I’m reading his assessment of the Iran War to date (you should too, depressing as it is), and feeling the same despair I think he is. This is a massive clusterfuck with no good outcome, but Marcus makes a prediction anyway.
Prediction: the US won’t lose. Because the Iranians don’t have the logistics or means to reach us. We’ll declare victory and head home for a ticker-tape parade, etc. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv will get as flattened as Gaza. I’m not sure how I feel about that, so I have been employing a trick I have used for years, which is simply not to feel. My, how interesting. Israel finally managed to talk the US into attacking Iran for them, and it’s the most incompetent thing anyone has ever seen. That’s the problem with hiring stupid people. The US won’t lose, Iran won’t lose, but Israel is fucked – unless they can convince the US to help pay for their repairs. Which is so absurd, I ought to expect it. The economic impact of repairing the damage Israel has suffered is incalculable. In a rational world, this would actually be the end of Israel because most of the population would fuck off back to Poland, Ukraine, Germany, and Russia where they came from, “Well that didn’t work.” To me, this is one of the crazy things about politics: in a semi-rational world, that would actually be a possibility: 95% of Israel ups and quits, and the remainder go “time we learn to negotiate, huh?” The Israelis have thoroughly imploded their own myth that their government is tough and savvy. That might be good for them to realize.
That sounds about right. As we have so many times before, we’ll devastate a country and pretend we’ve won a great victory. It’s an interesting idea that maybe, finally, Israel has bit off far more than it can chew. We’re also sending in 2000 marines — I’m not sure what they can do against a population of 93 million riled up people with AK47s and missiles, but that sounded familiar, too.
I’ve read all the Flashman novels. They’re sitting on a bookshelf in my living room right now. In case you’re unfamiliar, they’re comedic historical novels about the rise of the British empire, centered on a character who is a bully and a self-serving poltroon who serves in all the major 19th century conflicts in Asia, Africa, North America, and even has a few escapades in Europe. He’s always a hair’s breadth from total disaster, but manages to pull through at the last moment, often at the cost of thousands of lives, including those of his fellow British soldiers.
Marcus is not a Flashman-like figure, but he does remind me sometimes of George McDonald Fraser, the author of the series, who is sitting back describing the horrors of these wars with some detachment. One of the themes of the books is the devastating incompetence of the British leadership, who can rescue their reputations by sending in masses of young men who will be ruined and wrecked by the experience, but can be praised by the generals as Heroes of the British Empire, who themselves escape scot-free and go home to their manors to sip brandy and tell war stories.
Pete Hegseth is setting up a few thousand noble sacrifices. You won’t be able to criticize him without besmirching the memory of the gallant marines who gave their all for their country, he thinks.
Marcus has also written a letter he would like to slip into the mailboxes of his neighbors who previously festooned their homes with Trump signs, since mysteriously taken down because they’re all chickenshits. It’s a good letter, honest and forthright, but I’d urge him not to post it. It sounds like a death threat to all Trump supporters. I agree with it — they’re all traitors and are responsible for everything our country might once have stood for — but this is not the time. They still have too much power. We need to tear down the right-wing establishment, and then we can bring their lackeys to a terrible justice.
Or more likely, like Flashman, they’re going to end up rich and praised, telling stories about grand victories that will be resolved by another century of idiocy.
I’ve often wondered, with thousands of missiles and drones flying back and forth above them, how the hell does Jordon actually remain neutral in all this? How often have they been hit by collateral damage of bad hardware or things shot down over their airspace?
If I had to pick one novel that really embodies the US military, it’s Bill the Galactic Hero.
I can haz AI operated autonomous drones that strike places that have/had Trump signs? Thx.
It’s been very hard to keep up with accurate news about this war. How much has Iran been hitting Israel?
Well, it is Pi Day, everything is irrational.
… the Iranians don’t have the logistics or means to reach us.
Apparently pro-Iranian persons have already reached Michigan and Virginia, and Mojtaba Khamanei hasn’t even emitted a fatwa yet.
