I have a longer statement below in spoiler tags, but for those who just want to get into the megathread itself, the very short version of my take is: things are going about as well as they realistically could go for Iran as of me writing this on March 2nd; the US and Zionists have clearly misplayed their hand; there's so much propaganda it's hard to get a good perspective of the overall conflict; I think if Iran is still fighting on at approximately the same pace as the end of this week then things are looking VERY bad for the West; I am unsure what the ultimate result of this conflict will be now that the new crop of Iranian leadership are in charge after Khamenei's assassination but am hopeful that anti-American sentiment has been yet further cemented and those in Iran who seek repproachment with the West will be further discredited in favor of those who wish to look East.
My Idle Ramblings
As we are now past the initial 48 hours of the war, what can be said with confidence is that the Iran of today is in a considerably more organized position than they were during the Twelve Days War, as the initial delay on meaningfully responding to enemy attacks was brought from something like 10 hours to about 1 hour. Unfortunately, given the not-insignificant number of Iranian top figures killed, Iran still has considerable opsec problems; whatever the hell Sinwar was doing to stay alive for over a year in the most bombed territory on the planet obviously hasn't reached Iran yet. However, to Iran's credit, the recovery was fast and effective, Khamenei had already drawn up detailed plans for the succession chain in the event of his death, and the new figures were clearly in position to take control of the situation within the hour. The name of the game appears to be greater decentralization of the military, making Zionist narratives about "decapitation" essentially meaningless - the hydra has a thousand heads.
This time around, there are fewer direct critiques to level at Russia and China. In an abstract sense, they could certainly "do more" (Xi, donate one million Chinese drones and let Iran and Yemen blot out the sun!), but to be geopolitically serious, it appears that the Twelve Days War delivered a swift kick up the ass of both Iran and China to start working more closely together, and so Iran now has access to Chinese intelligence and satellite tools, has been receiving certain military equipment like much better radars, and, one hopes, will provide greater economic assistance during and after this war's conclusion.
The overall impacts of the US's and Zionists' strikes on Iran, and vice versa, have been very hard to assess due to the customary tsunami of misinformation and comical exaggerations. Clearly, the most sensational claims - that Western aircraft feel safe enough to fly directly over Iranian territory (let alone that they have air superiority, let alone that they have air supremacy); that Iran's leadership have been killed in meaningful numbers; that Iran is on the verge of collapse or giving in; that Western losses are insignificant; that things are going well or better than expected; etc, are obviously for the general population and peanut gallery, and the situation looks very different from within the halls of power. Nonetheless, stitching every individual missile/drone strike together from both sides into a cohesive picture from which we can draw conclusions has always been a major challenge of present-day warfare, and is certainly challenging here. What can be generally gathered is that Iran does not seem to fear striking Occupied Palestine or American bases directly and with pretty significant firepower, but either is deliberately not focussing on the fleet or does not have the capability to focus on it, leaving American warships intact. And from the highest perspective, it's unclear whether Iran is only beginning a long term war of attrition, or whether they hope to not overly anger the US and Zionists so that an offramp later is possible, or indeed, that the West is succeeding in attriting Iran's offensive capabilities faster than Iran can attrit the West's (or a mixture of all three).
The assassination of Khamenei and other figures is a symbolic victory for the West, as he was one of the last remaining pre-October 7th Resistance leaders alive or in power. Reports are that he stayed at his compound despite being advised in the days before the attack that he should leave, knowing that he would likely very soon die, as he did not want to flee to Russia or hide in bunkers. It's currently unclear to me how impactful his death will be in the end. On the one hand, it is obvious to every serious analyst that his death will not negatively impact Iran's military operations, nor will it lead to regime change in the short or medium term - Iran's government is not a strongman regime (few governments truly are), and the current government is both very durable and has very widespread legitimacy. His replacements and subordinates are already in charge, and from what I can tell, effectively were in charge long before his death.
