Trump bombs Iran, what could possibly go wrong?

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A Voice of Reason:

"The Pentagon Vocabulary, Telling Satellite Companies What Language They Are Allowed to Use About the War…
It is Monday March 23 2026 and the American public is being told to look at the war through a government approved lens. A U.S. Space Force guidance document recently leaked from within the defense establishment reveals that the Pentagon has been issuing language directives to commercial satellite imagery companies. They are not just managing the pictures. They are managing the words used to describe them. They are instructing private corporations to avoid any terminology that could constitute a battle damage assessment of strikes in Iran.
The guidance is specific. It is a manual for narrative control. Satellite operators are directed to avoid phrases such as "target destroyed" or "target eliminated" or "structure rendered inoperable." Instead of stating that an American strike successfully leveled a facility the companies are steered toward sanitized clinical language. They are told to say "imagery shows the structure largely collapsed with debris covering the building footprint." The distinction is deliberate. One describes a military outcome. The other describes a photograph. The timing of this guidance coincides precisely with the opening of Operation Epic Fury on February 28.
Planet Labs is one of the largest commercial satellite imagery providers in the world. They went further than the language restrictions. The company imposed a 96 hour delay on all public Iran war imagery on day one of the conflict. By March 10 that delay was extended to a full 14 day blackout. Planet Labs described the decision as their own made after consulting with experts. But the context tells a different story. The four major commercial satellite operators including Planet Labs and Maxar and BlackSky and Spire collectively hold between six and seven billion dollars in Pentagon contracts annually.
A military source familiar with the situation says the level of information blackout on this conflict is unprecedented. There is essentially no publicly verifiable data on bombing levels or targets hit or confirmed damage. The source is direct about the intent of this policy. This is another layer of trying to make things about the war seem less bad than they are. There are two separate issues here that deserve to be examined on their own terms.
The first is the practice itself. The use of language guidance to shape how commercial companies describe military operations is a form of information management that operates outside the traditional boundaries of military classification. Classified information has legal definitions and oversight mechanisms and formal processes. Language guidance issued to private contractors about how to describe what their satellites observe is something different. It is the government shaping the vocabulary of private companies whose products the public and the press rely on to independently assess military operations. That is not classification. It is narrative control.
The second is the context. Americans are being asked to support a war that Congress never authorized. This is a conflict in which confirmed U.S. casualties have already occurred. It is a war being prosecuted with the largest conventional bombs in the American arsenal against underground nuclear facilities. It is a war that has already prompted Iran to fire missiles at the nuclear research center at Dimona. The public ability to assess the scope and consequences of that war depends in part on independent satellite imagery. That imagery is now subject to language restrictions and outright blackout windows.
This practice did not begin with the current administration. The expansion of commercial satellite governance frameworks under national security guidance has been a bipartisan project for years. But the application of those frameworks to an active and ongoing and unauthorized war is a different order of concern. The administration own former counterterrorism director resigned recently rather than endorse the justification for this conflict. That should be a signal to everyone.
The Space Force slide says to avoid language that implies operational conclusions. But the American public is trying to draw operational conclusions about a war being fought in their name. That is the function of a free press and an informed citizenry. The language guidance exists because those conclusions drawn honestly from the available imagery would not be favorable to the people running this war.
We are witnessing the Managed Collapse of independent oversight. When the government controls the cameras and the vocabulary they control the reality of the conflict. They want the public to see "collapsed structures" and "debris footprints" instead of the human and strategic cost of a regional conflagration. They are treating the truth like a target to be neutralized.
Stay awake. A Voice of Reason is independent journalism with no paywall and no corporate backing. If this work has value to you a voluntary contribution keeps it free for everyone. Links are in the first comment. Subscribe to the Substack for the full archive and email delivery of every edition.
#AVoiceOfReason #OperationEpicFury #Pentagon #SatelliteImagery #PressFreedom #Censorship #PlanetLabs #Maxar #Iran #SpaceForce #News #Politics #March2026

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Trump is going to need a whole lot more than the $200B he's requested from Congress in order to pay for what he's set in motion.
On its way...

