Five Quick Things: How’s the Iran War Actually Going?
Yesterday’s column was probably as dour as I get, and I regret nothing.
I’m as disgusted as our readers with the Republicans in the Senate, who — with some merciful exceptions — are as gray and drab a collection of political losers as America has ever produced. As I wrote yesterday, the utter debacle that is the SAVE America Act standstill in that body is proof that, as much as we’d like to think the GOP has finally moved past its well-deserved reputation as the Stupid Party in Washington, it hasn’t.
And while the American people deserve better than to lose the Senate majority to a catastrophically treasonous, anti-American Marxist mob of Democrats, including a Star Wars cantina scene cast of bizarre characters among their candidate list, the GOP Senate caucus actually richly deserves that fate based on their performance over the past six months starting with their refusal to break the siege of the Democrats’ government-shutdown filibuster last fall.
There is time to redeem at least some of this. It’s difficult to see the inclination.
Would that the senators performed as well as our men and women in uniform do at their jobs.
Which is, generally, the topic of the 5QT today.
1. A Geometric Trap for the Iranian Regime
You’ve likely heard messaging from the Trump administration, and particularly War Secretary Pete Hegseth, about how we’ve only just begun the military campaign against Iran. This might have made you nervous if you’re one of the large majority of Americans who want no part of sending ground troops into that country to finish off its apocalyptic, tyrannical regime.
I don’t think a ground war is what Hegseth was talking about, for two reasons which we’ll discuss in our first two items of this 5QT entry.
Instead, as the video below details, he’s talking about the brand-new USS George H. W. Bush, which put to sea from its pre-deployment Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX) off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, on Thursday of last week. The Bush is a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier with three separate air squadrons, and it’s completely fresh — unlike the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is toward the end of a year-long deployment and can be expected to cycle home within the next month or two.
The Ford was stationed in the eastern Mediterranean, but after Operation Epic Fury began, it suddenly passed through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea. The Bush is replacing the Ford’s former position and could be on station off the coast of Israel by the end of next week.
And when all three carriers are plying their trade — the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf of Oman or Arabian Sea, or somewhere outside of the Persian Gulf, the Ford in the Red Sea or Gulf of Aden, and the Bush in the eastern Med — the effect will be to put Iran in a kill triangle which their air defenses aren’t capable of countering.
Those defenses have largely already worn out as it is, but when the Navy has three different attack vectors from which to hit targets, air superiority can become air supremacy.
There are quibbles one might have with the argument made in the video. For one thing, we haven’t stopped the transport of Iranian oil just yet — and Iran is still allowing China-bound tankers through the Strait of Hormuz (more on that below).
And for another, the issue isn’t so much that we lack air supremacy. It’s that the Iranians still have assets they’re using to close the Strait to maritime traffic they don’t like — which is their one strategic accomplishment in this conflict to date — and to harass and terrorize their neighbors. That’s going to have to be countered, and the only effective way to do it is to sink everything they can put in the water. Which is going to take some time, because essentially the Iranian Navy is a collection of fast little boats now.
But the video does make one excellent point about the strategy the Pentagon devised for this conflict. Namely, that Iran’s war doctrine counted on us sailing our ships into the Persian Gulf where they’d get battered by waves of missiles, drones, torpedoes, and mines, overwhelming our defenses and inflicting casualties. The USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group didn’t take that bait, standing well off from that trap and throwing punch after punch to open air corridors into Iran. That decision, perhaps more than anything else, might explain why Iran has unloaded so much ordnance in the direction of the Gulf States — those missiles don’t have the range to reach the Lincoln, or better put, they can’t get to the Lincoln strike group faster than our ships can detect and defeat the incoming barrage. So, in a use-it-or-lose-it situation, Iran’s commanders decided to punish the Gulf states in hopes that they’d wet their pants and demand we stop the air war.
And that hasn’t worked. In fact, it’s been a disaster for them.
2. Going Granular
The second thing I think Hegseth might have been talking about when he discussed an escalation of the pressure on Iran was this…
BREAKING: These are the first videos of the airstrikes conducted by Hermes-900 armed drones of the Israeli Air Force against Basij militiamen and IRGC terrorists who had set up roadblocks to intimidate the people of Tehran, the capital city of Iran, tonight. They are being hunted… pic.twitter.com/a1FCLBIWTL
— Babak Taghvaee – The Crisis Watch (@BabakTaghvaee1) March 11, 2026
Nothing will reduce the footprint of the regime’s most aggressive elements (the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij) faster than having hunter-killer drones hovering above their heads, ready to drop explosives on demand. Sure, some of these guys are fanatics, and they’re willing to martyr themselves for the ayatollahs, but it’s something else entirely when the question is whether to fade into the woodwork and survive on one hand, or stand a post and get killed like a sitting duck on the other.
