Kernow Damo

Zionism is Racism motion got through and now the usual lobby pressure is trying to turn Green Party democracy into a legal panic. Right, so motion A105 as it was, The Zionism is Racism motion proposed for Green Party Spring Conference has now been prioritised, now being the 12th E motion to be discussed, motions categorised as E are ones that went through this prioritisation process basically, and is now sitting there as E12, which means the thing got through enough internal process to become real, not internet froth, not some draft in a side room, not some fever dream cooked up for a group chat, now sitting there 12th in the queue. And UK Lawyers for Israel have responded to all of this by firing off a memorandum treating all of this like a legal emergency, because of course they have. A motion called “Zionism is Racism” has moved onto the prioritised list for conference business, and one of the loudest pro-Israel legal pressure outfits in Britain has reacted by trying to make ordinary party debate look like unlawful conduct before members have even voted on it. Dress political disagreement up as institutional risk, wrap it in worried lawyer language, and hope people panic before they read the text. Well, they’re too late to the gate on this one and far be it from me to explain all the ins and out of exactly why that is, when my Green Party brother Tariq Khawaja has already done so – and brilliantly at that [CLIP] Everything you need to know right there. If you’re not already a Green, become one, ne part of this. If you are, be there online on Match 28th, sign up for Spring Conference, its all online, you don’t need to travel, you can have a say in the Green Party taking a stand against Zionism – it’s way past time we had one major mainstream political party in the UK stand against this racist white supremacist, colonialist affront to humanity, when so many others seem intent on being part of it instead.

Israel is STILL releasing new Netanyahu footage to try and prove normality, but every fresh clip just makes their credibility crisis worse. Right, so fresh footage of Benjamin Netanyahu has been put out again, this time with US envoy to Israel Mike Huckabee laughing off those death rumours and then another clip went out, this time with Netanyahu sat in a command-room style clip beside his war minister Israel Katz and his Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, but again, we’re left pondering over the legitimacy of these videos too, not only because of the inconsistencies some people are claiming they can see them, but just the simple fact Israel are still putting these clips out, their desperation to prove Netanyahu, just getting more and more incredulous each and every day. The thing Israel needed those videos to do is the one thing they are no longer doing. They are not closing the rumours down. They are not restoring confidence. They are generating yet another round, yet another day of freeze-framing, of side-by-side comparisons, of finger counting, lighting arguments, metadata arguments, and the kind of forensic gawping you get when a government has trained half the internet to think every official image they are now putting out, may be one more stitched-up bit of stagecraft. So let’s start with the Mike Huckabee clip here. Have a look at this. How happy they are, how jovial, thank goodness I’m not on your kill list there Huckabee giggles, though no names are conspicuously mentioned, perhaps notable since Iran’s Head of Security Ali Larijani was assassinated yesterday. Israel Katz certainly took to gloating about that the moment Israel got word. Huckabee says Donald Trump sent him to make sure Netanyahu was alright, Netanyahu answers “Yes, Mike, yes, I’m alive,” and the whole thing ends up packaged as a little wink to the audience, a bit of banter, a bit of “look at these silly rumours.”

