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

Iran's new supreme leader issues a warning but fails to appear in person

The first words have been spoken by the new leader of Iran since his elevation following the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the words of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the late supreme leader, were read out by a news presenter. There was no sign of the new ruler. This says a number of things. First of all, he won't dare show his face anywhere in public or private because he knews the Israelis will target him and even now are probably doing their best to discover where he is hiding. He can't be in his late father's bunker because that has been destroyed by airstrikes. The second thing is he might still be receiving medical treatment for injuries he supposedly suffered when his father, mother and wife were all killed at the start of the joint US/Israeli strikes. There is no official confirmation that he was wounded. But it would seem suprising that he didn't suffer some injury from an attack which killed most of his family. His first words focused on the intention to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed for as long as the US and Israel continued to attack Iran. But there wasn't any rousing speech appealing to his countrymen to back him in his confrontation with Trump. But he made it clear he wanted revenge for the death of his father. I fear this war is going to go and on. This is not what Trump envisaged when he sent his bombers towards Iran on February 28. PLEASE BUY AND ENJOY AGENT REDRUTH, MY SPY THRILLER PAPERBACK. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES

Unfortunately for Trump, the enemy (Iran) has a vote, too

Donald Trump has changed his mind a few times about how long the war against Iran will go on. First it was four or five weeks, then he thought the strikes were nearly completed, and now he is warning there is still stuff to do. But the bigger question is, not what the US will do in the next week or so, but what Iran will do. Iran may have lost a chunk of its top leadership but the second layer of leaders, from the new supreme leader downwards, are settling in and clearly the decision has been taken to fight and fight and use the one card they have which might make a difference to Trump's timetable: keeping the Strait of Hormuz shut for all shipping and attacking oil tankers sitting the other end of the Gulf waterway, stuck in limbo. The US military may have successfully targeted 19 or so Iranian navy warships. But Iran has the capacity to stop the flow of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz just by threatening to attack ships, because as a result international insurers have declined to indemnify shipping companies. No insurance, no tanker movements. Trump has warned Iran not to lay mines in the Strait but it's pretty likely that is what they will try to do. A massive blockage in the waterway where huge numbers of ships pass through every month will have a long-term impact on the world ecnomy. This is the threat posed by Iran and there is no way Trump can declare victory over Tehran until the Hormuz question has been resolved. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER PAPERBACK. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES.

Trump's air war is devastating for Iran but not regime-changing

Bombs from the air are not going to bring about regime-change in Tehran. I thknk that can be safely predicted. The people of Iran might yearn to rise up against the mullahs but for very understandable reasons they are scared to do so. Thousands of families are still mourning the loss of their loved ones in January when the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps opened fire on their own people and killed at least 7,000 and probably many more. Trump claims it's as higb as 30,000. He may be right. What we don't know is how many of the IRGC have been killed in the US/Israeli bomb and missile strikes. But it's a huge organisation and the majority I suspect will survive by the time the bombing stops, so the guards corps will still be functioning to keep the new supreme leader in power and the Iranian people suppressed. What sort of victory will that be for Trump? Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary (war secretary) has claimed today that bombing will go on until the job is done. But what is the job? You can't annihilate a country like Iran into submission? Or can you? I seriously doubt it. The end game is still a confusing mystery. PLEASE BUY AGENT REDRUTH, MY PAPERBACK SPY THRILLER. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS, WATERSTONES.

The selected new supreme leader is Iran's two-fingers to Trump

Iran has done what Donald Trump said publicly would be unacceptable. The Assembly of Experts, all radical Shi'ite clerics, voted for the son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to be the new supreme leader. Trump said Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son, was definitely not on his list of suitable candidates (suitable to Washington) to take over the top slot. But Mojtaba Khamenei was duly selected and now, because of his tight, longstanding association with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, he is probably the worst possible outcome for the US and Israel, now starting DayTen of the war against Tehran. The IRGC basically runs the country under the say-so of the supreme leader. This corps of up to 180,000 ayatollah devotees controls about 60 per cent of Iran's economy and is in charge of defence and foreign policy and is key to all the terrorist attacks throughout the Middle East and Europe, courtesy of its overseas wing, the Quds Force. So, with Mojtaba Khamenei now in charge, there is no hope of any kind of practical deal between Iran and the US, and no hope whatsoever for the poor Iranian people who just want a decent life. Israel has already threatened to bump off the new supreme leader and clearly he is going to be someone with a target on his back. But even if Israel succeeds, I doubt this will bring the Tehran regime to its knees. How is this war going to come to an end? PLEASE BUY AGENT REDUTH, MY NEW SPY THRILLER, SEQUEL TO SHADOW LIVES. AMAZON, ROWANVALE BOOKS AND WATERSTSONES.