March, 8: His Will Be Done
when your spiritual adviser needs a spiritual adviser
What came before:
Four days became four weeks became eight weeks became a hundred days became six months.
“Strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you have victory! For every enemy that is aligned against you - we would strike the ground, for you will give us victory, God!”
“The Lord says it is done. The Lord says it is done. The Lord says it is done, for I hear victory victory victory victory in the quarters of heaven!”
“Victory victory victory victory victory victory victory, for angels are being released right now! Angels are being dispatched right now!”
“Hamandah, Akka, Ataraka, Tedda, Bakka, Sanda, Ata, Ambo, Osa, Kata, Ritte, Eke, Banda, Ata, Ritte, Didi, Asha, Taa...”
“For angels have been dispatched from Africa right now! Africa right now! Africa right now! They’re coming here! They’re coming here! In the name of Jesus, from South America! They’re coming here! They’re coming here! They’re coming here!”
“Angelic reinforcement! Angelic reinforcement! Angelic reinforcement!”
“I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory. I hear the sound of victory.”
If you want to know my dealer, let me put your mind at ease: that’s Paula White. Totally normal behaviour. She’s Trump’s “senior adviser to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives”. Chanting over a war that has killed ~1,300 Iranians including 200 children. Not a cult, by the way.
She wasn’t alone. A room full of pastors gathered around the President, laying hands on him, praying for heavenly blessing as he prosecuted an attack on a country with which he was negotiating the day before. On camera.
I wrote on day four about military commanders telling their troops this is Armageddon. That Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire. These people aren’t speaking in metaphor. They mean it.
And this morning, it looked like they got their wish.
Yes, this is Tehran today.
You can’t see the sun. Oil from the Rey storage facility - struck overnight - has spilled into the sewage system.
Burning crude is running through the drainage network beneath Tehran, setting entire streets on fire. CNN’s Frederik Pleitgen, reporting from inside Iran: “It is raining oil”.
Refineries. Oil depots. A desalination plant on Qeshm Island. The switch from military to civilian targets happened fast!
My guess is that “Plan A” was decapitation. Kill the head and let the country fragment. It didn’t work. Israel kept killing replacements, because No1 needs to sign the surrender right? But today the Assembly of Experts confirmed a new supreme leader has been elected. They’re not announcing who. Can’t blame them - the last one received a housewarming gift from Tel Aviv. Emphasis on the warming.
But the constitutional mechanism survived the physical destruction, and formal procedures are underway. Million-dollar munitions to delay a vote by a few days. Great ROI.
Plan B seems to entail economic strangulation. If you can’t break the government, break the people and their economy.
The Tondgouyan refinery, oil storage, and now: water.
Iran’s Foreign Minister confirmed it: the US struck a freshwater desalination plant on Qeshm Island using HIMARS launched from Bahrain’s Jufair base. Thirty villages lost their water supply. His response was measured but unambiguous - “the US set this precedent, not Iran”.
Iran gets 2% of its water from desalination. It has mountains, rivers, rainfall.
Israel gets 75%. From five coastal plants that sit within range of everything Iran has been firing for eight days.
Kuwait: 90%. Saudi Arabia: 70%. Bahrain: 60%. All desert states running industrial civilisations on machines that need electricity that needs fuel that sits inside infrastructure Iran has already proven it can reach.
When the US hit Qeshm, it opened a front where its closest ally is 37 times more vulnerable than its enemy. Iran can lose every desalination plant it has and barely notice. Israel loses its five and it stops existing as a modern state. The asymmetry is so obvious it could even make it through a Senate hearing.
And it goes beyond water. USrael struck oil infrastructure yesterday - economic sabotage, pure and simple. Iran’s answer arrived last night. A rocket hit Netanya and went straight for the water-desalination and well systems. Another struck Hadera’s power-generation zone. A third hit the refinery sector in Haifa. Not military targets. Infrastructure for infrastructure.
That’s the pattern I wrote about yesterday. Centralised leadership managing every phase. Every escalation met with a symmetrical answer, one rung at a time. Ben Gurion is already severely restricted. If this continues, the economic arteries that keep a country of nine million connected to the outside world are next.
