Iran defeats Israel First

11 reasons to be cheerful

April 8 2026

I’m not a military expert, of course, I just follow independent journalists, academics, and ex-US/UK CIA/military/diplomatic experts ranging from Max Blumenthal to Professor Professor Mohammad Marandi to Professor John Mearsheimer to Alistair Crook. By synthesising their analysis I posted an article on 9 March that predicted that Iran would score a total victory in its war against Israel First. Trump’s provisional acceptance of Iran’s ten key demands indicates that Iran has indeed achieved this victory. It’s early days, the talks could break down, but the current scenario offers eleven reasons to be cheerful.

UPDATE 9 April: I wrote and posted the below before Israel's treacherous escalation of its war on Lebanon began. Perhaps the escalation was predictable. Perhaps the US lies that Lebanon never formed part of the initial ceasefire deal with Iran--lies confirmed by the Pakistani moderators as well as Iran-- were also predictable. Iran has responded by insisting that the protection of Lebanon remains essential to any ceasefire. Unlike the US and Israel, Iran has been consistent since the start of the war. Iran remains in a position of considerable strength. No amount of Israel First killing and mania will alter the basic scenario: Israel First has no path to success and the more is lashes out the more it will lose.

1. Iran rode out the Israel First attack with relative ease

Iran withstood everything the Israel First alliance could throw at it. The loss of two thousand Iranians—including 300 kids, 165 of them in one criminal attack on the Minab girls school—is tragic. At the same time the total death toll is proportionately less than the ten-day war of last June. Israel First’s wanton destruction of Iran’s infrastructure, much of it civilian, has been abysmal yet Iran is a massive country with carefully deregulated resources that Israel First barely started to scratch (this from independent journalists interviewed last night on Max’s Grayzone). The Iranian leadership held firm when Israel First threatened to completely obliterate its main civilian infrastructure, even end Iranian civilisation with a nuclear bomb. In fact it didn’t bat an eyelid. Trump backed away from the genocidal bluster and instead declared that all of a sudden Iran’s ten demands look very reasonable to him!

2. Israel First fought a WW2-style war in 2026 and lost badly

By thinking it could destroy Iran from the air and if necessary complete the job with a ground invasion the US was fighting WW2-style war in 2026. The attack from the air did substantial damage but the US also lost numerous planes, helicopters etc (mostly not reported by the mainstream media). The ground invasion always seemed completely impossible. Iran was always going to destroy any incoming US ships carrying infantry with ease, and if they didn’t they had a million troops waiting for them. Meanwhile the Iranians prepared its missiles/drone resistance that the Israel First alliance could barely touch, with much of it buried underground. Iran took out the US bases in the Gulf states with ease (again barely reported). When they were done with that Iran accelerated its reactive attack on Israel, with Israel all but powerless to stop the Iranian missiles, including new sophisticated models. Iran also created decoy rubber missile launchers with a heat-generating capacity to make Israel First radars (those that weren’t already destroyed…) think they were real and waste missiles costing millions on them. You gotta hand it to them, the Iranians know how to defend themselves with humour. Meanwhile how come the country that has the biggest mouth on the planet has the smallest brain?

3. The Israel First alliance failed to achieve any of its objectives (if it even managed to work out what they were in the first place)

The US has agreed to Iran’s ten demands, which are the complete opposite to what Israel First was hoping to achieve by starting its illegal war against Iran. Whatever Israel First is supposed to have wanted—regime change Iran, turning the Iranian population against its government, decimating Iran’s military capacity, decimating Iran’s nuclear capacity, decimating Iran’s civilian infrastructure, having European and other countries join the war against Iran, having the Gulf states join the war against Iran, etc—it got nowhere. While some of us were hoping that Iran would inflict more damage to the IDF that carried out the genocide of the Palestinians, the truth of the matter is we don’t yet know the extent of the damage it inflicted on the world’s least moral army. While the business in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon is unfinished, Iran has emerged as the most power state in West Asia bar none. It has achieved this victory without initiating a single attack but instead by merely responding to Israel First’s unprovoked attacks. It has conducted itself in a dignified, ethical, mature manner.

