One week into the US-Israeli attack on Iran, the mission has been extended from "4 days" to "4 weeks" to "4 months" to "as long as it takes." But what IS the mission? It was "regime change," but Iran is not "surrendering" despite its leadership being assassinated. In fact, surviving Iranian leadership is conveying that its counter-strikes will continue until ITS mission is accomplished. So, a war of attrition until one side blinks? In the meantime, damage to neighboring countries in the Middle East, and to the global economy, is already setting in. This missile war threatens to become a maelstrom of truly epic proportions.

Which brings us to what is motivating the Americans to do this. We all know they're in lockstep with an Israeli regime that has been salivating at the prospect of "taking out Iran" since 1979. But why the desperation, extreme rhetoric, absurdity and gross risk-taking from the Americans? What, truly, made them furious enough with Iran to even name their operation "Epic Fury"?


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Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, issued a surprising televised address on Saturday as the war involving Iran, the United States, and Israel entered its eighth day.

In a pre-recorded five-minute video statement aired on Iranian state television, Pezeshkian apologized for Iranian strikes on neighboring countries while simultaneously warning that Iran would never surrender to outside pressure. The remarks come amid escalating regional tensions, U.S. military deployments, and an intensifying campaign against Iranian military infrastructure.

Pezeshkian acknowledged that Iranian attacks had struck targets beyond its borders during the conflict and issued a direct apology to countries in the region.

According to the Iranian president, Tehran has now ordered a halt to attacks against neighboring nations unless those countries launch attacks against Iran first. The directive reportedly followed a decision by a Temporary Leadership Council after days of intense military exchanges across the Middle East.

While extending the apology, Pezeshkian attempted to frame the earlier attacks as actions carried out during a moment of chaos after senior Iranian leadership figures were killed during the conflict.

Despite the conciliatory tone toward neighboring countries, Pezeshkian delivered a defiant message toward the United States and Israel, particularly in response to warnings from President Donald Trump demanding Iran's "unconditional surrender."

The Iranian leader rejected the idea outright.

"Anyone who believes that we will surrender unconditionally should take that dream to their grave," Pezeshkian declared.


Read the AI-generated translation of his speech:

After 15 months of a fragile ceasefire, Lebanon woke up on March 2 to the familiar sounds of Israeli bombs. As the violence escalates and tens of thousands are displaced, Lebanon's social divisions threaten to worsen an already dire situation.

For the first time since the "ceasefire" with Israel of November 27, 2024, Hezbollah had launched missiles toward the northern occupied territories of Palestine. Hezbollah said in a statement that it had launched rockets and drones from Lebanon to Israel in response to the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and as a response to ongoing Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Israel quickly responded with a series of airstrikes across Lebanon's southern towns, the Bekaa and Beirut's southern suburbs, throwing the entire country into chaos. Israel also ordered full evacuation orders for all of the areas south of the Litani river, all of Beirut's southern suburbs, and six entire villages in the Bekaa, effectively forcefully displacing more than 1.2 million Lebanese civilians.

The Lebanese government convened an urgent cabinet meeting on March 2nd that ended with the declaration that Hezbollah's actions were "unlawful" and that the group's military activities were to be restricted. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said the state would ban Hezbollah's military activity and insisted that decisions of war and peace belong to the Lebanese state, and that those who fired the missiles will be brought to justice. Different Lebanese right-wing parties denounced Hezbollah's action as "dragging Lebanon into a war for Iran."

Social gaps in the country are deepening, furthering a crisis that is quickly spiraling out of control.

Hungary and Slovakia are the only EU nations standing up to the Kiev Godfather and truly representing Europeans' interests.

Politics can be very rough. Yet, usually, as long as they don't collapse into war, at least in public a certain minimum pretense of decorum is maintained. Especially by governments vitally dependent on others' support. Ukraine under the rule of never-reelected Vladimir Zelensky, however, has anything but a normal political system.

