Quds Day
Nobody flinched
[International Quds Day, Tehran, 2026, Muslim News Nigeria. In view are Pezeshkian and Larijani.]
Published: 2026-03-14
Quds Day
Every sign of continued resistance and retaliation to the US and Israel’s war of aggression against Iran has been displayed by Iran’s political and military leadership. They share the support of a unified nation.
International Quds day was established by Imam Khomenei in 1979 as Iran’s annual expression of solidarity with the people of Palestine and opposition to Israel’s occupation of it.
On Quds day, on the streets of Tehran, March 13th, 2026, under leaden skies, residents of the capital joined millions across their nation to reaffirm their support for Palestine. Palestinians continue to struggle to survive under the brutal rule of the US sponsored apartheid state, Israel.
The Zionists running Israel are currently warring against Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. While Iranians marched in Tehran, Israelis continued with their genocide in recently re-blockaded Gaza.
Iran’s leadership were not “cowering” or “hiding”, as US Secretary of War Hegseth propagandised. They were on the streets with the people. They marched fearlessly.
Iran’s newly chosen and grieving Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, President Pezeshkian, Top Iranian national security official Ali Larijani, chief of judiciary Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, former vice presidents, the current speaker of the parliament and many other senior officials walked among the people.
[In] central Tehran, Enghelab Street, supporters of the Islamic Republic are marching on Jerusalem Street, chanting “Allah-o Akbar” AS AMERICAN AND ISRAELI BOMBS EXPLODE straight ahead of them.
There is no visible panic in the video, not even an attempt to pause or change direction. No one is trying to take cover. Instead, they keep marching straight toward the explosions.
[Trita Parsi on X/itter]
During this public display of protest against the Israeli genocide and in support of Iran’s political independence, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) launched Wave 45 of Iran’s response to the unprovoked, illegal war. 30 ballistic missiles, each carrying warheads weighing between one and two tons, were launched at the aggressors.
According to the Iranian commander [Brigadier General Majid Mousavi], the strikes successfully disrupted key aerial monitoring and surveillance systems belonging to the Israeli entity.
He described the attack as “the heaviest operational rainfall against the entity so far.”
Iran’s military has been designed and built to fight this war, foreseen as inevitable by Iranian leadership decades ago. The 1980 to 1988 US sponsored Iraq war against Iran informed the Islamic Republic’s leadership then, and now.
Many subterranean towns were built. There, missiles and drones can be built, or stored ones can be fired. The same distributed, subterranean model of defence, the “mosaic” model, was implemented by Hizbollah, Ansar Allah and Hamas.
Neither the US nor Israel has been able to defeat any of these forces. There is no reason to believe the US or Israel can defeat the far larger force protecting the 93 million people of a unified Iran.
Group Shame
Two days before Quds Day, on March 11th, the nation which has hosted the US 5th fleet for decades, Bahrain, tabled a resolution in the U.N. Security Council condemning Iran. The past tense of “hosted” is used as the US base which serviced the port in Bahrain has been destroyed during Iran’s retaliation.
Bahrain’s resolution did not mention that both the US and Israel had illegally attacked Iran. Both halves of USrael lacked approval for the attack from the same chamber in which Bahrain tabled the unbelievable resolution. Bahrain portrayed Iran’s self-defence as “unprovoked” aggression, borrowing the same false term from the US narrative for its failed war against Russia in Ukraine.
The Security Council farce saw 13 nations vote for an historically perverse lie. They wrote themselves into the U.N. record as cowardly, imperial liars for future generations to read about.
And read they almost certainly will. This US war is highly likely to last long enough to create sufficient economic suffering for it to be long remembered. In Iran, it will never be forgotten, as it began with the murder of revered Shia jurist, Imam and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Flooding the Zone
US President and war instigator Trump began blathering about “winning” this week. He repeated his rhetoric when he commanded the US Navy to retreat from its months long battle with Yemen’s Ansar Allah on the Red Sea. US questions were relayed to Iran about a ceasefire. Negotiations or discussion were point blank refused. Instead Iran issued a list of demands, including reparations and a full US demobilisation from the region, to settle the war.