Superlative character was forfeited after announcing no quarter and no rules of engagement. Hegseth already besmirched them.
acroyear@1
If only King Abdullah I had been given both sides of the Jordan by the British, maybe we wouldn’t have some of the problems we’ve seen over the decades between Israelis and Palestinians. There would have been other problems I suppose. There would have been no unruly PLO issue for King Husayn or later in Lebanon, but not sure what sorts of resentments Palestinian Arabs would have, being ruled over by newbies from the Hejaz given future Jordan as a consolation prize for Damascus. At least some Jews in Palestinian Jordan would have been unruly as the Revisionists under Begin were pissed enough over losing out on Transjordan itself.
Jordan is badly placed being between Iraq and a hard place before and now Iran and that same place. I would think Jordan has a warmer relationship with Israel than Iran though for more reasons than the simple Sunni-Shia rift. With friends like that…
Given the whole fait accompli of Israel’s becoming a thing I don’t think their elimination is something I’d want to see. They should have stayed in their pre-67 lane. I don’t like a right wing rabidly expansionist Israel with designs on so-called “Judea” and “Samaria” (and again running roughshod in Lebanon) nor do I like the idea of a theocratic Iran regime, especially now cornered and decentralized, looking to retaliate against Israel in a big way.
Too many are saying Iranians started this war with the US in ‘79 when the origins have roots planted firmly in ‘53.
I think he’s right about everything but that Tel Aviv will be flattened (or that Israel will suffer significantly more than they have for the last few decades). Iran can hurt Israel and Israelis, even after the damage they’ve suffered, but they’re not an existential threat to Israel. But I think there’s a very real chance this war could be the beginning of the end of the US-Israel alliance. The American people are already largely against this war — if the public believes that Israel dragged us into this, then at least some Democratic candidates for President ’28 are likely to say that they will end this alliance as one of their first acts… and maybe that message can resonate (hopefully along with massive anti-billionaire sentiment).
Blowing up 120 innocent girls while they were in school in pretty much a definitive case against Petey gaining the grateful appreciation and respect of the nation for bravery in the face of over-whelming fire. It is consistent, however, with the attack on a non-combatant ship in Venezula by submarine and leaving survivors to drown.
In any other timeline, these events would be prosecuted as war crimes.
Before you get excited about the prospect of an Israel as flattened as Gaza you need to remember the people of Gaza don’t have nuclear weapons. Israel has around 200 of them. They say nothing is as dangerous as a cornered rat and those nukes make Israel a very big, very dangerous rat.
Looking around, without flinching or ignoring, I see all the death and destruction from so many sources. And, even though there are SOOO many that sit comfortably saying, ‘But, it won’t impact me, personally’, I am not comfortable.
I see that with only a few special, yet, almost powerless positive exceptions, we are immersed in a world that is murderous on such a massive global and all encompassing scale with no diminution in sight, it is obvious to me that human society is a murderous failure. And, I won’t even add those lyrics by Martha and the Vandellas again, for now.
shermanj, “I see that with only a few special, yet, almost powerless positive exceptions, we are immersed in a world that is murderous on such a massive global and all encompassing scale with no diminution in sight, it is obvious to me that human society is a murderous failure.”
It was never any better; arguably, it was even worse.
Not a failure, therefore — just par for the course.
(Were it not for our global and ubiquitous communications and media, you’d not be aware of it)
I’m not excited about the prospect of Israel getting flattened — I hope Marcus is wrong and the the region stabilizes peacefully, unlikely as that is. But if it were to happen, I’d say Israel has earned it.
robro@5–
Irrational but real :-(
Can we see this letter some place?
If anyone hates themself enough to recount a previous Israeli excursion into Lebanon I suggest the animated movie Waltz with Bashir. It will scar you for life. I don’t think Arik was retrospectively as evil as Bibi now but holy fuck he was the epitome at the time. I’m not saying Arik wasn’t evil. It got much worse with Bibi.
I ironically enough watched Waltz with Bashir within a month of the October 7th Hamas thug atrocities. Fuckers enabled Bibi to unleash genocidal hell to shield himself from scrutiny for something else. Trump has shielded himself from much worse by unleashing multiple hells.
