Bolivia rose up and turfed their right wing, american favoured leader.
Now trump has new marching orders.
Now trump has new marching orders.
War with Iran
- Thread starter Butler1000
- Start date
Why does the UK arrest so many more people than Iran over SM posts?
Where is the free speech?
Where is the free speech?
america burned through its missile supply and Israel can't do it alone.
Maybe they can't restart the war at all.
Maybe they can't restart the war at all.
Trump The Dealmaker Taken For A Ride
Exclusive
U.S. bears brunt of Israel’s missile defense, Pentagon assessments show
Amid hostilities with Iran, the American military expended far more advanced interceptors to protect Israel than Israeli forces did, according to Defense Department data.
May 21, 2026 at 1:52 p.m. EDTToday at 1:52 p.m. EDT
An Israeli Iron Dome interceptor streaks through the sky close to the Israel-Lebanon border in late March. (Jalaa Marey/AFP/Getty Images)
By John Hudson
The U.S. military has depleted much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors after expending far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iran than Israeli forces used themselves, according to Defense Department assessments described to The Washington Post.
The imbalance, according to three U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, underscores the extent to which Washington has shouldered the burden of countering Iranian ballistic missile strikes during Operation Epic Fury, and raises questions about U.S. military readiness and security commitments around the world.
The United States launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptors in defense of Israel — roughly half of the Pentagon’s total inventory — along with more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors fired from naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, said the U.S. officials, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 of its Arrow interceptors and around 90 David’s Sling interceptors, some of which were used against less sophisticated projectiles fired by Iran-backed groups in Yemen and Lebanon.
Military analysts said the data described to The Post offers a rare window into how the United States and Israel work together.
“The numbers are striking,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “The United States absorbed most of the missile defense mission while Israel conserved its own magazines. Even if the operational logic was sound, the United States is left with roughly 200 THAAD interceptors and a production line that can’t keep pace with demand.”
The shortage of U.S. interceptors has alarmed U.S. allies in Asia, particularly Japan and South Korea, which rely on the United States as a deterrent to potential threats from North Korea and China. “That bill risks coming due in theaters that have nothing to do with Iran,” said Grieco.
U.S. and Israeli officials routinely tout their close cooperation and the strength of Israel’s multilayered air-defense system. But the Defense Department assessments suggest a more lopsided dynamic.
“In total, the U.S. shot around 120 more interceptors and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles,” said a U.S. administration official.
If the United States and Israel resume hostilities against Iran in the coming days, as President Donald Trump has threatened to do, the U.S. military is likely to expend an even greater share of interceptors because of a recent decision by the Israeli military to take some of its missile defense batteries offline for maintenance, said an administration official. “The imbalance will likely be exacerbated if fighting restarts,” the official said.
In a statement, the Pentagon defended the balance of military resources used between Israel and the United States.
“Ballistic missile interceptors are just one tool in a vast network of systems and capabilities that comprise a layered and integrated air defense network,” said Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman. “Both Israel and the United States carried the defensive burden equitably during Operation Epic Fury, which saw both countries employ fighter aircraft, counter-UAS systems, and various other advanced air and missile defense capabilities with maximal effectiveness.”
The Israeli government also defended the approach. “Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury were coordinated at the highest and closest levels, to the benefit of both countries and their allies,” the Israeli Embassy in Washington said in a statement. “The U.S. has no other partner with the military willingness, readiness, shared interests, and capabilities of Israel.”
Since the start of the conflict on Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel have worked together closely, killing Iran’s supreme leader and scores of senior Iranian military and political leaders while laying waste to Iran’s navy and air force.
Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank inspect the remnants of a missile fired from Iran in late March. (Heidi Levine/For The Washington Post)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was central to persuading Trump to go to war, promising an offensive that would inspire regime change and rid the country of its ability to develop a nuclear weapon, said U.S. officials.
