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Posted on 04/07/2026 12:55:16 PM PDT by billorites
Let us be precise about what is happening here. A war is being fought in the Middle East. Another war is being fought in the pages of newspapers, on the panels of cable networks, and in the faculty lounges of institutions that have confused sophistication with a reflex. The second war has a declared winner: Iran. It just has nothing to do with what is actually happening in the first one.
The claim, repeated with the solemnity of established fact, is made by smart and credentialed people, who know and want you to know they know. However, they are wrong. Not subtly wrong. Not wrong in ways that require careful qualification. They are wrong in the way that requires ignoring ninety percent of Iran's missile capacity destroyed in week one, a navy that no longer exists, a Supreme Leader killed in the opening hours of the campaign, and a proxy network that is fracturing from Lebanon to Yemen.
Wrong in the way that requires looking at the Gulf states, which are doubling down on the relation with the US and Israel, and concluding somehow that Iran has outmaneuvered everyone.
This is not an analysis. So what is it?
Start with the cultural reflex that makes it possible. There is a tradition in Western intellectual life, old and deeply rooted, that assigns moral value to resistance independent of what the resistance actually represents. The weaker party defying the stronger carries a charge, almost aesthetic in nature, that bypasses any serious accounting of the defiant party's actual character. Content is irrelevant. Posture is everything. Advertisement
So the theocracy that massacred thousands of its own citizens in January, that has bled Lebanon dry through Hezbollah, that has sustained proxy wars across four countries at its own people's expense, gets cast as a proud country holding the line against imperial aggression. Few, in this context, question what the country actually does to the people living inside it. The template does not require that question. Power versus resistance. Empire versus defiance. The weaker party is always the more sympathetic one, and sympathy, in this world, travels quickly into presumed strategic vindication.
Now add the sophistication racket. In the circles where foreign policy commentary is produced and consumed, confidence in a military outcome is socially expensive. It reads as simple. Hawkish. The kind of view held by naive people who have not yet grasped the deeper currents. Doubt, by contrast, is the marker of serious thinking. Complication is currency. The analyst who delivers a verdict of American success sounds like he wandered in from a briefing room. The analyst who finds seventeen reasons the situation is more nuanced than it appears gets the panel invitation, the prestigious byline, and the knowing nods.
This produces something intellectually corrupt. Complexity becomes performance. Nuance becomes a class signal rather than a tool for getting closer to the truth. And a military situation that is neither complex nor ambiguous gets buried under a qualification whose purpose is not to illuminate anything but to demonstrate that the speaker occupies a certain kind of mind. The so-called wisdom of calling a winning campaign a quagmire before the evidence supports it, is vanity in analytical dress.
But neither romanticism nor intellectual vanity fully explains the depth of the commitment to this narrative. Something more deliberate is operating.
The liberal international order has two problems with this war. The first is structural. America is the last Western democracy that still believes military force is a legitimate instrument of order, not a confession of civilizational failure. Europe settled that question in its own mind decades ago and built an entire political identity around the settlement. American willingness to remain the enforcer was tolerable when it meant keeping Soviet tanks out of Bonn. It is intolerable now because it validates a vision of the world, one where power and deterrence are the actual foundations of stability, that the European liberal project has spent fifty years attempting to replace with institutions, dialogue, and the softly spoken authority of multilateral consensus. A successful American military campaign does not just win a war. It wins an argument they thought they had closed, and it wins it twice. Because Ukraine already cracked every institution built to make war obsolete on the European continent, proving decorative the moment Russia invaded. The entire post-Cold War security architecture, gone in seventy-two hours.
The second problem is simpler and more raw. If America did it, it must be wrong. Not as a conclusion, but as a premise. American power is suspect by definition, its exercise presumptively illegitimate, its victories either temporary, tainted, or both. This is not a position that arrives after examining the evidence. It is the lens through which the evidence is examined, which means no evidence can ever change it. That is not a political view. It is a religion with better footnotes.
And then there is Trump. A Trump failure ratifies everything the liberal order has argued since 2016, whereas a Trump success is an ideological catastrophe. Because it means the man they identified as the singular threat to civilized governance managed to accomplish something consequential and real in the one domain where their own preferred approach produced the JCPOA, the engagement doctrine, and two decades of elaborately reasoned accommodation with a revolutionary theocracy that never moderated and never intended to.