"Ignore the public statements, watch where troops are moving and I think you end up with a pretty accurate picture of where things are headed.
So, Malcolm Nance concurs on the significance of the flight log I shared yesterday, which The Sons of Liberty shared as well.
Notably, Nance flags the 75th Ranger Regiment; he thinks 1/75 and 2/75 are going, probably based on the inclusion of Hunter Army Air Field/Fort Stewart, GA, and Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM).
It's also pretty clear that the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment - the storied "Night Stalkers" who just did the Maduro raid - are headed in-theater.
This is at odds with POTUS' public statements today talking about how they're negotiating with Iran; they said the same thing over the weekend, which Iran denied.
I'm sure someone over there at the White House thinks this is all some kind of genius military deception play but on the outside, that just looks like the current Executive Branch being unreliable during a war.
Again."
Joohn Choe

[PAL]

Fertilizer is a big concern as well. Food production along with drough=food shortages this summer. Krugman explains it well.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/when ... eets-chaos

[mister_coffee]

Again, we are being beaten like a rented mule.

As long as Iran can keep world petroleum prices elevated, they are winning. Doesn't really make any difference what we do in retaliation for that either.

They are winning because they can strangle our economy just by pushing petroleum prices up. And the raw materials that depend on fossil fuels as well.

They are winning because they are able to threaten or premier economic position and the dollar's position as the world reserve currency. By allowing oil to flow only if it is bought and paid for in yuan does precisely that.

They are winning because they are hurting our allies as much as they are hurting us, if not more. So soon we won't have any.

Nothing we can do to Iran can hurt them as much as they are hurting us right now.

Some people have talked about Iran launching direct attacks against the Untied States. I don't see why they'd bother and it would arguably be a strategic mistake for them to do so.

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" The Troops Are Saying No...
With thousands more U.S. Marines headed to the Middle East and the president reportedly considering a ground invasion of Iran, the Center on Conscience and War is reporting a massive surge in inquiries from active-duty soldiers seeking to file conscientious objector applications.
Mike Prysner of the Center on Conscience and War put it plainly: "Dozens of people I have talked to have started working on the conscientious objector claim. They're scared of killing in a war that they don't believe in. They're scared of the long-term moral consequences of their actions."
These are not protesters. These are not politicians. These are not pundits. These are the men and women who signed the contract, wore the uniform, and are now looking at orders to deploy into a war that Congress never authorized, against a country whose nuclear facilities are being bombed for the third time in three weeks, and they are asking a question that the administration has not answered for anyone: what exactly are we fighting for?
A conscientious objector application is not a casual act. It is a formal legal process requiring a soldier to demonstrate that their opposition to war is sincere, deeply held, and based on moral or religious conviction. It can take months. It can effectively end a military career. It invites scrutiny, skepticism, and in some command environments, retaliation. Soldiers do not file these applications lightly. The fact that dozens are working on them simultaneously, with thousands more Marines now being ordered toward the region, is a signal that deserves to be treated as exactly what it is: a moral referendum from inside the ranks.
The administration has spent the past three weeks describing Operation Epic Fury as a necessary and righteous response to an imminent nuclear threat. Joe Kent, the former National Counterterrorism Center director who resigned in protest, said Iran posed no imminent threat and that the conflict was driven by external pressure. The director of the agency responsible for assessing terrorist threats could not support the justification for the war. Now the soldiers being ordered to fight it are filing legal paperwork to avoid participating in it.
The men and women applying for conscientious objector status are not cowards. The application process itself requires more moral courage than most people will ever be asked to demonstrate. They are doing what every soldier is trained to do: assess the mission, evaluate the orders, and make a determination about whether what they are being asked to do aligns with the values they were told they were serving.
Their answer, increasingly, is no. When the troops start saying no, history pays attention. Vietnam reached its turning point not in the halls of Congress or on the front pages of newspapers but in the moment when enough soldiers looked at their orders and decided the mission had no moral foundation they could stand on. We are not there yet. But the applications are being filed."
Stay awake. A Voice of Reason is independent journalism with no paywall and no corporate backing. If this work has value to you, a voluntary contribution keeps it free for everyone. Links are in the first comment. Subscribe to the Substack for the full archive and email delivery of every edition.
#AVoiceOfReason #ConscientiousObjector #OperationEpicFury #Iran #Marines #Military #AntiWar #JoeKent #CenterOnConscienceAndWar #News #Politics #March2026
Brent Molnar

