Is America Winning or Losing the War With Iran?

For centuries, modern nations had generally conducted their wars in rather gentlemanly fashion, usually making efforts to comply with all the laws and international treaties regulating such conflicts.

A war might often begin with a downcast ambassador delivering a diplomatic note to the accredited government, informing its political leadership that unless certain crucial demands were immediately met, a state of war should be assumed to exist by noon the following day. After performing that doleful duty, the diplomat and his staff would return to their embassy, pack their bags, burn their secret documents, and take the next train to the frontier.

Even Japan’s infamous December 7, 1941 surprise attack at Pearl Harbor had supposedly been intended to preserve all these legalistic niceties. From what I’ve read, the Japanese ambassador and his aides had been instructed to personally hand-deliver a declaration of war to our president perhaps five or ten minutes before their country’s planes were scheduled to begin dropping their bombs on our anchored fleet at the other side of the world, thereby complying with the letter of international law though massively violating its spirit. But delays in decoding diplomatic instructions or other such accidental errors led to a snafu in which the military attack actually came before the official declaration of war that legally enabled it, resulting in a lasting legacy of hard feelings between our two countries.

However, America has always prided itself on its innovations, and in recent years we have applied this approach to the initiation of military conflicts, following the lead of our Israeli mentors in that regard. A perfect example came in how we began our current war against Iran.

Iran was extremely eager to avert such a military conflict, so just as in the past we successfully lured them into several rounds of lengthy peace negotiations with the personal envoys of President Donald Trump.

According to media reports, considerable progress had been made in the talks, and the Iranians had already agreed to many of our demands. They were considering doing so on others as well, making greater concessions than anyone had originally expected. The negotiations therefore adjourned for a couple of days, and were scheduled to resume on the following Monday.

The Iranians naturally had to think long and hard before agreeing to all our terms. Therefore, they held a full meeting of their top leadership to decide whether to do so.

But prompting the Iranians to hold such a high-level meeting had apparently been the underlying goal of our entire negotiating strategy. As the New York Times reported the next day, with so many of Iran’s leaders thus gathered together in one place, they were all killed by an Israeli missile strike, an attack that essentially constituted our official declaration of war:

Israel, using U.S. intelligence and its own, would execute an operation it had been planning for months: the targeted killing of Iran’s senior leaders.

The United States and Israeli governments, which had originally planned to launch a strike at night under the cover of darkness, made the decision to adjust the timing to take advantage of the information about the gathering at the government compound in Tehran on Saturday morning.

The leaders were set to meet where the offices of the Iranian presidency, the supreme leader and Iran’s National Security Council are located.

Israel had determined that the gathering would include top Iranian defense officials, including Mohammad Pakpour, the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; Aziz Nasirzadeh, the minister of defense; Adm. Ali Shamkhani, the head of the Military Council; Seyyed Majid Mousavi, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Aerospace Force; Mohammad Shirazi, the deputy intelligence minister; and others.

That same Times article published a helpful chart showing just how much of Iran’s top military and national security leadership had been eliminated in that sudden, unexpected missile attack.

Led by the heavy coverage in the Times and the Wall Street Journal, all of our subsequent mainstream media accounts emphasized the devastating nature of the blow that America and Israel had struck against Iran’s political and military leadership, immediately followed by the massive bombing campaign that was unleashed in its wake. All these articles suggested the total success of our military strategy, while naturally soft-peddling the completely illegal and rather treacherous aspects of using the ruse of peace negotiations to launch a surprise decapitating strike, killing so many of Iran’s top leaders.

If Japan’s 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor had been combined with the simultaneous assassination of President Franklin Roosevelt, several members of his Cabinet, and most of our military high command in Washington, I daresay that the American media would have portrayed such successful Japanese operations in a rather unflattering light.

My own article was published less than 48 hours after the initial missile strike that began the war, and given my lack of military expertise, I took a very cautious approach to summarizing the outbreak of the conflict.

Once again, we used the ruse of ongoing peace negotiations in hopes of luring our adversaries into a false sense of security. Our initial strikes against top Iranian leaders were quite successful, and by the end of the first day Iranian sources confirmed that we had successfully assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old Supreme Leader, as well as the country’s defense minister and numerous other top military commanders…

Despite those leadership losses, the Iranians almost immediately responded with a barrage of medium and long range ballistic missiles, exactly as they had previously threatened to do, striking our own major military bases in the region as well as sites in Israel. Strict censorship and the fog of war makes it difficult to accurately assess the total amount of damage visited upon either side in the conflict.

Although all our media outlets were reporting our total military success, I emphasized the potential difficulties we faced in attacking a country comparable in size to all of Western Europe and with a population of over 90 million. I noted that knowledgeable military experts had issued similar warnings.

For example, Col. Larry Wilkerson, the longtime chief of staff to Colin Powell, had argued that we might face challenges greater than those in any previous war since the Korean conflict that we had fought to a draw three generations earlier. Indeed, just before the outbreak of the war, our media had carried stories making many of these same points:

Although all our major media outlets had uniformly been fiercely hostile to Iran, during the last few days before the American attack, a flurry of news stories had suddenly appeared emphasizing the severe difficulties that we might face in any such war, and these seemed based upon leaks by top Pentagon sources.