Trump hit Iran’s oil lifeline, still couldn’t control Hormuz, and now Saudi soil getting hit has dropped him in an even bigger mess. Right, so the satsuma skinned nappy soiler in chief Donald Trump has hit Iran’s main oil lifeline and he still has not got what he wanted. Kharg Island, the terminal that handles most of Iran’s oil exports, has been struck and despite not actually achieving anything particularly notable, Iran certainly has in Saudi Arabia today by giving the US air forces something to think about now as they brag about air superiority, for however long they manage to stay up there and all in all its added to Trump’s oil crisis which us nothing to brag about at all, nor is the fact nobody is coming to help him either. If only US jets could run on hot air, Little Donnie has an infinite supply! But let’s turn to that Kharg island story first here, because despite the truth being a long way from his claims over that strike, it hasn’t stopped him from taking to Truth Social to very much say otherwise and putting out a handy bit of footage to grandstand around Trump said: ‘Moments ago, at my direction, the United States Central Command executed one of the most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East, and totally obliterated every MILITARY target in Iran’s crown jewel, Kharg Island. Our Weapons are the most powerful and sophisticated that the World has ever known but, for reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island. However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision. During my First Term, and currently, I rebuilt our Military into the Most Lethal, Powerful, and Effective Force, by far, anywhere in the World. Iran has NO ability to defend anything that we want to attack - There is nothing they can do about it! Iran will NEVER have a nuclear weapon, nor will it have the ability to threaten the United States of America, the Middle East or, for that matter, the World! Iran’s Military, and all others involved with this Terrorist Regime, would be wise to lay down their arms, and save what’s left of their country, which isn’t much! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP’

Israel has turned Netanyahu into a rolling meme cycle and made itself look even more desperate as others poke fun with AI of their own! Right, so Israeli desperation to prove Benjamin Netanyahu is still alive is now seemingly going from the sublime to the ridiculous, as not a day goes past following the Café video, which I covered yesterday, then another video drops. Still seemingly wearing the same clothes from the Café, has he run out? Did he not have time to pack a wardrobe before seemingly disappearing from any official duties, yet is still able to make these apparent puff pieces to prove his wellness and always notably somewhere where there is no sign of warfare you’ll note too. Whilst on the subject of the Safar café visit, the one thing I’ve now clocked is that this place is in Jerusalem, whereas we’re supposed to believe Netanyahu is alive and well and in Tel Aviv, so he travelled from the sea to the river in effect, Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, an hour by road each way on a good day when you’re not being bombed, to do this proof of life clip? Perhaps Tel Aviv is too much of a smoking ruin now to work as a fitting backdrop, or perhaps Jerusalem is where he’s hiding. At any rate, we have this new video. Now did you spot anything up with this one? If not, don’t worry, others have. Disappearing rings! Make of that one what you will. Of course this still doesn’t mean there is any solid evidence that Netanyahu is dead, but there is now more and more solid evidence that for some reason Israel is insisting on keeping itself stuck in a recurring cycle of weird little reassurance clips that keep making him and his current circumstances, whatever they might be, look less normal, not more. A government in the middle of a war is still trying to show its prime minister is fine, anywhere but somewhere official it seems and instead of calming the room it is increasingly fuelling a global round of AI mockery, frame-by-frame scrutiny and public ridicule. Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism has already put numbers on the size of the thing. Its daily status update on March 15 logged 767,000 X posts about the war that day and said around 285 anti-war protests had been identified worldwide.

No evidence Netanyahu is actually dead - but a leader who needs dodgy “proof” videos has got far bigger problem than just rumours. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has put out a second “proof” video, he is alive, honestly, why wouldn’t you believe us the first time? It’s not like we don’t have some of the most powerful AI on Earth and a relationship with the truth so distant it gets measured in parsecs. But this time it took place in a café, and instead of killing the rumour that have been swirling amid the weeks nobody knew where Netanyahu was, to the first video, where he suddenly seemed to grow and extra finger, instead of quashing the debate as to whether he is dead or injured orsimply hiding away because the target on his back has got too big, it has poured petrol on it. This time it might be the smoking gun, because people have watched the thing, frozen it, replayed it, and started pointing to moments that again look wrong in ways ordinary footage is not meant to look wrong. So here it is, stop pause, ponder, point out all you like, does it look suss to you? So what do you reckon then? There’s a few cues worth going into here which certainly make matters a tad questionable. The hand goes toward the pocket and the jacket line appears to move over the hand. The coffee cup gets gripped and barely seems to react. The pattern on top of the drink stays oddly neat after he sips from it. There’s a few other bits too which I’ll go into in a moment. But the fact remains that after one clip blew up in Israel’s face, they’ve released another clip meant to end the argument that has functionally now made matters worse, and that is a humiliation problem before it is anything else. Before anything is actually proven one way or another. A wartime leader tries to project calm, normality and control, and the public end up staring at the coffee cup like it is evidence in a fraud case. There is no real evidence Benjamin Netanyahu is dead here still, that does need to be reinforced before we all disappear down to Wonderland following a white rabbit waving an Israeli flag. It’s worth reinforcing that point as the mainstream media appear to go to pains to say the video is legit as if denying us our own eyes and ears.

