Al Jazeera op-ed praises US-Israel operation against Iran, says Dems, media critics are wrong
Operation Epic Fury is receiving praise from an unlikely source. Al Jazeera, the Qatari government-funded news organization, published an op-ed Monday declaring in the headline, "The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working."
"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... But this narrative is wrong," the piece began.
"Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are [cataloging] the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger."
Muhanad Seloom, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, authored the piece.
"When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air [defenses], 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," he continued.
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Seloom marveled at how "every aspect of Iran’s ability to project regional power is being successfully degraded" and "collapsing in real time."
He also pointed out how Iranian ballistic missile launches "have fallen by more than 90 percent" since Operation Epic Fury was first underway, dropping from 350 to roughly 25 — similar to its drone launches going from 800 on Day 1 to 75 by Day 15.
"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," Seloom wrote. "Iran’s naval assets, fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air [defenses] 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."
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The Qatari professor insisted the Iranian regime is facing a "strategic dilemma" — that firing any remaining missiles will expose the launchers and would promptly be targeted by the US and Israel while reserving missiles "forfeits the ability to impose costs of the war."
"This is a force managing decline, not projecting strength," Seloom said.
After highlighting the damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, Seloom pushed back against Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who claimed the Trump administration misjudged Iran's retaliation, as well as CNN's suggestion that the administration lost control over the war regarding the Strait of Hormuz, saying their 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," Seloom wrote. "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."
He continued, "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."
Seloom also pushed back against the notion that the war is expanding through Iran's proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iraqi militias, stressing that the command structure of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) "has been decapitated at multiple levels" and that the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei "eliminated the apex of the [authorization] pyramid."
"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 [centralized] command system activates when it anticipates its own destruction," he wrote. "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."
Seloom went on to say President Donald Trump's rhetoric "has not helped" combat critics who question the endgame, which the professor said is the "permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks." He also acknowledged critics like Murphy have a "legitimate concern" about what happens in Tehran after the fighting stops, something he says the Trump administration needs to lay out.
"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," Seloom said. "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."