How much longer can Iran hold on?

Most media reports suggest the US/Israel war against Iran is heading towards a mighty Middle Eastern conflict, dragging in many of America's allies, and that the regime in Tehran is putting up such a fierce fight, it could go on for months and lead to a collapse of the world economy. But that doesn't take into account the huge damage being done to Iran from 24-hour bombing. A huge proportion of the Iranian military infrastructure has been smashed, the leadership dares not show its face for fear of facing Israeli assassins, the cost of living has shot up, the country is effectively facing ruin. How long can this go on before the people of Iran cry out: enough, enough! Ok, it's too dangerous for them to come out into the streets and rebel against the regime. But there will have to come a time when someone sensible -is there anyone? - in Iran will make the call to Trump and say: "Stop destroying our country, we are ready to talk." So far, the contacts have led to nothing but that's because the yearning for revenge, particularly for the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the late supreme leader, is so overwhelming there is little motivation for seeking a deal. But it's in no one's interest for Iran to be destroyed. The 90 million people deserve a decent future but it's not going to happen while the radical clerics are in charge. I feel sorry for the ordinary Iranian families who just want a peaceful life. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES.

Will Trump seize Iran's Kharg Island?

Iran’s most strategically vital oil facility, now on President Trump’s hitlist, is known to Iranians as the “Forbidden Island”. Located about 15.5 miles off the coast of Iran in the northern Persian Gulf, Kharg Island, a tiny coral outcrop, is heaving with oil storage tanks, loading terminals and pipelines. It represents Iran’s lifeblood and is protected by thousands of troops from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Access to Kharg is heavily restricted which is why it has acquired the sobriquet ,“Forbidden Island”. Millions of barrels of crude oil flow from Iran’s principle oil fields through pipelines to Kharg Island every day. The island was selected because it’s located in deep water, suitable for the arrival and departure of oil tankers. Iran supplies more than 4.5 per cent of global oil. Kharg Island currently has an estimated 18 million barrels of crude stored in tanks. After a mass US bombing raid last week on Karg Island which, according to Trump, “totally obliterated” everything military, from air defences to drone-launching sites, the path has been laid for an amphibious landing by thousands of American Marines. currently en route from the Philippine Sea. Such an operation, aimed at seizing control of the island through which around 90 per cent of Iran’s crude oil passes to its global customers, would be Trump’s most daring and potentially most risky offensive mission against the Tehran regime since the war began on February 28. The insertion of Marines – the first boots on the ground in Operation Epic Fury – would expand and extend the confrontation with Tehran. It would no longer be an air war lasting “four or five weeks”. Territorial occupation, even if limited in time, could provoke retaliation on a different scale. All of these factors are being weighed up by the Pentagon and the White House, as the 2,500 troops of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) on board the big-deck amphibious assault ship, USS Tripoli and two other vessels, make their way to the Middle East. They are due to arrive next week. A successful seizure of Kharg Island would provide Trump with the ultimate leverage to persuade Tehran to capitulate, albeit that so far the regime has shown no sign of giving in to the president’s demands. The air and Tomahawk-missile attacks on Kharg Island carefully avoided any targeting of the oil terminals and other vital infrastructure The threat to destroy this crucial sector of Iran’s oil empire is still one of the options on Trump’s list. But to do so would cause a spiralling of global oil prices. There is another factor. China is Iran’s largest oil customer, and Trump is still due to meet with President Xi Zinping in Beijing later this month. The destruction of Kharg Island’s oil terminals would scupper not only the planned visit but also relations between Beijing and Washington. So, the second option, an amphibious landing and occupation by Marines would mean the US could hold the island hostage in return for Tehran agreeing to stop blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and allow 20 per cent of the world’s oil to pass through the chokepoint safely. It would be a huge gamble. Kharg Island may be only five miles long by about three miles wide. But it could require more than 2,500 US Marines to seize and hold it. Double that number would make more military sense, although an MEU is self-sufficient and comes with tanks, artillery, armoured vehicles, helicopters and its own F-35B vertical take-off fighter jets. What has not been revealed is how many of the IRGC residents of Kharg Island were killed in last week’s bombing raids and how well they may have been reinforced from the mainland. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES.

Are Trump and Netanyahu doing this war together or...?