Trump sold escalation as control; now Iraq is in play, Israel is taking heavier Iranian strikes, and the war is spilling across the region. Right, so if we thought Donald Trump was already losing control of the war with Iran, nothing quite nails that on than it managing to spill over even more borders and in this case, the US is now back in Iraq it seems, but perhaps not for very long. The United States embassy compound in Baghdad has been struck, the embassy has told American citizens to leave Iraq immediately after repeated attacks, and Iran has answered the war on Israel’s side of the map with one of its hardest barrages yet, including the first reported wartime use of the Sejjil and a wave that Iranian state reporting says also used Khorramshahr, Kheybar, Qadr and Emad missiles, so they are now delving into newer and heavier munitions as the defence systems run out of juice, just as every credible commentator on the military goings on in the Middle East predicted would happen. So Donald Trump’s wartime sales pitch has now bitten the dust. This was supposed to look like pressure working, deterrence being restored, enemies being cowed into submission, all the usual rubbish that gets dragged out every time Washington and Benjamin Netanyahu, be it the real of 6 fingered AI version of him these days, decide that dropping more explosives on more people is somehow a sign of control. Instead, Trump has got Baghdad under strike pressure, Israelis under alerts again, and a public leave-now warning in Baghdad sitting there in black and white where everybody can see it. Trump chose to back an expanding war on Iran, Netanyahu chose to keep widening the field while Gaza is still being pulverised and Lebanon is still being hit, and they both chose to act as though the region would simply absorb whatever they threw at it and then politely line up to thank them afterwards. That was always stupid, but now it is stupid in public. When an embassy compound is struck in Baghdad and the official answer is not swagger but a warning to your own citizens to get out by land because commercial flights are not available, you are no longer advertising anything like control of this situation.

Iran hammering the UAE may now be choking the lifelines that have kept Sudan’s RSF butchers in business. Right, so Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, Hemedti, the warlord in charge of the risibly named Rapid Support Forces has spent the war in Sudan acting like the road behind him would stay open forever. Arms would come. Fuel would come. Men would come. Routes would stay available. Sponsors would stay coy. The denials would keep doing their job. The usual respectable little game would carry on, where everybody who matters says as little as possible while a genocidal militia does as much as it likes. But Sudan’s butchers may now be running out of road, and not because conscience has suddenly broken out in Abu Dhabi or Addis Ababa like a particularly unsightly rash. They may be running into a much rougher problem than that. The United Arab Emirates, their sponsors, is under strain from Iran’s regional war, Ethiopia has been dragged closer into the light as part of the RSF’s rear architecture, and Sudanese army pressure has been hitting supply sites and routes at the same time. So the question is no longer whether the RSF has foreign sustainment. The question is what happens when the machinery that has kept Hemedti supplied and comfortable starts losing room to move and room to act. General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has Sudanese Armed Forces units pushing on fronts that are tied to Hemedti’s logistics. Sudanese military sources have described strikes on RSF supply positions near the Libya and Chad borders and around 21 strikes on convoys. In the Blue Nile area, RSF activity around Deim Mansour and Al-Kurmuk has dragged the Ethiopia corridor into the war more openly, because once a convoy route, as that has been, stops being a quiet line on a planner’s desk and starts becoming something that can be named, tracked and hit, the whole atmosphere changes doesn’t it?