It is in this context that Vladimir Zelensky's latest folly needs to be seen: Zelensky has threatened Hungary's leader Viktor Orban, telling him he will hand the prime minister's address over to "our guys" in the military so that they could "communicate with him in their own language." Obviously, this is not even a hint of violence anymore, but the equivalent of a mafia godfather placing a dead horse's head on your pillow or leaving a bullet on your doormat. The reason: Orban is exercising his right within the EU not to agree to yet another insane "loan" - the kind that will never be paid back, at least not by anyone in Ukraine - for Zelensky's astronomically corrupt regime.

Orban is right about that "loan," of course. Yet that isn't even the core of this particular scandal. That is the fact that Zelensky feels he can issue a direct, mafia-style threat against the leader of an EU member state. Regarding Zelensky, though, there is no surprise here. He has been at the top of a regime that combines a bizarre sense of entitlement, shameless demands, outrageously greedy corruption, and a repulsive record of sabotage and assassination operations, very much even against its Western backers. Ask Germans who still have a spine about the Nord Stream attack, for instance. Or, if you can't find a German with a spine, ask Viktor Orban, who has correctly called it "state terrorism."

What needs more emphasis than Zelensky's depraved sense of impunity is that he has reason to feel that way. It is true that, in this instance, the EU Commission has publicly protested against his barbaric behavior. But let's be realistic, that is a formality, nothing but a gentle slap on the wrist for appearances' sake. What really matters is that first the West as a whole and recently the EU "elites" on their own have spent years emboldening Zelensky and his regime by feeding Ukraine's corruption, accepting and spreading Kiev's lies, and suppressing any criticism of this policy as "Russian talking points."

Indeed, in the EU, Hungary and Slovakia as well have been harassed and treated as pariahs for their resistance to this coddling of the Zelensky regime. It is all the more remarkable that both countries have principally stuck to their guns, even while having to concede ground repeatedly.

Obscene US-Israeli murder of Iranian schoolchildren cannot be whitewashed

Western media is either silent or implicitly blaming Tehran for the strike that killed 168 girls

In Iran, under ongoing US-Israeli attacks, a mass funeral took place today for 168 Iranian schoolgirls aged 7-12, killed by an Israeli airstrike on February 28.

The strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' primary school in Minab, southern Iran, in broad daylight, when the children were at school. Fourteen teachers were also killed in the bombing. The bombing occurred as part of US-Israeli attacks sadistically dubbed 'Operation Epic Fury', attacks which have to date targeted schools, hospitals, residential areas and other civilian infrastructure.

Minab girls' primary school in Iran, which was targeted by the child-killer Israeli and American regimes pic.twitter.com/utl6YjGcbD

— Iran Screenshot (@iranscreenshot) March 2, 2026

It was a scene all too familiar to Palestinians: grief-stricken parents collapsing sobbing at the site of their daughters' murders, clutching bloodstained backpacks, pulling out schoolbooks and personal items of their slain daughters. Children's desks covered in debris from the bombing. A child's shoe in the rubble. Death where life had flourished.

None of this is being conveyed by Western legacy media - only ghoulish gloating over the US-Israeli bombardment of Iran and the murder of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and his young granddaughter and children.

"The question is no longer whether America can afford this war on Iran. It is whether America's allies can afford America."

For three weeks, Washington and West Jerusalem have marketed the dubiously titled "Operation Epic Fury" as a limited, surgical campaign against Iranian nuclear and defence manufacturing facilities, to remove a perceived existential threat to Israel. The reality is a haemorrhaging of normative power, the fragile legitimacy that allows an empire to lead not through coercion alone, but through the promise of protection. When the protector becomes the proximate cause of the threat, the accounting shifts. The cost is no longer measured in Tomahawks expended ($2.2 million each) or Patriot interceptors launched ($44 million per volley), but in Kuwaiti bases incinerated, Qatari radar arrays allegedly obliterated, Bahraini water facilities targeted, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, supplying 30% of Israel's oil, now in Tehran's crosshairs.

