Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Iran's Ace in the Hole: Why the Houthis Are Waiting — and Why We Shouldn't Let Them

Something unusual is happening in Yemen. The Houthis — a movement whose official slogan includes "Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews" — are watching Iran take its heaviest blows in history and doing essentially nothing about it.

Why not?

At first I thought it was self-preservation. But Hezbollah, which has the same instinct, went all in, no doubt at Iran's behest.

The Houthis are saying that they are waiting for the right moment. On March 9th, speaking during his Ramadan lectures, Abdul Malik al-Houthi explained, "Regarding military escalation and action, our fingers are on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment should developments warrant it."

What is the right moment? For that, we need to understand a basic fact: for Iran, survival is victory.

Iran's strategic objective right now is not to defeat the United States militarily. It is to survive the campaign with enough institutional continuity, territorial control, and proxy infrastructure to reconstitute its threat posture over time — and to create enough economic and political pressure on the coalition to force a ceasefire before that threat posture is fully dismantled.

The oil weapon is central to that strategy.

The Strait of Hormuz closure has removed approximately 20 million barrels per day from global markets, roughly one-fifth of global oil consumption. There are partial mitigations available to make up some of this shortfall. Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE's Habshan-Fujairah pipeline to the Gulf of Oman can together bypass the strait for perhaps 6-9 million bpd under optimal conditions, though drone strikes have already targeted Fujairah infrastructure and a Saudi oil field has been hit. Global spare production capacity outside the Gulf adds perhaps 1.5-3 million bpd. Strategic petroleum reserve draws from the U.S. and IEA members provide perhaps 2-4 million bpd of cushion measured in weeks, not months. U.S.-led naval escorts could restore another 0.5-2 million bpd through carefully batched convoys, but commercial operators won't return at scale until the route is genuinely safe, not merely escorted, and insurers remain unwilling to write policies. Venezuela can only add about half a million bpd.

Add all of it up generously, and the world can cover perhaps 10-14 million bpd of the shortfall. The remaining 6-10 million bpd, sustained over weeks and months, will do what oil shocks have always done: drive inflation, strain supply chains, and create political pressure on governments whose populations feel it at the pump. Asia absorbs over 80% of Hormuz oil flows. South Korea, Japan, and India are not parties to this conflict. Their governments will not remain silent indefinitely. And in the United States, Brent crude at $90-100 per barrel will eventually be measured in polling numbers.

This is Iran's path to survival: economic attrition with the world pressuring the US to end the war as soon as possible.

Yet even the partial mitigation from the Saudi pipeline depends almost entirely on one assumption: that the Red Sea bypass route stays open.

The Houthis control the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. They have already demonstrated, over two years of operations, that they can make that corridor effectively impassable to commercial shipping through a sustained campaign of ballistic missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. During their previous campaign, the Houthis attacked 178 vessels, sinking four ships and killing nine sailors, forcing hundreds of commercial vessels to reroute around South Africa.

Right now, ships going across the Red Sea to the Suez Canal are still unimpeded. The Saudi pipeline is safe for now. But the Houthis can make the entire Red Sea too dangerous for shipping; insurers would bail as soon as there is one ballistic missile aimed at the Yanbu port that the Saudis use.

This is Iran's ace in the hole. Closing both the Straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb, and harassing the ships already in the Red Sea, is an oil shock that the world cannot absorb now.

If the Houthis enter now, they do so at the moment of maximum U.S. military attention and maximum carrier strike group presence. They would be struck hard, potentially decisively, while the political and military infrastructure to do so is fully in place. That is a bad trade, not just for the Houthis, but for Iran, which needs them intact for exactly the scenario described above.

The Houthis, kept intact and in reserve, are the instrument designed to execute the most important part of Iran's survival strategy at the critical moment.

The only question is timing. And here is where strategy must be considered more importantly than a literal interpretation of international law. Because there is no reason to wage the war in Iran's timetable.

The Houthi threat should be addressed now, while the carriers are in place, while the military and political infrastructure to address it is mobilized. Waiting until they shoot their first missile or drone is exactly what Iran wants the US to do - because Iran controls the timing to stay in power.

Airstrikes against Houthi military infrastructure — launch sites, missile and drone storage, command and control — conducted now, as part of the broader campaign posture, carry a fraction of the political and operational cost they would carry in four or six weeks, when justifying renewed escalation becomes exponentially harder. The targeting intelligence accumulated during Operation Prosperity Guardian and the August 2025 strikes is there. The assets are in the region. The narrative logic — these are Iran's proxies, this is a single integrated threat network — is defensible and accurate.