As Trump begs for help to bring down the Strait of Hormuz blockade, Iran calmly tells the world its open for business - except to him! Right, so Donald Trump has gone onto Truth Social and asked other countries to send warships into the Strait of Hormuz because Iran has turned that waterway into a live test of whether the United States can still command the region it keeps setting on fire. Beg hard little man because you have royally screwed up. He’s said: ‘The United States of America has beaten and completely decimated Iran, both Militarily, Economically, and in every other way, but the Countries of the World that receive Oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage, and we will help — A LOT! The U.S. will also coordinate with those Countries so that everything goes quickly, smoothly, and well. This should have always been a team effort, and now it will be — It will bring the World together toward Harmony, Security, and Everlasting Peace! President DONALD J. TRUMP’ Have you though? You said the war was won on day one when you took out the 86 year old Ayatollah Khamenei, but you’ve simply replaced him with a 56 year old Ayatollah Khamenei, the son of the former Ayatollah, so younger and with an understandable chip on his shoulder for you particularly Isn’t it? If he had won on day one, why are we now more than 2 weeks into this war still with you asking for more nations to join your stupidity? Trump has named China, France, Japan, South Korea and Britain and said they should help keep the Strait open and safe, while also boasting that the United States will keep bombing the shoreline and shooting Iranian boats out of the water. It was only a week ago Trump was bashing Keir Starmer for joining a war he had already won and the warship that the UK was sending wasn’t needed! So the man fronting the most overfunded navy on Earth is now asking round for backup in a chokepoint he was supposed to dominate. As you can imagine, this has triggered a lot of hilarity. Journalist Craig Murray observed Trump’s mad posting and mused ‘That's a lot of words for "Help I screwed up!"’ I spotted this delightful meme which has pretty much summed up Trump’s commentary and what is actually being observed in the Middle East as opposed to being printed in the mainstream media to a tee as well.

Trump backed a war meant to break Iran and restore control, but the last 24 hours have left both him and Netanyahu looking anything but in charge. Right, so Donald Trump has triggered the last thing he wanted, and it is not some mystery buried in briefing paper language either, it is sitting right there in the Strait of Hormuz where ships are now moving on the basis of Iranian permission, American promises have started sounding like cheap sales patter, and one Turkish-owned vessel has already gone through after Ankara said Tehran cleared it. I think calling this control might be underselling it a bit actually. That is not what control looks like not really. That is not what victory looks like. That is what a backfire looks like when the people who started the fire are still pretending they are in charge of the smoke with Billy Joel playing in the background. Trump backed a war that was supposed to break Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu widened it because widening things is what Benjamin Netanyahu does when restraint might force him to examine his own hand this, all 6 fingers of it, and now one of the busiest energy routes on earth is being discussed in terms of what Iran does and doesn’t let through. No input from the US or Israel required. Donald Trump has then made it even worse, because the brain cell deficient buffoon has opened that yawning chasm in the front of his orange face and said out loud what the cover story was trying to hide. United Nations experts have condemned the American and Israeli attack on Iran as illegal aggression, they have said Iran has the right to self-defence, and they have warned that Trump’s talk of “unconditional surrender” and talk of choosing Iran’s future leadership crosses straight out of the language of security and into regime change.

