Kernow Damo

Jordan says it is outside the Iran war, but with missiles overhead & a US missile launcher destroyed, that story is getting harder to sell by the hour. Right, so King Abdullah of Jordan said on 24 February that Jordan would not let its airspace be violated and would not become a battlefield. Four days later Jordanian forces were intercepting drones and ballistic missiles over the country, the Interior Ministry was dealing with falling debris across multiple regions, and people in Jordan were being told to treat suspicious objects like live danger instead of bad weather. That is the first promise gone. The state line was that Jordan would stay out of the war between the United States, Israel and Iran while protecting its own territory. The actual condition on the ground was missiles overhead, fragments coming down, airspace controls, and emergency alerts. A government can call that sovereignty if it likes. People tend to call it the war arriving anyway don’t they? If it looks like a war and smells like a war, it’s a war. By 1 March the Interior Ministry had recorded 73 incidents involving falling objects and missile debris, with property damage reported in Amman, Zarqa, Madaba, West Balqa, Jaresh, Irbid, Aqaba and the Central Badia, and that leaves the palace with wreckage on record. The Jordanian Armed Forces then said they had intercepted 49 drones and ballistic missiles. That matters because it strips the polite little fiction down to the studs. Jordan is not sitting on a hill watching two other countries trade blows through binoculars. Jordanian air defences are up, Jordanian skies are active, Jordanian territory is taking fallout, lying between Israel and Iran as it does, and the state itself is counting the pieces. There is no neutral-looking way to dress that up once the numbers are public. When a government moves from issuing regional statements to listing debris incidents governorate by governorate, the distance between “we are not part of this” and “please report suspicious fragments to the authorities” has already closed.

Trump and Israel wanted a war with Iran — what they’ve got instead is failing defences, trapped allies, and a nightmare spreading across the whole region. Right, so Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu wanted a war with Iran. What they have got instead is a widening chain of blowback that now runs through Israeli cities, British bases, Gulf oil terminals, shipping lanes, airline schedules, insurance markets and the homes of people who had no say in any of this. The sales pitch was control. The footage says otherwise. Iranian missiles and drones have kept getting through. Israeli authorities have kept tightening what can be filmed and shown. Trump has started talking about “unconditional surrender” because when the clean quick dominance fantasy falls apart, the language just gets bigger while the room for manoeuvre gets smaller. The fantasy that passes for a brain in the head of the mango coloured muppet seemingly has no bounds. Of course he’s not the only muppet in the room right now. Pete Hegseth has confirmed an investigation into the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab after a US official told investigators the strike was likely American, and the evidence around the site has made the usual excuses look very thin. More than 165 people were reported killed there during school hours, most of them as we know were children, and satellite analysis has pointed to clustered, precise impacts inside the compound rather than some random malfunction story doing the rounds to protect reputations. The school stood next to a Revolutionary Guards compound, questions need asking about that certainly, it’s the sort of thing we expect Israel to do. But equally that does not make the school a military target.

Trump and Netanyahu sold this as control - now Israel’s getting blasted, Lebanon’s blowing wide open, and the lies are falling apart. Right, so Tel Aviv has been hit again. Central Israel has been under alerts again. Explosions have been reported again. And Donald Trump has chosen that exact moment to announce that Washington must have a role in choosing Iran’s next leader. What planet is he on? He’s up against the wall right now, the Middle East is on fire and he thinks somehow, he’s winning. Israel gets hit in public, the promise of control starts looking very thin, and the man backing Benjamin Netanyahu decides this is the perfect time to talk not like a defender, not like a mediator, but like somebody auditioning for the job of Emperor. Well this one is wearing no clothes and that is a horrible mental image for which I will apologise for. Netanyahu is still widening the war, increasingly moving into Lebanon now as well as continuing atrocities across the Palestinian territory. Trump is all but declaring victory even though Iran is very much still firing and apparently is still using stock right now more than 10 years old – they’re not even into the modern stuff yet. So this is not a neat campaign under tight management. That is a story slipping increasingly out of control for Trump and Co, with Israel and all those Gulf states the US swore to protect in exchange for those bases very still on the receiving end of Iranian fire. Donald Trump has not misspoken here though. He has not been dragged off message by some stray microphone or an awkward media question causing him to soil himself. He has said out loud that the US wants a say in who runs Iran next.

