Yemen/Iran: Reality Knocks on Trump's Door

The "Hot Mess" of US intelligence, official incompetence and tactical failures

Published: 2025-03-29

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2 Months and 9 Days In

When newly returned US President Donald Trump expressed his desire to build a Gazan Riviera while also beginning efforts to rebuild diplomatic relations with Russia, this newsletter gave him the benefit of the doubt. The horrific situation for the population of Gaza was not being further destroyed at the time due to the "ceasefire" into which Trump envoy Witkoff had strong armed the ever deceitful Israeli leadership. That situation has now changed demonstrably. There is no more doubt.

While it was always understood that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu would not strictly abide by the ceasefire and harbored a passion to restart the IDF's military massacres in Gaza, it was Trump's approval of this which defined his subservience to Imperial Project Israel.

On March 18th Antiwar reported that "Trump Gave Israel the 'Green Light' To Restart Large-Scale Bombing in Gaza". A month earlier it had reported "Israeli DM: US Gave Israel Green Light to Stay in Lebanon 'Indefinitely'". Trump has now demonstrated political, on top of military, support for the genocide in Gaza, Palestine, as well as the illegal annexation of Lebanon. He, as with the previous president, is complicit in the Empire's genocide in Palestine.

As this newsletter noted back in November 2023, two political groups with a military capability, outside of Hamas in Gaza, were complying with the Genocide Convention to prevent and punish Israel for the genocide it was executing on the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Israel used booby-trapped consumer electronics and 86 US "bunker buster" bombs on top of each other, to assassinate the political leadership and command structure of Hezbollah. Since, a change of political leadership in Lebanon and an imposed ceasefire have forced Hezbollah to stop applying military pressure protesting the Israeli genocide in the strongest way they could.

Israel has consistently demonstrated its preferred policy of personally targeting its political opponents. In the West this is executed by falsely smearing people as being "anti-semitic". In its region, Israel assassinates them. Its murder of Hamas' political leader Haniyeh in Tehran, at the inauguration of current Iranian President Pezeshkian, proves the point.

At the resumption of Israel's blockade of humanitarian supply to Gaza, Ansar Allah warned that it would restart its economic blockade of Israel on the Red Sea. The Trump regime responded, proactively and illegally, by firing missiles without U.N. approval at Yemen. The initial attack included targeting an apartment building in the Yemeni capital Sana'a, to assassinate a senior military leader. The attack was an Israeli style "cut off the head of the snake" targeted assassination operation. The US had not only used the Israeli tactic, but murdered a Yemeni using Israeli intelligence.

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson revealed the tactical weakness in the Trump regime's plans to use aircraft carrier groups in the Red Sea for the renewed illegal war against the only nation standing up to Israel's genocide. A carrier's pair of destroyers defending it are each equipped with 96 vertically launched missiles to intercept missile attacks against the carrier. Each "SM-3" missile costs well over a million US dollars, with two being a minimum launch to intercept an incoming ballistic missile. The destroyers cannot be re-armed with these missiles at sea. This explains the two carrier groups deployed for the operation, to operate on rotation, doubling the cost.

Ansar Allah could, with less than 100 attacks, drain all defensive missiles from the defending destroyers leaving a US Navy primary asset vulnerable. In comes the next carrier group, rinse and repeat. Should Ansar Allah do this twice, there may be insufficient missiles in US stocks to rearm the destroyers. Ansar Allah would have rendered inoperable two US carrier groups and potentially have made all others vulnerable because of lack of defensive missile resupply. This serious tactical error is one into which the US Navy refuses trap itself.

If the US Navy fires two SM-3s at every ballistic missile fired by the Houthis, the US inventory will be rapidly depleted and the CSG will be forced to withdraw from the Red Sea to reload. If the Houthis decide to launch daily attacks of the Harry S Truman CSG, they may be able to achieve the tactical disarmament of the CSG.

[Larry Johnson]

Admitting tactical defeat, the Trump regime has since “suggested” that it will be using bombers from Diego Garcia instead. It has no choice.

This US foreign military base is located on one of the Chagos Islands, gifted to the US by the UK who stole it from its indigenous population.