Arik’s whole withdrawal from Gaza thing was perceived as a diversion from corruption scrutiny itself also eclipsed by Trump.
I’d say the fear of a Palestinian demographic bomb was more at play then and not irrelevant now. Yeah Israel quit Gaza then. Arik stroked out soon after, leaving us with his enemy Bibi unopposed. Fuck you Arik!
Now it seems depopulation of “Pals” (sorry for the apt slur used by Zionists) is becoming the more popular solution by death or eventual forced migration.
@indianajones
You can read Marcus’s entire post titled Wow at his blog, stderr.
It’s in the sidebar menu of recent blog posts.
I believe the assault on Iran is mostly to distract from the Epstein scandal, because that’s exactly how rapidly decomposing narcissists tend to operate. It was an incredibly bad idea to put it mildly. Let’s spike gas prices and literally blow up billions in tax dollars while killing Iranians and American soldiers at the same time!
I think many Americans and pretty much most of the planet would cheer if Iran managed to bomb Mar a Lago when the entire wretched cabal is in residence.
lotharloo@#4:
How much has Iran been hitting Israel?
The situation is really bad. Tel Aviv looks like Gaza. Haifa took a hit on the oil exchange terminal, which burned to the ground. Many buildings have been hit, and collapsed. That’s part of why I say it looks like Gaza: suddenly a building crumbles.
Casualties have been light, by my measures. When someone pastes your city with hypersonic missiles, you more or less expect a few thousand casualties/hour or worse than that. But in Israel, it looks less bad than Kyiv at the height of the Russians bombing it.
A big problem, which nobody wants to discuss, is that the missile defense missiles cost about $250,000-1,000,000 per shot. The Iranians simply fired lots of their crappy missiles (“several years’ ago model”) until the anti-missile missiles ran out, and then they switched to nasty things. The Iranians also sent some judicious messages along with the rockets: they used one cluster-disperser, which demonstrated it is real and functional by flattening the military airport near Tel Aviv.* The implication is not just that the Iranians can flatten things, but those cluster-dispersers technologically are getting close to MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicles) which is a means of packing dummy warheads in with your real nukes. I am sure there are a lot of people whose jaws hung at various stages in the performance because Iran demonstrated not only that they are capable of defeating Iron Dome, they are capable of destroying entire cities if they want to. That’s going to be huge problem for Israel: Iron Dome can be oversaturated any time (people like me have been saying this for a decade at least) and then you get plastered with re-entry vehicles coming in so fast that just their kinetic energy is problematic. So what will Israel do? They can fix neither Iron Dome nor Tel Aviv in a realistic time-frame. The Iranians are using commercial Chinese satellite imaging, and they might just wait until the next Iron Dome is partly finished, then blow billions of dollars of stuff to flinders, using cheap missiles.
There is only one option for Israel, and I think it’s a very good option: learn to negotiate. Israel has been playing nuclear threat for decades and now they’ve been called. They either need to start doing diplomacy and learning how to work with the neighbors, or pack up and go back to Europe. [Note: whenever someone has asked me, “oh yeah wise guy what’s your suggestion for Israel?” my answer has been to go back to Europe. Various European nations (France, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, etc…) need to fucking confront their anti-semitism problems and stop it. Encouraging people to relocate, rather than figuring out how to be decent people, is -um- exactly what not decent people would do, isn’t it? Only a disgusting anti-semite would argue against my solution.]
Tel Aviv will need to be mostly rebuilt. So far Jerusalem has been left alone, by tacit agreement. Israel can’t repair the city while the Iranians are still busy flattening it. It’s a situation Israel has inflicted on its neighors and I have lost all sympathy.
*[The Israelis also positioned one of the Iron Dome batteries in the parking lot of a hospital in Tel Aviv. When the anti-missiles ran out, Iran blew it to bits. Israel was using human shields by placing it so near a hospital, and they ought to be sanctioned by the international community for war crimes.]
