🇮🇷🇺🇸⚡️ — Iran has adopted a harder stance ahead of potential negotiations, demanding major concessions, Reuters reports.

➡️ Its key demands include assurances against further strikes, financial compensation for losses, formal control of the Strait, and no negotiations on its ballistic missile program.

🇺🇸❌🇮🇷 — BREAKING: The Pentagon is set to send a brigade combat team from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East to support operations against Iran, according to WSJ.

➡️ A formal deployment order for the roughly 3,000-soldier unit is expected within the next few hours.

➡️ No final decision has been made on sending ground forces into Iran, officials said.

🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇶 The U.S. broke the truce it had with the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) as soon as the evacuations of Victoria Base and the Green Zone in Baghdad were done by assassinating the PMF commander in Anbar province, Hajji Saad Duway al-Baij.

Iraqi sources report that Saad al-Baij played a crucial role in negotiating this truce with the US allowing the USAF to safely evacuate all remaining personnel at the Victoria Base and the U.S. in response, killed him, hence last night's retaliation by the PMF against other American bases in Iraq.

This act continues to reinforce the rule that the U.S. is not a trustworthy, credible negotiation partner that will always go behind your back once they get what they wanted from you. This act continues to discourage any real diplomacy between Tehran and Washington D.C.

📝 Ahmad Askary: The one lesson we must take from the past 30 years is that what begins as an experiment in the periphery eventually makes its way back to the imperial core in a much more refined manner. The Israelification of the world is such a process.

The treatment of Palestinians became the treatment of neighbouring states in the region (destroying cities, infrastructure, expelling entire populations, killing governments to make governance impossible), which has become the treatment of countries further afield like Cuba (under siege with no electricity) and Venezuela (helicoptering in and kidnapping a country’s leader).

All norms incubated by Israel in the Arab world and, through colonisation of US halls of power, now spread to every node of decision-making in American empire, which has abandoned any pretense to a higher moral Christian or post-war Universalist notion of international law, and now fully adopts Israel’s Bronze Age/Old Testament mindset.

And all of these practices, incubated and proliferating in the periphery, will come back in refined form and deployed on the core’s citizens. The War on Terror brought back surveillance, militarised policing, “domestic threats”, etc. Palantir’s surveillance empire is another forward example.

The Israelification of the world is here. And what Israel does or wants is no longer a distant sand people affair, but something that increasingly defines the architecture of this decrepit civilisation.

🔗 Ahmad Salman

🇮🇶🤝🇮🇶❌🇺🇸🇮🇱 — The Iraqi National Security Council authorizes the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces and other security agencies to operate under the principle of the right to respond and self-defense to counter military attacks targeting their headquarters.

🔴 @alsaa_plus_EN

🇺🇸🤝🇮🇱 Gavin Newsom clarifies he is a “proud Zionist” who “reveres Israel.”

He said he “regrets” calling Israel an “apartheid state”, only meaning to describe Netanyahu’s leadership.

🔗 AF Post (@AFpost)

⚖️ Judge releases a 12 year old accused of pinning a 12-year-old girl down and shoving rocks in her mouth so his friends could rape her

Miami-Dade Judge Richard Hersch ruled that Nelson Nunez, 13, the alleged ringleader of the gang rape, must remain in jail

Jusiah Jones, 12, was released but placed on strict house arrest. He has had prior run-ins with the law and was out of juvenile detention.

Xavier Tyson, 15, is out of custody but is required to appear in court soon; he was 14 when the alleged attack occurred

Jones’ lawyer argued that his client acted under duress and that the victim’s statements suggested he was remorseful but was seen smiling as soon after he heard the judge let him go with essentially a slap on the wrist.

🔗 Unlimited Ls

📝Many people still insist that this war is not primarily driven by Israeli foreign policy goals. It's possible to argue against this by sifting through media reports about who called who in the lead up to the war, and this is the tack most people take. But I'd like to build a case for Israeli strategic primacy through a different route.

Place yourself in the shoes of an Israeli strategic planner and assume that your principal strategic goal is Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. It should be uncontroversial to assert that eliminating Iran is a necessary (and perhaps the most important) component of this goal.

The IDF consists of 170k active duty personnel, and is suffering recruitment and retention issues. The IAF packs an outsized punch considering Israel's size, but it's ultimately a mid-tier air force with ~250 fighter airframes (most of which are F-16s and F-15s), no bombers, and only 11 refueling tankers. The Israeli Navy is a souped-up coastal defense force and can't be expected to operate in the Persian Gulf.

Compare this to Iran, which has a manpower pool an order of magnitude larger, tens of thousands of drones and thousands of ballistic missiles, an asymmetric naval force focused on area denial, extensive proxy forces, and hugely favorable terrain for defensive operations.

There's no chance of deploying an IDF ground component onto Iranian soil. It's an impossible prospect on a political level for any other state in the region to support this, and Iraq and Syria stand between Israel and Iran. Even if the Iranians didn't outnumber the IDF by a huge margin, sustaining some kind of invasion simply isn't on the table.

The best you can do in terms of direct offensive operations is the following:

• Launch a short campaign (remember you're limited by refueling aircraft) of aerial attacks using standoff munitions like ALBMs
• Insert agents into Iran and have them launch drones from within the country
• Try to arm and support proxy forces within Iran, or organize multiple small invasions
• Orchestrate political violence, protests, terrorist attacks, etc

The Israelis have attempted all of these, and so far none of them have seemed to fundamentally shift the strategic picture. This leaves one option on the table: get the United States to fight Iran for you. Considering this has been an Israeli goal for decades, and one administration after another has balked at the prospect, it's not an easy task.