This is what uncontainable war looks like: a "limited" strike that horizontalized into a regional catastrophe, exposing the miscalculation at the heart of the US-Israel strategy. Today, the allies are waking up to the protection racket's dirty secret, where you pay for the promise, not the performance — and now the failure is burning through their infrastructure, their security, and their future.

Donald Trump today, in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, stated that his goal for the current war with Iran is unconditional surrender. Specifically, he wrote:

"There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!"

Moreover, Trump specified that the US will have final say on "the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)."

In stating all this, however, Trump is essentially announcing that the US will be at war for an extended period.

Historians have long noted that demands for unconditional surrender have worked to prolong conflicts rather than shorten them, leading to needless death on both sides. After all, Trump is essentially saying that the Iranians should put themselves in a position of accepting whatever terms the United States seeks to unilaterally impose, including the total dissolution of the Iranian state, plus sanctions, punishments, occupations and other humiliations. What government would accede to this? Very few would, which is why only very weak, small, and relatively unarmed regimes can be forced into accepting unconditional surrender after anything less than a protracted war.

The heresy of Walt and Mearsheimer's Israel lobby theory was the claim that Israel and its supporters pushed the U.S. into war. Marco Rubio has now confirmed this analysis when he admitted that Trump went to war with Iran because of Israel.

The greatest heresy of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's 2006 Israel lobby paper (published by the London Review of Books because American publications turned it down), was the assertion that the lobby had pushed the disastrous Iraq war on the George Bush administration. The media called this an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Paul Wolfowitz said neoconservative was a euphemism for Jewish.

The left also dismissed the idea, saying Iraq was an imperialist war for resources, and the dog wags the tail, not the other way round.

But that was a long time ago, and the evidence of Israel's influence over U.S. foreign policy has only mounted. Obama nullified the policy he'd laid out boldly in Cairo- of stopping the settlements- because pro-Israel groups had virtually unlimited access to the White House in the run-up to his reelection bid in 2012. Biden signed off on the Gaza genocide in evident concern for pro-Israel billionaire donors (per the Washington Post and Responsible Statecraft).

Then yesterday Marco Rubio said the heresy out loud.

The first week of the military operation in Iran is coming to a close, and one thing is already clear: the US hasn't managed to deliver a knockout blow to Iran and repeat the 'Venezuela scenario'.

Washington and West Jerusalem have apparently realized that regime change in Iran is impossible without a ground invasion, and are looking for candidates to carry it out.

The Kurds in Iraq and Iran

The Kurds are a stateless ethnic group. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, they have spread across Türkiye, Syria, Iran, and Iraq where they constitute a persecuted minority. The Kurds' ongoing fight for independence has often been exploited by external players who promised them statehood but betrayed them when their services were no longer required.

The Iraqi Kurds came the closest to achieving independence. After the Iraq War, they solidified control over northern Iraq. They have a modest economy and most importantly, their own militia, the Peshmerga. Kurdish communities also exist on the Iranian border. This makes the Peshmerga the most likely candidate for boots on the ground in Iran.

So now the die is cast and the United States has joined Israel in an unprovoked attack on a non-threatening Iran to destroy its military capabilities and to bring about regime change. This is a major mis-step that could easily turn out very badly as it is a pointless war of choice that could easily escalate to neighboring states and become nuclear if a reckless Israel decides it needs to "defend" itself against an Iranian response. US Navy vessels might also find themselves vulnerable to Iranian missiles.

As the attack took place, President Donald Trump announced the latest bit of nation destroying from his Florida home away from the White House, which he is also wrecking as part of a lavish and characteristically tasteless ballroom "reconstruction." By way of his Truth Social Platform, he declared early Saturday morning:

"We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally — again — obliterated. We're going to annihilate their navy."

The destruction of the missiles as a top priority was clearly under orders from Israel, which sees the weapons as the major threat against it. Trump also called on the Iranians to rise- up and overthrow their government.