The Houthis have already demonstrated their willingness to act against global shipping when Iran requests it. That is not a theoretical future threat — it is an established behavioral pattern with a two-year track record. The question is not whether they will do it, but when Iran decides the moment is optimal.

The Houthis are not acting out of self preservation. Like Hezbollah, they are doing exactly what their Iranian masters tell them to do. Iran needed Hezbollah to open up a second front to Israel at the outset of the war, but they need the Houthis to be wait and maintain their full capabilities.

Waiting for that moment give Iran control of the most important single variable in the war's political sustainability: the oil price, and with it, the patience of every government in Asia and every voter in America watching their energy bills.

The Houthis are not standing down out of principle. They are being held in reserve as a weapon. The time to address a weapon is before it is fired, not after.

We know they would use it on request. They already did.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Arabs don't know who to root for

Arabs who hate both Iranians and Jews have a conundrum: who do they want to win in the war?

Sunni Arabs hate Shiites. Almost all hate Jews. This is a tough problem.

Kuwait's Al Jarida has an op-ed, without answering. It says there are three agendas - the Iranian, the Zionist and the Christian evangelical agendas. It notes that Iran has suffered major setbacks but it doesn't think any of these are good for the Arab world, and warns that Arabs need to prepare, without offering detail/

Dr. Mu'tasim Al-Dabbas in Jordan's Ammon News is a bit more optimistic, thinking that the US and Zionists will win and go through their evil plans, but eventually there will be a world war where the Arabs will destroy them too.

After America eliminates the Iranian bogeyman within weeks, it will reveal its true face and assume the role of the wolf in place of Iran to fulfill the ambitions of global Zionism. The Arabs will then ask, "Why is your mouth so big, America?" as Little Red Riding Hood asked the wolf in the well-known story. America will answer, "So I can eat your oil with it."

America will seize control of all the region's oil resources to exert economic pressure on China. Israel will follow the same path, extending its influence from the Euphrates to the Nile. The Arabs will have no cards to play after the two wings of the Arab nation, Syria and Iraq, have been broken, and they are all scattered and divided. There is no joint Arab project to save their fate.

The Arabs will all say then, "We were devoured the day the white bull was devoured," referring to Gaza, which was a thorn in Israel's side.

In the future, God willing, after the axis of evil, Israel and America, reaches the height of their power and tyranny, and then invades the Kaaba, the world war will begin—and God knows best—the war of the end times between the Zionist-American axis of evil and soldiers chosen by God for the inevitable end of Israel.

In both cases, the Arabs are reduced to being bystanders in their own region, which is very shameful to them - they used to have Syria and Iraq as their powers and both are gone. (It is interesting that Egypt is not even mentioned in that analysis.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/09 Links Pt2: Is October 7 the Exemplar of the ‘Palestinian Cause?’ The Western Left Says Yes; Australian PM Will Grant Iranian Women’s Soccer Players Asylum

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Is October 7 the Exemplar of the ‘Palestinian Cause?’ The Western Left Says Yes

Duwaji and the Times both speak like any Western leftist about the conflict. But the larger question is whether they are correct. Is it true that, as the Times reports, the Palestinian cause is what Hamas and hundreds of other Gazans did on October 7?

Again, the Hamas apologists who brand child murder as “resistance” seem to think they’re helping the Palestinians somehow. But this euphemism game has exactly the opposite effect: In the public’s mind, it connects the Palestinians to the worst actions of their worst representatives.

Many people would support the “Palestinian cause” if it were defined as self-determination in the areas currently governed by Palestinian institutions. Fewer would support the “Palestinian cause” as the Times describes it: unfiltered bloodletting.

For example: Palestinians kidnapped a baby, then killed him with their own hands and mutilated his corpse to hide their work. Hamas soldiers then put the remains in a coffin and danced around with it in a public ceremony.

Is this the Palestinian cause, or is it an aberration? Is it the rule or the exception? The Palestinians’ so-called supporters in the West say it is the cause in its purest expression.

Jared Kushner, who represents the Trump administration, doesn’t believe that. Nor do most Israelis (and certainly they did not before October 7). Which is to say: The parties who are supposedly irredeemably biased against the Palestinians would never talk about them in the kind of harsh, dehumanizing terms that their champions use.

Which tells us much about these champions. Whatever the Palestinians might consider their “cause,” the pro-Palestine movement in the West lustily describes it as a nightmarish, phantasmagoric horror show. And they absolutely cannot get enough of it.

They might be wrong about the Palestinians—that is, Palestinians themselves may still believe in a cause with more noble ambitions. But we are not wrong about these Western activists: They have traded human decency for a life of fetishized and demented violence, especially against Jews. They have become something truly monstrous, and they want us all to know it.