$95 Billion that congress doesn't want you to know about, the return of the Houthis and a bit of a head scratcher over some drones... Right, so Donald Trump is being handed a bill being talked about at roughly ninety-five billion dollars as the expected cost for backing Israel through a war with Iran, and the US Senate has just blocked an effort to curb his war powers, which is the neat procedural way of saying: the people who could have slowed this down have decided they won’t. At the same time, Yemen is signalling it’s back on the board – perhaps you’ve been wondering where the Houthis have been thusfar in all of this, with reports saying that Sanaa is now in a declared state of war and the timing of their first actions therefore is the question left hanging in the air right now, and when that switch flips, it won’t’ necessarily just hit one city, it will hit shipping lanes and energy flows, their warning having gone out not to Israel or the US, but to other Gulf states saying if they attack Iran, the Houthis will be coming after their oil and gas. And then you’ve got a third thread, staying with the oil and gas theme, but away from the Houthis.

Hit lists, religious destiny being sold as justification, and war spreading to more and more nations, is the Iran war beginning to go global? Right, so A US submarine has torpedoed an Iranian frigate in the Indian Ocean off Sri Lanka, and Sri Lankan officials are now counting bodies and hospital beds while Washington boasts about “global reach”, with eighty-seven bodies recovered off Galle and thirty-two wounded being treated at Karapitiya Teaching Hospital, and the ship said to have carried one hundred and eighty crew. A war that is “contained” does not produce a mass rescue operation on somebody else’s southern coastline, and it does not do it with torpedoes in international waters. It produces one thing: a new rule that says Iranian state assets can be hunted far from the Gulf, and the only thing separating that from chaos is whether the other side chooses to answer in the same language, on the same oceans, with the same distance. UK Maritime Trade Operations records an attack fifty nautical miles north of Muscat in Oman, and the sequence in the notice tells you how fast a normal shipping run turns into an emergency. First it’s a report of a strike above the waterline and an engine-room fire. Then it’s updated as a confirmed uncrewed surface vehicle attack, with the crew evacuated to shore.

Israel and their British Zionist allies in parliament have tried a double gotcha on the Greens, but karma had something to say about it Right, so the Embassy of Israel in the UK has put out a public condemnation of a Green Party conference motion and it has done it in the language of authority, shame, and threat, meant to make a British political party flinch before it even gets to a vote, because within days the row has travelled from a document to a widening dogpile, from Israeli whining into the House of Commons, and then implicating the safety of an elected politician, seemingly forgetting the lessons we supposedly had to learn from before. Motion A105, titled “Zionism is Racism”, is a member motion going to the Greens’ spring conference, and the first problem is that most people arguing about it aren’t reading the motion at all, because the text isn’t sitting in front of the public in one clean official place everyone can point to. So what you end up with instead is a fight over characterisations. One side says it’s an anti-racist statement about a political ideology, the other side says it’s hostile and extremist, and the press picks the most inflammatory paraphrase and sells that as the meaning, because it’s what establishment pro-Israel press will do. The bits that keep getting cited are consistent though: that it calls for the party to adopt an explicitly anti-Zionist stance, that it pushes a one-state position in historic Palestine framed as equal rights for all, and that it includes language about a right to resistance and liberation, with a line about “all available means under international law” being treated as the flashpoint, because that phrase can be framed as either a legal claim or a coded endorsement depending on what the person speaking wants their audience to hear.

Trump can brag as much as he likes - the real hit is the one that makes fleets, insurers, and governments price up his 'wins.' Right, so Donald Trump has said, on camera, “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” and that one sentence is the whole story of this war in miniature, because it takes the public excuse, the tidy “we had no choice” posture, and it puts a wobble right through it while the bombs are still falling. He has added that he thought Iran was going to attack first and he did not want that, and he has said it while sat next to Friedrich Merz in the White House. That is the first crack in the pitch: the White House is not even keeping its own trigger story straight. A war sold as unavoidable gets harder to sell when the man who started it tells you he did the forcing. A chap called Yahya Rahim-Safavi has then walked right up to the other end of the escalation ladder and said Iran knows where Benjamin Netanyahu is, where he convenes his meetings, and that their intelligence database is complete, which is not a battle report, it is a message aimed at one man’s sense of safety. He has framed it as a capability claim and a warning. The important part is the target set he is talking about though. When a former IRGC commander as he is starts describing leadership locations, he is telling everyone watching that the war is not staying in the lane of “sites” and “assets” and “intercepts.” He is dragging it toward personal vulnerability and personal consequence, with Netanyahu as the named subject.

