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Posted on 03/19/2026 1:16:33 PM PDT by MeanWestTexan
Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war.
The chorus is loud and, in some respects, understandable. War is ugly, and this one has imposed real costs on millions of people across the Middle East, including the city I live in.
But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.
When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.
I write this from Doha, where Iranian missiles have triggered alerts for residents to take shelter and Qatar Airways has started operating evacuation flights. I lived through four years of war in Baghdad.
I have worked for the US Department of State and advised defence and intelligence agencies in multiple countries. I have no interest in cheerleading for war.
But I have spent my academic career studying how states authorise the use of force through intelligence institutions, and what I see in the current campaign is a recognisable military operation proceeding through identifiable phases against an adversary whose capacity to project power is collapsing in real time.
An arsenal built over decades, dismantled in days Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90 percent from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, according to publicly available data. Drone launches tell the same story: from more than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15.
The figures drawn from US and and Iranian military statements differ in detail but converge on the trajectory. Hundreds of Iranian missile launchers have been rendered inoperable. According to some reports, 80 percent of Iran’s capacity to strike Israel has been eliminated.
Iran’s naval assets, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defences have been suppressed to the point at which the US is now flying nonstealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace, a decision that signals near-total confidence in air dominance.
The campaign has moved through two distinct phases. The first suppressed Iran’s air defences, decapitated its command and control, and degraded its missile and drone launch infrastructure. By March 2, US Central Command announced local air superiority over western Iran and Tehran, achieved without the confirmed loss of a single American or Israeli combat aircraft.
The second phase, now under way, targets Iran’s defence industrial base: missile production facilities, dual-use research centres and the underground complexes where remaining stockpiles are stored. This is not aimless bombing. It is a methodical campaign to ensure that what has been destroyed cannot be rebuilt.
Iran now faces a strategic dilemma that tightens every day. If it fires its remaining missiles, it exposes launchers that are promptly destroyed. If it conserves them, it forfeits the ability to impose costs of the war. Missile and drone launch data suggest Iran is rationing its remaining capacity for politically timed salvoes rather than sustaining operational tempo.
This is a force managing decline, not projecting strength.
The nuclear threshold that previous US presidents accepted
Much of the criticism of the US-Israeli campaign focuses on its costs while treating the status quo ante as if it were cost-free. It was not.
Iran entered 2026 with 440kg of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity – enough, if further enriched, for as many as 10 nuclear weapons. Before the June strikes, Tehran was less than two weeks away from enriching enough uranium for one nuclear bomb, according to US intelligence assessments. At that time, the International Atomic Energy Agency acknowledged that Iran’s accumulation of near-weapons-grade material had no clear civilian justification.
The current campaign has damaged further the Natanz nuclear facility. The one in Fordow remains inoperable. The defence industrial facilities that would be needed to reconstitute enrichment capacity are being systematically targeted.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether diplomatic alternatives were fully exhausted, the Omani-mediated negotiations in February showed real progress, and there are legitimate questions about whether Washington walked away too soon.
But the critics’ implicit alternative, continued restraint while Iran inched towards a nuclear weapon, is the policy that produced the crisis in the first place. Every year of strategic patience added centrifuges to the enrichment halls and kilogrammes to the stockpile.
The limits of military force against a nuclear programme are real, and as others have argued elsewhere, strikes can destroy facilities but cannot eliminate knowledge. The 440kg of enriched uranium remains unaccounted for.
A successor regime of any political colour will inherit a strategic environment in which the case for nuclear deterrence has been strengthened, not weakened. These are genuine long-term risks. But they are arguments for a comprehensive post-conflict diplomatic architecture, not arguments against the campaign itself.
The Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s wasting asset
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is dominating the critical commentary. US Senator Chris Murphy has called it evidence that President Donald Trump misjudged Iran’s capacity to retaliate. CNN has described it as proof that the administration has lost control of the war’s escalation.
The economic pain is real: Oil prices have surged, a record 400 million barrels of oil will be released from global reserves, and Gulf states are facing drone and missile strikes on their energy infrastructure.
But this framing inverts the strategic logic. Closing the strait was always Iran’s most visible retaliatory card, and always a wasting asset. About 90 percent of Iran’s own oil exports pass through Kharg Island and then the strait.
China, Tehran’s largest remaining economic partner, cannot receive Iranian crude while the strait is shut. Every day the blockade continues, Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.
Meanwhile, the naval assets Iran needs to sustain the blockade – fast-attack boats, drones, mines, shore-based antiship missiles – are being degraded daily. Its naval bases at Bandar Abbas and Chahbahar have been severely damaged.
The question is not whether the strait reopens but when and whether Iran retains any naval capacity to contest it. Critics compare the challenge of escorting a hundred tankers daily to an impossible logistical burden. But you do not need to escort tankers through a strait if the adversary no longer has the means to threaten them. That is the operational trajectory.
