🇮🇷❌🇺🇸🇮🇱- Iran has reinforced the entirety of Kharg Island with troops, air defenses, land & sea mines, preparing for a potential US ground operation.

American officials warn of high risks, which includes heavy casualties, due to layered defenses and the recent deployments of MANPADs and anti-armor mines.

Source: CNN

@GeoPWatch

🇮🇱🇮🇷 Excerpt thread from "Treacherous Alliance: Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran & the US".

Book dismantles many pernicious myths, like that the Shah was ever an Israeli ally, or that the Islamic Republic is blindly driven by ideology, rather than national self-interest.

Poor US understanding of past and present Iran-Israel relations, reasons for conflict is "conveniently ignored at great cost to US national interests".

In the 80s, Israel lobbied the US *not* to take Iranian rhetoric at its word (it was then selling Iran weapons).

Both Iran & Israel have strong PR reasons to pretend their conflict is ideological (to appeal to wider Western or Islamic worlds), but real rivalry goes much deeper. Even if the Iran had a different government, little reason to believe those underlying causes would change.

Important for Israel to insist on the fundamental "irrationality" of Iranian leaders, in effort to encourage zero international tolerance of Iranian military capability. Iran's support of the Palestinians had paid PR dividends with the Arab public, if not most Arab leaders.

Israeli-Iranian cultural commonalities & differences, shared sense of superiority to Arabs, overlapping diasporas. Complaint of Iranian Jews faced with Israeli boorishness: "they're uncultured". Clash between Persian high-politeness "taroof" vs go-getting insolence of "chutzpah".

The warmest period of Iranian relations with Israel was in the first decade or so after Israel was founded. Iran viewed Nasser & pan-Arab nationalism (due to seeing it as a Soviet project) as a major threat, and even financed a major oil-pipeline in Israel, to bypass Suez.

As Israel grew in power & expanded its territory, Iran's Shah cautiously backed Palestinian aspirations, despite being well aware that Marxist Palestinian orgs even trained Iranian leftist terrorists. The Mossad taught the Savak, the Shah's secret police, torture techniques. Iran never recognised Israel de jure. Turkey was and still is used a travel loophole.

Israel repeatedly attempted to force Iranian public acknowledgement of their extensive private dealings, much to the Shah's annoyance. Royal Iran, with hegemonic ambitions, in particular wanted to keep an image of fair impartiality in Arab-Israeli affairs.

Israel expected its big victories in the Six Day War to wow or intimidate Iran into official recognition of the Jewish state. Instead, the opposite happened. The Shah became increasingly cold, and was openly critical of Israeli occupation of the Golan & Palestinian Territories.

Iran-Israel relations thawed somewhat over recognition of Iraq as a growing mutual threat. However Iranian Iraq concerns were again more over fears it would become a centre of Soviet influence -Iran had been occupied by the Russians in both WW1 & WW2., sharing a long border.

📝 Peter Nimitz: Iran likely would have had to democratize had it not been for external pressure repeatedly delegitimizing moderate politicians and legitimizing the IRGC hardliners.

📖 Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S. — Trita Parsi, 2007.

🧵 https://fxtwitter.com/haravayin_hogh/status/2037341597604708576?s=20

🇺🇸❌🇮🇷 — NEW: U.S. officials told Reuters they can confirm the destruction of roughly one-third of Iran’s extensive missile stockpile as the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign approaches its one-month mark.

➡️ The fate of another third remains uncertain, though airstrikes likely damaged, destroyed, or buried many of those weapons in underground tunnels and bunkers.

➡️ A similar assessment applies to Iran’s drone capabilities, with about one-third confirmed destroyed.

➡️ Overall, the intelligence suggests that while a large portion of Iran’s arsenal is either eliminated or currently unusable, the country still retains a substantial number of missiles and could potentially recover some that are damaged or buried once the conflict ends.

➡️ These findings contradict Trump's claim that Iran has “very few rockets left.”