Thomas Wictor

The things I do for the people who want to know the truth. I’m in agony right now because of my back, but this is too important put off. Brace yourselves. We’re in for a bumpy ride. At the end of it is sunshine—maybe forever.

First, some lines from Wilfred Owen.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

That’s me. I can walk only if I’m bent double. At long last I am an old beggar and a hag.

Still, there’s lots of news to report. Two stories are equally momentous, so it doesn’t matter the order. I’ll start with Israel.

The Lebanese and Syrian media said Saturday that Israel Air Force warplanes have attacked targets in Syria linked to the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah. Reports varied, however, on the exact targets and location of the strikes.

According to a report on the Lebanese Debate website, six IAF jets carried out the strike over the Qalamoun Mountains region of western Syria, and targeted weapons that were headed for Hezbollah, Channel 10 said.

Syrian opposition groups, for their part, claimed Israeli planes had attacked targets in the Damascus area, in two strikes in areas where Hezbollah and pro-Assad forces were centered.

Syrian media, however, said that Israeli warplanes hit several Hezbollah targets in southern Syria.

Israel’s defense establishment declined to comment on the reports of the strikes, which would be the first since Russia boosted its involvement in the Syrian civil war.

This came after the Israelis attacked the Syrian Arab Army.

The IDF fired artillery and anti-tank rockets at two Syrian military posts in the central Golan Heights Tuesday morning after three mortar shells exploded in Israeli territory on the northern end of the plateau hours earlier.

The fire on Israel had been ruled to be spillover from fighting between Syrian regime forces and rebels on the Syrian side of the Golan.

“The IDF holds the Syrian army responsible and accountable for this blatant breach of Israeli sovereignty, and will not tolerate any attacks emanating from Syria, intentional or not,” the army said.

Remember how everyone said that Russia had put an impregnable air-defense-electronic-warfare bubble over Syria that would prevent Israel and the Combined Joint Task Force from carrying out missions? You know how I knew that was bunk? Netanyahu’s trip to Moscow in September.

Look at Putin. What happened was that Netanyahu gave him his marching orders. Russia and Israel are cooperating in the fight against Iran and Hezbollah. I’ll provide my indisputable proof in a moment.

Here’s the second hugely important news story.

Khamenei Issues Nine New Conditions, Blocks Execution Of JCPOA

Now the big secret is out. [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not approved the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal]. And those who pretend that it has been approved – President Rohani, Foreign Minister and negotiator Javad Zarif, and their associates – have been on borrowed time. While they could lie to the West, to President Obama, to Secretary of State Kerry, and to the EU foreign ministers that they can move ahead, they always knew that Khamenei opposed the JCPOA. Now, at the moment of truth, they feared to proceed.

Indeed, it was logical for Khamenei to allow the Iranian negotiators to play along with the P5+1, to see what they could get at no cost to Iran – since it was well known that President Obama was dying for an agreement. But once Khamenei knew that President Obama is standing firm on the last fragment of the original U.S. position, either unwilling or unable to capitulate any further, Khamenei broke his silence. Stepping in in the final act, Khamenei, deus-ex-machina style, dictated, in a letter to President Rohani, nine new conditions for the JCPOA, and declared that if these were not met Iran would stop the agreement.

This PROVES that the JCPOA is a deception operation. President Obama gave in to virtually all Iranian demands, but Khameini then negated the entire agreement, showing the world that the mullahs are implacably dangerous and must be overthrown. Khameini was PLAYED.

Actually, Khamenei had issued an early warning in a September 3 speech, in which he said that all the sanctions must be lifted, not suspended, and that if not, there would either be no agreement or Iran would also only “suspend” its obligations. But President Obama did not yield… Therefore, Khamenei, realizing that the sanctions would remain, also kept his promise and blocked the agreement with new conditions, one of which – i.e. the lifting of sanctions rather than suspension – he knows for sure cannot be met…

Khamenei had spoken, banning outright any implementation of the JCPOA by Iran until his new conditions are met. The entire Iranian political system is hewing to this line – including President Rohani, Foreign Minister Zarif, Majlis Speaker Larijani, a majority of Majlis members (166), and more.

Everyone, that is, except for Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei’s political rival and head of Iran’s pragmatic camp, who in an interview published this week by MEMRI openly challenged Khamenei and said that Iran should abide by what it undertook in the JCPOA.

But this cannot happen. Khamenei holds the reins.

Did the media report on Rafsanjani’s interview? No! But the media in Iran did. This, however, did not stop the editor of the Israeli daily Haaretz from writing that the interview was faked.

This is a well-known human reaction: When people stand before the complete collapse of what they believe in, they enter a state of denial.

And what is President Obama to do, as everything he has stood for in the Iran deal collapses so ignominiously?

With every passing day, Iran is more and more in violation of the JCPOA. But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats, nor the media, nor anyone else will acknowledge this, for the implications are too devastating. The agreement is no longer in effect. Its clock has stopped.

But the weeks will pass, and the media and politicians will be forced to admit that this is the case. And the last thing they will be willing to do is to force Iran to meet its obligations. Thus, it appears that President Obama’s only option, shameful as it is, is to restart the negotiations with the Iranians and talk with them about their leaders’ new conditions.