A proxy network that is fragmenting, not expanding
The regional escalation – Hezbollah resuming attacks on Israel, Iraqi militias striking US bases, Houthis issuing threats in the Red Sea – is cited as the clearest evidence of US-Israeli strategic failure. The war is spreading, the critics say, just as it did in Iraq. This misreads the dynamics of Iran’s alliance network.
My research on how states authorise proxy violence identifies four layers of control: strategic legitimation, operational coordination, financial-logistical distribution and deniability calibration. The current campaign has disrupted all four simultaneously.
The assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei eliminated the apex of the authorisation pyramid. His son Mojtaba’s appointment as his successor, a dynastic transfer without precedent in the Islamic Republic, signals institutional fragility, not continuity. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command structure has been decapitated at multiple levels – the acting defence minister was among those killed.
When proxies launch retaliatory attacks across the region, this is not evidence of an expanding network; it is evidence of predelegated response authority, which is what a centralised command system activates when it anticipates its own destruction.
Predelegation is a sign of desperation, not strength. It means the centre can no longer coordinate. The attacks will continue, but they will become increasingly uncoordinated, strategically incoherent and politically costly for the host states where these groups operate.
Qatar and Bahrain are arresting IRGC operatives. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are intercepting Iranian drones over their own territory. The regional environment that sustained Iran’s proxy architecture, including the grudging tolerance by Gulf states fearful of Iranian retaliation, is being replaced by active hostility.
Hezbollah is weaker than at any point since 2006, degraded by more than a year of Israeli operations before this campaign began. Iraqi militias retain the ability to launch attacks, but they are doing so into a region where they face increasing isolation.
The Houthis in Yemen possess independent capability but lack the command integration with Tehran that transforms militia activity into strategic effect. What the critics described as an expanding regional war is better understood as the death spasm of a proxy architecture whose authorising centre has been shattered.
A clear endgame
The most politically potent criticism is that the administration has no endgame. Trump’s own rhetoric has not helped: the oscillation between “unconditional surrender” and hints at negotiation, between regime change and denial of regime change, feeds the impression of strategic incoherence. Only 33 percent of American respondents in a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll said the president had clearly explained the mission’s purpose.
But the endgame is visible in the operational phasing, even if the rhetoric obscures it. The objective is the permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.
Call it strategic disarmament. This is closer to the approach of the Allies to Germany’s industrial war-making capacity in 1944-1945 than to the US war on Iraq in 2003. The analogy is imperfect: Strategic disarmament without occupation requires a verification and enforcement architecture that no one has yet proposed, but the operational logic is the same.
No one is proposing to occupy Tehran. The question is what happens when the bombing stops, and here the critics raise a legitimate concern, which Murphy articulated concisely after a classified briefing: What prevents Iran from restarting production?
The answer requires a post-conflict framework that does not yet exist in public: a verification regime, a diplomatic settlement or a sustained enforcement posture. The administration owes the American public and its regional partners a clear account of what that framework would look like.
But the absence of a public diplomatic blueprint does not mean the military campaign is failing. It means the campaign is ahead of the diplomacy, a sequencing problem, not a strategic one. The military conditions for a durable settlement – Iranian missile capacity too degraded to rebuild quickly, nuclear infrastructure inaccessible, proxy networks fragmented – are being created right now.
War is ugly, but the war strategy is working None of this minimises the human costs. More than 1,400 civilians have been killed in Iran, a moral burden the US and Israel will carry. Oil price spikes are hurting every economy on Earth. At least 11 US service members have been killed. I live with these sirens every day, as does everyone across the Gulf. The costs are real, they are serious, and any accounting that ignores them is dishonest.
But the critics are making a different error: They are treating the costs of action as if the costs of inaction were zero. They were not. They were measured in the slow accretion of a threat that, left unchecked, would have produced exactly the crisis everyone claims to fear: a nuclear-armed Iran capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz at will, surrounded by proxy forces that could hold the entire region hostage indefinitely.
Seventeen days in, Iran’s supreme leader is dead, his successor is reportedly wounded and every principal instrument of Iranian power projection – missiles, nuclear infrastructure, air defences, the navy, proxy command networks – has been degraded beyond near-term recovery. The campaign’s execution has been imperfect, its public communication poor and its post-conflict planning incomplete. War is never clean. But the strategy – the actual strategy, measured in degraded capabilities rather than cable news cycles – is working.
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I note it comes from Al Jazeera, which tells you have far our media has fallen. Our media is so biased, AJ tells the truth before they do.
Exactly. Dr. Muhanad Seloom writes an article in Al Jazeera about how US - Israel (yes, you read that right, Israel) strategy is working. Hell must have frozen over. But the partisan hack Democrat mouthpieces in the US still dutifully report that the US is losing the war badly and Iran is on the verge of a glorious victory. Pravda under Stalin would be embarrassed to produce the propaganda being vomited by CNN, NBC, ABC etc.
The first sentence completely discredits the guy. The second one is an outright lie, as he is basically a paid propagandist.
