Iran War Update: Shutting down the mullah's money making method | Hour 2

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. All Right, so it's been a while, but do we have some developments in the Iran war. So this is your Iran War update today or yesterday, I should say. The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control or the OFAC, or as I call. It, the O fact. I'm gonna say, yeah, just to protect the FCC license. Yeah, it's O fact. Anyway, they are designating ten individuals that are part of a network responsible for transferring cash to Hezbolah. The network utilizes couriers traveling on commercial airline flights between Lebanon, turk Eah the UA. That's how you say it now. By the way, they don't like Turkey anymore because it sounds like an insult. But that was what they called themselves for a very long time. But anyway, they now prefer Turk. Yeah, I think it's how they pronounce it, as well as the UAE and Iran. Okay. So you had this network of people that were using commercial airline flights to move hundreds of millions of dollars between these jurisdictions that provided an avenue outside of the formal financial system for Hezbollah to obtain foreign currency and evade sanctions. I just would like to say it's about dang time. O fac is already is also redesignating Hesbelah as a terrorist organization for service to the Iranian regime under the command of the IRGC Khuds Force Hezbolah. This according to the press release from Treasury, Hesbela and its allies exploit financing schemes including oil smuggling, illicit shipping, commodities sales, and bulk cash smuggling to generate and move funds across the region. One of the people identified among the ten is Turkish businessmen Unice Alper Yilmaz, who manages the network of couriers responsible for moving cash between other countries in the region and Hesbelah's base in Lebanon. Yill maaz abuses certain Turkaya based exchange houses using them as front for his business dealings and provided front companies and bank accounts for money transfers connected to the IRGC. All property and interests in property of the designated or blocked persons must be reported to OPHAC. And also if you engage in certain transactions involving the ten people that were designated, you too are at risk for the imposition of what's called secondary sanctions on you. And if you is a foreign bank or financial institution, well that could kill your institution, which is why nobody wants to do business with these entities. So that's putting the screws to the financiers of the IRGC. Donald Trump put out a post on truth social He said, no one has given the Islamic Republic of Iran a greater opportunity to make a deal than megically for them, they have failed to take it. Therefore, today I am announcing this is all in caps, the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country exclamation point. This will be economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale. Their navy is gone, their air force is destroyed, Their military factories are now rubble, their currency is worthless, and their country is hanging on by a thread. Today, I am announcing that any country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face tremendous economic consequences. Oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, front companies. It all needs to stop. Now you know who you are. This will. This will be an economic d Day. And we need all of our allies to stand with the United States to isolate and defeat the Iran threat. These maniacs are on the ropes and these historic measures will cripple them and their ability to project terror worldwide. Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Okay, this is part of a larger thing that's happening. Again. People look at individual events and isolation. That's not the way to look at this stuff. You know me, I am not the one to tell you that Trump is playing seventeen dimensional chess, all right. I do not believe that. I do believe that there is a much larger chess board. Okay, there's a much larger board that is being played upon. That's why when you look at and I went over this the other day. I mentioned this the other day. You've got Venezuela, right, you have the oil issue, you have yes, the straight of Horror moves. But then you also have the Abraham Accords, and you have these various alliances. You have China, you have Russia, right, So you have all these different pieces. And I believe that what we are seeing is a reordering. And I said this at the beginning of the Iran war as well, Okay, that we are seeing a reordering of the global oil markets and the distribution systems. I think that's what we are seeing. I don't know, but that's what it looks like. This is Ida Tehran, born and raised in Iran, R and D engineer who says what is happening right now is one of the most important and effective preparatory stages before the next round of military strikes. I don't know if this is true, but this is their prediction. It is designed to force the regime towards surrender and to create the conditions for a bureaucratic collapse and transition, rather than ca Okay, So a couple things to keep in mind. She points out that the Islamic Republic is at its core a plunder oriented structure. Okay. Historically it most closely resembles the early Arab conquests of Iran and the Mongol invasions, systems organized around extraction rather than governance or belief. This is one of the things, like the molocracy. You've heard this called, I'm sure in Iran. Like all of the Mullahs that you know are supposedly these religious figures, you know, they all control different sectors of business and businesses in the economy, Okay, and you get to these positions with deals and loyalty and whatnot. Right, So all of these different little fiefdoms are controlled by the various Mullahs and they just extract. They just rob the nation of its riches to enrich themselves. Right. It's just complete corruption top to bottom. The central