Iran’s ultimatum is so contradictory to US political propaganda that the US has not even acknowledged receipt of it. Instead, the US has been issuing a “flood the zone” diatribe of irrelevant and impossible military ideas and other distractions.
The conundrum at the heart of the longevity of the war and the impossibility of the issued US military fantasies is Iran’s control of commercial passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Before addressing the Strait, let’s consider the parties to and motives behind the war.
This war, emphasized Brian Berletic, is a war between the US and China. The US is implementing a blockade of energy supply to China, planned and re-planned for years. The US intention is to prevent China reaching its escape velocity from the empire, the emergence of a completely independent “peer” or “rival” China. The energy blockade of China has already been signaled through recent US military intervention in the oil exporting nations of Niger and Venezuela.
Many would argue that the moment of China’s escape from US domination has already passed. They would cite economic and technical research data. China is the largest world economy by Purchasing Power Parity measures, and is by far the highest publisher of research papers in material science. Its robotic Mars landings a few years ago were testament to its scientific and engineering capabilities.
The war’s economic damage will cause political realignments, but those are likely be too little to late, or too uncoordinated, for the US to achieve its goal. China has established and will maintain its political and economic independence from US imperial domination.
Berletic emphasized that Israel is a player in this war. It is guilty of its own crimes. Berletic reminds us that Israel’s creation was approved by the US. It is funded and armed by the US. It can do nothing without the US. Israel is a participating, guilty, bit player.
This is a US war.
Military Fantasies
Currently, maritime transit of Hormuz requires Iranian approval. China bought the tickets for its merchant fleet years ago via its 25 year strategic partnership with Iran. With the provision of satellite and other “ISR” [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] capabilities China has reaffirmed to Iran and the rest of the world its right to Iranian energy supply. Iran’s military destroyed US bases in the region using their own weaponry. Targeting was assisted with Chinese ISR and GPS (Beidou) support.
One of the key target types of these first 45 “waves” by the IRGC was US ISR capabilities. Iran destroyed at least 5 significant US radar systems in the region. The IRGC has left the US and Israel blind. That the US could not defend these systems is quite a surprise.
Larry Johnson asserted that Israel now has less than 90 seconds warning for incoming missile attacks. He is certain that one significant US base in the region has no missile defence at all.
The US is, therefore, being run out of the region. It cannot, or chooses not to, defend a significant military base in the region. The US has lost the war in the region, militarily. [See the update at the end of this article, in which the US President has called for other countries to join the US in this failed war of attrition.]
The US is cannibalizing its own defense systems in other allied nations to shift components to southwest Asia. This desperation confirms analysis from the Ukraine war of the poor production rates of US military contractors and the depleted state of US arsenals. The fact that the US is in this state attests to its ongoing collapse as an empire.
Dire Straights
While Iran chooses to fight, the Strait of Hormuz will be under its control or the Strait will unavailable for commercial shipping.
Iran could sink its own ships, or anyone else’s, in the middle of the Strait and block it. Then, if anyone tried to clear the sunken ships, a difficult task, Iran can pile those ships on top of those already below by sinking the “rescue” ships.
There is no escape from this.
Thus, any military fantasy about locations on the inside of the Strait, like “Kharg Island” are a logistical impossibility. One must capture the Strait, and tens of kilometres inland from it, first, or one’s attacking forces will have no supporting logistics (read drinking water and ammunition).
Any attempt to capture the Strait will result in its blockage by Iran sinking the vessels. The Strait will then be blocked for the the duration of the conflict because its clearance is impossible.
Thus, to re-conclude, either Iran controls the traffic through the Strait, or it is blocked, for the duration of the conflict.