We’re using the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb on Iran’s underground missile cities, and you’ve likely seen some of the video of those detonations…
BREAKING: Local Iranian journalists claim the U.S. Air Force has targeted underground sites in Qods, central Iran, using the GBU-43/B “Mother of All Bombs.” The strike reportedly hit what appears to be an underground missile storage facility. pic.twitter.com/KNIXSYYGsb
— Baba Banaras™ (@RealBababanaras) March 11, 2026
…the Israelis continue taking out high-level regime figures with their own airstrikes…
WILD: The predicted “future” came within 24 hours. This is Israeli Air Force footage of drones and jets blowing up Basij checkpoints all around Tehran today, based on tips called in by Iranian citizens. A revolution with air support against a regime with no air defence. https://t.co/SZNn3mseMU pic.twitter.com/JRvRNUWZQP
— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) March 13, 2026
BREAKING: General Dariush Soleimani, commander of the Tabriz combat airbase, has been eliminated. pic.twitter.com/epjiUeJ1Ub
— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 12, 2026
…and now you’ve got evidence of granular strikes against checkpoints and street deployments so precise that very little collateral damage has been done to the civilian population.
???? HOSPITAL WORKER TESTIMONY – TEHRAN
“In ten days working at the hospital, I have not seen a single injured civilian.”According to his account:
• Hospitals are receiving dead and wounded Basij fighters
• Many injured IRGC and Basij members are sitting on the floor waiting… pic.twitter.com/0KfjYcQbFK— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) March 12, 2026
Our messaging to the Iranian people continues to be that they’re going to need to stay home and out of danger, but to get ready to take to the streets.
Hopefully, that messaging is quietly backed by an effort to arm some of the Iranians. It’s one thing to terrorize the regime’s stormtroopers with death from above, but if they can just spray down crowds of protesters with no fear of reprisal, you can’t really expect the regime change that pays this effort off in a geopolitically significant way.
That said, breaking the morale of the regime’s rank and file with the individual attention these strikes promise will do a lot to make those stormtroopers drop their rifles and skedaddle.
Something else that happened this week was that the Israelis knocked out the data center powering Sepah Bank, which is the bank the regime uses to pay its employees. Sepah, by the way, is the name the IRGC goes by in Iran — Sepah Bank might as well be IRGC Bank. And now its computer system has… lots of problems. So for the regime’s enforcers who are doing what they’re doing because they need the money, well, there might not be any money.
We’ll see what effect that has.
3. A Little at a Time, and Then All at Once
Before we go any further, I’ll issue a caveat: it’s never been more true than today that the truth is the first casualty of war. Is our government giving a 100 percent accurate account of the events on the ground in Iran? No. I’m not sure we even should. Is Israel? No. Is Iran? Of course not. According to the Iranians, the USS Abraham Lincoln is at the bottom of the Persian Gulf when it never even entered that body of water. So you can and probably should doubt everything you see and hear.
That said, there was a trickle of data points — with an expected range from total propaganda to absolute truth — earlier this week, indicating that deep cracks are forming in the Iranian regime’s political defenses.
There’s the old joke about going bankrupt that I’m repeating in this subhead. You can translate that analogy into all kinds of scenarios, from a dam breaking to an egg cracking. Small fissures appear in the firmament, and with constant pressure, those deepen and grow until the structural integrity fails and the collapse comes.
The Third Reich fell much like that. As did the Confederacy. As did the Soviet Union from its internal failings. Two or three years before the Berlin Wall fell, almost nobody thought the USSR was going anywhere; we won a final victory in the Cold War essentially without firing a shot.
So when you see things like these, it’s an indication the Iranian regime could well be crumbling under the pressure of those bombs, missiles, and drones.
Two Iranian diplomats defect: Alireza Sohbati and Mohammad Pournajaf, posted in Copenhagen and Canberra, seek asylum, joining a rising wave of Iranian officials abandoning their posts.
– Iran International.
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) March 12, 2026
«من دوازده سال پیش به سپاه پیوستم چون عاشق کشورم بودم. هر روز به ما میگفتند که ما مدافعان اصلی ایران هستیم، سپری که از مرزهایمان در برابر دشمنان خارجی و تروریستها محافظت میکند. مدتها این را باور داشتم. آن لباس را با افتخار میپوشیدم.
اما دیگر نمیشد واقعیتی را که در اصل از…
— Avi Kaner ابراهيم אבי (@AviKaner) March 11, 2026
BREAKING: IRGC members are abandoning their posts, saying that the Islamic regime is over.