A second reason for the US change in tactics results from the NATO-Russia Ukraine war. The US is very low on various missile types, but has a deep inventory of bombs which its Ukrainian proxy was not able to deploy and consume. Bombs are less precise and will result in even more civilian casualties in Yemen. Any hope the US may have that this will turn the population against Ansar Allah can be discounted. They withstood the same abuse by US proxy Saudi Arabia, for 7 years.

Ansar Allah in Sana'a

During Pepe Escobar's visit to Sana'a he reported (see Sources) on the triangular political structure of Ansar Allah. Its religious and moral leadership is from the leader of the Houti tribe. Its political decision making is made by a political council. The council defines policy for the government. The dominant religion is Shia Islam, as is that of Hezbollah and Iran.

US President Trump's rhetorical threats to "hold Iran accountable" for actions chosen by Ansar Allah contains the usual mix of hypocrisy and racism which the Global Majority have come to expect from US regimes. The US cannot accept that Ansar Allah makes its own weapons, because they are Arab. Trump, along with most US citizens, is almost certainly unaware of the history of the Arabian peninsula, and the Yemeni region's role in it. Escobar emphasized the millenia for which the territory has been inhabited, and its peoples' role in trade from Africa to southeast Asia.

Yemeni engineers, Escobar informed us, were trained in Russia and China. Russian engineers designed and built hypersonic missiles. The US is still working on it. China has landed rovers on the Moon and Mars. It is building its own space station.

Trump's hypocrisy stems from accusing Ansar Allah of acting in Iran's stead when the US is clearly acting in concert with Israel. Good ol' illogical, racist political rhetoric from the GOP side of the Imperial Uniparty.

Larry Johnson issued multiple recent articles partially explaining why the US executes such ham-fisted tactical operations. In the first, "US Annual Threat Assessment is a Hot Mess", he notes that US intelligence agencies are echoing the same casualty figures for the NATO-Russia Ukraine war which were issued as Ukraine's propaganda, which were also reprinted in US media in the US-AID information laundering loop. More realistic data is available. Johnson cites those from Mediazone.

Another approach can also be informative. From the US Intel Leaks, the public learned of the kill ratio understood by the lower ranks of the intelligence community, where real data still resides, as 8:1 to Russia's advantage. Later statements by Russian President Putin revised that down to 5:1 due to higher Russian casualty rates believed to have come from fighting in urban environments. The actual ratio is certainly above 5:1 now, given the continuous examples of Ukraine's soldiers being forced to retreat under fire. From an estimated ratio, one can take the Mediazona numbers and from them calculate to see that the figures propagandized by Ukraine to be Russian, are actually close to their own.

Ukraine has likely been using its own losses as propaganda for Russia's.

The US Hot Mess

Johnson followed up with an article explaining the corrupt political basis for the lies in US intelligence. He added the case of George Allen to the that of Sam Adams, made famous from the award named after him by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) for integrity and ethics in intelligence reporting. The Allen case directly parallels Adams' of correctly estimating adversary troop numbers as higher than politically motivated statements of flag officers. The differences between the two cases are the nation (Vietnam vs. North Korea) and a decade in time.

Intelligence data is required to match political statements. No, not in Russia during the Cold War, in the US during the Cold War. Nothing has changed. The "WMD" lies for Iraq War 2, and now the casualty figures in Ukraine stand as examples.

Johnson's piece reminds us of the political and economic corruption which is endemic to the US "MICCIMATT" system. False intelligence is being used to attempt to gin up a war with Iran. False statements are being made by senior officials. "Ooops, aren't we allowed to use Signal?" US National Security Adviser Waltz asserted that Iran's missile defenses remain significantly damaged from the US supported Israeli missile attack on 2024-04-19. There is no evidence to support this claim.

Israel's "attack" was launched from Iraqi airspace. Its planes did not fly into Iranian airspace because of the risk. The first wave of the Israeli attack was meant to remove air defenses, but failed. Additionally, Israel detected an "unknown" source identifying some of its planes. The Israeli's got spooked and bugged out, having only launched a limited attack on defense radar and some Iranian targets in range of their plane's missiles from Iraqi airspace.

One should not forget that prior to the Israeli attack on Iran, preparations for it were leaked by a mid-level US staffer from one of their geospatial intelligence organisations.

Iran and its strategic partner Russia have had almost a year to repair the small amount of damage done to one or two of its radar and missile defense installations and upgrade them.