All US ideas about military solutions to this conflict are facetious, military blather for the MSM to waste everyone’s time talking about.
The military pathway for this war is one of attrition. Iran, by understanding its geography and planning an intelligent defence, has left the US with no alternative than a war of attrition. It is entirely reasonable to expect that Iran can fight this war for years. Those underground cities surely have stocks of food, water and medicines.
Iran’s strategy is not military, but economic. The rest of the world cannot afford the high prices and lack of availability of oil caused by the war which the US and Israel started. The US has Iran’s list of demands to end it.
Shedding Allies
The “E4”, as this newsletter has named Britain, France, Germany and the EU Commission under Starmer, Macron, Merz and von der Leyen, respectively, remain staunch adherents of narrative misdirection issued from Washington D.C., typified by the recent U.N. resolution. However, other nations in Europe are beginning to find their independent voices.
Spain has perhaps been the most prominent. This is unsurprising given its centuries long relationship with north Africa and its Muslim communities. Other European nations are likely to find their voices as the prices of LNG and petroleum skyrocket. This will happen as US manipulations of the market by dumping oil reserves and narratives into it stop, and as other nations’ petroleum reserves begin to disappear.
A greater risk for the Empire than European nations leaving it is a loss of influence over its “forward military base hosting allies” in East Asia. Just as the Gulf monarchies are now being forced to question the value of hundreds of billions dollars paid to the US for what resulted in no security, South Korea is being asked the same.
[US bases, current and potential, five years ago.]
The Korean peninsula was divided by the US to freeze the war there in 1953. The southern half of the peninsula is watching as a US THAAD battery, theoretically meant to defend it, is being dismantled to be shipped to Israel. The true understanding that the US presence on the peninsula is to fight China, a war the Koreans do not want, rather than defend the south from the north, may grow politically.
Escape Velocity in 5 Years?
It is not entirely beyond comprehension that the Russian allied north may yet come to support the south in clearing the US from a unified peninsula. The US has become so reckless in its foreign policy that aligning oneself with it is dangerous. The Korean people have longed to reunify their peninsula for decades. It has been US imperial policy to prevent this.
The question becomes, can the US afford to continue to enforce this policy? The Empire’s foreign policy implementation arms, AKA the CIA and the IMF, will soon have their hands full. Retaining allies during the recession soon to be caused by the US war against China in Iran may prove challenging. (As an aside, note the similarity of the structure of terms: US (and NATO) war against Russia in Ukraine, and US (and Israeli) war against China in Iran — this is how the empire has fought, using proxies and/or on their territory, since 2008. Contained in the two similar terms are the leading US “enemies”, Russia and China, which together with Iran form the Trilateral Strategic Partnership at the center of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).)
On top of South Korea, the US needs to enforce its will on Japan and the Philippines to maintain its ring of military bases around China. A loss of any of these increases the risk of losing the rest. Unfortunately for the strategically challenged US, they need the oil which the US is preventing them from obtaining. Australia finds itself in a very similar situation.
By some calculations, China will achieve core energy independence in 5 years. This timeline is based on China’s astonishing investments in renewable energy. Time was running out for the empire to begin its blockade strategy. Netanyahu’s vulnerability to imprisonment may have been a factor in the US rush to start the blockade before it was fully prepared.
From Tokyo to Reykjavik
As the last article noted, there is no strategy on display from the US, via its narrative construction or military tactics. Both the Pentagon and the US “intelligence community” have disowned the war via publishing leaks in the Washington Post. These indicate an opportunistic and unprepared launching of the energy blockade. That lack of preparedness implies a lack of control of outcomes rather than a lack of ability to temporarily deny China energy. That members of the currently ruling elite in the US will profit from the war is a given. They all invest in the ponzi scheme of military contractors and US energy companies in the US stock market.