If Israel’s footage is meant to settle questions, why has it left so many people asking where Netanyahu and Ben Gvir actually are? Right, so this is perhaps not the face you were expecting at the start of this video, but I daresay you were expecting to see something along these lines if you’re already somewhat familiar with this story because this is a clip of the Netanyahu speech Israel has put out, the full version is 8 minutes long, if you really want to watch the whole thing the one meant to show the man alive, present, speaking, governing, all the usual serious-leader stuff after he’s not been seen for days, dark suit, stern face, little hand gestures, the full package. It’s what we expect from a Netanyahu televised announcement, just missing the whinging and the accusations of antisemitism that generally come with it, the sound having been muted. The trouble is, they have managed to release a what amounts to a reassurance video that has left people watching his hands and counting his fingers. Or watching his teeth seemingly come into frame and then disappear as if by magic. Tremendous work. Watch the hands as they come up in front of his chest. Watch the shape of them. Watch the way the fingers seem to sit and then not sit, the way the image starts looking smeared and wrong, the way one part of the hand area starts drawing the eye because it does not look clean or natural enough to just pass over. That is why people have been slowing this down. That is why people have been pulling stills from it. That is why what was supposed to be proof has started getting treated like a possible fake and to say that is feeding suspicion right now would be an understatement. The clip was supposed to settle people down. Benjamin Netanyahu was put in front of cameras on 12 March and instead of calming anything down it sent people into frame-by-frame mode because a lot of them looked at one section of that footage and did not see reassurance, they saw something off. They saw hands that looked wrong, movement that looked wrong, delivery that some thought looked wrong, teeth that looked wrong and within hours the whole thing had gone from “here is the prime minister speaking” to “what exactly have they put out here?” That is how badly this has landed. A wartime government tried to project continuity and have got the internet counting fingers.

Iran and Hezbollah are still hitting Israel and Gulf oil and gas dries up, but Trump insists he's still in control and it's nearly over. Who's he kidding? Right, so Donald Trump has said there is “practically nothing left” to target in Iran and that the war ends when he decides it ends. Fine. But then reality has answered back. Hezbollah fires a heavy barrage into Israel overnight in joint strikes with Iran hitting Haifa and other targets in the north. Israel’s mad war minister Israel Katz answers that not by restoring quiet, not by proving control, but by ordering expanded operations in Lebanon, because that is what you do when the thing you promised to stabilise is still burning in public. The International Energy Agency has answered the Hormuz crisis by reaching for the biggest emergency oil stock release in its history, which is not the behaviour of people who think this is all nicely contained and in another signal as to how precarious energy supplies are right now, Shell has piled on more pressure as they have now been forced to declare force majeure themselves on Qatari LNG-linked contracts, so now even the big energy firms are having to admit that the normal machinery is seizing up and even they cannot now deliver. Spain has permanently withdrawn its ambassador from Israel and following that move Iran has said the Strait of Hormuz will stay passable for states willing to send their Israeli and US ambassadors home. So no, this is not some neat little demonstration of strength under Donald Trump’s firm hand.

Netanyahu admits Iran may not break, US intel says it hasn’t, and the whole filthy war is starting to blow back on the people who sold it. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has finally crawled out from whatever rock he has been hiding under as Iranian missiles hammer Israel, all his own doing of course, and has now said out loud that his gamble may fail. After all the dead, after all the bombing, after all the talk about strength and deterrence and teaching enemies lessons they will never forget, the man selling the war has had to admit he cannot promise the result. He says Israel is creating the conditions for toppling Iran’s government, but he cannot tell you with certainty that Iranians will do it. So, you mean to say that after taking out their Supreme Leader on day one, they didn’t scatter and demand regime change? Well of course they didn’t! You did the one thing sure to unify them! And just to salt that wound that bit further, reporting on US intelligence says Iran’s leadership is still very much in control, not close to collapse at all and frankly breathing fire at this point, not a cat in hells chance of this ending now, when the new guy in charge is the son of the old supreme leader, and not only did you kill his father, you took out half his family with him. So the first thing to get straight here is brutally simple: the war’s main salesman is now admitting this hasn’t gone to plan, all while the intelligence says the target state is very much still standing, still active and that leaves Netanyahu with a war still running and no guaranteed political payoff, especially as munitions continue to dry up faster than price rises at our petrol pumps. Donald Trump hasn’t helped matters either, because the delusional fool keeps speaking as if the thing is already won while the region keeps answering back in fire.

