CIA station in Riyadh was hit by Shahed suicide drone.
"Trump Getting Taste Of His Own Medicine From An Emboldened Iran,
Which Now Has Russia Feeding It Weapons And Intelligence"
by Leo Hohmann
"The Trump administration is getting a hard lesson on the essence of that old adage: Paybacks can be a b----! After more than four years of the U.S. funding and supplying Ukraine and using that country as a battering ram to weaken Russia, the regime in Washington has allowed itself to be weakened by Russia in the same way.
While Ukraine is serving the role of America’s proxy against Russia, Iran has emerged as Russia’s proxy against America. There is now evidence that Russia, and likely China too, are funneling weapons and intelligence to the Iranians.
Russia in particular has found the perfect opportunity to get back at Trump for double-crossing him on the Ukraine war. Trump bragged that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war with a simple phone call within “24 hours” of taking office. And he could have made good on that campaign promise simply by telling Vladamir Zelensky that the gig was up, the funds were ending, and he needs to sign on the dotted line to make peace with Putin.
Instead, Trump did a complete 180 and has continued funding Ukraine the same as Biden did, and has actually allowed the Ukrainians to routinely strike deep inside of Russian territory with U.S.-manufactured missiles, something Biden never did. They’ve knocked out key energy infrastructure, weapons depots and manufacturing facilities in Russia, a favor Putin is said to be mulling whether to return by firing missiles at NATO countries supplying drones to Ukraine. Trump even presided over a Ukrainian assassination attempt on Putin’s helicopter back in May.
Now, Trump is getting a taste of his own medicine in Iran. And it might not be long before that taste becomes a full-course meal, which he won’t be able to spit out. In a July 23 article, Defense Security Asia reports as follows: U.S. intelligence agencies have opened an urgent multi-agency investigation into whether Russia supplied Iran with targeting intelligence and combat-tested drone upgrades used in a wave of precision strikes against Central Intelligence Agency facilities across the Gulf region in March 2026.
The probe centers on two confirmed CIA sites struck during the conflict, namely the CIA station embedded inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and a separate clandestine facility located in eastern Iraq, according to four U.S. intelligence officials.
Analysts examining the strikes have grown increasingly suspicious of Russian involvement because the attacks demonstrated a level of navigational precision that appears to exceed the known technical baseline of Iran’s indigenous Shahed-series loitering munitions. The article goes on to state the quiet part out loud, that U.S. embassies double as CIA intelligence-gathering operations throughout the Middle East. These diplomatic missions could become targets and knocked out, one by one, with Russian intelligence and targeting data.
One internal memo circulated within a Western intelligence agency reportedly concluded that Moscow “has likely played a role in targeting regional CIA facilities,” a judgment that, if confirmed, would mark a dangerous escalation in the Russia-Iran military-technical partnership. Two Western officials briefed on the intelligence assessments believe the Riyadh strike specifically involved a tandem pair of Russian-enhanced Shahed drones, with the first breaching the embassy’s exterior wall and the second flying through the opening to detonate inside the compound.
It’s interesting that when Russia gets caught aiding Iran it’s a “dangerous escalation,” But Washington can openly aid Ukraine’s war against Russia all day long without being seen as the aggressor in that war, the one who is fueling its continued blood letting.
When the U.S. first attacked Iran, I warned that this would likely become a long, drawn-out war and my intuition has turned out to be accurate. I have no military experience and don’t come from a military family, but I have studied history and have a good sense of just how ego-centric the U.S foreign policy has become over the last 75 years. Our foreign policy establishment believes we can hit other countries with impunity and never expect to get hit back. When countries do hit us back, we call them terrorists. Sovereignty is never respected by Washington’s warmongers.
The only countries whose sovereignty has traditionally been respected are those with nuclear arsenals, but in their arrogance even that reality is not keeping them from making war on countries like Russia, which has enough nuclear weaponry to blow up the world many times over. So if we don’t respect Russia’s sovereignty, we certainly won’t respect Iran’s.
But now we have evidence that Russia is supplying Iran with key components in what has become an existential struggle for Iran’s survival in the war with America. Iran was in many ways the perfect country for America’s enemies to use against us, delivering a long overdue humbling of the out-of-control global hegemon. We have become overly prideful in our sense of invincibility, and it’s only that overwhelming pride that could cause our leaders to attack a country like Iran and think we could win easily in a few days or weeks. Russia and China alike must have celebrated the day Donald Trump launched this ill-conceived war back on February 28.
Because the financial markets are just now starting to figure out what seemed obvious to some of us from the start - that this is guaranteed to turn into a long war that permanently disrupts the flow of energy and fertilizers to critical areas of need; crude oil has now surged to over $100 a barrel.
Gasoline prices are about to skyrocket to heights perhaps never before seen in the United States, Canada and Europe. Then will come worldwide famine and depopulation. This will all make America the most hated country in the world as other countries realize that none of this economic misery would have been foisted upon them if Trump hadn’t attacked Iran and triggered the disastrous chain of events now starting to play out.
Few Americans seem aware, or even concerned that this war has the potential to be different from all the other wars the U.S. has involved itself in since World War II. If this war continues to go south, and I believe it will, it could be the trigger for a collapse of the petro dollar, and with it the entire U.S. economic system. How are Americans going to get by when gasoline is $8 to $10 a gallon and food prices quadruple in price?
Trump is already losing support for his war of choice on Iran, and we’ve hardly seen any of the disastrous economic effects that are coming but have been forestalled by market manipulations and Trump’s drawing down of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Rerserves.
The share of self-identified MAGA Republicans who say the war has been “worth” the financial cost has fallen from about 50 percent in May to 37 percent now, with one in five saying the war should end, according to the latest poll.
Trump has allowed this war to drift into a dangerous phase of tit-for-tat escalations. This is dangerous because at some point the conventional weapons will run dry, as we run out of munitions to feed them. Iran and Russia have proven they have the industrial capacity to outproduce us on weaponry and munitions. Our military-industrial complex is not built for speed. It’s built for profit. So, we will run out of munitions before Russia, China and Iran do.
What happens then? Will Trump walk away in humiliation? I don’t think so. It’s not in Trump’s DNA to admit defeat even when he’s hit in the face with it. His instinct is to hit back harder. That’s exactly the personality type who would resort to the unthinkable.
God help us at that point. Because the U.S. is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons against another nation. If we do it again, all bets are off, because unlike in 1945, we live in a nuclear world. Russia, China and Pakistan all have nukes. If the U.S. were to nuke Iran, I don’t believe these other nuclear countries would allow the U.S. to get away with it a second time.
Iran’s goal is to kick the U.S. out of the Middle East, and so far it’s making great progress. My sources say 16 of the 20 U.S. bases in the Gulf region have been either totally destroyed or suffered substantial damage. And if this war continues there are plenty of other bases that Russia could decide to take out.
As our munitions continue to sink to dangerously low levels in a protracted Iran war, Putin could feel emboldened to strike U.S. bases on the periphery of his country’s borders? Maybe at some point China realizes that the U.S. going after Russia and Iran is just a prelude to us going after them. If that’s the case, we’re cooked. There are about 800 U.S. bases on foreign soil that could be targeted, and China hasn’t even started dipping into its vast stockpiles of conventional missiles and drones. Once the U.S. is out of conventional stockpiles, what comes next? You can see where this is leading. Unfortunately, nobody in the Trump White House has thought this through."
No comments:
Post a Comment