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The graft is right out in broad daylight

[mister_coffee]

The first year of the second Trump administration they spent a lot of time and effort undoing any efforts to get us away from fossil fuels. Including spending billions of dollars to pay companies to cancel large-scale projects.

Now that bill is coming due. With interest.

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From HCR:
"In a frantic attempt to lower oil prices, the administration on Friday lifted sanctions on Iranian oil currently at sea. Iranian oil has been sanctioned since 1979. The lifting of sanctions will enable Iran to sell about 140 million barrels of oil, worth about $14 billion, including to the United States and to China.
National security scholar Phil Gordon, who served as the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region during the Obama administration, posted: “When Obama sent Iran $400m + $1.3bn in interest in 2016 Trump called it ‘insane’ and he and others spent a decade mocking the idea of ‘pallets of cash’ even though it was Iran’s own money, American prisoners were released, courts were likely to require the U.S. payment, and Iran had just agreed to significant and verified reductions and restrictions on its nuclear program for 15+ years.
“Now Trump is giving Iran up to ten times that amount of revenue—one of the most significant measures of sanctions relief provided to the Islamic Republic since its founding—in exchange for marginal and temporary relief from the big increase in oil prices his actions have caused, without any concessions from Tehran, and even as Iran continues to target the United States, its allies, and world oil supplies. No way to read as anything other than desperate recognition of the situation Trump’s own actions have created and the lack of available alternatives for dealing with it.”
On Meet the Press today, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said: “We’re gonna give Iran $14 billion to fund this war with the United States? We’re gonna give Russia billions of dollars to fund their war with Ukraine? We’re literally putting money into the pockets of the very nations that we are fighting right now. We’ve never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.”

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If anyone is looking for a good synopsis for where we are, this one is a humdinger

https://no01.substack.com/p/march-19-21 ... irect=true

[mister_coffee]

Any invasion there will accomplish nothing but getting a lot of good kids killed.

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Lindsey Graham on Sunday am Fox talking about how we 'took' Iwo Jima, we can take the Iranian island Kharg.

This is how tragedies start.
Kharg Island and Iwo Jima are both about 8 square miles.
6,821 Marines died taking Iwo Jima; another 19,217 were wounded.
It took five weeks, and it did not involve Lindsey Graham.'

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The self proclaimed stable genius is now changing his ultimatums every 4 hours
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/ ... el-strikes

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World War 3 is no on the table

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A scary future
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-Gene ... =fb_repost

[mister_coffee]

"When you kick over a hornet's nest, the hornets decide when it is over."

