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War On Iran: – Ceasefire Sabotage
The Trump administration’s self-congratulations for the ceasefire with Iran immediately fell apart after Israel bombed Lebanon and killed more than 250 people.
This was a breach of the ceasefire agreement which Pakistan had arranged and announced and which had included Lebanon and other areas of the conflict.
The Trump administration had been begging for a ceasefire for several days. It had been involved (archived) in formulating the message the Pakistani Prime Minister had issued. Trump himself had endorsed the 10-point condition sheet the Iranians had proposed by calling it “a workable basis on which to negotiate”.
With knowledge of the imminent ceasefire members of the Trump administration had (again) waged bets on commodities and won large amounts of money.
But just a few hours after the Israeli attack the Trump administration repudiated two central points of the ceasefire. Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire, it suddenly claimed, and Iran’s 10 point sheet had been “thrown into the trash” even before Trump had endorsed it.
Iran reacted by immediately closing the Strait of Hormuz (archived) for good. Only four ships, all coming from Iranian ports, have passed during the last 24 hours.
The statement by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian is plain:
The repeated aggression by the Zionist entity against Lebanon is a flagrant violation of the initial ceasefire agreement and a dangerous indicator of deceit and lack of commitment to potential accords. The continuation of these aggressions will render negotiations meaningless; our hands will remain on the trigger, and Iran will never abandon its Lebanese brothers and sisters.
While there is currently no bombing of Iran ongoing, and no new launching of Iranian drones and missiles on USraeli targets, the quietness is unlikely to hold.
Further talks, supposed on happen on Saturday in Pakistan, are in doubt.
I expect the war to reignite before they take place.
Results of this war
US – Nothing whatsoever gained, but much damage suffered by the US, especially to its reputation. War is changing, as it always does. One hundred years ago, Iran could not have remotely thought of closing the Strait of Hormuz; the issue didn’t exist. In 1941 Britain and the USSR simply invaded Iran almost bloodlessly to remove the neutral but supposedly pro-Axis shah. Today, they can’t even set foot in the country. The increase in the destructiveness of weapons has worked in favor of the weak; hence guerilla warfare as exemplified by countless nasty ethnic struggles trumps maneuver warfare. More importantly perhaps, missile and drone technology trumps large-sized things like warships and massed military formations. Missile technology will probably get defter, more miniaturized, and more deadly. The same type of things started happening to US aggressions in Vietnam, then Iraq, and now this. With all their billions, the genocidal billionaires who back the wars are hopping with rage that their so-called wealth doesn’t give them an edge. Boo-hoo.
The other thing is that Israel has never been any kind of asset to the US, nor an ally. It is diametrically opposed to US nationalism and is in fact the greatest enemy that the US has right now, and it directly threatens the US even with the possibility of nuclear attack to get its way. Of course, it is not the ultimate reason that the US is subordinate to it. That is rather the fault of the US billionaires, whom the Gaza business since 2023 has finally smoked out into the limelight, Ellison, Ackman, Adelson, etc. They are so thoroughly intertwined in the US Epstein class that they cannot be removed without a bloody, violent conflict, which gives them the confidence to keep up their one-track thinking.
At first, Israel did not cost very much. It was partly funded by independent efforts of the Zionists to shake down the Jewish communities of the world in the name of their supposed nationalism, and it didn’t need as much, as the conflict levels over the decades only built up to the present catastrophe over time. But now, Israel has become very expensive, and the panic in the Zionist leadership over declining support, especially in Jewish communities and among the young, has led them to double down on their fanaticism, now giving up almost completely on hasbara, and instead trying to suppress free speech altogether, probably a quixotic project. At the same time, they have inserted their agents into every country in the world, trying to take over both foreign and economic policies. This might work in places where such agents are not immediately identifiable, as in the US, Western Europe, and Russia, but they can’t do it in China, which is well aware of their machinations and has its own internal security services on the watch for traitors. In the US, of course, they are trying to crack down. Previously, they only persecuted Palestinians, and sometimes other Muslims, but now they are after any opponents.
As for Israel being an asset to the US in the Middle East, never! It only made it more difficult to dominate the Arab world. The Arab world, especially their elites, would just love to have worked with the US all the time, but Israel has always put a crimp in that. At first, that wasn’t so much a problem, because the Arab peoples were poor and not integrated yet into modernity, but now they are, so Israel merely hurts the US at every turn. Today, the conflict of interest of Israel’s desire to annihilate the Arabs with the US’s desire for economic dominance and exploitation is more obvious to see than ever.
