It's no secret that Washington is looking for an off-ramp amid what has been a steady pattern of escalation with Iran over the past month since Operation Epic Fury began. The White House's anticipated timeline and even list of objectives has seriously shifted since the war's start, as has the scope, given Tehran's 'unexpected' big retaliatory strikes on the Gulf and Israel - including on energy and infrastructure targets.

It seems Trump was thinking Iran could be parallel to the Venezuela situation - where a 'decapitation' operation swiftly removed Maduro and the US basically acknowledged a pliant puppet in his place (Delcy Rodríguez). That's why White House officials at the very start were talking about an operation that would last just 'days' or maybe a couple weeks. Now, one month in, and we have fresh headlines like this: "Iran war enters its fourth week with no clear end in sight."

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Sunday warned that US- and Israeli-linked universities in the region are now "legitimate targets" in retaliation for attacks on Iranian educational facilities, Anadolu reports.

In a statement carried by the semi-official Fars news agency, the IRGC accused the US and Israel of repeatedly bombing Iranian universities, including Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran.

The Spanish government is walking a tightrope: it rejects involvement in a war it deems illegal, while still contributing to the defense of Turkey and Cyprus, in keeping with its commitments to NATO and the EU

Spain has closed its airspace to flights involved in Operation Epic Fury, launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Not only is it prohibiting the use of the military bases in Rota (Cádiz) and Morón de la Frontera (Seville) by fighter jets or in-flight refueling aircraft participating in the attack; it is also denying airspace access to U.S. aircraft stationed in third countries, such as the United Kingdom or France, according to military sources.

"We have denied the United States the use of the Rota and Morón bases for this illegal war. All flight plans involving operations in Iran have been rejected. All of them, including those for refueling aircraft," said Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez last Wednesday in Congress. In other words, flyovers by bombers or tanker aircraft participating in this operation are not being approved. The Spanish ban has a single exception: in emergency situations, the aircraft in question will be authorized to transit or land.

However, this does not mean that the Morón and Rota bases are not being used by U.S. Air Force (USAF) aircraft, as all missions falling under the bilateral agreement with Washington remain in effect, such as logistical support for U.S. troops deployed in Europe — some 80,000 personnel in total — which is proceeding as usual.

A month into his "little excursion" in Iran, Trump's campaign of sustained airstrikes is yielding preposterous results: significant damage in Iran, but also in America's regional client-states, and also in key global supply chains. Every Monday he calms 'the markets' with assurances that the war is won and "very nearly over," and every Friday, when markets close, he threatens "TOTAL DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!"

In the meantime, non-stop rumors of American troop movements suggest Trump is seriously considering a ground invasion of Iran, ostensibly to "reopen the Strait of Hormuz." Which actually is open, just now on Iran's terms. The US president apparently seeks to return shipping there to the status quo ante. But can he do it with a small landing force? And would such a move even work? It's D-Day for the West as we knew it: do, or die.


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The US-Israel war against Iran is nearly one month in, and amid the ongoing escalating threats and warnings Iran is touting that it is able to tap more than one million fighters for a potential ground confrontation with the United States, according to Tasnim News Agency citing a military source.

Some 7,000 additional US troops, mainly Marines and elite Army Airborne troops, are currently headed toward the region, amid speculation that President Trump will order a military operation to forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, which could involve a high risk island campaign and effort to takeover Kharg Island oil export hub.

Tasnim has described a surge in volunteerism which driving the buildup, with young Iranians seeking to join military formations - angry at Iranian cities coming under heavy US-Israeli bombardment.

The 15-point plan that Team Trump presented to Iran is already D.O.A.

It's an imposed capitulation: a surrender document disguised as "negotiation".

The non-plan plan - imposing demands while begging for a one-month ceasefire - includes:

Zero uranium enrichment on Iranian soil; full dismantlement of Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow installations; all enriched uranium out of Iran; the missile program extremely restricted; no funding for Hezbollah, Ansarallah and Iraqi militias; the Strait of Hormuz totally opened.

All that in exchange for a vague "cancelling the threat of reimposing sanctions".

The only realistic Iranian response to this accumulated wishful thinking might be Mr. Khorramshahr-4 showering his business card across selected targets - consistent with leveraging economic and military deterrence to dictate the real terms.

Contrary to what our media would have us believe, the Islamic Republic of Iran is no more a totalitarian regime than our own. Iran is a far older civilization than the West. Its people possess qualities we lack. Not only should we not be proud of eradicating them, we should listen to their voices.