Israel is basically helping itself to targets in Iran and sometimnes one wonders whether Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are on the same page. Trump said in the first week that all the people he had in mind for possibly taking over from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in the huge Israeli airstrike on Day One which finished off the then supreme leader and many others. Israel has continued to target and kill other top Iranian regime leaders including Ali Larijani, the head of Iran's national security council, and today the intelligence minister. Were either of those on Trump's list of possible leaders he could do business with? Now Israel has bombed one of the largest natural gas fields in Iran. Yet Trump deliberately didn't order US bombers to target the oil terminals on Kharg Island when all the military facilities on the island were hit. Presumably Trump had his reasons - the price of oil - for leaving the terminals and oil storage sites undamaged. So did he know Netanyahu was going to hit the gas field? Maybe, Trump has told the Israeli prime minister he can bomb what he likes but it seems to be a bit of coordination and shared objectives might be a good move.

Trump disillusioned by America's allies

It has been quite a shock for Donald Trump. Normally when he puts out a call from the Oval Office, people come running. Look what happened when Joe Biden rang to create a coalition to help Ukraine fight Russia. Everyone, bar none, agreed to rally round. Trump asks allies for help in tackling Iran and the response has been tepid to say the least. First, Keir Starmer, and then the Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanche, said no to US bombers flying off to Iran from UK and Spanish bases, and now none of the Nato allies seem to be responding to Trump's call to send warships to escort oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz under fire from Iran. Starmer said he wasn't willing. German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz said it wasn't a job for Nato. No one wanted to get involved in what is seen as Trump's war. Actually while this is understandable, it is a fact that Iran under its theocratic regime does pose a threat to every decent country, so Trump must be seriously miffed that no one wants to join him. He says he doesn't care and that he will do it on his own, along with Benjamin Netanyahu. But he won't forget. Oh no. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES

Does it matter if Mojtaba Khamenei is alive or dead?

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, his war secretary, have both been hinting that Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Iranian supreme leader, is either dead or seriously wounded from the first raid on Tehran two weeks ago. Either tbis is hot propaganda to stir the pot or they are trying to force him to come out into the open and show himself to prove he is not dead. If he is dead, will it matter? It depends how you like to interpret it. Why would the so-called Assembly of Experts have unanimously elected him as the successor to his late father if they knew he was dead or on the point of death? Maybe because there was such expectation around the world that Mojtaba would be the chosen one, the clerics felt they couldn't elect anyone else, otherwise it would send a message around the world that they had spurned the son of the revered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. So, instead of risking that, they went for Mojtaba even though he was in hospital receiving what they hoped would be life-saving medical treatment. Either way, he hasn't shown himself or spoken in public, and his enemy in Washington is gloating that he is dead or has lost a leg or some such. What the clerics can't do now is tell the world that actually the leader they chose is no longer with us. That would look pretty strange. So I guess for the monent, they are stuck with Mojtaba whether he is alive or dead. The reality is, however, that Ali Larinjani, secretary of the supreme national security council of Iran, is leading and running the country and is quite happy to walk in the streets to show himself off. He is still carrying out the orders of the late ayatollah and knows precisely what he is going to do to fight the US and Israel over the next few months. Yes, months, not weeks. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES.

Right now there is no end state for the war in Iran

There is a danger that Donald Trump and his secretary for war Pete Hegseth are making the same mistake that befell a whole bunch of their predecessors which is simply this: massive military force wins wars. It absolutely doesn't. Especially if the firepower is only being directed from the air and from warhips and submarines launching missiles. A country the size of Iran, run by a fanatically ideological political regime backed by a fanatically ideological military force is not going to give in, even with four or five weeks of bombs and missiles. You can't change a whole country by bombing from the air. And if you put thousands of troops on the ground, you still can't control the country if the fanaticism is still there. Just look at the examples of Vietnam, Afghanistan and to a lesser extent, Iraq. Saddam Hussein was beaten and his regime fell but there followed another eight years of insurgency warfare. Trump cannot afford to face years of fighting in Iran, so even though he is sending Marine reinforcements to the region, what does he think they can achieve? They can launch an amphibious assault on the coastal areas from where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' navy is hitting tankers in the Gulf waterway. But then you have boots on the ground which will mean casualties and occupation of sorts. You can already hear the groans: "here we go again".This war, if it is going to bring real results, can only be ended once the regime is deposed. This is effectively what Trump and Hegseth have in mind. But there is no sign that the new regime put in place after the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is going to give up. Lessons lessons lessons from the past. BUY MY NEW PAPERBACK AGENT REDRUTH, AN EXCITING SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES

Donald Trump hit by Iran's tanker war

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has turned the tables on President Trump’s “fire and fury” campaign. The Strait of Hormuz through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes, is blocked. Tankers and cargo vessels are on fire. The navy section of the IRGC has struck back with its most effective revenge card. Now the third tanker war in four decades has scuppered Trump’s hopes of declaring victory against Iran in the near future. Despite the massive destruction caused by US and Israeli bombers since the war began on Saturday, February 28, the IRGC still has the capacity and the skills to drag the whole of the Middle East into the conflict. Not so much with its short-range and medium-range ballistic missiles, not even by its long-range drones, although all have caused fear and damage across the region. But by its combat-proven ability to send across the Gulf waterway explosives-laden drone boats, fast attack craft armed with missiles and sea-skimming cruise missiles from concealed coastal launchers. It’s the IRGC navy’s asymmetric warfare versus the full panoply of America’s mighty armada of aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers and Tomahawk-armed submarines. “Iran learned this lesson in the 1980s during the first tanker war, that if you have a conventional navy it’s vulnerable if you come up against the US Navy, so they went asymmetric and relied on cheap, small, in-shore craft that could cause a lot of damage. They didn’t require naval facilities and could just pop out, carry out an attack and go back into hiding,” said retired Vice Admiral Duncan Potts, much of whose Royal Navy career was spent in the Gulf facing daily threats from the IRGC. During the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, Iraq tried to disrupt Iran’s oil exports, and Tehran retaliated by attacking ships in the Gulf associated with Baghdad’s trading partners. Iraq responded with its own tanker war. More than 400 ships were attacked, 239 of them oil tankers. Many countries were forced to send warships to guard the shipping route, including the US, the UK (operating the Royal Navy’s Armilla Patrol), the then Soviet Union and France. Potts who is president of the Royal Naval Association (PLEASE LEAVE THIS IN), said Admiral Brad Cooper, the American in command of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, was well versed in IRGC tactics because he used to be commander of the US Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain. “I can’t believe the US won’t be directing their efforts on this IRGC capability, it’s a different approach to warfare,” Potts said. Potts first served in the Gulf when he was a 21-year-old sub-lieutenant in 1982 but went on to command HMS Southampton, a Type 42 destroyer, in the same region and became commander of Combined Task Force 158, an international naval group providing security in the northern Gulf in 2008 “I’ve always been up against the IRGC,” he said. A former senior Pentagon official said: “It’s hard to say at this point whether the US Navy is ahead of the threat or not. One thing for sure, this is not like the tanker war in the 1980s. The age of the drones [air and sea] has enabled Iran to fight precision warfare on the cheap. Mines which bedevilled us in the first Gulf War ]1991, will enable the Iranians to pose multiple problems for tanker traffic. So far in Operation Epic Fury, the focus has been on effecting-a strategic defeat on the Tehran regime– a shock and awe style of warfighting which has achieved impressive results, not least the knocking out of a large proportion of Iran’s ballistic-missile capability and destruction of command-and-control sites. Trump has also repeatedly referred to the obliteration of the Iranian navy - about 60 naval vessels so far, according to Admiral Cooper. But the Iranian navy wasn’t the real threat. “What the Iranians are doing now is entirely predictable, the IRGC is using small boat drones, jet skis in some cases, and mines to achieve a disproportionate impact. You don’t need a specialised warship to lay mines, a rowing boat can do it, depending on the mine,” said Kevin Rowlands who served with the Royal Navy’s Armilla Patrol in the Gulf in the 1990s. Mines are now being dropped in the water in the Strait of Hormuz by IRGC small boats, the US has confirmed. The disproportionate impact of the asymmetric warfare is clear to see. Before the launch of Operation Epic Fury, an average of about 153 commercial vessels transited through the Strait of Hormuz every day. Since March 1, the strait has effectively been closed to all traffic. Rowlands, a specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “The US navy with its aircraft carriers would probably prefer to engage with a peer adversary, like China, out in the open with long-range weapons and sensors, carrier against carrier. But what they have against Iran is more like counter-insurgency.” One way to combat the IRGC navy’s capabilities would be to launch an amphibious raid on the in-shore drones and missile launchers, he said. “But I don’t think there’s any intention of doing that, with boots on the ground,” he said. So, If the Iranians have learned lessons from the previous tanker wars – the second one was in 2019 during heightened tensions following the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran – then the US, too, will have to adapt to counter the tricky warfare of the IRGC navy. If the US is intent on continuing the war, Rowlands said, there might come a time when commercial ships will need protecting. “But I don’t envisage a convoy of ships with warships alongside. It would be more about information-sharing and perhaps overhead surveillance aircraft or drones to warn tankers of threats,” he said. Ultimately, however, Admiral Cooper will have to do something to eliminate the asymmetric threat to the Gulf waterway. PLEASE BUY MY NEW SPY THRILLER, AGENT REDRUTH. BUY FROM AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS OR WATERSTSONES. ends