They cannot let that be visible. So the goalposts move. Every civilian casualty becomes evidence of strategic bankruptcy. Every Iranian missile that gets through becomes proof of resilience. Every European condemnation becomes a harbinger of American isolation. The war must be failing because the alternative, a world in which this worked, is a world that does not fit the story they have been telling.
There is a test for this. Ask any of them directly: what would American victory look like to you? If the answer keeps changing, if every benchmark met produces a new benchmark, if success in their telling is always just out of reach, you are not in the presence of an analyst. You are in the presence of someone who decided the verdict before the trial began and is now selecting evidence accordingly.
The facts are not difficult. The enemy's supreme leader is dead. His navy is at the bottom of the Gulf. His missile arsenal is a fraction of what it was. His neighbors are not mourning. They are urging Washington to finish the job.
That is not a war Iran is winning. Saying otherwise is not sophistication. It is not moral complexity. It is a political project dressed in the language of seriousness, executed by people who know exactly what they are doing and are counting on the rest of us not to notice.
The writer is a senior Emirati journalist and policy advisor.
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Good question for FR’s goat copulating IRGC 5th columnists and Tehran Tiffanys.
It depends on how you define “winning”.
If the goal of the United States is to overthrow the mullahs and effect regime change, then Iran does appear to be winning.
But if the goal is to defang Iran, then Iran is most certainly losing.
Either way, only time will tell.
The mainstream media is our enemy. Trump states this regularly.
They’ve been our enemy since they were infiltrated by the communists prior to the 1960s.
Yet another way to express the fact that Liberals are just plain evil people.
Trump has more power than them and their leaders.
What hurts Trump or Team Trump is good.
Because the biggest enemy of the USA is its media.
The Tokyo Roses of 2026...
Steve Bannon claims Iran has got the initiative.
And they mouth on about escalating the war. How much more can their be any escalation when all their leaders are being killed?
And Carlson brought in the specter of weapons of mass destruction. Who in the administration has even hinted at such a thing?
President Trump took a great risk in this action... I said this from the beginning. He has clearly defined goals. Some of those goals require the acquiescence of his enemies to be realized (capitulation). His enemies (Democrats, media, and Iran & proxies) only need to prolong the conflict to hurt him politically. Going into the midterms with a continuing conflict will give the media a megaphone for Trump’s “elective” war... and that will hurt.
The three above (Democrats, media, and Iran & proxies) are aligned in their interests and don’t even need to give each other a head nod to carry out a coordinated “quagmire.”
Pray for President Trump and our country. This is dangerous.
the west?
This country is too extensively Balkanized to ever again take national pride in things like winning for freedom...
Done...
Finis...
There is only one solution...
If the goal of the United States is to overthrow the mullahs and effect regime change, then Iran does appear to be winning.
That’s ridiculous.
Then Japan was “winning” right up until the Emperor surrendered. Germany was winning until Hitler offed himself.
Lee was winning until…
Just as they said back in 41 a.d. The Republic is not coming back.
Give war a chance!
In this war, and during the past half century (and more really) Iran represents two separate entities.
The mullah-run government is one entity. The other is their puppetmasters, the global crime syndicate.
They always do.
Who can forget the Peter Jennings , Dan Rather, Geraldo Rivera , Peter Arnett , Lester Holt and the rest of the blame America first media screaming the preferred media talking point of the day for the Afghan war - constant weeks of repeated coordinated messaging of “quagmire, quagmire, quagmire, quagmire, quagmire , quagmire , quagmire ,quagmire followed by a croaking. “we won” “ When ever you hear the media coordinated talking point campaign you can be certain we are being played, bluffed, baffled and bullshitted.
The new media talking points this time are "war crime" and "escalation."
“The mainstream media is our enemy. Trump states this regularly.
They’ve been our enemy since they were infiltrated by the communists prior to the 1960s.”
You are confused. Communists can never long term
succeed due to the nature of man.
No one is that selfless, unless directed by God.
Democrats are men and women that enslave others.
Completely different.
There have been slave owners since
the beginning of time.
If you control education and information,
what will your population develop into?
Cooperative slaves.
Who dominates in Education and media?
Democrats.
Who dominates in productive industry’s?
God fearing men.
I’m not always sure the military is a productive
industry,
But their oath (and mine) ended
with “So help me God.”
There is no such thing as an Atheist
in a war.
We are at war.
Communists can never long term succeed due to the nature of man. No one is that selfless”
But communism is founded on the principles of selfishness and stealing from others.
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