Jeff Jackson

Revolutionary Socialist and a member of the SWP.

[The Hormuz Report @HormuzReport]

BREAKING: Russia has now reportedly started evacuating its personnel from Iran, with multiple Russian Il-76 military cargo aircraft landing at Bushehr Air Base to begin pulling all Russian staff from the nearby Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant ahead of a military escalation, per Iranian sources.

Sources suggest the flights are also delivering weapons. The last time Russia's Rosatom evacuated personnel at the plant was on February 28, the day the war started, removing 94 people in a single day. Subsequent waves pulled out 163 in late March and 198 in early April, before staff began returning in August as tensions eased.

The current evacuation signals Moscow expects the plant to be in the line of fire. Rosatom's CEO said as recently as October 8 that logistics were prepared for a quick pullout. The Il-76s suggest that assessment has changed—Russia might be expecting new developments in Iran.

[Quds News Network @QudsNen]

ScotRail drivers from Aslef will refuse to operate new trains if Spanish firm CAF wins the contract for over 100 carriages.

CAF is listed by the UN for helping build the Jerusalem Light Rail that links illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine.

[Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz ,داني سيترينوفيتش @citrinowicz]

Washington and Jerusalem Have Learned the Wrong Lessons from Their Wars with Iran

I regret to say that neither the United States nor Israel appears to have learned the most important lessons from their previous military campaigns against Iran.

Five realities must be understood before launching another war:

1. Iran will not surrender. Even a far more intense and destructive military campaign, including strikes against critical energy infrastructure, is unlikely to force Tehran into capitulation. The Iranian leadership will not simply abandon its nuclear ambitions or ballistic missile program under military pressure. If anything, another war could further strengthen its determination to preserve these capabilities.

2. Washington and Jerusalem cannot dictate the duration of the war. Anyone who believes another military campaign can be limited to a few days is making a dangerous assumption. Iran's response is likely to be extensive and violent, potentially forcing the United States and Israel to launch additional strikes. Once this cycle begins, controlling the pace, scope, and duration of the conflict will become extraordinarily difficult.

3. There is no military silver bullet. Striking Iranian infrastructure, including energy facilities, will not magically resolve the Iranian challenge. On the contrary, such attacks could trigger massive Iranian retaliation against energy infrastructure across the Middle East, with devastating regional and global consequences.

4. Iran will have surprises of its own. American and Israeli planners should not assume that Tehran will respond only with missiles and drones. Iran could attempt to disrupt undersea communications cables, conduct unconventional operations, or even launch limited ground operations against vulnerable targets in Kuwait or Bahrain. These are potential scenarios, not certainties, but they cannot be dismissed.

Moreover, another confrontation could rapidly become a regional war, with Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Houthis likely to join the fighting in one form or another. The assumption that a war against Iran can remain geographically contained is deeply questionable.

5. The global economic consequences could be severe. Another major conflict would almost certainly put substantial upward pressure on global energy prices, particularly if Iranian energy facilities were targeted and Tehran retaliated against Gulf energy infrastructure. The consequences would extend far beyond the Middle East, affecting global markets, inflation, and economic stability.

The bottom line is simple: Without a return to a diplomatic agreement, another military escalation in the Gulf increasingly appears difficult to avoid. But that does not mean another war would achieve its strategic objectives.

Even a highly destructive campaign targeting Iran's most critical infrastructure may fail to produce meaningful strategic gains. Instead, the United States and Israel could find themselves trapped in another prolonged war of attrition, with no decisive outcome, mounting economic costs, and an increasingly unstable Middle East.

The fundamental lesson of the previous campaigns should be clear: Military superiority does not automatically translate into strategic success.

Before launching another war, Washington and Jerusalem must answer a basic question: What exactly can another military campaign achieve that the previous ones failed to accomplish, and what is the exit strategy if Iran refuses to back down?

There is no kinetic solution to the Iranian challenge. Ignoring that reality risks repeating the same strategic mistakes, only at a much higher cost.

#Iran
#iran

[Martin Shaw @martinshawx]

The general secretary of the main UK teaching union, the NEU, has rejected this recommendation.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Surreal to hear Energy Secretary try and say this is a "pragmatic decision."

It will do nothing to lower bills.

It will do lots for the profits of the oil & gas companies.

And will continue us further down the path of floods and wildfires.

Disastrous decision from Labour.

[Peter Beinart @PeterBeinart]

It's true: the legal status of Palestinians in the West Bank is not the same as that of Blacks in segregated Mississippi. It's worse. In the Jim Crow South, Black Americans were at least citizens of the country in which they lived.

[Dame Linda 🇵🇸 #FreePalestine 🍉 @LoveIntegrity9]

Behind Badenoch is Jack Ross, who stood as a Conservative Party Candidate in 2023 who has been exposed by undercover reporters for having close ties to convicted criminal Allan Nesbitt, who is a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force & linked to Turning Point UK.

Ross, the CEO of Turning Point UK, made it clear that they had a long history together, stating that for a certain £amount, Nesbitt & his contacts could arrange physical attacks, cutting people's faces, and for another amount they can st@b and sh00t to k1ll someone. Ross also bragged about setting up and organising violent demonstrations during the Farage riots.

The right wing are out of control and the Conservative Party has links to contract killers.

Where are the answers from @KemiBadenoch ?

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Now that @AbdulElSayed has been asked to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood because of his mother’s alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood before he was born, will we be asking Donald Trump to disavow the Ku Klux Klan because of his father’s alleged ties to the KKK in the 1920s?
https://t.co/QKS2qozDeX

[Socialist Worker @socialistworker]

Anti-racist round-up: Unity marches build networks against far right
⭐️Unity demonstrations organised by Stand Up To Racism took place in eight towns and cities across England
https://t.co/TGudixBhQE

[Stand Up To Racism @AntiRacismDay]

📣 Blame the billionaires not our neighbours! Join the fantastic panel at this Saturday’s Together Against the Far Right summit.