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"Iran Is Weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz Against the Dollar Itself…
The war did not just close a shipping lane. It may have cracked the foundation of the global financial system that has underpinned American economic power for half a century. Here is what is actually happening and why it matters far beyond the gas pump.
Since 1974, the United States has operated under what economists call the petrodollar system. In simple terms: the world buys oil in American dollars. That arrangement means every country on earth needs a constant supply of dollars, which they obtain largely by holding U.S. Treasury bonds. That demand for dollars is what allows the United States to borrow cheaply, run large deficits, and maintain the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. It is one of the primary structural advantages the American economy holds over every other on earth.
Iran, with China's active support, is now using physical control of the Strait of Hormuz to directly attack that system. The foundation was laid in 2021 with a 25-year strategic partnership between Iran and China, in which China pledged approximately $400 billion in infrastructure investment in exchange for guaranteed discounted oil. For years that arrangement operated through shadow fleets and barter systems designed to evade U.S. sanctions. In early 2026, it formalized: Iran and China moved to yuan-denominated oil settlements, cutting the dollar out of the transaction entirely.
Now, with Iran controlling traffic through the Strait, Tehran is reportedly signaling that tankers settling oil transactions in Chinese yuan may receive preferential passage or lower security fees compared to those trading in dollars. In a strait where 20 percent of the world's oil supply moves, that is not a subtle incentive. It is a toll booth with a currency preference, and it is a direct challenge to the 50-year petrodollar arrangement. The cascading consequences of this are not theoretical.
If countries no longer need dollars to buy oil, they have less reason to hold dollars, which means less demand for U.S. Treasury bonds, which means the United States must offer higher interest rates to attract buyers for its debt. The government is already borrowing $50 billion a week. Higher interest rates on that borrowing would accelerate the fiscal crisis that the CBO has already documented in stark terms. A weaker dollar makes every imported good in the United States more expensive, feeding inflation at precisely the moment when the administration has promised lower prices.
Gold hit record highs this week. Silver is following. These are not coincidences. Investors who see the dollar's reserve status under structural threat move into hard assets. The flight to gold is a real-time indicator of how seriously sophisticated investors are taking the de-dollarization risk.
The infrastructure for this shift is already being built. Iran is a member of BRICS, the bloc that also includes China, Russia, India, and Brazil. Within that framework, China and Russia are developing alternative payment systems including mBridge and BRICS Pay, blockchain-based settlement networks designed specifically to route around the dollar-based SWIFT system that gives the United States significant leverage over global finance. U.S. sanctions derive much of their power from SWIFT. A functional alternative to SWIFT is a functional alternative to American economic coercion.
Here is the strategic reality that the administration either did not understand or chose to ignore. Iran has spent 45 years building its military and economic doctrine around a single objective: making any attack on the Islamic Republic so structurally expensive that no rational actor would attempt it. The Strait of Hormuz is not just a shipping lane in that doctrine. It is a lever on the global financial system, a threat to the petrodollar, and an instrument of de-dollarization that China has been preparing to use for years.
The war that began on February 28 gave Iran the operational justification to pull that lever. Every day the conflict continues, the yuan-based oil market gains credibility. Every tanker that routes around the dollar, every country that decides to hold fewer Treasury bonds, every basis point by which the dollar weakens is a structural consequence that will outlast the war itself by decades.
The physical oil price is $153 on Asian benchmarks. The gap between that and the Western futures price is $56 and growing. JPMorgan projects Brent snapping up to meet Asian prices once Western stockpiles run out, putting oil at $160 minimum.
But the deeper number is the one that does not appear on a trading screen. It is the percentage of global oil trade that routes through the dollar. That number is moving. It was moving before the war. The war accelerated it.
The president told a rally crowd in Kentucky that everybody in the world has all the oil they need thanks to him. The petrodollar system that has underpinned American economic supremacy since 1974 is under the most serious structural attack in its history.
The war was supposed to demonstrate American strength. What it has demonstrated, to every country watching, is that physical control of a shipping lane can be weaponized against the foundation of American financial power. China was watching very carefully before the first bomb dropped. It is watching more carefully now.
Brent Molner Voice of Reason

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The US is spending more than $1B a day on Trump's Iranian debacle.

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[mister_coffee]

You can't make this stuff up:

https://www.notus.org/trump-white-house ... gas-crises

Six months before the Trump administration started bombing Iran, the Department of State fired its oil and gas experts.

As the war in Iran stretches into its third week, and the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of the world’s oil supply usually flows — remains effectively closed, the U.S. government is without the resources it once had to handle such crises, former State Department employees tell NOTUS.