Israel – As Lapid noted, Israel really did not get Iran. But it did get an opportunity to further savage Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, so it was not entirely a loss, and that explains why the Israeli public continued to back the war, even though they were being inconvenienced and even beaten up a bit. So Iran functioned as a diversion. The big question is, how much damage has Israel sustained? The biggest damage is certainly in public opinion. Its conflict with US interests is more apparent than ever, as even the US right wing starts to blame it. But that may not matter as long as the pro-Israel billionaires remain in control, and removing them would require a bloody conflict which the US elite as a whole is certainly not willing to contemplate, nor maybe the rest of the US citizens either. And building US anti-Zionism into any kind of significant movement will take time and will face murderous, directly killing suppression from the Zionists.
Iran – Damaged, but not broken. Rather, the regime has come through politically strengthened inside the country, clearly. Should the war resume, it will be able to carry on. In choosing to continue to block the strait instead of firing missiles at anybody, it means to pressure the US to stop Israel’s aggressions against Lebanon, at least, if not also against the Palestinians. In other words, it would like to make the US elite face the fact that Israel is no asset or ally, but indeed an opponent and a threat. Unfortunately for that, even if the awareness of those being true facts is now obvious and known to a larger segment of the US elite than before, to challenge Zionist control of the US would require a revolution of some kind.
Lebanon – Hizbullah seems to be doing better than expected, but the death, damage, and refugees are still proportionately more than in Iran. Non-Shi`i Lebanese continue to have no stomach to confront Hizbullah, however, and all of them, even the Maronites, see what a malign threat Israel is.
Palestinians – God help them, always everybody’s least and last concern.
Gulf Arabs – I don’t think those regimes are as fragile as some in this list seem to believe. They did not retaliate against Iran, and have thereby kept a modicum of good will of their neighbor that they have to live with. The UAE has been the most servile to imperialism, but it, like the other Gulf Arabs, just doesn’t want to lose everything, and it might if it makes the wrong move. They are kind of like Russia and China, neither of which wants to put itself under Zio-American sovereignty, but both of which hope that good sense will eventually prevail to keep the world’s economy going.
Sorry for the long post. I don’t do this often.
Posted by: Cabe | Apr 9 2026 22:26 utc | 276
Results of this war
US – Nothing whatsoever gained, but much damage suffered by the US, especially to its reputation. War is changing, as it always does. One hundred years ago, Iran could not have remotely thought of closing the Strait of Hormuz; the issue didn’t exist. In 1941 Britain and the USSR simply invaded Iran almost bloodlessly to remove the neutral but supposedly pro-Axis shah. Today, they can’t even set foot in the country. The increase in the destructiveness of weapons has worked in favor of the weak; hence guerilla warfare as exemplified by countless nasty ethnic struggles trumps maneuver warfare. More importantly perhaps, missile and drone technology trumps large-sized things like warships and massed military formations. Missile technology will probably get defter, more miniaturized, and more deadly. The same type of things started happening to US aggressions in Vietnam, then Iraq, and now this. With all their billions, the genocidal billionaires who back the wars are hopping with rage that their so-called wealth doesn’t give them an edge. Boo-hoo.
The other thing is that Israel has never been any kind of asset to the US, nor an ally. It is diametrically opposed to US nationalism and is in fact the greatest enemy that the US has right now, and it directly threatens the US even with the possibility of nuclear attack to get its way. Of course, it is not the ultimate reason that the US is subordinate to it. That is rather the fault of the US billionaires, whom the Gaza business since 2023 has finally smoked out into the limelight, Ellison, Ackman, Adelson, etc. They are so thoroughly intertwined in the US Epstein class that they cannot be removed without a bloody, violent conflict, which gives them the confidence to keep up their one-track thinking.
At first, Israel did not cost very much. It was partly funded by independent efforts of the Zionists to shake down the Jewish communities of the world in the name of their supposed nationalism, and it didn’t need as much, as the conflict levels over the decades only built up to the present catastrophe over time. But now, Israel has become very expensive, and the panic in the Zionist leadership over declining support, especially in Jewish communities and among the young, has led them to double down on their fanaticism, now giving up almost completely on hasbara, and instead trying to suppress free speech altogether, probably a quixotic project. At the same time, they have inserted their agents into every country in the world, trying to take over both foreign and economic policies. This might work in places where such agents are not immediately identifiable, as in the US, Western Europe, and Russia, but they can’t do it in China, which is well aware of their machinations and has its own internal security services on the watch for traitors. In the US, of course, they are trying to crack down. Previously, they only persecuted Palestinians, and sometimes other Muslims, but now they are after any opponents.