On the other hand, succession is a bit of a risky process for nations today, in the short and long term. If whoever is left as his replacement at the end of this war - I cannot safely assume it will be Khamenei's immediate replacement in the current environment of Western strikes - ultimately leans even a little more reformist and towards reproachment with the West than Khamenei did, then this whole war may be worth it to the West regardless of the materiel losses. Alternatively, if this war causes a permanent shift away from repproachment and genuine, sustained, and hard-to-repair damage to America's foothold in the Middle East as well as the attrition of most of the US's interceptor missiles, we may indeed be looking at a region soon to be free of Zionist designs. It is much too early for me to distinguish which path we are on.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
My feeling is they have no good paths in the game. They played poorly in the game earlier (2000s/2010s) and it has reduced their choices and options to range from bad to worse with no good ones existing in the near future.
Fact is they don't control their airspace. Building a bomb takes time, facilities and they must enrich higher. The US and zionist entity will target their enrichment facilities with nuclear bunker busters assuredly if they try to race to enrich higher and they'll probably hit a city with a nuke if they think it's necessary to kill the scientists working on the bomb itself. Western media will spin it as they had a bomb and were going to use it and it was "the only way to stop this imminent attack on peaceful small bean israel".
There's also the question of delivery. If the war continues and Iran is able to use its advanced missiles and keep launching them after US interceptors are depleted they can maybe force the US and zionist entity to call a ceasefire and back off for some time (at least a year I feel) so they don't need a nuke in that case. If the war continues and most of their launchers or advanced missiles are inoperative then how would they deliver the bomb? A bomb is only good if you can deliver it to the enemy successfully.
And it's an enemy we must remember whose leadership shamelessly flies to Europe to hide when the bombings start. An entity that has a huge amount of bomb cellars and were they to nuke Iran first and expect small retaliation they could send people down and a higher percentage would survive than in Iran. Things are grim because of missteps, serial missteps by a government that hasn't been rational about the US all along at all.
The only reason that Israel/US knew where all their nuclear reactors and materials were was because they were complying with the IAEA who was leaking all the information to them. Iran can easily create a nuclear weapon in a hidden location once they drop the delusion that they've clung to that they can appease the west.
As for delivery, Iran has hypersonic missiles which could easily serve as a vehicle. No matter how depleted their launchers and rockets get, they can never get all of them. It only takes a couple missiles to credibly threaten the Israelis
Can they? Zionist intelligence is quite good. Lots of blackmailed people, diaspora, secret atheists (see blackmailed), etc, etc in Iran not to mention them hacking cameras, satellites, phones. It's hard to build big facilities for this stuff without some of the equipment being noticed. You could do so discretely but you can't do so discretely and quickly. They either build a facility and a bomb in a reasonable time (by sometime next year) or they take half a decade trying to do it carefully at which point it's moot and probably been discovered thanks to hacked microphones or computers anyways.
Right now most of Iran's material is entombed and the US and zionist entity are watching those sites like hawks and could bomb any teams trying to get at it and keep it entombed. I don't think a couple amount to a credible threat. I think the enemy is unhinged, fascist, entitled religious maniacs and that with their intercept systems Iran would need a coordinated attack to punch through with several missiles. A gun you're not prepared to fire is more dangerous than no gun at all. And if Iran announces they have nukes and the zionist entity can't reasonably home in on them in the middle of a mass bombing campaign where they have aerial dominance they could be tempted to use nuclear weapons to eliminate all major military and civilian sites to prevent it. They would act totally self-righteous about it and it wouldn't change the perception of the world about the zionist entity one bit given their genocide of Gaza has firmly drawn lines of where people stand.
It's like being held at gun-point by a bunch of heavily armed criminals and deciding while they're watching you it's a good time to assemble a gun in plain view. They're likely to react badly to that. You can't do that in combat conditions as it will be taken to mean you intend to imminently use it and they will react in an imminent threat to the mission way which means maximum and total force to stop you and prevent it.
Also Iran is operating in an autonomous mode without strong control from central command which you'd need in this situation. I doubt an individual commander of a given region is going to be able to undertake this. This type of operation requires centralized delegation and coordination which is most likely out at the moment. Given another 4 years of bombing maybe they could make it happen anyways but the zionists will probably use that time to kill as many Iranian atomic scientists as they can to make the job hard.