CHAOS UNLEASHED: On day 3 of U.S.-Israel war against Iran, more questions than answers about where this is heading

Entire Middle East now enraged and in flames, as Trump warns U.S. death toll is expected to rise. Could Iran become the flip side of Ukraine -- a Russian proxy against US?

Barely three days in and the latest phase of the U.S./Israel-Iran war, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury” by the White House, is already spiraling into a wider regional conflict.

Trump decided to launch the war, and Iran retaliated with deadly strikes across the Middle East, just as it promised it would, targeting Israel as well as U.S. bases and U.S.-allied Muslim nations while shutting down the key Mideast oil-shipping channel, the Strait of Hormuz.

At least 600 people in Iran have been killed by a barrage of mostly Tomahawk missiles and at least 10 have died in Israel from Iran’s launch of retaliatory missiles. Thousands of commercial flights have been canceled or rerouted. And gasoline prices at the pump are already soaring across the United States and Europe.

Shia Muslims have been protesting in Iraq, Pakistan and Bahrain, their indignation touched off by the U.S. assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, who is Iran’s supreme leader and the second-most important religious figure to Shia Muslims worldwide. He was 86 years old.

In the first indication that the war might not be going exactly according to plan for the U.S. and Israel, President Trump announced Monday that he expects strikes on Iran to continue for at least four to five weeks. That’s up from the original estimation of two to three weeks. There are already four confirmed deaths of U.S. military personnel, with Trump saying more are expected in the days and weeks ahead.

Reliable information is difficult to find and confirm.

As the old saying goes, “the first casualty of war is the truth.” Propaganda is rampant on both sides in any war, and yet it’s surprising to me how many Americans still lap up every word their government tells them about the war and how it’s progressing.

And the media is no better.

Once the missiles started to fly, most of what we’ve heard on Fox News and the other corporate-media outlets immediately devolved into rank cheerleading, totally untethered from the reality of war.

We saw little to no actual reporting, for instance, on the missile, allegedly fired by the Israelis, that hit an all-girls elementary school in Iran. All we know for sure is that an ordnance of some kind hit the school, resulting in the deaths of more than 150 girls enrolled in first through fourth grade. We don’t know if it was a mistake or deliberately targeted due to the possibility of some Iranian military asset being hidden at or near the school. Either way, it’s an unspeakable tragedy that warrants a U.S. response. There has been none.

The U.S. also killed the Iranian ayatollah, but he was an easy target given that he apparently wanted to be martyred and stayed in his government office rather than go into hiding. Sadly, he allowed his 4-year-old granddaughter to be with him, and she was also killed.

While the ayatollah was an easy target, I’m not sure he was a wise target. This infuriated Muslims throughout the region, especially the Shia, and could result in more people in more countries being willing to sign up to fight the Americans and Israelis. This is something that will not surface immediately but could come to bear after the Iranian regime is replaced by a U.S puppet and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps retreats into the mountains to wage a years-long counter-revolution against whoever the U.S. decides to install.

Suffice it to say, two things happened in the first couple of days of the war that backfired on the U.S. because the U.S. deep state that runs our military has no clue about how Muslims think.

Those two mistakes were killing the ayatollah and his granddaughter and the strike on the school, which was either an honest mistake where a missile veered badly off course, or a ruthless decision to sacrifice 150 girls in an attempt to take out a military asset that was somewhere in the area of the school.

Most of the analysis I’m getting from trusted sources seems to be focused on the fact that the U.S. is not prepared for a war that lasts more than a few weeks. If we find ourselves in the fourth or fifth week of this war and the Iranian regime is still firing missiles, that means there has been no regime change and is unlikely to be one anytime soon. It also signals that the U.S. and Israel are running out of munitions and might get desperate to stop the war like they did the last time they attacked Iran in June 2025.

To win this war, Iran only needs to prolong it.

Iran could become the flip side of Ukraine in an escalating World War III scenario.

If you accept the fact that the world is already engaged in a Third World War, then it would be a mistake to view the Israel/U.S.-Iran war in isolation from what else is happening in the world. The only question is, how quickly will this theater of World War III escalate?