With all due respect to the brilliant Yigal Carmon, that won’t happen. I don’t blame him for not seeing the coming maelstrom, because it’s unprecedented. But I can prove to you that I’m right, and that the JCPOA is designed to give Israel, the Arab League, and as many as a dozen other nations a casus belli to overthrow the mullahs, destroy Hezbollah, smash the Islamic State, and finish off al-Qaeda.

The signs of new alliances are everywhere.

Arab media - and governments? - signal their displeasure with the knife attacks

Over the past day, at least a dozen Arabic newspapers, mostly out of Jordan and Egypt, published articles about a Salafi preacher who is against attacking Jews and even soldiers in Israel.

Jordanian preacher Ali Hassan Al-Halabi said, in response to a question, that it is not permissible to kill Jews in Palestine as “there are shari’a agreements that protect people’s rights and lives.”

And what about this?

Egypt’s representative at United Nations voted on Friday in support of Israel’s bid for membership of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Israeli media reported.

Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and its acceptance to membership of the UN, Egypt had never voted in its favour at the UN before last Friday.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to know the truth is that you have to find it bit by bit. Today I learned this.

The Israel Air Force (IAF) is revamping headquarters staff, planning procedures and air operations to support a 10-fold increase in the number of targets it can detect and destroy, the Air Force’s chief of air operations said.

In an exclusive interview with Defense News, Brig. Gen. Amikam Norkin said the institutional revamp — the service’s first since the 1973 Yom Kippur War — aims to shorten the duration of future wars while reducing demand for maneuvering ground forces through massive, persistent and punishing use of precision air power.

More than a year in the making and slated for phased implementation in the coming months, the changes are driven by IAF Commander Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel and his Expanding Attack Capacity (EAC) program…

“In Pillar of Defense, our daily attack capacity was twice that of Lebanon, despite the fact that [Gaza] was a much smaller area and more densely populated,” Norkin said. “Now, when we talk about the northern area of operations, we’re aspiring for an order of magnitude expansion — maybe more — in the number of targets to be destroyed every day.”

During Pillar of Defense, the Israeli Air Force hit about 187 targets per day. The Expanding Attack Capacity will allow for at least 1870 targets to be destroyed per day. No military on earth could withstand such an assault. This explains how the Coalition in Yemen is hitting so many targets with such precision and relatively few aircraft. They’re using Israeli methods.

Targeting. Here’s what Israel has up its sleeve.

As for the Arab League, I finally found a mainstream media report that noted what I did from the beginning.

So far, despite the presence of several thousand Saudi and Emirati troops in Yemen at times during the war, their use of more ground troops seems unlikely. The arrival of Sudanese troops in Aden this month underlined Riyadh’s desire to keep a light footprint.

Most of the ground troops in Yemen are Yemeni. They’ve been armed, equipped, and trained by the Saudis and Emiratis.

The Arab League has sent comparatively few troops to Yemen, except for the 10,000 Sudanese. Why the light footprint, and why the sudden arrival of the Sudanese?

To free up large Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Qatari assault units for the real war. Others are apparently going to be involved. Israel just spent three weeks training German Panzergrenadiers in tunnel warfare and how to fight combatants who use human shields. There’s absolutely no chance that Germany’s premier conventional fighting force will need those skills in Europe.

Now my proof that the war on Iran, Hezbollah, the Islamic State, and al-Qaeda will happen, and Russia will do nothing to stop it.

Oil prices. The economies of Russia and the Gulf Cooperation Council have been devastated by low oil prices, but none of those nations’ leaders are panicking. That’s because they all know that when the war starts, the price of oil will double. Within seconds. Oil prices will remain high for at least two years, long enough to give the Gulf Cooperation Council the funds it needs to rebuild the region with a Marshall Plan, one of the seven points in Saudi Arabia’s long-term strategy for the region.

Small things tell us a lot. Beginning in 2010, the Republic of Korea (ROK) Special Forces Arc Unit began training the United Arab Emirates Presidential Guard. The Arc Unit wore digital camouflage uniforms in the green woodland pattern.

The ROK always announced that the Arc Unit was being sent to Al Ain Camp to train Emirati troops.

In March of this year, this is how the deployment was described.

Family members photograph soldiers in the Arc Unit, South Korean troops dispatched for special military operations in the Middle East. The special commandos attended a farewell ceremony on Tuesday at the training field of the Special Warfare Command in Songpa District, Seoul.

Now they’re commandos performing special military operation in the Middle East. Though military forums claim that the Arc Unit is in the United Arab Emirates, the ROK has declined to comment. And now the Arc Unit is wearing a new uniform.

Digital desert camouflage, adopted this year without fanfare. And they’re doing this.

A drill is an exercise. Do you know what all this means? The Arc Unit is no longer trainers. It’s training.

And one last photo: Chinese People’s Liberation Army troops marching in Beijing on September 3, 2015, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of victory over Japan in World War II.

Why are they wearing digital desert camouflage and sand goggles?

Though the uncertainty is great, have faith. It’s a brave new world. A good one.