But tensions have grown between the two allies as the war has proven more challenging than either leader anticipated. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked global energy supplies and ramped up inflation. Despite Trump’s claims that Iran’s missile arsenal has been “mostly decimated,” Tehran retains about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, according to U.S. intelligence. Much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium probably remains in the nuclear facilities bombed by the U.S. and Israel last year.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu and Trump held a tense phone call about the path forward, said U.S. and Middle Eastern officials. The Israeli leader’s persistent pressure to restart the war has irritated some U.S. officials, particularly given the strain that renewed fighting would impose on the Pentagon’s munitions supply.
“Israel is not capable of fighting and winning wars on its own, but nobody actually knows this, because they never see the back end,” said a second administration official.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...mm-v-smith-mental-disabilities-death-penalty/
It’s unclear whether the United States’ munitions shortages factor into Trump’s deliberations over restarting the war.
Earlier this week, Trump said he called off an imminent military strike on Iran at the behest of America’s Arab allies who urged him to consider a peace deal with Iran that would restrict its nuclear program in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and ending the war.
“We’re in the final stages of Iran. We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “We’ll either have a deal, or we’re going to do some things that are a little bit nasty.”
In preparation for a potential resumption of hostilities, the United States moved more naval assets near Israel to provide additional protection from Iranian threats.
If fighting does resume, the extent to which Iran’s allies in the region may join in will be a significant factor, said U.S. officials. During the last round of fighting, Israel could generate only 50 percent of the airstrikes by the end of March compared with the beginning of the war because its aircraft and pilots were “worn down” by operations against Houthi militants in Yemen and airstrikes targeting Hezbollah in Lebanon, said a U.S. official.
“The sortie degradation is important,” said Grieco. “The IDF was worn down by Gaza, Lebanon, and the question I have is whether Israeli commanders underestimated their ability to sustain operational tempo.”
According to officials, the two countries agreed in advance to a ballistic missile-defense framework that effectively ensured that high-end interceptors such as THAAD and ship-based missiles would absorb the bulk of ballistic threats to Israel.
Israel relies more heavily on lower-tier systems such as Iron Dome and David’s Sling to counter projectiles from groups such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, while conserving its more sophisticated interceptors. The result, officials said, was a “significant” drawdown of U.S. stockpiles while Israel was able to maintain its higher-end air defense stockpiles.
The dynamic seemed to clash with Trump’s “America First,” mantra, said Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian CATO Institute.
“Since Trump took office again, Israel’s position makes sense: our priorities first, our resources last,” he said. “Why Trump has tried to make this America First is less clear.”
After the Pentagon last year reportedly disclosed having only 25 percent of the Patriot air defense inventory needed to fulfill existing U.S. defense plans, it should’ve been a wake up call, said Logan. “Why this wasn’t a screeching siren to Trump officials is a mystery,” he said.
Tara Copp and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
Israeli-US Plot To Replace Iran's Government With........??!! Stupidity On Stilts!
Early War Goal Was to Install Hard-Line Former President as Iran’s Leader
An Israeli strike designed to free Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from house arrest in Tehran, U.S. officials said, was part of an effort to bring about regime change and put him in power.
- 567
Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran registering as a candidate in the presidential election in Tehran in 2024.Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
By Mark MazzettiJulian E. BarnesFarnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman
The reporters have been covering the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
May 19, 2026
Days after Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader and other top officials in the opening salvos of the war, President Trump mused publicly that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country.
It turns out that the United States and Israel went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president known for his hard-line, anti-Israel and anti-American views.
But the audacious plan, developed by the Israelis and which Mr. Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, quickly went awry, according to the U.S. officials who were briefed on it.
Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.
He has not been seen publicly since then and his current whereabouts and condition are unknown.
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Smoke from explosions in Tehran on Feb. 28, the first day of U.S.-Israeli strikes in Iran.Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
To say that Mr. Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement. While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to “wipe Israel off the map.” He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.
How Mr. Ahmadinejad was recruited to take part remains unknown.
The existence of the effort, which has not been previously reported, was part of a multistage plan developed by Israel to topple Iran’s theocratic government. It underscores how Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel went into the war not only misjudging how quickly they could achieve their objectives but also gambling to some degree on a risky plan for leadership change in Iran that even some of Mr. Trump’s aides found implausible. Some American officials were skeptical in particular about the viability of putting Mr. Ahmadinejad back into power.