We are witnessing, astonished, a new kind of war, without understanding it. Several phenomena are converging, clouding our understanding:

On the one hand, we remain fascinated by the military superiority of the West, which made our countries masters of the world for five centuries. We cannot accept that barefoot people could be more civilized than we are. Yet, the Iranians have no use for our comfort and luxury. They are nonetheless a nation of engineers, far more scientifically educated than we are.

Their civilization is characterized first and foremost by an iron will, the likes of which we cannot fathom. In Iranian museums, one sees works of art that artists have dedicated their entire lives to creating. This does not exist in our culture, where we believe creation and concentration are incompatible. They only think of time in the long term, never in terms of the present day. The second characteristic of their civilization is more common: they organize their lives around their perception of spiritual realities. This is how our societies were organized at the end of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, but no longer today. We consider this progress; they do not. These two characteristics lead them to value awareness rather than fleeting pleasures.

Relations between US President Donald Trump and the Kiev regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky have long been defined by mutual distrust, clashing worldviews and high-stakes bargaining rather than any form of genuine partnership.

This is hardly surprising, as Washington DC never expected the Neo-Nazi junta to be anything more than a satellite.

Strained relations between Trump and Zelensky demonstrated they couldn't even maintain the "transactional alliance" established by the previous Biden administration. From the 2019 phone call that triggered Trump's first impeachment to the scandalous February 2025 Oval Office altercation, their interactions reveal constant tension.

Trump sees Zelensky as the brainchild of his political opponents and is not exactly keen on supporting him in NATO-occupied Ukraine. Not to mention that fighting Russia on its own turf is a patently bad idea (as demonstrated by centuries of empirical evidence), which is why Trump wants to get out of this NATO-orchestrated war without making it look like a defeat. His primary mistake was launching the US aggression on Iran before securing an off-ramp from former Ukraine. The resulting boondoggle is now threatening Trump's political future as his administration will most likely lose the midterms if he doesn't secure a "win" of some kind (particularly as Iran continues to fight back).

Washington colluded with Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria to topple Bashar Assad, Joe Kent has said.

The US "worked directly with Al-Qaeda" and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) to topple former President Bashar Assad and destroy Syria, US President Donald Trump's former counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, has said.

Kent, who resigned as head of the US National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the US-Israeli war against Iran, made the remarks in an interview with MintPress News on Friday.

The former senior official reiterated his take on the Iran conflict as the latest in a series of wars waged by the US on behalf of Israel, preceded by the Second Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, in which Washington actively backed terrorist groups:

"We came in and we said: We're going to work with the Israelis, but we're also going to have to work heavily with the Sunni population on the ground in Syria to create an uprising.

"And that's where ISIS came from. We worked directly with Al-Qaeda; Hillary Clinton's emails confirm this. The operations that we were doing to support the so-called Free Syrian Army, and there were some moderates there, but the most effective guys initially were Al-Qaeda and then eventually ISIS."

Netanyahu pitched the war as a repeat of Israel's apparent 'audacious feat' of smashing Hezbollah. The US president should have noted instead Israel's moral and strategic defeat in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must have persuaded Donald Trump that a war on Iran would unfold much like the pager attack in Lebanon 18 months ago.

The two militaries would jointly decapitate the leadership in Tehran, and it would crumble just as Hezbollah had collapsed - or so it then seemed - after Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese group's spiritual leader and military strategist.

If so, Trump bought deeply into this ruse. He assumed that he would be the US president to "remake the Middle East" - a mission his predecessors had baulked at since George W Bush's dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.

Netanyahu directed Trump's gaze to Israel's supposed "audacious feat" in Lebanon. The US president should have been looking elsewhere: to Israel's colossal moral and strategic failure in Gaza.

There, Israel spent two years pummelling the tiny coastal enclave into dust, starving the population, and destroying all civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.

Netanyahu publicly declared that Israel was "eradicating Hamas", Gaza's civilian government and its armed resistance movement that had refused for two decades to submit to Israel's illegal occupation and blockade of the territory.

In truth, as pretty much every legal and human rights expert long ago concluded, what Israel was actually doing was committing genocide - and, in the process, tearing up the rules of war that had governed the period following the Second World War.

But two and a half years into Israel's destruction of Gaza, Hamas is not only still standing, it is in charge of the ruins.

Israel may have shrunk by some 60 per cent the size of the concentration camp the people of Gaza are locked into, but Hamas is far from vanquished.

Rather, Israel is the one that has retreated to a safe zone, from which it is resuming a war of attrition on Gaza's survivors.