“Everyone is gone or leaving. I’m going home too. It seems like the regime is finished and we should surrender. I just hope the people don’t take revenge on us.”
pic.twitter.com/aYSaa74IVq— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) March 10, 2026
The regime’s top brass seems to have decamped to the distant city of Mashhad, as far away from the US bases and carriers—and from Israel—as you can get without actually fleeing to Afghanistan. They have abandoned the capital. https://t.co/xkXk2KHe23 pic.twitter.com/tcIExBPCGs
— Saul Sadka (@Saul_Sadka) March 11, 2026
???? Breaking: The regime has blocked all the runways of Mehrabad Airport with cars, fearing that US or Israeli planes would land with special forces pic.twitter.com/aLEHAFyZPS
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) March 11, 2026
What we don’t have yet is much in the way of hard evidence that the Iranian countryside has turned on the regime. By that, I mean towns and cities throwing off the Basij and IRGC, or those outfits simply melting away as their rank-and-file troopers decide the regime isn’t worth dying for, and establishing some sort of local governance outside of the regime. My guess is that when you start to hear about such incidents, it’ll be very good evidence that the trickle is becoming a flood.
All I have to point to on that question is this — which, as I mentioned above, might or might not be a real thing…
What a glorious moment for the Iranian people! Persia will rise again! Free Iran! ???????? ???????? pic.twitter.com/q37YBG4jAl
— LynneP (@LynneBP_294) March 12, 2026
Nurabad is a city of 65,000 people in the southwest of Iran. It’s the kind of out-of-the-way place you’d expect to see these cracks forming in.
If you haven’t heard more of this a week from now, then it’s an indication that the pressure we’re putting on the regime isn’t enough to crack it.
4. The Strait of Hormuz
As said above, the one strategic “win” Iran has managed is that they’ve been able to mostly close the Strait of Hormuz, though their boasts about driving oil to $200 per barrel have fallen far, far short of reality.
There is a fascinating narrative out there about how one of the hidden features of this conflict is Trump’s counter, using the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, in response to the London maritime insurance markets’ refusal to cover shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. London has for 300 years been the global center for maritime insurance because it used to be the Royal Navy, which enforced the free transit of the seas, and now it’s the U.S. Navy, which performs that role, and the Brits can’t even put a vessel to sea on two weeks’ notice to protect their base in Cyprus. So why on earth isn’t maritime insurance centered in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, or Houston? (RELATED: Shipping Interruption in Persian Gulf Is Yet Another Reminder of the Risks of Offshoring)
For more on this, here’s a very interesting video…
That might be more than a little premature, as the word hit that we aren’t quite ready to send ships to escort convoys moving out of the Persian Gulf, but you can see the contours of what could come from this war if and when the U.S. Navy reopens the Strait of Hormuz.
But there’s something else worth paying attention to, which is that while the Iranians are allowing friendly ships through the Strait of Hormuz, we aren’t stopping them.
Why aren’t we stopping them? We certainly could. And assumedly those ships are carrying Iranian oil. Shouldn’t we shut that down and starve out the regime?
Maybe we will. On the other hand, there is this…
If Iran allows Chinese cargoes through the Strait of Hormuz, it will break its own blockade. Iran can’t create a blockade that inflicts pain on everyone except China. That’s not how commodity markets work.
Commodities like oil are fungible. The benefit China gets from a carve…
— Michael McNair (@michaeljmcnair) March 12, 2026
The money quote from that post…
Commodities like oil are fungible. The benefit China gets from a carve out doesn’t stay contained in China, even if Beijing wants it to. It spreads through the entire global market.
Every extra Gulf barrel China buys is one less barrel it has to buy from the rest of the world. In theory, nearly all Gulf supply could reroute through China. But the point isn’t whether China literally takes every barrel. It’s that the more Gulf oil China buys, the less oil it has to buy from everyone else. And it is the act of China buying less from the rest of the world that transmits the relief globally. Trade routes change, and prices re-equilibrate.
That doesn’t mean prices fall all the way back to the exact pre-war price. There would still be frictions. But it would dramatically loosen the market, especially relative to the alarmist view.
So Iran can’t have it both ways. It can’t maintain a blockade that economically punishes everyone else while sparing China. If China gets through at scale, China becomes the relief valve for the world. So they either keep the strait closed to everyone or the blockade breaks.
“Closing” the Strait of Hormuz is a cool short-term win for Iran. It’s very similar to drone-bombing hotels in Dubai. In the immediate term, it’s a terroristic play that generates screamy headlines and boosts the political cost of the war. But the fun and games end when Trump decides that if the Strait of Hormuz is going to be shut down, then it’s REALLY going to be shut down, because at that point Iran’s oil is just as shut in as Kuwait’s and Saudi Arabia’s (more so, in fact).
And with the economic burn rate that regime has established, a disruption of their oil revenues would be utterly calamitous.
Of course, doing so makes for a major crisis for China, a crisis Beijing will respond to by buying a lot more oil from Russia, and it’s a lot more hostile than we’d really like to be toward the ChiComs just now.
