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Notes -
I made a prediction that Iran might step up attacks before the midterms. Looks like that may be happening and the rates of attacks are up:
Two ships sink near Hormuz after being hit by projectiles amid surge in attacks
Container ship hit by projectile sinks in Strait of Hormuz, Singapore says
The decision to pause the war by Trump remains puzzling to me, and it suggests a lack of conviction in the war effort. A side confident of success would act immediately rather than grant Iran weeks to strengthen its defenses, plan retaliation, consult its allies, and position its assets. One thing it certainly isn't doing is helping with inflation:
Consumer prices rose 3.7% annually in September as gas prices skyrocket
Trump seems to have a plan though, although it is not popular even among Republicans:
Bipartisan group of senators call on Trump to rescind Russian diesel deal
Polling numbers and prediction markets also paint a pretty bleak forecast for the Republicans.
From Nate Silver:
If things go as they seem, we are about to witness the end of the age of Trump. If we get a Blue Tsunami -- and I believe we will -- Republicans are going to turn on him. Why wouldn't they? What can he offer them at this point but big fat L's. The only question now is what comes next on the Right, because it's certainly not Trumpism.
Trump was doing great until he decided to simp for Israel and attack Iran. The next Republican candidate could just keep Trump's playbook while doing away with the retarded stuff (Zionism, tariffs).
You could argue just as much that the US foreign policy establishment was already primed for this, independent of Trump’s administration. Had October 7th and the proceeding events happened under Kamala’s watch, for all we know we’d still be in the exact same situation today (or worse). We’ll never know though.
Looking at it from an institutional POV rather than the personal whims of the current president, the war with Iran follows the exact same script as every other war we fumble our way into and lose our way out of:
Create a “problem” by arming or provoking a group in another country to adopt a violent stance.
Stir up a reaction among the public by spreading disinformation or demonizing the government.
Propose a “solution” to the problem that involves military intervention or overthrowing some group or government to put the people you want in power.
This isn’t a “Trump” phenomenon exclusively. Even after more than a quarter of a century of wars, the west still doesn’t understand shit about how the Middle East works. That’s why back in 2019, Ali Khamenei gave a speech in Baghdad where he said, “Praise be to God who’s given us such foolish enemies.”
And just because there’s “opposition” in Iran that would like to see change (as there is in every country), that doesn’t mean they think an outside force should overthrow the government. That’s why in places like Syria, protests had to be instigated from the outside, via social media; and in Iran, the US setup an entire network of servers and app’s to facilitate the mobilization of dissent in the country (that’s what the smuggling in of thousands of Starlink terminals was about).
The whole point of the Starlink system (which was reputed to be impossible to jam) was to create this ‘parallel Internet’ that would evade the surveillance of the IRGC. What Starlink essentially does differently than other satellite systems (which are geostationary systems in high orbit) is use a large amount of satellites that move rapidly in low orbit with equally rapid changes in frequency. And so the “thousands of terminals” then formed these arrayed beams that effectively “track” the satellites. So the system goes in and scans the sky with a terminal, locks onto a satellite rising in the west and follows it until it sets in the east; and then repositions itself to pick up the next one.
The reason why the network went down though, was because its claims were false. The signals did end up getting jammed due to jammers that were synchronized across the entire landmass of Iran. They adopted a strategy the Chinese actually came up with that was developed in anticipation of an invasion of Taiwan: synchronize jammers across the ku-band frequency to saturate the airwaves with a stronger signal, blocking communication between terminals and satellites.
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