🎟️ TICKETS: https://t.co/laVsAhy43M

See you there! #Together @UKTogetherAll

[Alex Callinicos @alexcallinicos.bsky.social @alex_callinicos]

Very important argument and dead right!

[Policy Tensor @policytensor]

The End of the Shia-Sunni Wedge

An important development that seens to have gone unnoticed and unremarked upon is the end of the Shia-Sunni wedge. What do I mean by that?

Ever since the Islamic Revolution, the Gulf Arabs have used the Shia-Sunni divide to isolate Iran. Since the Shia are a minority in the Islamic world, this suited their purposes very well. They milked it whenever and wherever they found it useful.

The entire political order dominated by the Al Khalifa in Bahrain was built on Shia exclusion. Oman was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bahrain. The others were in between.

Even though Shia Iraqis had fought for him against Iran, Saddam crushed the Shia Intifida in southern Iraq with great brutality, under the watchful gaze of General Schwarzkopf and in full knowledge of the Bush Administration, using West German chemical weapons to boot.

The greatest threat to Saudi Arabia was posed by the inconvenient fact that all the oil sits under the Shia-majority region in the east. Here the repression was severe but not by the standards of the Al Khalifa or Sadddam.

Into this regional context, the US invaded and dismantled Saddam's regime. That unleashed the first great wave of sectarian war. The ensuring violence destroyed any chance of what the US hoped to build in Iraq. It took years of counterinsurgency and the Anbar Awakening to get the violence somewhat under control.

A second great wave of sectarian violence began with the Syrian civil war. Sectarian polarization intensified as the civil war evolved into a proxy war between Iran and Hezbollah on one side, and the Sunni states on the other. It is hard to overstate the degree of sectarian bloodletting. Millions were slaughtered by both sides.

What has happened this year is a great twist in the tale. The US and Israel attacked Iran after Bibi gave Trump a bully boner. This naked act of aggression, and Iran's heroic resistance to it, neutralized the great Shia-Sunni wedge that the Gulf Arabs had been working all these decades.

As it pummeled US bases and Gulf states, Iran became the hero of the Islamic world across the Shia-Sunni divide, including in the Gulf states that came under Iranian fire. The defeat of the United States cemented Iran's status. Iran's heroic war against the empire dissolved the sectarian divide.

And then came the Houthis. They had already won great respect and admiration for being the only power to have dared to attack Israel for the genocide. Their confessional identity, never really coded as Shia to begin with, became totally irrelevant. The Arab street and the Islamic world simply feel in love with them. They are being described as 'the only real Muslims in the world'.

This is a world historic development in its own right. It is part and parcel of the end of Iranian isolation, undercutting a central component of the Gulf Arabs' strategy to contain Iran. In Yemen, it undermined the Saudi-led coalition's strategy to contain the Houthis.

Central to this historical turn was the genocide in Gaza. It was Gaza that exposed the hypocrisy of the authoritarian Sunni states allied with Washington.

This development is right now playing an important role constraining the Sunni states intervention in Yemen. For the Pakistanis, the Egyptians and the Turks, going after the Houthis to protect the Saudis threatens the stability of their own regimes.

There is no doubt that it will have wider ramifications still. A very big development that almost no one is talking about.

[Policy Tensor @policytensor]

If the Egyptians think they can impose their will in Yemen like the 1960s, they’re in for a rude surprise. Cairo was not within range of Yemeni missiles even as late as 2015. A little missile campaign may very well destroy the junta politically.

[Socialist Worker @socialistworker]

‘There is no safety anymore’: Palestinian in West Bank
⭐️Amal from the city of Nablus spoke to Socialist Worker about Israel's campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
https://t.co/UcXcjtfysz

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Can anyone remember the last time @BBCNews interviewed a Palestinian about their experience of the racism of Zionism? Having spent the last two weeks interviewing elderly Nakba survivors in Jordan, driven off their land in their teens because of their ethnicity and religion, I'd be happy to suggest some astonishingly articulate victims of Israeli racism who would be only too happy to tell their tragic stories of eviction, slaughter and dispossession. It is like reporting on the Civil Rights movement in the US and only interviewing outraged Whites
@bbclaurak @bbcnickrobinson @JustinOnWeb
@BBCr4today

[Rehad Desai @RehadD]

Siyafana Sonke call for decisive action to counter xenophobia and announce a day of action https://t.co/C6UNswz1Lb

[Jeff Jackson @FireThisTime]

French Revolution Duncan Hallas audio recording https://t.co/uuQnZIWE8I

[Charlie Kimber @charlieswp]

"The government is asking us to 'pick a side.' Fine, then for us it will be the side of the protesters, the rioters, the rebellious youth, the oppressed, and disorder. Against the side of power, the dominators, the panicked privileged. Simple, basic." #solidarite

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Never has the concept of Liberal Zionism looked more absurd and contradictory. It almost makes you feel sorry for people who simply can't accept the evidence before their eyes that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was inevitable from the very beginning of Zionism. As Theodor Herzl wrote in his diary on June 2nd 1895: “We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

[Mrs Gee 💚 @earthygirl011]

Zack Polanski has turned the 'antisemitism' scam, the 'Zionism is Judaism' scam, into the Emperor's new clothes

Now everyone can see the naked msm & political establishment

The scam is *toast*

Zionism is racism. Palestinians are its victims

#BackZack
#ItWasAScam
#bbclaurak