Axios reported today that the US is considering seizing Kharg Island - Iran’s main oil export terminal, 90% of its crude exports. Since China has free passage through Hormuz, bombing refineries alone doesn’t cut it. You need to destroy the oil at the source so there’s nothing for Chinese tankers to load.
Kharg is 25 kilometres off the Iranian coast. In range of every coastal defence missile Iran has been saving. The Lincoln is keeping 300-400 kilometres of distance for a reason. Whoever goes for Kharg gets a lot closer than that. Bay of Pigs, anyone?
Reports surfaced today of a drone hitting a desalination plant in Bahrain.
I don’t buy it.
Iran has spent this entire war trying to peel the Gulf states away from the US. The Shia majority in Bahrain was in the streets cheering Iranian missiles on day four. Pezeshkian just announced a ceasefire toward Arab neighbours (the IRGC’s footnotes notwithstanding). Hitting Bahrain’s water supply - a country where 60% of drinking water comes from desalination - would torpedo everything Iran is trying to achieve.
Same smell as the Cyprus drone that arrived at exactly the moment London had to decide on basing rights. Same smell as the Azerbaijan airport and school on day six - a landlocked exclave with no US bases, no military value, no Iranian interest. Same smell as the Ras Tanura strike that Iran denied immediately and emphatically. Today’s scorecard of things Israeli media claimed that didn’t happen: Gulf states attacking Iran (no), Kurds invading Iran (the political leadership publicly refused), UAE striking Iranian desalination (denied by the UAE within hours).
One false flag is a coincidence. Two is a pattern. We’re on number five. Cui bono keeps pointing in the same direction.
“Western Official Estimates Iran Likely Has Just Days of Missile Strikes Left”.
That was the WSJ. On day five. It’s day eight.
Wave 28 of True Promise 4. And tonight the IRGC announced - via Fars News - that they will increase drone operations by 20% and double the use of ultra-heavy and strategic missiles. A hundred per cent increase.
On the same day that Israeli Channel 14 admitted on air that Iran’s launch capability is increasing despite the strikes.
Well, that WSJ headline from 3 days ago aged pretty well… “Just days of missile strikes left”. Any day now, I suppose.
I wrote yesterday about the ‘declining salvos’ narrative. Simplicius has the graphs to bury it (link). The initial barrage was never meant to be sustainable. What should scare you is that Iran is settling in at the pace it can maintain indefinitely.
A missile struck Tel Aviv on live NBC television yesterday. They couldn't cut away in time.
Today, cluster munitions over Tel Aviv left sixteen impact sites from a single barrage. Sixteen. From a country that's apparently out of missiles.
Iranian air defences over Markazi Province shot down a JASSM cruise missile. That’s $1.5 million right there. And if Iranian’s AD is still knocking down cruise missiles in central Iran eight days in, the reluctance to fly manned aircraft over cities makes more sense than Hegseth’s “complete control of Iranian skies” ever did.
Hezbollah logged 33 operations in a single day. Two IDF soldiers killed by anti-tank missile in southern Lebanon this morning. Drones flying past Nahariyya toward Acre - deeper into Israel than last week. The northern front isn't flickering anymore. It's burning continuously.
The USS Ford is in the Red Sea. Spotted by satellite. Not heading to the Gulf. Parked.
It’s there to protect Israel. Which tells you everything about the state of Israel’s own defences - they need a carrier strike group’s Aegis destroyers and SPY-6 radar to plug the holes in a sensor network that barely exists anymore.
The Lincoln is alone near Iran at 300-400 kilometres. The two-carrier pincer didn’t materialise. One defending. One attacking. A third - the George H.W. Bush - deploying from Norfolk. Weeks away. Meanwhile Iran’s military spokesperson issued what I can only describe as an RSVP: enemy ships entering the Gulf “will end up at the bottom of the waterway”.
And they won’t be navigating blind. Take the Liaowang-1 (Chinese intelligence vessel), definitely not providing Iran with real-time data on US-Israeli naval and aerial movements (link). They’re simply on shore-leave in beautiful Oman.
Israel warned civilians within 16 kilometres of the Fordow nuclear facility to evacuate immediately.
