There are obvious aspects of war. Industrial capacity and the ability to restore weapons to the front line are obvious ones. Another is the reconstitution of forces. Both of these are what we watch carefully to determine if a campaign has culminated. This does not mean that a side has completely run out of weapons or troops. It is that the ability to get these to the front lines becomes increasingly difficult. Hence, we have watched several Russian offensives culminate, as well as a few Ukrainian counter-offensives. We may be at the point where the US Air Force campaign in Iran may be culminating as well.

How do we know? This is how we know. And yes, I have cited others in this respect in recent days, so here it is the American Enterprise Institute, which, fun fact, is behind Project 2025, and they want a draft as well:

The war with Iran is no longer hypothetical. American forces are engaged. Missiles are being launched. Interceptors are being expended. Precision munitions are striking targets across a widening battle space. And with every salvo, one uncomfortable reality becomes clearer: The United States does not look like it can sustain protracted, high-intensity conflict with a near-peer adversary.

This is not a budget debate. It is not an academic exercise in force planning. It is a real-time stress test of the American arsenal, and the early results are troubling. The United States entered this conflict with inventories already strained from years of high operational tempo and insufficient industrial replenishment. Now, as Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors are fired to blunt Iranian missile attacks and long-range cruise missiles are launched in sustained strike operations, the depth of America’s magazines is being measured in the only way that ultimately matters, in combat.

Meanwhile, in Beijing and Moscow, analysts are watching closely. Neither China nor Russia needs to fire a shot to learn from this war. They are observing production rates, consumption rates, congressional politics, and the elasticity of the US defense industrial base. They are calculating whether the United States can sustain a prolonged, high-intensity conflict while maintaining deterrence in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. At present, we cannot. War has a way of exposing illusions. One illusion now shattered is the notion that America can rely on small inventories of exquisite, ultra-expensive weapons to carry the day.

The conclusion in paragraph three is not wrong, either, by the way. And some of us have been screaming about this since the Ukraine war started, because there are a bunch of weapons systems that in an asymmetric war are going to lose. Say, tanks, and aircraft carriers, for example. Or for that matter, E3 Sentry AWACs...50,000 dollars defeated that.

So today, I want to look at the other intangible of war. This is propaganda, otherwise known as strategic communications. I have looked at Russian propaganda in the past. Theirs is not a short-term effort. Some of their efforts against the West started in the 1950s, and they have been extremely effective. Some of these were countered by the NAFO dogs in places like Twitter before it was bought by Elon Musk. His actions have made countering Russian propaganda next to impossible, and he himself often spreads it. So reach your own conclusions about Musk and other Techbros that allow all that on their platforms, but suppress any counterarguments. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg, I am looking at you, too.

So today I want to give you Iran, and state from the beginning that we have no strategic communications game. I mean, none of them, so countering these brilliant videos is going to be an impossible task. Though an obvious first step would be to order American social media platforms to prevent these videos from even being posted. In war, your enemy does not get First Amendment protections. So let’s look at a few of these. And please, while they are funny, yes, I laughed, they are also part of war. You are watching brilliant propaganda.

So this first one is directed at the American people. It is clear that the war started because Trump wanted to escape from the Epstein files. Is this a lie? No, not quite. That is one of the going theories, and indeed, Trump will benefit the less we speak of these files. Watch carefully, though.

Satan in this image is not Satan, though it will be read this way. It is Saytan. A different meaning in Islamic eschatology. So here is your first introduction to what you are actually watching:

Iblis was proud and self-centered. He rebelled against Allah and became of nonbelievers. He became the chief of all the Jinn that were like-minded with him. Whoever follows Iblis in his arrogance, rebellion and wickedness is also called a satan. That is the case both among the Jinn and people (al-An’am, 112).

There are many satans, but only one Iblis. Iblis as Satan is capitalized - because of him being the epitome as well as a source of all evil and mischief - whereas other satans are in lower case.

Here he is tempting both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, who both may be in the files. And what does that US Missile target? A school. Only people tempted by evil would do that. And I am of the camp that it was a war crime, but in total war, everybody is committing them. It lays the groundwork for the rest of the LEGO propaganda series. This is the easiest way to explain the need for this war for non-believers.