As for Israel being an asset to the US in the Middle East, never! It only made it more difficult to dominate the Arab world. The Arab world, especially their elites, would just love to have worked with the US all the time, but Israel has always put a crimp in that. At first, that wasn’t so much a problem, because the Arab peoples were poor and not integrated yet into modernity, but now they are, so Israel merely hurts the US at every turn. Today, the conflict of interest of Israel’s desire to annihilate the Arabs with the US’s desire for economic dominance and exploitation is more obvious to see than ever.
Israel – As Lapid noted, Israel really did not get Iran. But it did get an opportunity to further savage Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, so it was not entirely a loss, and that explains why the Israeli public continued to back the war, even though they were being inconvenienced and even beaten up a bit. So Iran functioned as a diversion. The big question is, how much damage has Israel sustained? The biggest damage is certainly in public opinion. Its conflict with US interests is more apparent than ever, as even the US right wing starts to blame it. But that may not matter as long as the pro-Israel billionaires remain in control, and removing them would require a bloody conflict which the US elite as a whole is certainly not willing to contemplate, nor maybe the rest of the US citizens either. And building US anti-Zionism into any kind of significant movement will take time and will face murderous, directly killing suppression from the Zionists.
Iran – Damaged, but not broken. Rather, the regime has come through politically strengthened inside the country, clearly. Should the war resume, it will be able to carry on. In choosing to continue to block the strait instead of firing missiles at anybody, it means to pressure the US to stop Israel’s aggressions against Lebanon, at least, if not also against the Palestinians. In other words, it would like to make the US elite face the fact that Israel is no asset or ally, but indeed an opponent and a threat. Unfortunately for that, even if the awareness of those being true facts is now obvious and known to a larger segment of the US elite than before, to challenge Zionist control of the US would require a revolution of some kind.
Lebanon – Hizbullah seems to be doing better than expected, but the death, damage, and refugees are still proportionately more than in Iran. Non-Shi`i Lebanese continue to have no stomach to confront Hizbullah, however, and all of them, even the Maronites, see what a malign threat Israel is.
Palestinians – God help them, always everybody’s least and last concern.
Gulf Arabs – I don’t think those regimes are as fragile as some in this list seem to believe. They did not retaliate against Iran, and have thereby kept a modicum of good will of their neighbor that they have to live with. The UAE has been the most servile to imperialism, but it, like the other Gulf Arabs, just doesn’t want to lose everything, and it might if it makes the wrong move. They are kind of like Russia and China, neither of which wants to put itself under Zio-American sovereignty, but both of which hope that good sense will eventually prevail to keep the world’s economy going.
Sorry for the long post. I don’t do this often.
Posted by: Cabe | Apr 9 2026 22:26 utc | 277
Posted by: Roger Boyd | Apr 9 2026 22:08 utc | 269
I found this long ago on The Saker. It talks about how the Cultural Revolution brought about an educational revolution in China’s countryside.
“Reviewing this book, Ramin Mazaheri writes:
The thesis of Han’s book is far more interesting than, “The CR was really not so bad….” This is his thesis:
The CR’s educational reform, which became approved following changes to political culture, produced an explosion in rural economic development and rural human capital, and thus China’s economic boom actually came before Deng’s reforms in 1978.
This contradicts the narrative that it was only after the introduction of (drastically regulated, and still-socialist) market-based reforms that China’s economy began to produce major wealth. Han’s book directly challenges what you always hear by pushing the start of China’s economic explosion back a decade earlier, i.e. with the very start of the CR.
[…]
I’d like to immediately give just a few of Han’s data-based examples, because they are so overwhelming that I think anyone who reads them will sit up with interest:
1965 primary schools in Jimo County: 8 schools, 3,600 students. In 1976: 269 primary schools, 52,000 students. Increases of 3,400% and 1,400% respectively.
1965 high schools in Jimo County: 2 high schools, 400 students. In 1976: 84 high schools, 13,200 students. Increases of 4,200% and 3,300% respectively.
1965 government & village teachers for middle & high school in Jimo County: 315 total staff. In 1976: 4,230 total staff. Increase of 1,300%.
As Han reminded me during a discussion, by 1976 almost all school-age students (including high school-age) were enrolled in the rural school system free of charge, something which has not even been achieved in the US today.
Clearly, this is hugely at odds with the well-known belief that the CR was a time of Chinese academic regression! That propaganda only works if one focuses solely on university-level (elite-level) education and only for a short period of time, but such a view simply does not fit the data when examining rural areas.
https://thesaker.is/a-necessary-revolution-in-discussing-chinas-cultural-revolution-an-8-part-series-1-8/
https://monthlyreview.org/product/unknown_cultural_revolution/
Posted by: Surferket | Apr 9 2026 22:47 utc | 292
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