Russia will be happy to stay out of the U.S.-Iran war directly, while helping prolong the conflict by supplying Iran with intelligence and supplies in an effort to bleed the U.S. dry of munitions, which would also help China if it decides to make a play for Taiwan. This is the exact Western strategy against Russia only in reverse, where the U.S. and NATO are funding and supplying Ukraine as a proxy against Russia.

This strategy failed when the U.S. and NATO employed it against the Russians because the Russian military-industrial complex has proven itself up to the challenge of quickly resupplying key munitions. They have outproduced the West 3 to 1 in the resupply game.

But the U.S. is reliant on a military-industrial complex that exacts far more in terms of cost and delivers its products much slower.

And this isn’t even figuring into the equation the ability of China to provide even more intelligence and weapons supplies to Iran.

In his Monday press conference, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth refused to rule out boots on the ground in Iran.

I personally don’t think Trump will approve boots on the ground, even though I believe that may be required in order to complete the job of a regime change. And make no mistake, that’s what this war is about. It has nothing to do with Iran being on the verge of attaining a nuclear weapon or its long-standing ballistic missile program. That’s all poppycock meant to drive fear into the hearts of Americans. Because without fear, you have no support for the war.

But here’s the big question: If the Iranian regime holds on past three or four weeks, maybe three or four months, and Trump refuses to insert U.S. troops into what would be a potential bloodbath situation, would Netanyahu deploy the so-called “Sampson option?” This involves the use of nukes by Israel against Iran.

Think about it. What if Israel runs out of interceptors and other munitions and Iran is still firing away a month or two from now? Did they not think about this in advance? Maybe they did and their solution was the Sampson option?

This would fit with the Trump doctrine of ending conflicts quickly and avoiding long, protracted wars of attrition.

The only other option would be to call the war off by negotiating another ceasefire, as they did last June in the 12-Day War. But if it comes to that point and Iran has hundreds of missiles still left in its arsenal, it may be in no mood to negotiate.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of Staff for Gen. Colin Powell, said in an interview with Danny Haiphong Monday that, “The potential is there for the unraveling of the American empire,” especially if Russia and China decide to get more involved.

According to a new Reuters poll, only 27 percent of Americans approve of Trump starting the war with Iran and 47 percent disapprove. The remaining 26 percent were unsure.

That’s not a very large margin of public support. And if this war drags on for more than a month, Operation Epic Fury could result in voters taking out their fury on Trump and his party in the mid-term elections in November.

Trump knows this. And that could result in him deciding to escalate further by allowing Israel to use a small tactical nuclear weapon against Iranian targets to finish them off once and for all. But that could result in a whole new set of challenges as it might be what triggers Russia and China to step off the sidelines and engage more directly with U.S. military assets. Let’s pray this does not happen.

HERE’S THE BOTTOM LINE OF WHAT WE CAN REPORT SO FAR:

• The US government, led by President Trump, has unleashed something it cannot control, as the outcomes of war are never predictable. Trump launched an unnecessary war, a war of choice, for reasons he never made fully clear based on facts that don’t add up about weapons of mass destruction (where have we heard that before?).

• Congress has not been given the opportunity to weigh in and there was no emergency national-security threat from an Iranian regime that had been in place for 47 years, making this an unconstitutional use of American military power, not that anyone in Washington still cares about the Constitution, other than Rand Paul, Thomas Massie and a few other outliers.

• We still haven’t heard a word about what victory in this war looks like, meaning what comes after the Islamic regime is taken out?

• The ayatollah is dead, but a vacuum of power has yet to be filled and we have no idea who will ultimately be running the government of Iran.

• Chaos and Instability is all we can confirm right now, as the White House and Pentagon press conferences offer up war propaganda, not meant to inform but to send highly orchestrated messages to Americans, to whoever may be running Iran, and to the world. The corporate media plays along and avoids even asking the critical questions (probably because they know they will be booted from the press pool if they do).

• The Iranians have closed the Strait of Hormuz, sending the oil markets into shock mode and gasoline prices at the pump soaring.

• The message out of the White House seems to be, just trust us, but the U.S. track record for these types of regime-change operations is horrendous.