The US military's job is to do what its told and generate income for the Military Industrial Complex, unless it risks the lives of large numbers of its soldiers, sailors, marines or pilots, the quotas for which it has been unable to fill for years. The little carrier group dance in the Red Sea did just that, generate income at acceptable risk.

A war with Iran is an horrifically different kettle of fish. Irrespective of the bovine excrement being issued out of Waltz' mouth, the US military know the operational state of Iran's missile defense capabilities. They have satellites for this.

“The war over war with Iran [has just begun]”, as Responsible Statecraft put it, is for the pundits and foreign policy think tankers to enjoy. The US military wont go near it. It does not have the assets, force strength or production capacity.

A potential political mission is to trigger the snap back provisions of the JCPOA before the treaty expires in October. Alastair Crooke emphasized this to Johnson during a recent discussion (see Sources). The power of those provisions is that they theoretically force all non-Iranian parties to the treaty to re-apply all economic sanctions on Iran. The provision was written to skirt any U.N. Security Council veto. If achieved it would amount to a two-fer: Iran receives economic sanctions, and the US is able to strong arm its squabbling European allies into it. Which of these would give more pleasure to the Trump administration is difficult to assess.

Iran and its BRICS/SCO partners are well aware of all of this. While the current US regime may be filled with clowns texting attack plans to a group chat with a journalist, Russia, China, Iran and India have professional diplomatic and security bureaucracies which inform their political leadership.

The nations which the US declares as its adversaries live in the real world.

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Sources

Chagos and the Dark Soul of the British Labour Party; Craig Murray; 2019-03-26

Trump Gave Israel the 'Green Light' To Restart Large-Scale Bombing in Gaza; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-18

Israeli DM: US Gave Israel Green Light to Stay in Lebanon 'Indefinitely'; Jason Ditz; Antiwar; 2025-02-27

US Bomber Deployment to Diego Garcia Suggests Heavier Airstrikes on Yemen Could Be Coming; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-26

Trump Says He Will Continue Bombing Yemen for a 'Long Time'; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-27

Report: Israel Provided the US With Intelligence for the Yemen Airstrike Discussed in Signal Chat; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-27

Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump's Advisers Shared on Signal - The Atlantic; Theatlantic; Archive.today; 2025-03-26

Political Pressure - Why The Intelligence Community Fails to Accurately Assess Combat Losses and Military Capability; Larry C. Johnson; SONAR21; 2025-03-27

US Annual Threat Assessment is a Hot Mess; Larry C. Johnson; SONAR21; 2025-03-26

The Limitations of the US Naval Air Defense System will Force the US to Withdraw from the Red Sea; Larry C. Johnson; SONAR21; 2025-03-20

The JCPOA Nuclear Deal: Why Europe Cannot Use the 'Snap Back' Mechanism Against Iran; Mehrnews; Global Research; 2019-07-03

Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence

Actively Complying with the Genocide Convention; YesXorNo; 2023-11-27

Paging Hezbollah; YesXorNo; 2024-09-18

[US] NATO v Russia: 2014 - 2025; YesXorNo; 2024-03-08

Zionists Invite US Into Suicide Pact; YesXorNo; 2024-08-01

The Tail is a Part of the Dog; YesXorNo; 2025-03-22

Yemen Strikes Back as U.S. & Israel Escalate; Alkhorshid interviews Pepe Escobar; Dialogue Works; 2025-03-25

War with Iran — Trump’s Biggest Mistake? | Alastair Crooke Interview; Johnson interviews Crooke; Counter Currents; 2025-03-26

INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern : Weekly Wrap; Napolitano interviews Johnson & McGovern; Judging Freedom; 2025-03-28

[SPECIAL] - Pepe Escobar : What I Am Seeing In Yemen!; Napolitano interviews Escobar; Judging Freedom; 2025-03-28

• Escobar revealed two more “westerners” in the party of 12 foreign visitors to Yemen. Surprise, surprise, they were our friendly Irish troublemakers, Clare Daly and Mick Wallace! I shall re-publish their episode on the trip for I4Ctrouble, when it is released.

Richard D. Wolff and Michael Hudson: Russia Has No Choice: Defend Iran or Lose Big?; Alkhorshid interviews Wolff & Hudson; Dialogue Works; 2025-03-27

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