Cloud services sunk, Israeli false flag accusations and the price tag of one day of fighting Iran show Trump and Israel's utter desperation already. Right, so Amazon has had to publish the sort of notice it never wants to publish, because it tells you the war has now reached the wiring and the power rooms, not just the runways and bases. It says drone strikes have physically hit its cloud facilities in the Gulf, with structural damage on site, disrupted power delivery to its infrastructure, and fire suppression that has left additional water damage, and it is warning customers the recovery is prolonged and that some services may take at least a day to stabilise, which is a polite way of saying businesses and services that sit on that cloud are now dealing with the fallout of a military strike, an outage notice. The United States has then had the opening day of its strike campaign costed at roughly seven hundred and seventy-nine million dollars in a single twenty-four hour window, not a decade-long programme, not a procurement plan, a single day of sorties, munitions and the machinery that keeps the operation moving. That is the first invoice of a war being run like an open tab, where the headline isn’t just what got hit, it’s how quickly the spend ramps and how little room there is to pretend this is tidy or cheap, day one, a bill. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei has then walked into a school in Tehran and chosen that venue on purpose, because he is talking about escalation while standing inside a civilian site that should never be part of any targeting conversation, but on the day more than 160 little girls get laid to rest after their school was bombed on day one, it was a prescient choice.

Depleted defence capabilities trigger ultimatums, a war related betting scandal, are things going more and more Iran's way? Right, so Marco Rubio has gone on the record and admitted the United States struck Iran because it knew Israel was going to strike Iran, and it expected Iran to hit American forces in the region in response, so Washington chose to hit first to reduce the American body count Yeah right. Netanyahu said jump and Trump said how high. And that is why the tables have now turned, because the excuse is no longer “Iran was about to attack America,” it is “we joined a war because Israel was about to start it and we didn’t want to take the retaliation.” Well you’re idiots then, because now you are and if you expect us to believe any of that, you think we’re idiots too. US Central Command has now confirmed six American service members killed in action as of 4pm Eastern time yesterday, including the recovery of the remains of two who were previously unaccounted for from a facility struck during Iran’s initial retaliation. A war sold as preventing American deaths therefore has already produced American deaths, and the administration’s first job therefore becomes managing the gap between the nonsense they are spouting and that toll. Saudi Arabia’s defence ministry spokesperson, Major General Turki al-Maliki, has said the United States embassy compound in Riyadh was hit by two drones, causing a limited fire and minor material damage, and no injuries were reported, and the phrase “limited fire” is the kind of minimising language states use when they are trying to keep the streets calm, but the act itself is the point, because a diplomatic compound in a capital being hit means the host-state bargain is now being contested by force.

Trump and Netanyahu have been reduced to making excuses, burning through defences, and somebody’s already trying to cash in on it too... Right, so US Central Command has admitted that three American F-15E Strike Eagles have been shot down over Kuwait by Kuwaiti air defences in an apparent friendly-fire incident, with all six aircrew ejecting and being recovered, and that is the sort of sentence that ought to stop you dead, because it’s not just “an incident”, it’s the mask-off reality of this mess: the people running the most expensive military machine on earth have got their allies shooting their planes out of the sky, and they still want you to believe they’re in charge of what happens next. Donald Trump has then gone on to tell people the “big wave strikes” have not even happened yet and that a bigger one is coming, and you can hear the arrogance in that because he is talking about escalation like it is a phase in a project plan, a four-week job he’s telling us as his own side shoots his own planes out of the sky and fire rains across air bases, US military shipping and Israel as if that means nothing, like he can schedule chaos and still pretend he’s somehow managing it, that he’s in control of this mess, while the first visible proof of this war’s reality is allied air defences accidentally shooting down their own assets. Keir Starmer has gone to the Commons and said a drone came down within 800 yards of British personnel at RAF Akrotiri, nobody killed fortunately, but you can’t say that sentence out loud and still pretend Britain is standing off to the side can you?