You'll draw vast sums of money out of a network of American Zionist billionaires to influence an election. You'll need the closest possible connections to US leadership, ideally agents within the executive's own family. You'll want to have your people involved in the US foreign policy apparatus, putting them in between the US government and Iran, so you can control negotiations. You'll need people within the Department of War, though having an agent as Secretary of War would draw too much attention. Once all of this is achieved, you'll stand a chance of orchestrating events to suck the US gradually into direct combat with Iran.

You start off by provoking the Iranians into attacking you. Hit some embassies, assassinate IRGC personnel, launch airstrikes on Tehran. Keep pushing about the dangers of an Iranian nuclear weapon, make sure the US treats it like a red line. Pressure the administration into participating in a limited strike. Bide your time when necessary, then suddenly escalate again. When it seems like an off-ramp might be coming up, find a red line and cross it. Keep going until American hegemony itself is on the line. The sunk cost fallacy will ensure events unfold in your favor until American boots hit the ground.

This is, of course, exactly what we're seeing. You can make a case that this war is really about China, or energy markets, or defense industry profits. There are sound arguments that some US interests overlap with Israeli goals. But it is *very* hard to make a case that this war isn't significantly the result of decades of Israeli soft power, influence operations, and espionage.

🔗 Amerikanets

🇮🇱🤝🇩🇪 Volkswagen reportedly is working with Israeli defense company, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to convert the Osnabrück car factory into a missile plant and build interceptors for the Iron Dome.

@CIG_telegram

🇮🇱🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 Israeli and/or American standoff munitions targeted a garbage truck parking lot in Tehran a few days ago, destroying several garbage trucks and killing a worker.

Why would the IAF or USAF target garbage trucks when Iran's capacity to launch drones and missiles hasn't been degraded at all? Why would the IAF and USAF choose to terrorize the population of Tehran by disrupting garbage collection instead of degrading the Iranian missile program which American and Israeli politicians keep claiming is one of the major war goals?

The goal of this strike and the war goals of Israel especially are to turn Iran into a failed state and degrade the Iranian state's ability to provide essential public services like garbage collection, to increase the misery which Israel hopes would lead to regime change or an all-out civil war.

Targeting civilian infrastructure is considered a war crime under the Hague Conventions.

@CIG_telegram

🇺🇸🇸🇦❌🇮🇷 — Answering to a reporter that asked him about it, US President Donald J. Trump says that Saudi Arabia is fighting alongside United States against the Iranian Regime

📰 Reporter:

Is MBS encouraging you to do certain things related to Iran?

🇺🇸 Trump:

He does.

He is a warrior.
He is fighting with us, by the way.

🇯🇵🛢 Japan to release national oil reserves from Thursday

Japan will release another part of its strategic oil reserves from Thursday and will tap into joint stockpiles held by producing nations in the country by the end of the month, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said Tuesday.

“In order to secure the necessary amount for the whole of Japan … we will release the state (oil) reserve from 26th March,” she said in a post on X.

“Furthermore, a release from the joint reserve of oil-producing countries is expected to begin in March,” Takaichi added.

The announcement comes after Tokyo started releasing 15 days’ worth of private-sector petroleum reserves last week.

Takaichi previously said that a month’s worth of government stockpiles would also be released.

Japan depends on the Middle East for 95 percent of its oil imports.

Its strategic oil reserves are among the world’s largest and stood at more than 400 million barrels as of December.

A joint reserve is held in the country by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, according to the Petroleum Association of Japan.

🔗 https://insiderpaper.com/japan-to-release-national-oil-reserves-from-thursday/

🇰🇷🚫🚙 South Korea will begin enforcing a 5-day car rotation system, banning certain cars from driving on certain days.

Starting Wednesday, the move is part of the government's energy-saving measures to mitigate the impact of global energy shortages, Seoul-based Yonhap News reported, citing the Climate Ministry.

The government will strengthen monitoring of the public sector's compliance with the license plate-based rationing system, under which cars are divided into five groups based on the last digit of their license plate numbers, and each group is prohibited from driving on a designated weekday.

Electric and hydrogen vehicles are exempt from such restrictions.

The system has been in place but was previously run loosely.

Some 1.5 million vehicles will be subject to the stricter rules, with the measure expected to help the country save about 3,000 barrels of crude oil every day.

South Korea's daily crude oil consumption stands at around 2.8 million barrels, with about half of the volume used for transportation.

The government will also ease restrictions on coal-fired power generation on days with low fine dust levels, in addition to pushing for five nuclear reactors currently under maintenance to swiftly resume operation as part of efforts to reduce consumption of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is also affected by the Mideast conflict.

🔗 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/south-korea-to-enforce-5-day-vehicle-rotation-system-as-mideast-conflict-hits-energy-supplies/3877074

🇻🇳🚫✈️ Vietnam Airlines to Suspend Some Routes as Jet Fuel Risks Rise

Vietnam Airlines will temporarily suspend flights on some domestic routes as jet fuel shortages and rising fuel prices caused by the conflict in the Middle East start to impact the nation’s air travel.

The national flag carrier will cut around 23 flights per week from April 1 over tightened supplies of jet fuel, according to a statement from the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam. VietJet Aviation JSC is also reducing flights on some routes, according to schedules on its booking website.

Bamboo Airways will strive to maintain flights during peak travel periods, though frequencies may be lower than last year if oil prices stay high, the airline said in a statement. It also called on the government to offer more support to airlines, including further reductions in environmental protection tax and aviation fuel taxes.

The aviation agency warned earlier this month that jet fuel shortages could emerge from early April as suppliers are delaying deliveries or may invoke force majeure clauses to terminate contracts. Around 70% of Vietnam’s jet fuel is imported, primarily from China and Thailand.

🔗 https://archive.ph/VjO0y