4. Iran’s economic scenario has been transformed

The most dramatic of the ten demands is that Iran will be the controlling force in Hormuz, which its military will run. Each ship that passes through will pay Iran and Oman $2 million per vessel. This will obviously provide Iran with a massive financial income that it didn’t previously have. The money will be directed to repairing the damage inflicted by Israel First and generally reinforcing its military position, because above everything else the Iranian leadership has been clear that the outcome of the war—the only way it would stop its attack—is if its future security is guaranteed. It’s almost hilarious to think—no it is hilarious to think—that before Israel First launched its war international shipping was able to pass freely through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, thanks to the hubris of Netanyahu and Trump, Iran is in control of one of the most important choke points in the global economy.

5. The US has lost its military base in West Asia

The second most dramatic Iranian demand is that the US military bases in West Asia close down. Well, not close down, because they’ve been destroyed, but aren’t rebuilt. The scale of this change, which I’ve been pondering for a month, is hard to quantify. The US has been building up its military presence in West Asia since World War Two. It has managed to lose this 80-year project, one that has cost $8 trillion alone since merely 2001, in the space of one month. In comparison US maintained a presence in Vietnam for 19 years and managed to fight the Vietcong for nine years before admitting defeat

With the US no longer capable of pretending that it can defend the Gulf states they will have no choice but to realign towards Iran (as well as China and Russia). Saudi Arabia and UAE are already in BRICS, Bahrain Kuwait and Qatar have expressed a desire to join, and, oh, Iran is in BRICS. So the US hasn’t just failed to reduce Iran’s geopolitical might and military capacity, it has boosted it exponentially. Having expanded its global presence ever since the end of World War Two and establishment of Nato, the US has lost between 13 (the US claim) and 17 (the Iranian claim) military bases in a region it was determined to dominate because of its highly-prized drink: oil. This amounts to arguably the greatest geopolitical shift to have taken place since 1945. Go Israel First!

6. Sanctions on Iran will end

Another dramatic victory for Iran is that the US/EU/UK sanctions on Iran—introduced at the behest of Israel—will be lifted. Steadily introduced ever since Iran had the temerity to overthrow the US-imposed colonial regime of the Shah in 1979, the sanctions were intended to suffocate the country until it imploded and allowed the US to reclaim its favourite drink. Now Iran the ten demands/ten commandments necessitate that Iran will become a normalised country in diplomatic and economic terms. This, too, amounts to a form of long overdue justice.

I’m not here to argue that Iran amounts to a fully-democratised country. It’s to acknowledge that Iran’s level of autocracy isn’t obviously any greater than many other countries in the region and beyond—among them Israel, the US, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia—and that it’s right that Iran should no longer be discriminated against for what were ultimately geopolitical motives. In military terms Iran has been behaved more reasonably than any other autocratic country, having not gone to war against a neighbour since the Anglo-Persian War of 1856-1857—when Iran had the cheek to want to capture the city of Herat (located in what’s now Afghanistan) from the British. Despite this Iran has been continuously demonised as an aggressor by the lying Israel First alliance, most vociferously and hypocritically supported by the UK and Germany.

If Iran choses to democratise that will be a choice for Iranians who live in Iran. Last time I checked that’s how democracies are supposed to work. I remain shocked at the number of Iranians living in the diaspora who justified the war on Iran, even during its most destructive, chaotic, murderous phase. I remain heartened at just how many Iranians living in the diaspora were clear in their opposition to the war, even if they would like to see domestic reforms introduced.

7. The myth of US military might is over

Ah, one more time, the myth of US military might is over. The US suffered terrible defeats while killing millions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Early into Trump’s second tenure it attempted to take out the Houthis and after a month gave up. Alongside Israel it tried to take out Iran last June but called off the strikes when Iran turned Israel Iron Dome into an Iron Sieve in a matter of days. The US has poured $128 billion into Ukraine as part of its attempt to establish hegemony over Russia yet there’s zero prospect of a victory and meanwhile millions of US taxpayers can’t afford to put food on the table or heat their homes. Biden and Trump provided more than $35 billion of military aid to Israel yet Israel hasn’t achieved its primary military objective, which was to disarm Hamas. These are just the surface headlines.

