The CIA paid a clergyman to destroy Iran’s democracy in 1953. The baksheesh passed through three brothers, sons of a British agent, to a Nazi-adjacent Islamist who had already tried to murder the Shah. Seventy years later, America is bombing the theocracy it built. The history is declassified. It has been sitting there for decades.
The coup did not sow the seeds for the Islamic Revolution. It constructed the machinery. SAVAK liquidated every secular democrat who might have led a modern Iran. The mosque was left standing because it was the one institution the secret police found too difficult to penetrate. Every morning the Australian media tells us the bombing is regrettable but the regime is monstrous. It does not explain who built the regime.
The USS Spruance blew a hole in the engine room of the Touska and Marines rappelled onto the deck. Trump crowed on Truth Social. Iran called it piracy and cancelled the peace talks. Urban Wronski on why the seizure of an Iranian cargo ship was never about a ship — and what is actually being prepared while the cameras watch the theatre.
Trump’s Hormuz blockade is live. Oil is at $102. China’s Defence Minister says the strait is open for Chinese ships and dares the US to stop them. A forty-nation coalition is forming against the blockade. And one of the last two tankers carrying pre-war oil on earth is heading to Australia. Urban Wronski on the war Trump cannot win.
The war now has the smell of salt, oil, and old empires trying to defy the tide. Thirty-three kilometres. That is the width of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest navigable point: two shipping lanes, each two miles wide, one in, one out, with … Continue reading Hormuz Dateline
JD Vance has just returned from negotiations with Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Two C-130s are still on a dirt strip outside Isfahan. And the Vice President would like to explain, in his own words, why this is going tremendously. Urban Wronski channels Clarke and Dawe. Stand by.
Operation Epic Fury” sounds like it was coined by a fourteen-year-old playing too much Call of Duty. In many ways, it’s a perfect fit for the Peter Pan that Donald Trump has running the Pentagon. Urban Wronski on the War of Donald’s Ear — how two homicidal maniacs borrowed one very willing ear, and launched a war.
Trump burned two C-130s on an Iranian runway, declared total victory, and is now threatening to demolish the power grid of 92 million people. Tonight is the deadline. Urban Wronski on the Easter debacle built on assumption, sustained by bluster, and ending in wreckage that no quantity of “WE GOT HIM!” can unbog.
Australia has signed up to another war without debate and without clarity. The costs are already visible, in rising prices, strained supply chains and a deepening entanglement that blurs the line between ally and participant.
Bernard Keane called Trump a toddler or vandal. After his April 1 speech, even that feels too kind. A sharp dissection of improvised theatre, ally humiliation, and the accelerating reordering of global power.
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