The Corridor Wars – The Art Of Strategic Ambiguity |
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis. Dante Alighieri
The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.
The chain of events is triggered by US initiatives, albeit driven by an overwhelmingly Israeli influence, but conflict and events are controlled by Iran since they were always designed to affect Iran’s decision-making. Iran has neither been overcome by them nor affected by them. Iran is not willing to settle for US-Israeli terms. This has frustrated the US as well as Israel, who had hoped on the 28th of February, with the commencement of the Operation Epic Fury, a quick and easy acquittal of Iran was likely. They were wrong.
Epic Fury gradually faded away on the 7th of May 2026, after 62 days, since it did not have the mandatory Congressional approval needed. A grace period of 60 days allowed the President to pursue a conflict in the national interest, but he would need Congressional approval within a 60-day period. The 60 days were up; Congress was not ready to approve Trump’s Iran war. This led to Project Freedom, which started on the 4th of May but petered out after a couple of days on the 6th of May. It was designed to escort commercial shipping in and out of the Gulf but failed and was dropped. We are now sitting on the edge of Operation Sledgehammer, but the real shooting war has not started, though some skirmishes took place when the US bombed Bandar Abbas on May 26th, and Iran retaliated by hitting a US base in Kuwait on 28th May 2026. The new 60-day grace period has not yet started under US Constitutional Laws!
In roughly 90 days of conflict, we hear of US-Israeli rhetoric switch from a 48-hour war, to regime-change, to unconditional surrender, to be given custody of the enriched uranium, to end any nuclear program – civil or military, and now the opening of an already opened Hormuz Strait. The changing objectives and shifting war demands projected by the US indicate a conflict marked by incompetence, total miscalculation, and in search of a strategy – a kind of on-the-job learning. The facts and figures are gradually coming out now and cannot be hidden – destruction to the tune of dysfunctionality of 8 US bases and multiple facilities, including those of NATO, in the Gulf Region, a total of 42 aircraft lost, and the figure keeps rising, an unknown number of dead and wounded, yet to be ascertained, but reported by the Intercept to be around 700. Iran, on the other hand, has lost leadership and infrastructure but was prepared to undergo these losses to protect their sovereignty. The missile launching silos comprising 30 of the 33 batteries are still fully functional, and Iran has 70% of their inventory of what was there prior to the conflict starting. The ceasefire has allowed them to address redundancy through the auspices of the Chinese, and there has been a radical improvement in their air defense systems, cyber warfare, and ballistic missile capacity.
To make sense of what the cost of war has been for the US, a look at the official statistics gives a real story. The Pentagon stated that the expenditure on the war was about $25 billion; independent economists put the figure at $ 63 billion to about $ 1 trillion. The Congress was presented with a defense budget to the tune of $ 1.5 trillion, which is a 50% increase from what it was. The US is now mulling over the merger with the Israeli military through a new law being proposed, i.e., Section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Israel knows that the public blowback within the US society, to Israel’s blatant manipulation and interference in US policy-making, is finally coming to an end and that this President and his stay in office will be their last opportunity. The cost indicates the war has not gone too well, the merger indicates that Israel is trying to capture the United States in a life-long bear hug – a parasite living off the US.
The impact of the war on the global economy has been horrendous. It has affected 20% of global oil and LNG. Brent Crude rose from $72 to........