prize has always been Iran's oil. She goes on to. Say, even under sanctions, extensive shadow networks in China, Iraq, the UAE, the UK even kept the revenue moving. This revenue is divided among competing power cartels that the Ayatola carefully managed and balanced for decades. Because these cartels are bound together by marriage and blood ties, their members remain confident that power will eventually rotate and that their own turn at plundering the oil wealth will come. Keep that in mind. Basically, you got all these different families, right, these different cartels, and they're all part of this network, and they all expect to get a little taste of the riches. But at some point, if that is in jeopardy, where does their loyalty actually lie? All? Right? For over a year now, you've heard me talking about Create a Video. Great local company in mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS, tapes, film reels and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now creative videos helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. 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Check out Group travel Videos dot com. That's group travel Videos dot com. Or call seven oh four eight four six seventy eight seventy extension two O six. And when you do that, ask for Katie. But Pete, can I just email? Well, yes you can. You can email Katie Katie at group travel videos dot com. Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. From the text line anonymous seven oh four number which allies is Trump asking for help North Korea. North Korea is not. An ally, but I get the sense that you might not like Donald Trump, So I'll proceed accordingly. We've done nothing but bully, tearif and threaten our allies, but asking them to help us get out of the mess Trump made with this war. I'm I don't have any inside information as to who specifically he's talking to, but if I had to guess, it would be the Gulf. Nations, the Arab countries. That's who he's talking to. And as proof, or I should say, as evidence, the UAE is halting trade with Iran, which is like one of their last remaining economic lifelines. So I'm thinking that the UAE announcement, just as Trump put out that post, and the announcement of the sanctions, the secondary sanctions on anybody that does business with Iran, I'm thinking that when he says, you know, calling on the allies to step up and join us, I'm thinking that's probably aimed at the Arab nations, who, by the way, have been attacked by Iran. So yeah, again, like if you. Want to say that all of this is a mess in Iran, it's all a mess, you want to go down the black pill path, or you hate Trump so much that you kind of want him to fail. So this way, you can bludgeon him and his supporters with failure. I'm not going to waste my time breath trying to disabuse you of this tactic. However, I would prefer me personally, I would prefer to see the Iranian regime collapse. That's my preference, and my preference is that we don't know that we can do that without putting any boots on the ground there, and so if you can cut them off from their oil exporting economic lifeline, you can starve that machine. I think it's I think there's a pretty good likelihood that it collapses perc No, nothing ever is. But yeah, I just I feel like, you know, when they declared war on us like fifty years ago, I kind of feel like like we've just been ignoring that for a very long time. I don't really understand why, but. Yeah, i'd like to see them gone. I think the world would be a better place when they are. So if we can collapse them bureaucratically, economically, i'd like to see that happen. But your mileage may vary if you can, you know, use a failure or the quote mess if you want to use that in order to score political points against your fellow Americans, you go right ahead and do that, all. Right, Let me go back to this right up by Ida Tehran. She says, the she's talking about the way the Iranian power structure operates with their money and stuff, and she says the revenue is divided among competing power cartels. Over the decades, Diatola used the rents to co opt, not rents on like housing, although yes, some of that is in there, but like the profits from these industries and such, because you don't get to con troll the industry unless you are in good standing with the Iatola, right, So they use this to co opt a much wider layer of society. We're talking the bureaucrats, the managers, the contractors, the industrialists. All of these people and others were bound to the system through money, through licenses, through contracts, and through privilege. Genuine ideological believers in Iran probably numbers, she says, about five percent actual ideological believers. Yet, because almost nothing can be done without proving loyalty to the IRGC and its networks, a far larger share, perhaps approaching half the population in practical terms, has its livelihood indirectly tied to the status quo. And therefore benefits from the regime's survival. The regime is not the pure ideological state many imagine it to be. It is profoundly corrupt. Ideology's real function has always been twofold to belies the masses when needed, and to provide a veneer of legitimacy for repression and for terrorism. The ideology itself is so incoherent that even many who publicly claim to believe it do not. This includes people at the very top. They chant death to America while their kids and their money live in the US. The mid level bureaucratic class in particular, has essentially no belief in it at all. Oh, I got to follow up from that seven oh four. We've always been at war with Iran. Oh no, this is another seven o is it? Oh? Yeah, thanks for your response. Cheers. So I guess are you British? If he fails, we fail. I don't want that. My preference would have been to have a plan to do this properly. What is that? Tell me your plan? What is the plan to do it properly? Because it seems like, I don't know, we've decimated them, we've isolated