“From the outset, President Trump was clear about his goals for Operation Epic Fury: destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles, dismantle their production facilities, sink their navy, and weaken their proxy,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in response to a request for comment about the regime change plan and Ahmadinejad. “The United States military met or exceeded all of its objectives, and now, our negotiators are working to make a deal that would end Iran’s nuclear capabilities for good.”
A spokesperson for Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, declined to comment.
U.S. officials spoke during the early days of the war about plans developed with Israel to identify a pragmatist who could take over the country. Officials insisted that there was intelligence that some within the Iranian regime would be willing to work with the United States, even if those people couldn’t be described as “moderates.”
Mr. Trump was enjoying the success of the raid by U.S. forces to capture Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement to work with the White House — a model that Mr. Trump appeared to think could be replicated elsewhere.
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In recent years, Mr. Ahmadinejad has clashed with regime leaders, accusing them of corruption, and rumors have swirled about his loyalties. He was disqualified from numerous presidential elections, his aides were arrested and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s movements were increasingly restricted to his home in the Narmak section of eastern Tehran.
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Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks to supporters and receives letters requesting help outside his home at “Square 72” in the working-class Narmak district in Tehran, Iran in 2014.Credit...Scott Peterson/Getty Images
That American and Israeli officials saw Mr. Ahmadinejad as a potential leader of a new government in Iran is further evidence that the war in February was launched with the hopes of installing more pliable leadership in Tehran. Mr. Trump and members of his cabinet have said that the goals of the war were narrowly focused on destroying Iran’s nuclear, missile and military capabilities.
There are many unanswered questions about how Israel and the United States planned to put Mr. Ahmadinejad in power, and the circumstances surrounding the airstrike that injured him. American officials said that the strike — carried out by the Israeli Air Force — was meant to kill the guards watching over Mr. Ahmadinejad as part of a plan to release him from house arrest.
On the first day of the war, Israeli strikes killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. The strike at Ayatollah Khamenei’s compound in central Tehran also blew up a meeting of Iranian officials, killing some officials whom the White House had identified as more willing to negotiate over a change in government than their bosses.
There were also initial reports at the time in the Iranian media that Mr. Ahmadinejad had been killed in the strike on his home.
The strike did not significantly damage Mr. Ahmadinejad’s house at the end of a dead-end street. But the security outpost at the entrance to the street was struck. Satellite imagery shows that building was destroyed.
In the days that followed, official news agencies clarified that he had survived but that his “bodyguards” — in actuality Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members who were both guarding him and holding him under house arrest — were killed.
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A Basij Paramilitary group holding flags and photos of Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, last month.Credit...Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times
An article in The Atlantic in March, citing anonymous associates of Mr. Ahmadinejad, said that the former president had been freed from government confinement after the strike at his house, which the article described as “in effect a jailbreak operation.”
After that article, an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad confirmed to The New York Times that Mr. Ahmadinejad saw the strike as an attempt to free him. The associate said the Americans viewed Mr. Ahmadinejad as someone who could lead Iran, and had the capability to manage “Iran’s political, social and military situation.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad would have been able to “play a very important role” in Iran in the near future, the associate said, suggesting that the United States saw him as similar to Delcy Rodriguez, who took power in Venezuela after American forces seized Mr. Maduro and has since worked closely with the Trump administration, the person said.
During his presidency, Mr. Ahmadinejad was known both for his hard-line policies and his often outlandish fundamentalist pronouncements, such as his declaration that there was not a single gay person in Iran and his denial of the Holocaust. He spoke at a conference in Tehran called “A World Without Zionism.”
Western satirists lampooned these views, and Mr. Ahmadinejad became something of an unwitting pop culture curiosity, even the subject of Saturday Night Live parodies.
He also presided over the country at a time when Iran was accelerating the enrichment of uranium it could one day use for making a nuclear bomb should it choose to weaponize its program. An American intelligence assessment in 2007 concluded that Iran had, years earlier, frozen its work on building a nuclear device but was continuing the enrichment of nuclear fuel it could use for a nuclear weapon if it changed its mind.