Blowing up 120 innocent girls while they were in school in pretty much a definitive case against Petey gaining the grateful appreciation and respect of the nation for bravery in the face of over-whelming fire
By the way, it’s really fun when some politician starts yelping about the 120 innocent girls, ask them why they’re so upset about that, when we lose much more than that every year in school shootings.
However, additional horror: apparently the strike on the school was a “double tap”. [That’s when another strike comes in 20 minutes later, to kill all the firemen and first aid teams that have shown up after the first one] There has been a lot of screaming about how we targeted and precisely blew up a school. My absolutely disgusting theory is: they asked Claude/AI to generate targeting lists, because they were in a rush and didn’t have time to validate them. So the school may not have been labeled on Google Satellite or whatever they’re using, the AI saw one label and assumed the school was an outbuilding of the military base it was targeting, and wrote that into the strike plan. An honest mistake. All the yelling about the military not being allowed to use Claude? They did, anyway. What did they use it for, drawing up a huge number of targets very fast because a surprise war was coming? Could anyone be so stupid? Do I need to ask?
I’ve always said that if christian apologists can say the bible proves the historicity of jesus, then I can say the Flashman Papers proves the historicity of harry Flashman
The situation is really bad. Tel Aviv looks like Gaza. Haifa took a hit on the oil exchange terminal, which burned to the ground. Many buildings have been hit, and collapsed. That’s part of why I say it looks like Gaza: suddenly a building crumbles.
Total hyperbole.
Marcus Ranum
Is it appropriate to say Tel Aviv looks like Gaza? How much damage has the city taken relative to Gaza?
This makes the damage sound more aspirational:
To me the results in Gaza have sounded much worse.
[grr… markdown]
Total hyperbole.
[obs, there’s a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iranian_strikes_on_Israel ]
John Morales @25
I pieced together the quoting you fixed but it does seem a bit hyperbolic to me too.
Interesting. There are lots of blown up buildings and craters. Of course the whole place hasn’t been blown flat and bulldozed like Gaza, but blown up buildings look pretty similar. If someone hit one of our airports as hard as Ben Gurion was hit, people would be having shitfits. I’m not sure on what basis you’re saying I am dealing hyperbole. Blown up streets full of rescuers kinda look the same.
Marcus, see #26.
There'[s alot of misnfo onlinbe about the Iran war – seems hard totell w that & Israeli censorship.
Currently on the Beeb: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/ckg1w1jp8kjt
If you have time, all three parts of this extended analysis are very worth the time – https://endtropy.substack.com/p/operation-epic-follyfury-part-1-us
Israel will as usual only suffer minor damage.
The oil infrastructure of the US allies in the Gulf will get seriously damaged.
Depending on how desperate they get, the Iranians may destroy the desalination plants of the Gulf kingdoms.
.
The orange king in DC will not give a damn about this, any more than he gives a damn about US casualities.
Re: How hard has Israel been hit? The counter on ynet’s front page
says: 55,428 alarms sounded, over 800 launches from Iran, over 700 launches from Lebanon, 3,400 civilians evacuated, 19 killed, 3,195 injured. There is no counter or list for infrastructures damaged.
Ah, Flashman. I had no idea PZ was a fan. I also have the whole set of novels sitting on a bookshelf, waiting to be reread. George MacDonald Fraser does a fantastic job showing how awful the various wars in the 19th century were. I highly recommend these books to anyone of literary bent who wants to learn some history in a fun, enjoyable way. Some of the best historical fiction ever written.
Back to the topic at hand, I can’t help but wonder what the flashpoint is for Israel to use any of their nukes, or if there even is a point where they would do so. The other thing I’ve been wondering about is at what point the US generals will decide they won’t obey their orders any more, especially those give by Pete “No Quarter” Hogsbreath. Gak, this is such a flustercuck.
Flashman makes his last appearance in Fraser’s late novel, “Mr American”. While he is a minor character in this book, I liked his scenes.
phillipbrown @ # 22: … I can say the Flashman Papers proves the historicity of harry Flashman.