The US Empire is at risk of losing allies in southwest Asia and from its ring around China in east Asia. The loss of US allies from southwest Asia, should they follow Saudi Arabia’s and Iran’s lead in selling hydrocarbons in non-US dollar currencies, will undermine the Petro-dollar. This will lead to a further devaluation of the US dollar, which will raise its national debt. That debt is already beyond US means to repay. Neither its Congress nor its Executive care. They have been bankrupting the US for years.
Additional to the normal murder and mayhem of the US and its military industrial complex, the US war against China in Iran has placed at risk the lives of millions in southwest Asia. The rich from the region are beginning to let the US feel their displeasure.
Another victim of the haphazard US militarism are household budgets being held hostage from Tokyo to Reykjavik.
Escorting in a new era
The continuous wars which the US has run since 9/11 have removed the Pax from Pax Americana. As Pepe Escobar has noted, we have an Empire of Chaos and Lies. It has run completely amok. It has destroyed the international institutions which it created to build and maintain itself. The Empire has destroyed its own foundations, believing that narrative trumps reality.
Descriptions of reality are still being published outside the Zionist owned, atrocity porn publishing, Imperial press:
We guarantee the security of any oil tanker, under any flag, that can convince an American destroyer to escort it through the Strait of Hormuz.
— Alireza Tangsiri, Commander of the IRGC Navy
US Destroyers are 700 Kms away from Iran’s borders. Their aircraft carriers are 300 Kms further out.
<>
Update 2026-03-15
Research into the massacre of more than 160 school girls in the town of Manib, Iran on the opening day of the war, revealed that the buildings the Pentagon targeted were assembled into a list by automated systems (AKA “AI”). Selected targets were not verified by human oversight as legitimate. Hospitals and schools were not manually removed from the list of targets assembled by the software and data which the Pentagon had purchased. Secretary of War Hegseth had demanded that such safeguards be removed.
Hegseth created a mechanism which allows the provider of the software and data to feed locations into a target list which will not be verified or assessed by a human. The Pentagon has effectively outsourced what gets destroyed and who gets killed to software systems which it neither understands nor controls.
This allows the Pentagon’s software and data providers to use the Pentagon as a private weapon. They add to the dataset whichever locations they would like destroyed. That private targeting disappears in the lack of accountability which is endemic to war.
The US targeting of schools and hospitals in its war against Iran is an expression of this “Pentagon as a private weapon” architecture.
This inhuman targeting follows closely the behaviour of the Israeli military as a part of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. There, the automated target selection system was called Lavendar. It turned social media posts and cell phone tracking locations into numbers. If they added up to a threshold, a drone was sent to kill the person or a missile was sent to murder their entire family.
The death of the US empire includes a moral death. Its public officials are celebrating the murder of children, in Gaza, Palestine and Manib, Iran.
Nothing signifies the collapse of morality more than celebrating the military murder of children by automated systems.
[Trump’s version of War is Peace, 2026.]
Thinking About the Unthinkable; Michael Hudson; The Unz Review; 2026-03-09
The war that began on February 28 can realistically be deemed to be the formal opening of World War III because what is at issue are the terms on which the entire world will be able to buy oil and gas. Can they buy this energy from exporters in currencies other than the dollar, headed by Russia and Iran (and until recently, Venezuela)? Will the present U.S. demand to control of the international oil trade require oil-exporting countries to price it in dollars, and indeed to recycle their export earnings and national savings into investments in U.S. government securities, bonds and stocks?
That recycling of petrodollars has been the basis of America’s financialization and weaponization of the world’s oil trade, and its imperial strategy of isolating countries that resist adherence to the U.S. ruler-based order (no real rules, but simply U.S. ad hoc demands). So what is at issue is not only the U.S. military presence in the Middle East – along with its two proxy armies, Israel and ISIS/al Qaeda jihadists. And the U.S. and Israeli pretense that it is about Iran having atomic weapons of mass destruction is as fictitious an accusation as that levied against Iraq in 2003. What is at issue is ending the Middle East’s economic alliances with the United States and whether its oil-export earnings will continue to be accumulated in dollars as the buttress of the U.S. balance of payments to help pay for its military bases throughout the world.
