🇺🇸 🇮🇷 🇮🇱 Mike Pompeo, at the Free Iran Summit: "I'm convinced that you all, in your lifetime, will get to celebrate that very moment when the regime in Iran collapses."

Today, I spoke before the Free Iran 2024 Summit in Paris in support of a democratic, non-nuclear Republic of Iran, after the Iranian people overwhelmingly rejected the mullahs' theocracy by boycotting their sham elections. I highlighted the need to provide political support for the organized resistance and to recognize the right of the Iranian protesters and Resistance Units to confront terrorist entities, such as the Revolutionary Guard Corps, to secure freedom for their noble nation and people.

📎 Disclose TV

🇸🇩 🇦🇪 🇺🇳 Sudan accuses UAE of fueling war with weapons to paramilitary rivals. UAE calls claim `ludicrous’

🔶️ U.N. experts monitoring an arms embargo in Darfur reported “credible” evidence in January that the UAE sent weapons to the Rapid Support Forces several times a week from northern Chad. U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield on Tuesday reiterated a U.S. appeal to all “external actors to stop fueling and prolonging this conflict, and enabling these atrocities, by sending weapons to Sudan.”

🔶️ Edem Wosornu, operations director for the U.N. humanitarian office, told the council the lives of 800,000 civilians trapped in El Fasher “hang in the balance,” echoing the risk of mass atrocities and warning that the violence in the encircled city “is just the tip of the iceberg.”

🔶️ Two decades ago, Darfur became synonymous with genocide and war crimes, particularly by the notorious Janjaweed Arab militias, against populations that identify as Central or East African. Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes.

🔶️ Last Thursday, the Security Council adopted a resolution demanding the Rapid Support Forces immediately halt its siege of El Fasher — the only capital in Darfur it doesn’t control. The council also urged the paramilitary force and Sudan’s military “to seek an immediate cessation of hostilities.”

https://apnews.com/article/un-sudan-uae-clash-war-weapons-paramilitary-fb5fde060708900d8b82774135828f85

🚀 🇺🇸 🛰 NASA awards SpaceX $843M contract to bring ISS out of orbit

🔶️ NASA picked SpaceX to develop and deliver a spacecraft that'll bring the International Space Station out of orbit after the operational life of the ISS ends in 2030, the space agency announced Wednesday.

🔶️ The spacecraft, which NASA is calling the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle, needs to guide the ISS safely back through Earth's atmosphere before its planned crash into the Pacific Ocean.

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/27/nasa-spacex-international-space-station-deorbit-vehicle

📖 🇺🇸 ☢️ Cheney recollecting the joint staff told him in 1991 it would take 17 tactical nuclear weapons to destroy an Iraqi Republican Guard division. And that's with greater concentration of force than exists in Ukraine today (not that anyone's operating as a division)

🔶️ Cheney: "The nuclear, tactical nuclear weapons option was something I wanted. I wanted to know myself, if something happened, is this an option?...I found out it takes 17 weapons to destroy an Iraqi Republican Guard division...that is what I was told."

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/richard-b-cheney-oral-history

📎 Shashank Joshi

📝 🇵🇸 🇮🇱 Why Samson Doctrine doesn't work in the 21st Century | CIG #commentary

🔶️ In the Bible, Samson the Nazirite toppled the Philistine government in Gaza. He dragged them down along with himself by destroying the pillars of their Temple. "Let me die with the Philistines!" (Judges 16:30). This mindset is mirrored in Israeli strategic policy, where they would launch full-scale nuclear retaliation if they faced destruction. Now, throughout the Oct 7th War, the Israeli Defense Forces have flattened the Gaza Strip through indiscriminate bombardment. The impact on Hamas' military capabilities however, is negligible.

🔶️ Samson Doctrine made sense in the 1960s when politically fragile secular states opposed Israel with conventional militaries. But the math has changed since then. Direct threats to Israel are mainly an amalgamation of various factions, ideologies and non-state actors. Much like Hamas, will bombing cities and deserts militarily defeat them?

🔶️ Whether or not the US prevents Israel from using nuclear weapons, there is no guarantee it would achieve the killing blow. Even worse, an Israel which no longer holds any nuclear deterrence after expending their stocks. Mulling the Samson Option is to acknowledge that Israel is losing the strategic war.

🔶️ It will bloody the nose of the region, with the added effect of uniting neighboring countries against Israel which have been previously divided. Effectively reversing decades of Israeli foreign policy gains. Can Israel survive isolated from the majority of the world? Opposing forces have the capabilities to blockade the majority of goods arriving into Israel along with the destruction of their power grid.

🔶️ The cost so far without nukes has nearly brought about the complete and total destruction of Israel. Their economy is shattered, Israelis are exhausted, the sea blockade lingers and the US military is spread too thin, weary of waging wars for Israel in the middle east while refocusing the majority of manpower & material towards Europe and the Pacific. Leaving Israel to face an unprecedented existential crisis like no other.