What lies beneath? Last summer the British medical journal the Lancet published a report that estimated that through the use of economic sanctions and currency manipulations the US has killed 45 million people since 1970. Let’s pause a moment to take in that figure… … … The US has killed millions of more civilians through its military invasions during the same period (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq etc), meaning that in order to prop up its capitalist system it has killed c. 50 million civilians in 55 years, or close to one million a year. The LA Times carried a report on the Lancet study but not the New York Times or the Washington Post etc. So the US is far and away the world’s leading murderer, most US citizens aren’t aware of this or don’t feel able to do anything or don’t care. In combination this has permitted the US to behave as the world’s most aggressive bully for decades.

However when a small kid stands up properly to a bully, the bully starts to freak out and retreats. Iran wasn’t and isn’t a small kid yet stood up all the same and has reduced the US to a blubbering wreck.

8. Iran’s reputation is up, the US has become a laughing stock, Israel has somehow managed to become even more unpopular

The western mainstream media remains beholden to the Israel First establishment, I wouldn’t dream of going to any western corporate outlet for anything these days. During the high point of the genocide I thought that Al Jazeera could be half-decent at times but during the Israel First war on Iran its reporting has been very poor indeed, just obviously propagandistic. Nevertheless Iran has still managed to come out of the war with its reputation and integrity enhanced.

(i) For all of the naked, skin-deep propaganda it’s transparently clear that Iran is united like it hasn’t been for years. Pro-democratic Iranians who actually—live—in Iran have been wholly supportive of the Iranian state’s right to self-defence and and self-determination.

(ii) Back on 20 January the US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent boasted at Davos that the US had deliberately crashed the Iranian currency in order to instigate civil disobedience. Earlier this week, on Monday 6 April, Trump boasted that during January he’d sent mass quantities of weapons to Kurdish fighters so that they could join and take over the peaceful protests that had developed in response to the intensifying financial crisis the US had instigated in the first place. In other words, Trump attempted to launch an internal coup, or the the kind of thing the CIA has been doing for decades, this time in accordance with Mossad (as claimed by the Israeli media). So Iran was telling the truth all along when it said it eventually needed to clamp down on the “protests” after they were taken over by foreign insurgents. Quite a few people objected when I made this case around a month ago. I stand by it.

(iii) Footage coming out of Iran this last month shows women walking around with their faces showing or without any form of hijab if they so choose, with no religious law imposed. Meanwhile women are at the foreground of Iranian engineering, journalism and other professions, more so than in many western countries. I understand that change is desirable and I support the work of Iranian feminists who live in Iran. At the same time it’s transparently clear that Israel First never had any intention to develop Iranian rights for women/queers or to further Iranian democracy. Israel First didn’t even pretend to want to spread democracy. That lie is so old they didn’t even bother with it. Instead they openly declared that they wanted to sow chaos and destruction—all of this from the Epstein class that’s the world leader in raping, abusing and also cannibalising girls.

(iv) It’s been instructive if not joyful to watch Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi along with other senior Iranian figures explain Iran’s position vs. Trump, Hegseth and co. While the Iranians have been balanced, consistent, clear, calm, reasonable and intelligent, the Israel First leaders and spokespeople have been wild, incoherent, abusive, unclear and all too ready to evoke genocidal language, that being the language they’re most familiar with.

(v) If you haven’t seen them already check out Iran’s Lego videos: stylish, funny, funky, incisive. Best trolling ever!