The author is partly British educated >>University of Exeter<< which makes him more impartial. Iranian 7th century Shiite Twelvers Ayatollahs are in the way of Sunni/ Saudi Arabia/MBS progress so they had to go. MBS has some very big plans for Saudi.>>>>> Yes Qatarlson faction, Israel benefits too, I know it hurts you clowns and know-nothings.
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Muhanad Seloom (also spelled مهند سلوم in Arabic) is an academic and expert in international politics, security, intelligence studies, and Middle East geopolitics.
Origin / Where from: He is Iraqi.
His education includes a B.A. in Translation & Political Science from the University of Al-Mustansiriyah in Baghdad, Iraq. His research frequently focuses on Iraqi politics, intelligence history, security governance in Iraq (from the Ba’ath era to post-2003 fragmentation), and issues related to Iraq’s Sunni Arab community (e.g., writings on the Iraqi Islamic Party and post-IS dynamics for Sunni Arabs in Iraq). He is fluent in Arabic (native), English, and Kurdish, which aligns with Iraq’s linguistic diversity.
When born: No specific birth date or year is publicly available in his professional profiles, biographies, academic pages (e.g., Doha Institute, University of Exeter, personal website), or publications. He earned his PhD in Ethno-Political Studies from the University of Exeter and has been active in academia since at least the mid-2010s (e.g., associate lecturer roles around 2016–2019).
Sunni?: Public sources do not explicitly state his personal sectarian affiliation (Sunni, Shia, etc.).
However, his scholarly work often analyzes Iraqi Sunni Arab political and community issues in detail (e.g., “After IS: The Meaning of Iraq’s Election for the Arab Sunni Community,” discussions of the Iraqi Islamic Party, and post-2003 Sunni challenges). This focus suggests deep familiarity with Sunni perspectives in Iraq, but it is academic rather than a direct indicator of his own background. No evidence points to him being Shia or otherwise; his name and Iraq/Baghdad origins are consistent with possibilities in either major Iraqi sect, but nothing confirms it definitively.
He currently works as an Assistant Professor of International Politics and Security at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (Qatar), is a researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, and holds an Honorary Research Fellow position at the University of Exeter (UK). He’s known for recent analyses on topics like US-Israeli strategy against Iran.
So I guess you have nothing to say about the substance of the article.
If the article is propaganda, one does well to recall that the best propaganda is true.
Very interesting article. It would have been better if he acknowleged the US government has to work with the burden of a hostile domestic media.
I’m usually not in the habit of reading anything published in Al-Jazeera, so I didn’t read anything beyond that point I referenced.
It was the frog being cooked by degrees. Or, to use another metaphor, each Prez was ok with kicking the can down the road. But that stopped with DJT.
I have worked for the US Department of State and advised defence and intelligence agencies in multiple countries. I have no interest in cheerleading for war.
The first sentence completely discredits the guy. The second one is an outright lie, as he is basically a paid propagandist.
It’s working great, there should be no question.
What comes after, is a much more difficult proposition to assess, if it can be assessed at all.
People I know and/or those who have a well documented track record of credibility.
This guy doesn't fall into either category. I never even heard of him before.
Your loss.
The author has a website. You can check out his credentials. https://muhanadseloom.com/ His CV can be downloaded from the front page. >>> https://muhanadseloom.com/Seloom_CV.pdf
“What comes after, is a much more difficult proposition to assess, if it can be assessed at all.”
The end game is pretty obvious. Unlike all the dead leaders of the IRGC (think SS) and Basij (think SA if the Night of Long Knives didn’t happen), the generals of the Iranian regular army or Artesh (think Wehrmacht) are all alive and kicking.
In fact, neither the Artesh generals, nor regular Aartesh troops in general have been particularly targeted.
The end game is to wipe out the IRGC and Basij and have the Artesh take over and then sign an unconditional surrender that is word-for-word the same as what Nazi Germany signed.
The Army will take control, the Shah will be a figurehead, and some sort of semi-dictator/semi-republic government will take over, giving the remaining IRGC/Basij people clemency provided they can’t hold any position in the government.
The last time someone told me that here on FR was in response to me telling people to ignore the so-called Branch Covidian “experts” in the spring of 2020.
“The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is dominating the critical commentary. US Senator Chris Murphy has called it evidence that President Donald Trump misjudged Iran’s capacity to retaliate. CNN has described it as proof that the administration has lost control of the war’s escalation.”
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Can you just imagine these fools commenting on and voting regarding our actions during World War II?
You’re wasting your time. The poster won’t read the NY Post because it was owned by Rupert Murdoch.
You strike me as the type to have taken 50 boosters.
I’m actually surprised you had enough sense to avoid it.
That sounds like a clean plan.
I am very skeptical that Iran’s oil, possibly one of the top ten stacks of wealth in the world, will be left behind, up for grabs. I don’t have that good an idea of how the regular army (grunts, for the most part) are going to compete with whatever remains of the IRGC, which is a well-developed mafia-type organization. A sergeant in the IRGC, even if/after we kill 90% of over 100K “soldiers” can probably outrun and out maneuver a regular army general.
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