From a Wall Street Journal piece I quoted yesterday:
> The Trump administration as soon as this week plans to announce that multiple countries have agreed to form a coalition that will escort ships through the waterway, which runs along the Iranian coast, U.S. officials said. The U.S. and potential coalition countries are still discussing whether those operations would begin before or after the war ends. <
I commented:
What is the use of escorting ships through the Strait “after the war ends”?
So far there are no takers of Trump’s call for allies. I doubt that there will be any.
No European country and no Asia ‘ally’ has offered to help him to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Nor does the U.S. Navy.
So for once I was right – nearly right:
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has decided to dispatch the Czech cruiser ‘Krteček’ to the Persian Gulf, making the Czech Republic the sole EU nation to join the US-led coalition. 💪🇨🇿🇺🇸
Czech what? Some twitteratis fell for the joke. But Czechia is a landlocked country with no navy. Krteček though (also Krtek) is a famous Czech personality. I’ll leave it to you color his cruiser.
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Larijani would have been the first high level person to contact for eventual peace talks.
That is likely the reason why the Zionist tried to eliminate him. It makes it more difficult for the U.S. to find a way out of the conflict.
But it will otherwise not make a big difference. Larijani is, like everyone, replaceable. His martyrdom will strengthen Iran’s willingness to endure all hardship needed to finally defeat the U.S. and Israel:
The killing of Ali Larijani, like that of Ali Khamenei before him, is best understood as an instance of strategic martyrdom, a dynamic that exposes the fundamental irrationality of Israel’s and the US’ continued reliance on decapitation strategies, especially given their repeated historical failure. The decapitation-attrition-invasion playbook that the US and Israel keep drawing from reveals systems locked into a familiar repertoire of counterproductive violence that have consistently failed to adapt to reality. This failure is so glaring that even Trump acknowledged it, when he recently admitted that the US attacked Iran “out of habit.”
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Iran operates from a value-strategic rationality whereby martyrdom itself can perform important political work and generate strategic effects that not merely resist but reverse the intended consequences of assassination.
That Larijani attended the mass rally and made statements openly embracing the possibility of martyrdom before his death only underscores how consciously this logic is adopted by those who bear its consequences, a logic articulated most clearly by Khamenei himself, who declared that “either we are martyred on this path, whose honour is eternal, or we achieve victory; both are victories for us.”
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In short, strategic martyrdom ultimately contributes to deterrence by regeneration, whereby repeated attempts at decapitation are subject to a law of diminishing returns as adversaries discover that killing leaders neither fractures the system nor compels submission but instead contributes to its consolidation.
One Joe Kent, the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, resigned today. In his resignation letter he blames Israel for pushing Trump towards the war on Iran.
Doing so has somewhat become a fad:
One diplomat with knowledge of the talks said: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.”
No. It wasn’t Israel (which Kent had promoted), that has dragged Trump into or launched the war. The sole person who did that was Donald Trump – in spite of all warnings about what a war with Iran would entail. The Israelis would not have dared such a move against Iran had Trump not agreed with them.