Labour broke the courts by underfunding them, and now wants to use that damage to strip one of the public’s last checks on state power. Right, so Keir Starmer’s government is trying to cut jury trial rights, and the first thing to ask is who gets the better deal once ordinary people start getting pushed out of the room. Because this bill would take a whole range of criminal cases away from juries and put many of them before a judge sitting alone, which is a very different room and they know it. And it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to ask about those pushing these reforms such as they are, which is being met with such dramatic outcry either. Sarah Sackman, the courts minister helping front this, has declared membership of the Jewish Labour Movement and has been reported as having worked at Israel’s Supreme Court in Jerusalem. David Lammy, the Justice Secretary above her, has declared membership of Labour Friends of Israel. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister carrying the government pushing this through Parliament, has spent years publicly courting Labour Friends of Israel. Zionist without qualification. So these optics are not subtle are they? They are not made up. They are sitting right in the middle of it while Labour tries to move verdicts further away from juries and closer to the state. So should we be worried about some kind of Zionist intent behind this, or is it just coincidence? Starmer’s government has already pushed this bill through second reading in the Commons by 304 votes to 203, so the bill has moved forwards.

Trump says it’s nearly over, but Iran is still tightening the trap, the oil shock is spreading, and Washington already looks desperate for a way out. Right, so Tel Aviv has been hit again, central Israel has been under alerts again, commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz have been hit again, and Donald Trump is now doing the exact opposite of what strong men do when they are winning: looking for a way out. That is the story as it stands today. Not control. Not dominance. Not the clean victory lap he and Benjamin Netanyahu were puffing and panting through waving their respective flags, that they thought they were buying with bombs if they threw enough of Iran, because there is no way Iran could cope with such an assault right? Didn’t work out that way did it though? Iran is still firing, and still haven’t broken out their best stuff yet by all accounts. The region is still tightening up, the costs are still spreading through shipping, oil, prices at the petrol pumps and troop exposure, and the White House is hunting an exit, even allegedly going cap in hand to Putin to try and get to an endgame. So there is your meltdown. The side that sold this as strength has landed in the oldest trap in war, because these people are functionally idiots: they can still make things worse, but they cannot make it look under control, Iran said they wouldn’t back down if you struck them and they’re doing so. No way out. Donald Trump is not talking like a man who has achieved his aims and can now calmly set terms. He is talking like a man who helped start something far dirtier and wider than the sales pitch allowed for, and is now trying to edge toward an exit without admitting the whole thing has gone badly wrong. So the old cover story is done all the same.

Trump’s “quick war” is already widening into a regional liability - Iraq hit, Gulf cover blown, oil shock rising, and even his own side reportedly wants an exit. Right, so Donald Trump has spent the last few days talking like this war is going brilliantly. He stood in Florida and said the United States was making “major strides”, said some people could say the job was “pretty well complete”, then said he could call it a “tremendous success” right now or go further, and of course he said they were going to go further didn’t he? It must be lovely to live in a world devoid of reality. yet at almost the same time, people around him have reportedly been urging him to start talking about a way out. So there it is, right at the top, no mystery, no ceremony, no need for any clever decoding. The man in public is still selling victory, but the people near him still in touch with some semblance of real life are already looking for the exit. Making matters worse, US CENTCOM has managed a trumpian trick all of their own. Gulf governments have spent this war trying to sound like they are above it, beside it, merely enduring the weather while American forces happen to pass through. As if those US bases were just figments of Iran’s imagination and these Gulf monarchies and their Israeli normalisation and US alliances were equally all pie in the sky too. Well, CENTCOM has blown that notion sky high. You see they have put out their own material showing HIMARS supporting Operation Epic Fury, HIMARS standing for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which is a lot more understandable, mobile rocket launchers basically, and its blown this whole Gulf State denial act out of the water, because guess where CENTCOM said these HIMARS are?