There is a little detail you may miss: when Bibi is running to the shelter, there is a rat running behind him. It is subtle, but it portrays Bibi as a scared rat. The video also shows all the hits, including the US Embassy in Riyadh, over the first few days of the war. The rat is not accidental. Sorry for relying a tad on AI for this.

In Islam, rats are generally considered ritually impure (najis) and filthy, often classified as harmful pests (fawasiq) that are allowed, and sometimes encouraged, to be killed even during the state of pilgrimage (ihram). They are considered harmful because they carry diseases and cause destruction, rather than being “dirty” in a physical cleaning sense.

This is not unlike what the NAZIs did either, and there is a long series of books on how some of the current Islamic antisemitism is a continuation of the Holocaust in ideological terms, starting with the Mufti of Jerusalem, who was an ally of Hitler. If you want more on this, here is a good book that covers it.

Now that does not mean that Israel is innocent here. It has committed its own horrors and both sides should start, after this war is over, at the most basic. Recognizing each other’s humanity and what they have done to each other. But that is for the future. Just pointing out the themes in the video.

The other theme which is a constant in all these videos, it is a series, is that Western and Israeli technology cannot deal with Iranian Shaheed drones or missiles. And they are partially right. How many radar systems, which are the backbone of air defenses, have we lost? And of course, the return of US personnel in coffins.

So here is the last one to drop in this series. I could go on; there are a lot of them. But this one jumps into what the regime believes, and it is starting to push towards revolution:

It starts subtly with both American Indians and enslaved African American slaves, the first victims of the United States. This is not even a little coded and will be easy to understand even for not very well-educated Americans, who are the target audience.

Who is next in this video? Vietnam, Iran, the Abu Ghraib prison, which most Americans have forgotten, but not the Iraqi resistance. There are more groups that the US has arrived, including the kids at the Al Minab school. By the way, these are a pattern. Including the Palestinians (Israel) and Malcolm X is not accidental. Nor are the Japanese victims of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For those of you who do not know this, or have forgotten, Malcolm X was a convert to Islam and a moral actor during the Civil Rights era. He also argued for the separation of Blacks from the rest of the nation at some point. And that peaceful protest was not going to work. By the end of his life, he had changed his views. So the Malcolm X way is revolution. But you need to know a lot of US history to understand this. Or just read his autobiography.

It strikes me of interest that Latin America is nowhere in this video, but the target may also be West Asia. And watch carefully, because Americans have forgotten, but not Iranians, Iran Air 655, which we shot down decades ago. This is why Iran tried to blow up the car of the wife of the Captain of the USS Vincennes in La Jolla.

What these missiles blow up is of interest as well. It is the Statue of Liberty, because the US is not a free country. It is both idols of Trump and Netanyahu; it is Hollywood, the source of all the bad ideologies of the West. That is what is targeted. The United Nations is a symbol of Western liberal democracies. In the eschatology of the Iranian revolution, destroying the US is a clear objective, because that, with the destruction of Israel, will bring back the twelfth Imam and the return of paradise. Carefully watch the first video in the series, where Shaytan tempts with evil.

And most people watching this don’t get it. And each missile, and they have been doing some of this for real, is named for victims like Rachel Carrie, the children at the school, the victims of Epstein Island; this is an underlying current as well. So, what you are watching in the cute video has been done on real missiles before launch.

Yes, some of us have strange hobbies and watch Telegram all day, and see these things tacked to missiles, like it’s been done forever in wartime. But this is a revolutionary video where Iran is literally telling all those who have suffered under the United States that the time to shed their chains is now. And that the time of vengeance is now under the flag of the revolution. If this sounds a little familiar to oh, Soviet messaging, you are there.

The bonus video I want to give you is what China is doing. That is directed both internally and externally, and no, it is not trolling, as the author of the video believes. It is brilliant propaganda. And if we are in for a long war, even if a war of choice, the government better start getting on with this game. Because, like Israel, which abandoned the propaganda war decades ago, we have lost it. We can get on top of it. I guess it would help if Trump had a discernible cause for the war. It changes so often that I really can’t tell anymore what this is about. Ok, there is one constant with him: the oil. He wants Iranian oil because of his greed. Secondly, the claim that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. Where we are going, likely Iran will end with a nuke, and the Middle East will enter a decades-long cold war, as the US and Russia did. Because mutually assured destruction is insanity, but also a deterrent.