them, and now we're putting the screws to them economically to collapse them. I mean, like, what's the alternative plan? Mass invasion, nuclear weapons? And then you follow up with we've always been at war with Iran. We haven't always been at war with Iran. They have been at war with us. That's what I said, kindly, you know, restrict your arguments. If you're going to put words in my mouth, make them the words that I spoke. Okay, so respond to arguments that I actually made. I said that Iran declared war on us, and we have not been responding as if they had, and now we have. From the text line, Gary says the striking of the drug cartels, Venezuela and Iran all have links through energy and black markets and offshore banking funneling and working against the US. Yeah, and throw in Cuba, and again always point out China, right, China has been a major trade partner of Iran through the ghost fleets, taking the oil, putting them in there, you know, the teapot refineries and stuff. So all of this is to read my view. The way I'm looking at this is a reordering of the global oil markets and distribution systems. So all right, back to this piece. This is uh I always forget her name, Ada Tehran. She says, what Secretary Scott Bessant and the Treasury Department are doing now is closing the remaining sanctions evasion arteries. The shadow routes that kept the money flowing are being shut down, so that finally there's no meaningful revenue left. In the next phase, I expect Israeli strikes to remove the remaining hard line ideological commanders within the IRGC. I have no idea if that's true, but she says, the people required to announce the regime's disillusion, the dissolution, not disillusion, will be the corrupt economic players who remain. They will only take that step once they are certain the plunder has permanently ended, right because as long as they think they can hang on and they're going to get that taste, they're going to get their riches, they be able to protect their wealth, right, their access, their importance and all of that. It's only when you know that that avenue is shut down that they are going to be willing to say, Okay, we need to do something different. They will only take this ship blah blah blah when they do the broader bureaucratic and mid level classes whose loyalty was always purchased rather than ideological. They will finally lose hope and become ready for a managed transition. She goes on to conclude Damascus in Syria, Damascus fell through a bureaucratic collapse with almost no serious resistance, and Bashar al Assad simply fled. Trump is systematically cutting the regimes lifelines one by one. Soon only an empty shell will remain, and that shell will collapse with a single kick from the Iranian people. Trump promised them help, he will deliver it. Okay. Now again, maybe this is overly optimistic, This is all predictive, speculative, don't know, but the insight into the way the regime works is accurate. And I've read enough over the years now to know, and i have. Actually there's a friend of our family whose family fled when the Shaw fell. This is what he did described as well, like he always talked about, like the thieves that were in charge, the mulas and stuff. That's that's what the Iranian people see. Then there's a site called the Iran Watcher. They say the Islamic Republic now admits military power cannot prevent regime collapse as economic failure leaves Iranians hungry. In a rare high level public admission of the regime's structural fragility, parliament speaker Mohammed Bagher Galibath, a former IRGC commander and core regime figure, warned, quote, no matter how much military power we have, if people are hungry and we don't have financial circulation, economic growth and domestic production, we will not endure. The warning comes as the regime's economy is collapsing under mounting pressure, with oil revenues being cut off, inflation crushing purchasing power, the real their currency under severe pressure, and billions in foreign funds remain inaccessible to them. The significance of this statement is enormous. A senior insider is openly acknowledging that missiles and drones and security forces cannot guarantee the Islamic Republic survival if it's economic foundations collapse. I mentioned this a month ago, maybe two months ago, right, This was what people inside sort of the civilian core. This is what they were saying too. They were sending out these warnings, and that was before they started the talks. For remember the Memorandum of misunderstanding. Gallibath is effectively identifying the regime's greatest vulnerability, which is economic collapse, which would feel internal discontent that military power alone cannot contain. And then there's the UAE United Arab Emirates. They announced a halt to all trade and financial sanctions with Iran, threatens one of Iran's most important routes for imports, petroleum products, sales, and access to international commercial and financial networks. This is a big deal, the fact that the UAE, which remember, had been getting shelled by Iran and they now have just finally announced, Hey, you know what, We're not going to do any more trading. We're not going to act as a front for your money laundering. Basically, this is from Mayad Maleki, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defensive Democracies. He says, if the UAES Iran trade cutoff holds and disrupts Iran's Dubai based foreign currency lifeline, the regime will lean harder on Turkish exchange houses and cash courier networks to rep place lost hard currency access. This is precisely the route US Treasury just hit. Today's sanctions show. Washington is already watching that displacement and moving preemptively against the Turkish node. They're not waiting for Iron's shift to fully materialize. See so before UAE made their announcement, the Treasury Department was already putting together the sanctions to hit the aiders and the betters of any kind of replacement