The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been the leading force pressing Trump for an immediate attack, but the Financial Times quoted an Israeli report that America would probably exhaust its available munitions after just a few days of combat, with many American military experts having said the same thing.

“Israeli intelligence has concluded that even with the imminent arrival of the USS Gerald R Ford later this week, the US has military capacity to sustain just a four to five day intense aerial assault on Iran, or a week of lower-intensity strikes.”https://t.co/b0zymvzwPV

— max seddon (@maxseddon) February 24, 2026

If these facts were correct, a war against Iran seemed the height of folly. How could we win a war if we would mostly be out of missiles and bombs in less than a single week?

But the larger concerns I emphasized were political ones, and both before and after the attack, these were expressed by thoughtful individuals all across the ideological spectrum.

Tucker Carlson has spent the last decade as America’s leading conservative media figure and a crucial Trump supporter. Just before our attack on Iran he hosted his fellow FoxNews alumnus Clayton Morris of the popular Redacted podcast. Both of them agreed that an attack on Iran would be disastrous and absolutely contrary to American national interests, also noting that only about 20% of Americans favored the idea.

A couple of days later, an outraged Carlson immediately condemned our attack on Iran as “absolutely disgusting and evil.” Other very prominent figures in the MAGA movement such as former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones denounced Trump’s Iran War in equally scathing terms. Greene declared “We voted for America First and ZERO wars,” condemning the administration as a “bunch of sick fucking liars.”

Journalist Glenn Greenwald noted the gigantic hypocrisy that Trump had successfully returned to the White House in 2024 by running as the candidate of peace, but had now begun the biggest war we had fought in at least the half-century since our debacle in Vietnam. In a Tweet viewed several million times, Greenwald denounced Trump’s official “pro-peace” candidacy as having constituted “One of the most shamelessly fraudulent presidential campaigns in American history”

Chas Freeman ranks as one of our most distinguished diplomats, and he also served as an assistant secretary of defense. In an interview immediately after the attack, he warned that our government had reduced the entire world to a complete state of lawlessness, with fateful consequences for all nations, certainly including our own. Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University made some equally disheartening points in an interview on the same YouTube channel.

I reported the huge doubts that Freeman raised about the course of the war:

Along with many military experts, Freeman also argued that Iran might actually be better positioned to win a long war of attrition against its American and Israeli foes, perhaps having far greater stockpiles of ballistic missiles.

Even more importantly, the Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most critical oil chokepoint, a narrow waterway off the Iranian coast through which one-fifth of all oil shipments must pass, along with a similar fraction of LNG exports. The Iranians controlled that transit route with their huge numbers of short-range missiles, and had repeatedly threatened to close it if attacked. When the vastly weaker Houthis had closed the Red Sea to cargo shipping during 2024 and 2025, repeated attempts by American carrier task forces to reopen it had proven dismal failures.

Having served as our ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time of the Gulf War, Freeman is extremely well versed in the geopolitics of oil and he pointed out that the military dimension of any such closure is completely secondary. Once the Iranians declared that they would enforce a blockade and target oil tankers, insurers would immediately pull their coverage, so few if any such vessels would even take the risk of such passage. Indeed, according to news reports, tanker traffic has already dropped by some 70%, and if the closure continues for another week or two, we can expect to see a huge spike in world prices of oil and natural gas, severely straining the world economy.

• Trump’s Iran War as America’s “Suez Moment”?
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 2, 2026 • 7,100 Words

Despite such longer-term difficulties, once war began our media outlets uniformly portrayed Iran’s military prospects as very bleak, presenting a narrative that I initially found reasonably plausible and convincing.

According to these accounts, the annihilation of Iran’s top leadership had severely weakened that country’s military reaction, with its retaliatory missile strikes being scattered and disorganized. Our media portrayed the Iranian response as something close to the temporary, desperate thrashings of a beheaded nation, lacking the necessary command and control that might render it effective.

Indeed, according to numerous articles in the Times, the Journal, and other outlets, although Iran did possess a huge arsenal of ballistic missiles, we had already destroyed a large fraction of all the necessary launchers. We were now successfully hunting down and eliminating most of the remainder, while also bombing the entrances to the underground storage sites.

This analysis seemed supported by the very rapid decline in the daily number of Iranian missiles fired, which had dropped by 85% or more after just the first couple of days. And even as the number of Iranian missiles sharply declined, our very effective air defenses were shooting down perhaps 90% of those few missiles that were launched at the territories of our Gulf State Arab allies or Israel.

We were also told that we had successfully eliminated most of Iran’s limited air defense network, giving us near complete control of the country’s skies and allowing our overwhelming air power to complete the country’s military destruction. Thus, we were headed for a sweeping victory within just a few days, exactly as Trump and his top aides had boastfully promised. His Iran War would be almost as easy a victory as his successful raid on Venezuela and capture of its president a couple of months earlier.

On the face of it, such an extremely one-sided military outcome should hardly have been so surprising. Indeed, it almost seemed foolish in hindsight to have expected anything else.

The Iranian defense budget for 2024 was estimated at $8 billion, less than 1% of the trillion dollars that we ourselves used. So we were outspending the Iranians by better than 100-to-1 in military matters and we had a population that was nearly 4 times greater. How could the outcome of any war between our two nations possibly be anything different than what the media was reporting, especially given that we had begun by successfully decapitating the opposing leadership?

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