can launch missiles directly from launchpads that are part of the facilities. Only three of the missile sites along the strait remain totally inaccessible, according to the assessments.

Iran still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, according to the assessments. That stockpile encompasses both ballistic missiles, which can target other nations in the region, and a smaller supply of cruise missiles, which can be used against shorter-range targets on land or at sea.

Military intelligence agencies have also reported, based on information from multiple collection streams including satellite imagery and other surveillance technologies, that Iran has regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide, which are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational,” the people with knowledge of the assessments said.

The findings undercut months of public assurances from [the Felon] President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who have told Americans that the Iranian military was “decimated” and “no longer” a threat.

On March 9, 10 days into the war, Mr. Trump told CBS News that Iran’s “missiles are down to a scatter” and the country had “nothing left in a military sense.” Mr. Hegseth declared at a Pentagon news conference on April 8 that Operation Epic Fury — the joint U.S.-Israel campaign launched on Feb. 28 — had “decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat-ineffective for years to come.”

The intelligence describing Iran’s remaining military capacity is dated less than a month after that news conference. . . . Asked about the intelligence assessments, a White House spokeswoman, Olivia Wales, repeated Mr. Trump’s previous assertions that Iran’s military had been “crushed.” . . . . Ms. Wales pointed to a social media post from Mr. Trump on Tuesday declaring that it was “virtual treason” to suggest that Iran’s military was doing well.

Joel Valdez, the acting Pentagon press secretary, responded to questions about the intelligence by criticizing news coverage of the war. “It is so disgraceful that The New York Times and others are acting as public relations agents for the Iranian regime in order to paint Operation Epic Fury as anything other than a historic accomplishment,” he said in a statement.

The new intelligence assessments suggest that Mr. Trump and his military advisers overestimated the damage that the U.S. military could inflict on Iranian missile sites, and underestimated Iran’s resilience and ability to bounce back.

The findings underscore the dilemma Mr. Trump would face if the fragile month-old cease-fire in the conflict collapses and full-scale fighting resumes. The U.S. military has already depleted its stocks of many critical munitions, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot interceptor missiles, and Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, and yet the intelligence suggests that Iran retains considerable military capability, including around the vital Strait of Hormuz.

If Mr. Trump ordered commanders to launch more strikes to take out or diminish those Iranian capabilities, then the U.S. military would have to dig even deeper into stocks of critical munitions. Doing so would further undercut U.S. stockpiles at a time when the Pentagon and the major arms makers are already struggling to find the industrial capacity to replenish American reserves.

Mr. Trump and his advisers have repeatedly denied that U.S. munitions stocks have been drained to dangerously low levels. . . . . In testimony on Tuesday to a House appropriations subcommittee, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We have sufficient munitions for what we’re tasked to do right now.”

Iran’s apparent ability to retain substantial military capacity has exacerbated concerns among U.S. allies about the wisdom of the war and generated criticism among Mr. Trump’s anti-interventionist supporters who opposed getting into the conflict in the first place.

The intelligence assessments on Iran’s capabilities point to the consequences of a tactical choice made by U.S. military commanders.

When American forces struck Iran’s hardened missile facilities, the Pentagon, faced with limited stocks of bunker-busting munitions, opted to try to seal off many of the entrances rather than trying to destroy the entire sites with all of the missiles inside, officials said, with mixed results.

Some bunker busters were dropped on Iran’s underground facilities, but officials said military planners faced a difficult choice and needed to be cautious in using them because they needed to preserve a certain number for U.S. operational plans for potential wars in Asia with North Korea and China.

Replenishing those stockpiles will take years, not months. Lockheed Martin currently produces around 650 Patriot interceptors a year. The company has announced plans to ramp up production of the crucial air defense weapon to 2,000 a year. But doing so will not be easy. And the industry’s ability to produce rocket motors cannot be scaled up as quickly as Mr. Trump has demanded, officials said.

Quite the fine mess - all of the Felon's creation.  Russia and China must be laughing.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Checkmate in Iran

Driving home from work last evening I was listening to a political talk radio show on satellite radio and the discussion was about how the Felon had been warned that an attack on Iran would lead to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.  Indeed, war games over the last decades have always foreseen the closure of the Strait. Of course the Felon and his incompetent Secretary of Defense either ignored the warnings and/or fired intelligence analysts and military leadership who did not tell the Felon what he wanted hear.  Now, the USA - and much of the world - is being held hostage in a mess of the Felon's creation that shows that America's vast military is not read to deal with asymmetrical warfare, just as Putin has found victory in Ukraine to be illusive if not impossible. One cannot stress enough that the USA's current quagmire with Iran is of the Felon's creation and that a defeat by Iran will greatly weaken America's standing around the world over and above the damage the Felon has previously done. The Felon has no good options - support for a land war is nonexistent outside of some of the Felon's cheerleaders - so the question becomes whether the Felon's ego will demand that he continue the stalemate or walk away.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the mess of the Felon's creation:

It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throughout the Western Pacific in the first months of World War II were eventually reversed. The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America’s overall position in the world, because they were far from the main theaters of global competition. The initial failure in Iraq was mitigated by a shift in strategy that ultimately left Iraq relatively stable and unthreatening to its neighbors and kept the United States dominant in the region.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

[The Felon] President Trump likes to talk about who has “the cards,” but whether he has any good ones left to play is not clear. The United States and Israel pounded Iran with devastating effectiveness for 37 days, killing much of the country’s leadership and destroying the bulk of its military, yet couldn’t collapse the regime or exact even the smallest concession from it. Now the Trump administration hopes that blockading Iran’s ports will accomplish what massive force could not. It’s possible, of course, but a regime that could not be brought to its knees by five weeks of unrelenting military attack is unlikely to buckle in response to economic pressure alone. Nor does it fear the anger of its populace. As the Iran scholar Suzanne Maloney noted recently, “A regime that slaughtered its own citizens to silence protests in January is fully prepared to impose economic hardships on them now.”

Some supporters of the war are therefore calling for the resumption of military strikes, but they cannot explain how another round of bombing will accomplish what 37 days of bombing did not. More military action will inevitably lead Iran to retaliate against neighboring Gulf States; the war’s advocates have no response to that, either. Trump halted attacks on Iran not because he was bored but because Iran was striking the region’s vital oil and gas facilities. The turning point came on March 18, when Israel bombed Iran’s South Pars gas field and Iran retaliated by attacking Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest natural-gas-export plant, causing damage to production capacity that will take years to repair.

The risk calculus that forced Trump to back down a month ago still holds. Even if Trump were to carry out his threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” through more bombing, Iran would still be able to launch many missiles and drones before its regime went down—assuming it did go down. Just a few successful strikes could cripple the region’s oil and gas infrastructure for years if not decades, throwing the world, and the United States, into a prolonged economic crisis. Even if Trump wanted to bomb Iran as part of an exit strategy—looking tough as a way of masking his retreat—he can’t do that without risking this catastrophe.

If this isn’t checkmate, it’s close. In recent days, Trump has reportedly asked the U.S. intelligence community to assess the consequences of simply declaring victory and walking away. You can’t blame him. Hoping for regime collapse is not much of a strategy, especially when the regime has already survived repeated military and economic pummeling. It could fall tomorrow, or six months from now, or not at all. Trump doesn’t have that much time to wait, as oil climbs toward $150 or even $200 a barrel, inflation rises, and global food and other commodity shortages kick in. He needs a faster resolution.

But any resolution other than America’s effective surrender holds enormous risks that Trump has not so far been willing to take. Those who glibly call on Trump to “finish the job” rarely acknowledge the costs. Unless the U.S. is prepared to engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold; unless it is prepared to risk the loss of warships convoying tankers through a contested strait; unless it is prepared to accept the devastating long-term damage to the region’s productive capacities likely to result from Iranian retaliation—walking away now could seem like the least bad option. As a political matter, Trump may well feel he has a better chance of riding out defeat than of surviving a much larger, longer, and more expensive war that could still end in failure.

Defeat for the United States, therefore, is not only possible but likely. Here is what defeat looks like.

Iran remains in control of the Strait of Hormuz. The common assumption that, one way or another, the strait will reopen when the crisis ends is unfounded. Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante. People talk of a split between hard-liners and moderates in Tehran, but even moderates must understand that Iran cannot afford to let the strait go, no matter how good a deal it thought it could get. For one thing, how reliable is any deal with Trump?

And Israel’s interests will be threatened. As many Iran experts have noted, the regime in Tehran currently stands to emerge from the crisis much stronger than it was before the war, having not only retained its potential nuclear capacity but also gained control of an even more effective weapon: the ability to hold the global energy market hostage. When the Iranians talk of “reopening” the strait, they still mean to keep the strait under their control. Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations.

The power to close or control the flow of ships through the strait is greater and more immediate than the theoretical power of Iran’s nuclear program. This leverage will allow the leaders in Tehran to force nations to lift sanctions and normalize relations or face penalties. Israel will find itself more isolated than ever, as Iran grows richer, rearms, and preserves its options to go nuclear in the future. It may even find itself unable to go  after Iran’s proxies: In a world where Iran wields influence over the energy supply of so many nations, Israel could face enormous international pressure not to provoke Tehran in Lebanon, Gaza, or anywhere else.

The new status quo in the strait will also occasion a substantial shift in relative power and influence both regionally and globally. In the region, the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran. As the Iran scholars Reuel Gerecht and Ray Takeyh wrote recently, “The Gulf Arab economies were built under the umbrella of American hegemony. Take that away—and the freedom of navigation that goes with it—and the Gulf states will ineluctably go begging to Tehran.”

They will not be the only ones. All nations that depend on energy from the Gulf will have to work out their own arrangements with Iran. What choice will they have? If the United States with its mighty Navy can’t or won’t open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans’ capability will be able to, either.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

Sunday Morning Male Beauty