[Hudson, cited above, emphasis mine.]
USrael frontmen Netanyahu and Trump are rolling the dice, all in, on destroying Iran.
The question the world can ask itself is, do we want a world war to “save Israel” and gift to Israel regional hegemony over the oil producing nations of southwest Asia?
If Iran survives this conflict and the USraeli military destroy themselves in the process, the petrodollar goes down and oil and gas can be sold in differing currencies.
If USrael wins, the existing profitable plan of genocide and sectarian violence in the region will continue on the path to “Greater Israel”.
Recall that al Jolani (al Sharaa or whatever they call him now), a beheading murderer, was installed by USrael as President of Syria. This is “Greater Israel” in the making. It is the plan for the region. “Greater Israel” will become a central node, the oil control nexus, of the US Empire.
The US Empire will be converted into the USrael Zionist Empire because the Zionists will control the nexus of power (the territory which contains the oil, and media, AI and the Pentagon).
The false dichotomy of America First or Israel First will disappear. Avaricious, ethno-supremacists, who celebrate the murder or children and claim to be religious, will rule the empire.
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Sources
Security Council Adopts Resolution 2817 (2026) Condemning Iran’s ‘Egregious Attacks’ against Neighbours as Middle East Violence Rapidly Escalates; Press Office; United Nations; 2026-03-11
Iran-US conflict turns into prolonged attrition; M. K. Bhadrakumar; Indian Punchline; 2026-03-13
When the Security Council Cannot Utter the Truth; Annette Morgan; Consortium News; 2026-03-12
Donald Trump’s War on Iran is Turning into a Debacle; Larry C. Johnson; SONAR 21; 2026-03-12
War On Iran: (Just a few links); b.; Moon of Alabama; 2026-03-12
War On Iran - No. Taking Kharg Island Is Not An Option.; b.; Moon of Alabama; 2026-03-10
Quds Day Marches Draw Massive Crowds Across Iran; archive.is; Archive.today; 2026-03-13
War On Iran: (Just a few links); b.; Moon of Alabama; 2026-03-12
IRGC announces 45th wave of Operation True Promise 4; Al Mayadeen English; Al Mayadeen English; 2026-03-13
South Korea Alarmed as U.S. Pulls Patriot and THAAD Missile Defenses for Iran Crisis—Lee Jae-myung Admits Seoul ‘Cannot Stop Washington; DEFENCE SECURITY ASIA; Archive.today; 2026-03
Hegseth ignored military officials when he slashed offices that limit risk to civilians; Politico; Politico; 2026-03-13
Videos
Day 11: A US War on Iran is a US War on China - US “Distant Blockade” Placed on China; Brian Berletic; The New Atlas; 2026-03-10
Update: US Middle-East Bases DESTROYED. Israel Defenseless; Prof. Lottaz interviews Larry C Johnson; Neutrality Studies; 2026-03-13
Israel’s Agenda Is Collapsing… And It’s Happening Fast; Alkhorshid interviews Amb. Chas Freeman; Dialogue Works; 2026-03-13
U.S. KC-135 Down — Carrier Abraham Lincoln Hit by Missiles & Drones; Alkhorshid interviews Larry Johnson & Col. Wilkerson; Dialogue Works; 2026-03-13
WATCH: The World This Week w/John Kiriakou; Lauria interviews Kiriakou; Consortium News; 2026-03-14
“… to dissect a war launched with no preparation, no diplomacy, no strategy, and no understanding of the country the U.S. has now attacked.
…
This conversation is a indictment of a government run by amateurs, ideologues, and blackmail‑artists, and a press corps too timid—or too complicit—to say so. It’s also a warning: history is repeating itself, but this time the stakes are far higher.”
Copyleft: CC0