Israel’s own propaganda racket is now being sued by the very people and firms it used to sell the Gaza lie abroad Right, so Israel’s own propaganda racket has started chasing the state for its money. People hired to go out and sell Israel’s line, shoved in front of cameras, flown around, paid through private companies, performed a skit on Insta are now saying the state never paid up. Not the usual critics. Not the people Israel always tries to smear and brush aside. Its own people. Its own companies. The same outfit used to push the story abroad is now sitting under lawsuits and payment claims from inside the machine itself. Now this is frankly quite funny, the state that sells a con by way of new has itself conned the conners, but it is also filthy, because once the people hired to do the lying start demanding their money in public, this stops looking like conviction and starts looking exactly like what it is, a paid operation with court paperwork now attached and the propagandists chasing some two million shekels. Now the Prime Minister’s Office took over this hasbara machinery after the Ministry of Information collapsed after 7 October 2023, so that already tells you something useful about the moral confidence of the whole operation, because if the thing is so righteous and so self-evident and so obviously true, why is it being thrown together in a rush through replacement channels inside government as the bombs are falling and the bodies are piling up? Moshik Aviv was the chap who had just taken over the national information system in August 2023 and then the genocide of Gaza commences following that Hamas attack on October 7th. Staffing is thin, urgency is cited, normal tender procedures are said to have been bypassed, and private production companies are pulled in as payment conduits for people representing Israel abroad. Listen to the language of that and tell me it does not sound exactly like what it is trying not to say. “Payment channels.” “Irregularities.” “External consultants.” “Exceptional payments.” The whole vocabulary is built to keep the stain off the façade. Strip the wording back to ordinary English and what you are left with is a state operation using outside firms to fund message carriers during a genocide, and now those firms are saying the money did not arrive through signed work orders.

Israel pulled an epic self-own - and instead of breaking Iran, it’s triggered toxic fallout, oil panic and a much bigger war. Right, so Israel has spent days selling this as control, as precision, as pressure, as the kind of war those in the know can widen without losing hold of the edges, and now Tehran is sitting under toxic smoke and black rain after fuel depots and refinery-linked sites were hit, a Chinese intelligence vessel has been reported operating south of Iran in international waters near the Gulf, and footage from the video game ARMA has been circulating online as if somebody needed fake explosions to make the real ones look more convincing. That is how things are going now. Not with a neat chain of military success, but with a poisoned capital, an information war that cannot keep its trousers up, and outside powers moving closer to the scene because the fire is now big enough to pull them in. Then Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader under wartime conditions, so the leadership gap Israel and Washington plainly wanted did not open. It shut. Overnight. Just as they were told it would. With a new man in place and the whole succession question taken off the table by a formal appointment. China has not sent in divisions, nobody is pretending that, but Liaowang-1, the vessel in question is being reported south of the Iranian coast in international waters, not randomly sight-seeing, but positioned so that it’d be a war crime for the US or Israel to try the same stunt here, that they tried with that Iranian training vessel off Sri Lanka last week, and Beijing has already had its foreign ministry fielding questions about safe passage through Hormuz because Chinese trade and energy flows sit inside this war prominently, Iran being a major source of energy for them. That is what happens when you decide to turn a regional confrontation into a shipping and energy crisis though isn’t it? Other powers do not need to fire a shot to become part of the pressure.

Trump’s Iran war is not just hitting oil routes, it is dragging Europe’s fake energy independence into the open and putting Russia back in the frame. Right, so Donald Trump has set this one up so badly that a war sold as strength against Iran is starting to look like a gift to Vladimir Putin, and no, not because Putin has suddenly become some military wizard in the Gulf, but because oil and gas do not care about swagger, tanker routes do not salute campaign slogans, and Europe still runs on fuel it does not control. The Strait of Hormuz has been carrying around 20 million barrels a day, a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, and once traffic there backs up, Saudi Arabia can reroute some cargo through the Red Sea, the UAE can bypass a slice of it from the Omani side of their country, which sits just outside the Strait, but nowhere near enough to replace the gaping hole left in global oil and gas supply. So the first thing that hits is not a speech, not a summit, not one of those tragic little statements about resilience from people who would not know what resilience was if it landed on their desk and kicked their coffee cup over. The first thing that hits is price, shipping, storage, and buyers fighting for cargo. QatarEnergy has already put force majeure on affected LNG buyers after halting production at Ras Laffan, and that matters because gas is where the polite European story starts wheezing. Oil is ugly but flexible. Europe can buy more crude from places like Norway, the United States, Kazakhstan, West Africa, North Africa, wherever the grade works. Gas does not work like that. Gas needs liquefaction plants, tankers, regas terminals, contracts, and a seller with spare supply. So once Qatar drops out even partially, Europe is not browsing many shelves for a replacement source. Europe is entering an auction. Asia is already the bigger direct buyer of Gulf energy, so when Gulf LNG goes missing or gets delayed, Asian buyers will then go hunting in the same Atlantic market Europe will need to for a refill. That is how Trump’s Iran war turns into Europe’s energy trap, with tankers diverting east and Europe staring at its storage schedule with ever increasing dismay. The European Commission has spent the last few years telling everyone the system is more secure now though haven’t they? It has points on paper for that. EU gas storage rules still target 90 per cent by the start of winter.