So Iran has made the US look like a bunch of dumb-assed terrorists. But let’s also not pretend that this was all about Trump. The US has been gunning for Iran for decades and has been bombing whomever it wants to bomb for decades—it’s systematic and tied to the power elite, the deep state, neoliberal capitalism and colonialism. Let’s not forget that “good-guy” Obama bombed Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. Let’s not forget that Biden-Harris sponsored and supported Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Let’s not forget that during the presidential election campaign Kamala Harris was far more hung-ho about treating Iran as a threat than Trump, who at the time was in his “no more wars” mode (remember that far back?). Save for the brief interludes of Kennedy and Carter, the US power elite has been dead set on military-industrial global domination. We’ve yet to see the establishment Democratic party properly break from a model they co-created. I’d say if you’re a US citizen don’t vote for a Democratic who is not 100% clear that the US must introduce a 180-degree turn in its foreign policy.

9. Israeli hubris has severely weakened Israel

In the run-up to March it was possible to wonder if Israel had somehow managed to more or less get away with a live-streamed genocide. Then hubris took over and Netanyahu decided to push for total domination by attempting to take out Iran. In the process Israel has failed to achieve any of its objectives and has somehow managed to sink even lower in global opinion. This is quite impressive, albeit in a truly sick way.

Israel led the Israel First war on Iran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said out loud early into the war that Israel told the US that it would strike Iran solo if the US wouldn’t join in. By then Iran had already declared that it would respond by attacking not only Israel but also US military bases in the region. So the US joined Israel in yet another “pre-emptive” attack.

Yet what has Israel achieved? Israel believed that this second Israel First war amounted to its last chance to take out Iran before the autumn, when Trump is quite likely to lose control of Congress, with the Democratic Party starting to turn against Israel/AIPAC in line with the radical transformation in public opinion. The most aggressive and terroristic country in the world by far, Israel fancied that if it persuaded the US to join an Israel First war on Iran need it could carry out a regime change, exhaust Iran’s military capacity, steal its uranium, and reduce the country to the kind of civil war that ate up Libya and prepared the way for regime change in Syria (allowing a compliant terror organisation, Al-Qaeda, to become the new government).

Instead Israel has failed in its objective of regime change and to generate civil war, it has failed to weaken the Iranian government, and it has failed to assert itself militarily over Iran, with Iran apparently capable of continuing the war indefinitely. Meanwhile Iran has inflicted severe damage on Israel, showing it can hit any Israeli site it choses. Of course Israel enforced a near total blackout on reporting and also the sharing videos/photos to boost morale, because “it’s the only democracy in the Middle East”, all to no avail.

Israel has also revealed that its trump card, its secret-but-not-secret nuclear capacity, turned out to be unusable even in the midst of the greatest military attack it’s ever faced. Israel is also widely understood to hold Epstein files that relate to Trump having sex with underage girls, and it’s believed to have used these to blackmail Trump into entering a war that Pentagon and intelligence chiefs were widely telling him he could not win. There’s no other way to understand why Trump went into a war his experts told him he couldn’t win. Yet somehow even the Epstein files weren’t enough to prevent a completely desperate Trump from backing out of the war last night.

Other weaknesses have emerged. Israel re-invaded Lebanon at a catastrophic cost to the Lebanese yet in the process has encountered resolute resistance from Hezbollah, which is clearly far from defeated, despite the bravado of the page-assassination plot. Yemen showed that it’s still willing to attack Israel and that it can also hold the international economy to ransom if it wants to. Meanwhile Israel has been able to achieve its most basic military objective in Gaza: to disarm Hamas.

Along the way, far from weakening Iran, Israel has turned Iran into a stronger force than ever. It has also insisted on launching a war with the US that has led to the US forfeiting its entire presence in West Asian. Countries ruled by US-friendly dictators/authoritarian governments (Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states) and strategic allies (Iraq) are inevitably aligning away from the US, leaving Israel’s warmongering attempt to extend its regional domination in tatters.

Hardcore zionists from Tucker Carlson to Joe Kent have become clear that Israel is running the White House, that it’s organising things in a way that are detrimental to US national interests, and that this has to change. Trump is losing his MAGA constituency over his commitment to Israel, propped up by massive money from Miriam Adelson, AIPAC and the wider Zionist funding network (much of it non-Jewish vs Jewish-Zionist). If Trump or any successor wants to retain the constituency’s support they’ll need to reset the US relationship with Israel. Israel is therefore close to implosion.