But on the flip side, McNair has it just right. The Iranians can’t just say they’re going to sell oil to China but none of their neighbors can move any — because ultimately that will get a lot of pipelines built and cause the Strait of Hormuz to be a whole lot less important choke point on the world energy market, and also because China will resell their Iranian oil at a profit until the markets reach equilibrium — or, as he says, just not buy as much from elsewhere, and that will help markets to reach equilibrium.
This obviously will take time. But we keep hearing that Iran can wait out the U.S. and Israel, and the tempo of the air war will have to slow down. Except even if that does happen, they’ll have lost so much security infrastructure that the regime will be hollowed out, and then they’ll have exhausted their gambit with the Strait of Hormuz. And Iran is by no means more resilient economically than the West is.
There are a lot of variables to this, obviously. But nothing really favors Iran more than the immediate term. And if something should happen to the Kharg Island oil export terminal in the Persian Gulf, well…
5. The Propaganda War
If you’re fighting a war against the United States, and this has been true since the early 1950s, your chief weapon is the American airwaves. Every geopolitical and military opponent we’ve had over the past 75 years has been principally involved in an information war against us. Many of those efforts have been victorious; they are the reason why it’s been said we haven’t actually won a war since Japan surrendered in 1945.
That isn’t true; the Korean War was a victory. So was the first Gulf War. You could make the argument that the Second Gulf War (which I agree was a mistake to fight in the first place) was also a victory, given that events in Iraq turned out to be relatively unremarkable amid the carnage next door. But in all of those cases, our opponents clearly won on propaganda.
The Iranians running that regime are crazy, for sure, but they aren’t stupid. They’ve invested everything into the propaganda war, and they’ve got a lot of help.
Of the 100 most viral “Iran” posts analyzed (each with over 10,000 shares), 60 came from foreign accounts — and 100% of them were negative. The only pro-operation voices in the dataset were American. Foreign posts also out-reached U.S. posts by 62 million views. pic.twitter.com/yHBWmnWsI7
— Jewish Onliner (@JewishOnliner) March 11, 2026
The takeaway: foreign actors didn’t just participate in the Epic Fury conversation on X — they dominated its highest-engagement spaces, making opposition look larger and more American than it actually was.
Full piece:https://t.co/aZZg53rSvJ
— Jewish Onliner (@JewishOnliner) March 11, 2026
And there is a certain go-for-broke quality to the messaging. Practically all the visual media coming out of the regime is AI-driven — including the pictures adorning new Iranian Supreme Leader Mujtada Khamenei’s X account…
This image of Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, which has been widely published by Iranian media today and now appears on his new X account, appears to have been manipulated with AI.
Google’s SynthID finds watermarks in it that indicate it has been edited using Google… pic.twitter.com/cDbYLlKFVz
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) March 12, 2026
Of course, Americans can use AI quite effectively as well…
— Herr Nation (@SteveEgan18) March 12, 2026
But seriously, folks…
There is an urgency to get this war finished and to achieve some concrete aim which can be justifiably termed a success. Regime change, which all involved in the Trump administration take pains to say is not a core aim of the campaign, is that brass ring, of course. It’s what needs to happen to actually solve this problem.
But something short of it — even if that something is an Iran left in chaos and sectarian strife, which would be a means by which Iran is incapable of projecting power onto its neighbors — could well be enough. A new Iranian dictator springing forth from this regime who makes his own peace with us while continuing to repress his people, à la what we see in Venezuela at present, is also a win — if a not particularly salubrious one.
And the reason for the urgency is that unfree nations are better at propaganda wars than are free nations. Unfree nations don’t have to be bound by truth — their regimes can say whatever the hell they want, and if anyone points out the lies, they get shot. Meanwhile, the leaders of free nations have to justify every action, generally to a public that would rather do less-painful things than fight a war.
The best example of this is the business of this “girls’ school” in southern Iran, at which some unverified number of casualties from a missile strike were incurred. The school was on the campus of an IRGC naval base and apparently was at one time a viable military target, but the new bit of messaging — by the Iranian regime’s allies in the Democrat Party — is that the War Department office that would have vetted the target suffered a budget cut courtesy of Hegseth’s ministrations.
And the girls’ school strike is the single biggest story of this campaign, per the propaganda war. Forget about Iran’s spray of missiles and drones at civilian targets in 13 different countries, or the 32,000 — at least — murders the regime committed against protesters earlier this year; the moral judgment to be made about this war was that one incident of collateral damage.
Oh, and the supposed “war crime” of an American submarine torpedoing an “unarmed” Iranian frigate off Sri Lanka. Which has to be the single dumbest outrage over a legitimate (and pretty freaking cool) military victory in world history.
But that’s the propaganda war.
The good news is that reality does ultimately win the propaganda war. So long as it differs from the propaganda. And while we don’t yet know where that stands with Iran, we might be finding out in the next couple of weeks.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
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