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"The Intelligence Chief Just Admitted Under Oath That Iran Had No Nuclear Program Before This War Started…
Read that sentence one more time. Then read it again. At today's Senate Intelligence Committee Worldwide Threats hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was pressed by Senator Jon Ossoff on a discrepancy between her written statement and her spoken opening remarks. The written statement, submitted to Congress in advance, noted that Iran's nuclear enrichment program had been "obliterated" by U.S. and Israeli strikes in 2025 and that there had been "no effort since then to try to rebuild." Gabbard left that assessment out of her spoken remarks. Ossoff asked her to confirm it on the record.
"So the assessment of the intelligence community is that Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated by last summer's air strikes?"
Gabbard: "Yes."
"And no effort since then to try to rebuild. Correct?"
Gabbard: "That's right."
The nuclear enrichment program was obliterated before Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026. There was no active reconstruction effort. The intelligence community knew this. Gabbard knew this. The president knew this when he ordered the strikes.
Ossoff then asked the question that the entire hearing had been building toward. If the program was already obliterated and dormant, did Iran actually pose an imminent nuclear threat before the United States launched the current war?
Gabbard's answer: it is not the intelligence community's responsibility to define "imminence." That is the president's responsibility.
Let's be precise about what that answer means. The Director of National Intelligence, whose office produces the assessments that determine whether military action is justified, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that whether a threat qualifies as imminent enough to justify war is not something she is responsible for assessing. She is responsible for the intelligence. The president decides what to call it.
What the intelligence showed: Iran's nuclear program had already been destroyed. There was no reconstruction effort. What the president called it: justification for a new war.
Joseph Kent, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned last week and said Iran posed no imminent threat. The resignation letter of a man with 11 combat tours who was confirmed by a Republican Senate is now corroborated by the sworn testimony of the Director of National Intelligence before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The war has killed 13 confirmed Americans. It is costing $1 billion per day. It has no congressional authorization. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Gas is above $5 a gallon. The Senate Intelligence Committee now has on the record that the nuclear threat used to justify it was already gone before the first bomb dropped.
Ossoff also pressed Gabbard on a second matter. She admitted that President Trump personally asked her, on the day of the FBI raid of the Fulton County Georgia election office, to travel there and "oversee" the execution of the warrant. The Director of National Intelligence, whose job is to coordinate and lead the 18-agency intelligence community, was sent by the president to personally supervise the execution of a search warrant targeting election records in a battleground state. Gabbard said she did not participate in "law enforcement activity." She was present to oversee it at the personal direction of the president.
The Fulton County raid was targeting records from the 2020 election. Multiple audits, independent investigations, and Republican-led inquiries have already found no evidence of fraud in that election. The Director of National Intelligence flew to Georgia to watch a search warrant be executed in a five-year-old race.
Two separate admissions under oath in the same hearing. One says the justification for the war was not supported by the intelligence. One says the nation's top intelligence official was personally dispatched by the president to oversee a raid on election records. Both are now in the congressional record. Under oath. The record does not forget what was said in a hearing room. It waits.
This publication answers to no advertiser and no algorithm. Only to the record. If you believe that kind of journalism still matters, the support link is in the first comment." Brent Molnar, A Voice of Reason

[mister_coffee]

“Anyone who invades the Middle East on false pretenses should be impeached.” — Donald Trump in 2008.

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Russia responds to Trump's claim that he can take Cuba with agreement to support Cuba with humanitarian aid and to send oil.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/03/ ... uba-a92243

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Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich's hamhanded statement that we should just bomb a new strait...

Trump posted this.

[mister_coffee]

"The only thing prohibiting transit in the strait right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit now should Iran not do that."

Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense^H^H^H^H^H^H^HWar

[mister_coffee]

The Iranians are making noises about allowing tankers to transit the strait only if the payment is settled in yuan but not dollars. Kind of wild when a country whose leadership seems to be basically medieval has a better understanding of world financial markets than the geniuses in Washington DC.

They are playing chess and our guys are trying to eat the pieces.