system. Turkey, recall, is part of NATO, and so this would put us in the position of sanctioning a NATO ally. Which I don't trust. Turkey. They're a cutout for they want a new caliphate and they're friends with Iran. So if you had any thoughts Turkey or Turquah as you want to be called, if you had any thoughts about creating a different mechanism to replace the uaes, you're gonna get hit with sanctions. Two. Expect more Turkey focused actions as Golf channels Titan. The UAE's total trade and financial cutoff of Iran if it's enforced, maybe the most consequential economic action. Of the war for Iran. Here's why the US naval blockade seals the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. No Leyden crude carrier has left since July twelfth, but Dubai Iran trades. They move entirely inside the Persian Gulf. They just go across the water. They're beyond the blockade's line, right, so they could just stay in those waters. They never have to come past our blockade. So basically UAE just closed the inner door that the US Navy could not reach. That's why this is important. And by the way, UAE has been Iran's number one import supplier for the last five years. Right, So the UAE has been Iran's number one import supplier for five straight years. Billions and billions and billions of dollars. Twenty two billion in imports from the UAE went to Iran, seven billion in non oil exports went back. The UAE and China are Iran's two economic bloodlines. If UAE is serious about its economic embargo against Iran, it's going to close the one that the US Navy could not reach, and then it's just China, right, And Johnny points out something I've been saying as well. Oh, Pete, I agree. It is all of this reorients the oil markets, but that is primarily to protect the dollar. China is the real target in all of this. Yeah, I mean, multiple things can be true. I've been talking about the Chinese connection to all of this. Like, if the Middle East is pacified to some degree, and you can leave it in charge, or you can leave you know, the Israelis, you can leave the Gulf coast countries that aren't you know, openly hostile to us, right, Like, if you could pacify the Middle East, now everything can reorient to the Orient. Huh. Okay. The Islamic Republic says, this is from the Iran watcher. The Islamic Republic says, Arab states should not be allowed to build pipelines that bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Like, I'm sorry, you do you own the world? Okay, because this is the other thing that's been happening. Golf coast countries that have relied on the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormus, they have been racing ahead with building and burying oil pipelines. Right, so Iran played their card. Once your card of the Horrmuz Strait is played, you don't get to play it again. And all of the other countries have been responding by finding alternative ways around the Strait of Hormones. They don't need the strait and countries that trade with each other generally don't go to war with each other. So you've got all of these agreements that these countries are hammering out with each other to move the oil around the Gulf. The second deputy speaker of the regime's parliament, Hamidreza Haji babaiye Ai, I think is how they pronounce that warned on state TV that pipelines circumventing horrormus are as dangerous to the Islamic Republic as missiles, a remarkable admission of how important the Strait remains to the Iranian regime's regional leverage. Yeah, it kind of seems like all of Iran's neighbors are sick of their poop. I think they're just done. They're like, you know what, if this is what you think gives you the power, then we're just going to go around it, and now you're not gonna have any leverage. Haji Babaii also declared that anyone cooperating with US sanctions is effectively at war with Iran. Well, you've already been, You've already been shooting missiles and drones at them. I kind of feel like they got that message already. The Iran watcher says the regime overplayed horror moves. Now it fears its neighbors, building a future where they no longer depend on it. And speaking of horror moves, the US military has quietly established a shipping corridor through the Strait of Horror Moves that has been helping to move about ten million barrels of ovoid a day. This according to Axios, reporting comments from two US officials. The operation has been underway for several weeks, with fifteen to twenty tankers moving in and out of the street every night through a southern channel along the coast of Oman. The US military is also helping empty tankers enter the Persian go from the Arabian Sea to load oil in the UAE and Bahrain and Kuwait before coordinating their passage back through the street. What have I been saying? What have I been saying? Vindication for Pete? I have been saying that if the US military wanted the Strait of Hormus opened, they could do it. And what do we find out? They've been doing it. They've been doing it for two months. They just haven't been telling everybody. So everybody who's been running around saying it's closed. It's and they have all the cards, and we can't do anything. Apparently that's not true. Apparently we could and we have been, one US official told Axios. By the way, this is being run from the eighty second Airborne Division, headquartered in Fort Bragg. One official told Axios that Washington has controlled the southern lane of the Strait for two months, saying the IRGC could still be a nuisance, but did not control the waterway. The US military did this through a multi week campaign to blind Iranian radar surveillance capabilities so they cannot detect shipping vessels traveling in single file lines near the Oman coast. US Air Force assets have also been deployed. They have shot down eight Iranian drones and two cruise missiles. Good job, good job military. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without you your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.