I can’t recall the name, but at least one serious academic historian publicly celebrated the first Flashy book as providing a trove of documents valuable for all students of Victorian military history. (He must have read it hurriedly; even teenage me lifted eyebrows at the claim that one Englishman had participated in the retreat from Kabul, and the charge of the Light Brigade, and the battle of the Little Bighorn.)
[OT]
Flashman? Meh.
Better is https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Ciaphas_Cain
(A straight rip-off, of course, but just more fun)
Ty Tethys
Per New York Times, 29 July 1969
So far, “Flashman” has had 34 reviews in the United States. Ten of these found the book to be genuine autobiography.
https://www.nytimes.com/1969/07/29/archives/gen-sir-harry-flashman-and-aide-con-the-experts.html
And, if they choose to make a film of ‘Mr American’, they should cast Malcolm McDowell as Flashman, reprising his role in ‘Royal Flash’
@ anat – 15th March 2026 at 11:30 am :
Thanks. Good info there. Its been quite had to tell in our media -social and other – where we are flooded with disinfo from both sides and given Israel has been pretty heavy-handed in censoring and refusing to allow footage as Novara media among others notes here –
What Israel Isn’t Telling You. (9 mins long.)
Clearly it isn’t going to plan – if there was one – worry is what Trump and Netanyahu might do rather than accepting defeat. I don’t think they will let Iran “win” and so have a horribly feeling that they may well resort to nukes and millions will die at best and we end up in WW3 and the end of the world as we know it at worst. Sure hope I am wrong – but who and what is going to stop them?.
phillipbrown@#40:
And, if they choose to make a film of ‘Mr American’, they should cast Malcolm McDowell as Flashman, reprising his role in ‘Royal Flash
Since it’s set in 1890, I guess that would have been General Flashman. I can’t remember.
Nice to see there are Fraser fans here. Anyone who hasn’t read “McAuslan in The Rough” would do well to remedy that. And if you want some interesting views on warfare, from the perspective of a participant, “Quartered Safe Out Here” is really great. The militarist assholes running around in Washington these days should be waterboarded with copies of it.
I love the Flashman novels. I learnt so much history from them.
Never heard of them, but happy to see my library has 4 Flashman titles available as audiobooks. Thank you Professor Poopyhead. :-)
The volume of fire aimed at Israel is absolutely peanuts compared to Gaza or Lebanon. The cost to Israel is almost entirely going to be the economic cost of having a war in the area. The damage to the buildings will barely show up in the GDP figures.
The Gulf countries similarly. Doing a billion dollars of damage to structures takes a lot of bombs. It’s way cheaper to do a billion dollars of damage by threatening to hit ships that cross Hormuz — just a day of blocked oil shipments does that, and they only need a few drones every few days to deliver the message.
The combination of censorship, AI-generated fakes, and the ease of claiming that real images and videos are fakes, makes it extremely difficult to get an accurate picture of the amount of damage done to all sides in the war. We can be certain that far more destruction has been done to Iran and Lebanon than to Israel and the Gulf Arab states but beyond that, I’m not sure much can be determined at this stage. I share stevoR’s worry that Trump or Netanyahu will resort to using nukes – which would mean, at the least, and apart from the tens of thosands or more immediate deaths, an immediate global financial crash.
OK, so you’ve always been a twerp. Thanks for letting us know.
@46 KG
I dunno, it sounds like a solid comparison to me.
You must overestimate the research capability of the typical Christian apologist — the ones I’ve spoken to think the Bible is sufficient for the historicity of its subject matter because it is infallable, and it is infallable because otherwise there would be nothing good and we’d all be going around killing each other.
KG@46
2 things
1. My name has 2 ‘l’s – it’s right there on the screen
2. better than being an obnoxious bore, I suppose…
I’m sure – but everyone knows you’re (at best) a twerp. It’s not just Christian apologists who conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person. It’s practically every relevant expert including atheists, agnostics, and observant Jews. Even if that were not the case, the comparison with the Flashman Papers would be absurd, because we know the latter are fiction (and when, by whom, and why they were written).
phillipbrown@48,
Apologies for getting your nym wrong. I take it as a compliment that a twerp thinks I’m an obnoxious bore.