I gamed this scenario two weeks ago in “The second after” (link). But what makes this whole thing absurd is that the enriched uranium is already gone. It moved. Even before the June ‘25 strikes. JD Vance acknowledged it. Rafael Grossi said it publicly.
Conventional bunker busters don’t need 16-kilometre evacuation zones. Fordow is buried under 80 metres of granite. CNN confirmed this week that Iran’s enrichment stockpile is impervious to airstrikes. So either they’re planning something with a very large blast radius, or they’re bluffing.
The stated casus belli was to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. The implied solution to a facility buried under a mountain is to use one.
The war costs ~$1.43 billion per day according to the NYT. Ten billion in seven days - six in operations, four in munitions. $3.5 billion of it completely unbudgeted. Congress hasn’t authorised a single dollar.
And whatever this war is supposed to distract from, it’s not working. The cracks are showing everywhere. Market stress is hitting levels not seen since 2008. Exhibit A: Gold and silver have been rising relentlessly for a year. B: The Nasdaq and S&P are topping. C: Friday’s jobs numbers were a disaster. D: Blackrock and Blackstone have both suspended redemptions on major private credit funds. The whole frickin’ alphabet’s on fire!
Crude hit $112 on weekend proxy markets. Largest weekly gain since records began in 1982.
The casualty cover-up is unravelling.
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany - the largest US military hospital abroad, the primary trauma hub for everything coming out of the Middle East - has suspended labour and delivery services “until further notice”. A source with DOD Wounded Warrior Program experience told Larry Johnson there’s a “flood of casualties” arriving (link). Stars and Stripes is reporting activity across the Kaiserslautern military community. Blood drives announced for next week.
On day five, Dover Air Force Base posted a job listing for part-time “Personal Effects Specialists”. Today, a US major from the 42nd Infantry Division was announced dead from “medical problems” at a base in Kuwait. During Iranian attacks. Medical problems. The lexicon of denial is getting more creative as the body bags get harder to hide. Ballistic missiles now cause medical episodes. Next they’ll be classified as weather events.
A CENTCOM exercise was cancelled on February 22nd. Six days later the war started. Yesterday I noted that the 82nd Airborne’s training exercise got cancelled. Larry reckons it’ll take two weeks to reach base camp. Invasion in three?
Pakistan’s army chief told the Saudi crown prince that Pakistan will strike Iran if Iran launches another attack on Saudi territory. A nuclear-armed state volunteering to fight China’s ally on behalf of America’s ally while dependent on Chinese money. The diplomatic geometry of this war has passed through absurd and arrived at M.C. Escher.
My take? It won’t happen. It’s posturing for Riyadh’s benefit. But the fact that Saudi Arabia feels vulnerable enough to need a nuclear-armed guarantor saying this on the record tells you how the Gulf states are reading their own survival odds.
A British journalist asked Israel’s president the question everyone’s been thinking. “Iran was at the negotiating table when you began this attack. How can you justify that?”
His answer: “It’s quite amazing when you think about the fact that Iran did not adhere to any rule of international law”.
From the country bombing schools and hospitals. From the country whose censorship the BBC called ‘unprecedented’. From the country whose media fabricated Gulf state participation in the war until each country individually denied it. From the country with twelve dead lecturing the one with 1,300.
Tonight, the IRGC doubles the heavy stuff. Tomorrow, Tehran wakes up under the same black sky. And somewhere in the White House, angels are being dispatched.
Still devolving...
I began watching the first vid of the ranting, insane woman in disbelief. Then the guy started walking nonchalantly back & forth behind her and I began laughing, realising it was a spoof, a send-up....it was, right?
Then Trump seated like a toy god, looking very holy & serious, with lessor mortals laying their hands on him in blessing. AI, right?
Please tell me this is all a sick, sick joke in the worst possible taste. Please tell me.
Otherwise, we're being ruled by insanity & pure evil. Repeat: INSANITY & EVIL!
I wonder if it has occurred to these dimwits that the destruction of all that oil infrastructure is not going to magically reverse itself the day the war ends. A long, expensive, and painful rebuilding will have to occur. Global oil demand already pushes the limit of what the world can produce--with a significant amount of capacity out of action indefinitely, we are going to be suffering serious energy shortages worldwide for a long time to come, even if the war ends tomorrow.