10. The dollar in decline, the BRICS alliance is ascendent

The geopolitical world was already going through a massive change before the latest Israel First war, especially through the rise of the BRICS alliance, and the war has merely accelerated these developments. In addition to the US falling even further from grace, the rise in oil prices became a bonanza for Russia and also worked out well for China, which gets a lot of its oil from Iran. Iran found it easy to persuade countries that were contemplating joining Israel First to instead continue to trade with them at the price it deemed appropriate, mainly the price of non-aggressive. Japan, South Korea joined in, as did the EU, which struck a massive deal with Iran a couple of days ago that will be paid for in Euros, not dollars, therefore further weakening the global standing of the dollar. This has huge consequences for the ability of the US to maintain its spiralling debt. It’s quite early to predict the implosion of the US economy, but it’s not looking good for the US right now.

11. Palestine, Lebanon

Where do the Palestinians and the Lebanese find the strength to keep going? If Iran’s non-intervention in Gaza and Lebanon has left the theory of the “axis of evil” in tatters—everyone with a heart as well as a brain understands that Hamas and Hezbollah were formed as independent liberation movements and not as Iranian proxies—it also means that the prospect of Iran directly intervening to support their extraction from Israeli colonialism also failed to materialise.

Is that it? Will your subjugation continue? What’s even going on in Lebanon? It’s hard to tell. For now we have a two-week ceasefire. Beyond that, we can be sure that the geopolitical realities of West Asia have already been redrawn. It’s hard to be optimistic for Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon right, yet logic dictates that Israel will not be able to sustain its assault economically or diplomatically.

Surely the collapse of the US at the hands of Iran will lead to the collapse of the US-Israel plans for a Trump riviera in Gaza. At some point the ICJ will also deliver its ruling that Israel has indeed perpetrated a genocide—one that everyone can seen by glancing at the Holocaust wasteland of Gaza or reading any of the numerous reports published that detail Israel’s brutal actions. At some point even hardcore Zionist support for Israel—non-Jewish as well as Jewish, diasporic as well as Israeli—will have to reckon with the reality of the genocide, just as German Nazis had to come to terms with their genocide of the Jews.

We’re also seeing more and more countries take a stand against Israel. All of these countries have filed declarations of intervention in support of South African’s ICJ case against Israel: Algeria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Belize, Chile, China, Colombia, Comoros, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Iceland, Iraq, Ireland, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mexico, Namibia, Netherlands, Pakistan, Palestine, Paraguay, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Slovenia, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. International organisations supporting SA including the Africa Union, the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. These countries are boycotting Eurovision due to Israel’s invitation: Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain. The BDS campaign continues to win support and take the challenge to complicit corporations.

As desperate as the situation remains—Palestinian kids live in tents infested with rats—everything points to Israel being unable to sustain its messianic assault diplomatically, economically and militarily, at which point it will be made to pay the price of its depraved actions.

Let’s hope that along with Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Herzog and company we see politicians who’ve overseen the UK and Germany’s sponsorship of genocide go to The Hague, including the UK’s Sunak, Starmer, Lammy, Cooper, Mahmood and Hermer, and Germany’s Scholz, Merz, Baerbock, Habeck. Let’s not just hope for this, let’s campaign. Let’s also campaign for the clearance of the activists and campaigners the UK/US governments have attempted to criminalise for opposing the genocide. Let’s vote for parties that have been clear in their opposition to the genocide as well as the Israel First war on Iran. Let’s seize this moment of change and not let go of it until a new democratic order is allowed to flourish.

Free, free Palestine!

PS Responding to "popular demand" I've started to write a follow-up to my piece about the ambulance arson attack in London on 23 March appearing to be a false flag and thought I might post it today. But then the ceasefire became more pressing. More on the physically empty but symbolically overflowing ambulances to follow.