Trump & Israel’s war lies are going up in flames — from Haifa to the Gulf, the fire, failures and panic are getting harder to hide. Donald Trump has rushed more than 20,000 bombs to Israel under emergency authority, while B-1 bombers have landed at RAF Fairford, because no matter what Keir Starmer says, the UK is definitely involved, though it ought to be pointed out that RAF Fairford has little to do with the RAF, it is just a US air base on UK soil, because of course we have such things here too. All whilst that has been going on, anti-war organiser Mike Prysner, a guy who knows a thing or two about war given he has served in both Iraq and Syria has now said US troops and families are contacting his group, the Center on Conscience and War, or CCW looking for help to avoid deployment. One soldier told his mother in his final call home that his unit would be going “boots on the ground” that night, and that his commander said the operation was meant to bring about the Second Coming of Christ, but we’re supposed to believe the Iranians are the religious zealots of course. But that is the current picture in one go: more bombs for Israel, American bombers in Britain, and the coming of the Lord in exchange for razing Iran – how very Christian, not. That is not a picture of control. That is a picture of a war machine feeding itself harder because the first sales pitch has already fallen flat. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sold this as pressure, deterrence and dominance, the usual words the men in suits use when they are about to set half a region alight and call it stability. And it’s not just Trump with issues blowing up in his face right now either.

Jordan says it is outside the Iran war, but with missiles overhead & a US missile launcher destroyed, that story is getting harder to sell by the hour. Right, so King Abdullah of Jordan said on 24 February that Jordan would not let its airspace be violated and would not become a battlefield. Four days later Jordanian forces were intercepting drones and ballistic missiles over the country, the Interior Ministry was dealing with falling debris across multiple regions, and people in Jordan were being told to treat suspicious objects like live danger instead of bad weather. That is the first promise gone. The state line was that Jordan would stay out of the war between the United States, Israel and Iran while protecting its own territory. The actual condition on the ground was missiles overhead, fragments coming down, airspace controls, and emergency alerts. A government can call that sovereignty if it likes. People tend to call it the war arriving anyway don’t they? If it looks like a war and smells like a war, it’s a war. By 1 March the Interior Ministry had recorded 73 incidents involving falling objects and missile debris, with property damage reported in Amman, Zarqa, Madaba, West Balqa, Jaresh, Irbid, Aqaba and the Central Badia, and that leaves the palace with wreckage on record. The Jordanian Armed Forces then said they had intercepted 49 drones and ballistic missiles. That matters because it strips the polite little fiction down to the studs. Jordan is not sitting on a hill watching two other countries trade blows through binoculars. Jordanian air defences are up, Jordanian skies are active, Jordanian territory is taking fallout, lying between Israel and Iran as it does, and the state itself is counting the pieces. There is no neutral-looking way to dress that up once the numbers are public. When a government moves from issuing regional statements to listing debris incidents governorate by governorate, the distance between “we are not part of this” and “please report suspicious fragments to the authorities” has already closed.