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Mr. Ahmadinejad before addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2012.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
After Mr. Ahmadinejad left office he gradually became something of an open critic of the theocratic government, or at least at odds with Ayatollah Khamenei.
Three times — 2017, 2021, and 2024 — Mr. Ahmadinejad tried to run for his previous job, but each time Iran’s Guardian Council, a group of civilian and Islamic jurists, blocked his presidential campaign. Mr. Ahmadinejad has accused senior Iranian officials of corruption or bad governance and become a critic of the government in Tehran. While he never was an overt dissident, the regime began to treat him as a potentially destabilizing element.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s ties to the West are far murkier.
In a 2019 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Ahmadinejad praised President Trump and argued for a rapprochement between Iran and the United States.
“Mr. Trump is a man of action,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “He is a businessman and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits and making a decision. We say to him, let’s calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be shortsighted.”
People close to Mr. Ahmadinejad have been accused of having too close ties to the West, or even spying for Israel. Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s former chief of staff, was put on trial in 2018 and the judge in the case publicly asked about his links to British and Israeli spy agencies, an accusation publicized by state media.
In the past few years Mr. Ahmadinejad has made trips out of Iran that further fueled speculation.
In 2023, he traveled to Guatemala and in 2024 and 2025 he went to Hungary, trips detailed by New Lines magazine. Both countries have close ties to Israel.
The Hungarian prime minister at the time, Viktor Orban, has a close relationship with Mr. Netanyahu. During the trips to Hungary, Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke at a university connected to Mr. Orban.
He returned from Budapest just days before Israel began attacking Iran last June. When that war broke out, he kept a low public profile and posted only few statements on social media. His relative silence about a war with a country that Mr. Ahmadinejad had long viewed as Iran’s main enemy was noted by many on Iranian social media.
Discussion of Mr. Ahmadinejad on Iranian social media picked up after reports of his death, according to an analysis by FilterLabs, a company that tracks public sentiment. But the discussion declined in the weeks following, mainly amounting to confusion about his whereabouts.
At the outset, Israel envisioned the war unfolding in several phases, starting with air assaults by the United States and Israel plus the killing of Iran’s supreme leaders and the mobilization of Kurds to fight Iranian forces, according to two Israeli defense officials familiar with the operational planning.
Then, the Israeli plan foresaw a combination of influence campaigns carried out by Israel and the Kurdish invasion creating political instability in Iran and a sense that the regime was losing control. In a third stage, the regime, under intense political pressure and the weight of damage to key infrastructure like electricity, would collapse, allowing for what the Israelis referred to as an “alternative government” to be established.
Other than the air campaign and the killing of the supreme leader, little of the plan played out as the Israelis had hoped, and much of it appears in retrospect to have profoundly misjudged Iran’s resilience and the capacity of the United States and Israel to exert their will.
But even after it became clear that Iran’s theocratic government had survived the first months of the war, some Israeli officials continued to express belief in their vision of imposing regime change in Tehran.
David Barnea, Mossad’s chief, told associates in several discussions that he still thought that the agency’s plan, based on decades of intelligence collection and operational activity in Iran, had a very good chance of succeeding had it received approval to move forward.
Is trump going to attack Iran again?
Nuke them?
Nuke them?
trump says he has a deal with Iran but has to ok with the boss, Netanyahu.
Standby for Israel to instigate another round of the war.
Standby for Israel to instigate another round of the war.
Not sure yet if this actually happened or if this is why a deal is happening.
AIPAC is melting down over trump's deal.
trump attacked Iran, now Iran responds.
The war is on again.
The war is on again.
i read something about that the other day, didn't they waste like half a stockpile of some of their fancy munitions defending them and it takes a while to make them so they're not gonna have them for a while
That's what I heard as well.
On top of that, Iran build heat seeking missiles that work against american jets and drones. All american focus was on radar invisilbility and heat seeking doesn't even register.
