Iran Trolling U.S. About Dwindling Inventories Of Interceptor Missiles

While the U.S. is trolling Iran with bad AI mostly showing adoration of 47

U.S. Army Humvee-mounted Avenger Short-Range Air Defense (SHORAD) at Bedminster golf course in New Jersey last week. Another video from the same day showed an AN/MPQ-64 Sentinel air defense radar alongside the Avenger.

Iran is trolling 47 again, this time with taunts that U.S. missile defense stocks are alarmingly low.

What could go wrong? According to the video, U.S. bases in North America could be hit next. Here we see scandal-ridden Fort Bragg in North Carolina up in flames:

Then there’s this somewhat relevant chart of interceptor inventories.

I say somewhat because “Floor” and “Goal” are based on interceptors needed to repel attacks on U.S. bases in places like South Korea or the Philippines. But some of those air defense systems were moved to West Asia after the first round of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases near Iran.

Based on the golf outing, 47 clearly believes that Iran could and might hit him with an intercontinental missile in an attempted decapitation strike. Allegedly that’s why he escaped secretly from Air Force One in a catering cart after the NATO summit in Turkiye, leaving most of his staff behind on the decoy jet. Mother-of-two Karoline Leavitt resigned as Press Secretary almost immediately, about which you may draw your own conclusions.

A hilariously bad AI-generated video shared by rabid 47 supporter Laura Loomer has not one but two (possibly three?) Karoline Leavitt look-alikes boarding Air Force One. The originator described it as “EXCLUSIVE Video of President Trump using the fake news media as bait for Iran.” Did he though? You be the judge.

One part of the Iranian video that confused me is this depiction of a Lor man (that’s how Explosive Media described him) wearing the distinctive felt cap of that ethnic group from western Iran. Why is he riding a missile and throwing bricks? Maybe to represent the BRICS threat to the crumbling petro dollar? Or is this Lego person a reference to the music of folk and pop singer Mohsen Lorestani? You might have to be Persian to parse this one.

As confusing as things are at the moment, with shifting alliances and rapidly deflating U.S. imperial power, we would all do well to read Pepe Escobar for his wealth of background knowledge and context. He’s just published “The New Great Game, revisited” on a debut substack called Geopolitics Prime. (You may recall that the old Great Game was Russia and Britain competing for influence in Afghanistan and Persia.) You can subscribe to Geopolitics Prime for free. What have you got to lose?

An excerpt:

in Iran, under a revamped – by Leader Mojtaba Khamenei – Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), the solidified consensus is that Tehran will never compromise, especially under the current “no war, no peace” status.

Washington would have to meet a set of very harsh conditions before the Strait of Hormuz reopens, including:

1. The end to US threats and “insults”;

2. Permanent end to US wars against Iran and its allies in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq;

3. Lifting of the American naval blockade and withdrawal of all US forces;

4. No less than $300 billion in compensation for war damages;

5. Lifting of all sanctions;

6. Unconditional release of all frozen assets;

7. Iran’s right to charge up to 7% on cargo transit;

8. A ban on US and Israeli vessels;

9. A 20% violation toll on ships if conditions are breached.

And if these conditions are not met, Iran is threatening to send more Lego videos.

But seriously, if these conditions are not met (and Escobar doesn’t think they ever will be):

some of the serious consequences of the war unleashed on February 28 are already quite clear. Those include the possible financial destruction of the [Gulf Cooperation Council] GCC, complete with the collapse of their ruling regimes; Yemen’s nearly inevitable geographical expansion; virtually complete international isolation of the death cult [i.e. Israel]; a massive global economic crisis in tandem with a U.S. financial crisis

Guess we’ll have to take the bad with the good, because this is the path that we’re on. And as the old Chinese proverb has it, If we make no effort to change direction, we will end up where we are heading.