The Architecture of Unseeing

How Ireland's Anti-Israel Obsession Became a Case Study in Collective Intellectual Dishonesty

I. The Mechanics of Collective Delusion
As used in popular psychology, “gaslighting” describes a form of coercive control whereby the perpetrator manipulates the victim into questioning his or her own sanity, memory, or perception of reality, adding up over time to a profound assault on that person’s sense of self. Most frequently noted in abusive domestic relationships, gaslighting is also prominent in the workplace, where targeted employees are manipulated into an alternate reality where they can do nothing right and are blamed for everything that goes wrong, which erodes their competency, confidence, and productivity.

Gaslighting can be traumatic on an individual level, but when scaled up from the personal to the political, it can become a powerful sociological weapon. Political polarization, now prevalent across the West, has metastasized into a system of collective gaslighting that ever more aggressively demands a culture of intellectual dishonesty, requires people to “unsee” what is plainly visible, and ultimately degrades the critical faculties and moral clarity of an entire society. The phenomenon has mutated far beyond differences of policy to become a clash of manufactured realities, to the point where belonging to a polarized tribe necessitates wholesale denial of factual evidence and observable truth.

Living in Ireland, I have become acutely aware of this dynamic as it has shaped our current obsessive discourse regarding Israel. Especially since October 7, 2023, this Middle Eastern conflict has become for the Irish an epistemological and ontological fracture that forces people to ignore history, marginalize a minority community, and court profound political and economic self-harm, all while claiming the moral high ground. What has unfolded in Ireland over the past two and a half years is not merely a foreign policy disagreement; it is the wholesale capture of a national consciousness by a single, simplifying narrative so totalizing in its grip that it has begun to corrode the very institutions (diplomatic, cultural, sporting, economic) upon which the country’s international standing rests.

What makes Ireland’s case particularly instructive, and particularly poignant, is the size of its Jewish community. Numbering around 2,500 to 3,000 people, Irish Jews have watched with growing alarm as a political consensus has hardened around them, transforming the country they call home into what Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs has characterized as one of the most hostile environments for Jewish life in Europe. That a nation of five million people, fond of proclaiming its historical empathy for the oppressed, could so comprehensively fail to see what it is doing to its own smallest minority is the central paradox of this post. It is a paradox sustained by the architecture of unseeing.

03/09 Links Pt1: Gulf states have a stark choice — and Trump must make them face it; Benny Morris: Iran’s Risky Gamble; NATO downs second Iranian missile over Turkey; Iran may be activating sleeper cells

From Ian:

"Revolutions Are Impossible Before They Happen and Inevitable After They Happen"

Prof. Ali M. Ansari, 58, is a historian at Scotland's University of St. Andrews, where he directs the Institute for Iranian Studies. He says, "I'm a firm believer in what Hannah Arendt says: Revolutions are impossible before they happen and inevitable after they happen."

Inside Iran, "the vast majority of people are struggling. The political system is hated. The economic system isn't delivering." Salaries "no longer meet the basic needs of life. There's an environmental crisis - they've drained the water table. And now, they have an international crisis."

"People tell me, 'Oh, but it's strong and stable.' Well, it can't be that strong and stable because people are rebelling every few years, and on a scale the regime deems existential." Regime supporters, whom Ansari pegs at 10-20% of the population, "are convinced they are going to defeat the U.S. in this war. They are not going to do it."

In January, "the regime carried out such a mass slaughter that it actually proved counterproductive. If they had suppressed it with, say, 'only' the 3,117 dead that they claim, it might have succeeded." But having killed "10,000, 15,000, 20,000 of your own in the random manner that they did, and shooting people in hospital beds, it creates an anger that is difficult to suppress."

Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-13), auditing bodies were dismantled and many state assets transferred to the IRGC. By one assessment, $800 billion in revenue went missing. "A lot of them in the IRGC made a lot of money and they don't want to lose it all." That's now a stronger motivation to fight than old revolutionary fervor.

When Iran's economy is in shambles, the reflex is to blame U.S. sanctions. "That doesn't explain why the Iranians have mismanaged their water. It doesn't tell you why, well before the real sanctions arrived in 2011-12, they were never able to get any foreign direct investment into the country....It's the corruption, the kleptocracy, the short-termism, the opaqueness, the lack of accountability, the uncertainty." Sanctions didn't befall Iran. They were a consequence of the regime's behavior.

Gulf states have a stark choice — and Trump must make them face it

Gulf leaders now face a stark choice, and Trump must frame it that way.

They can continue absorbing blows and hope Iran eventually runs out of missiles — or they can help shorten the war.

That means more than quiet coordination: It means building a formal, defense-focused regional security architecture that integrates air and missile defense with shared intelligence.

The Gulf states should have joined such a framework long ago.

In fact, the basic architecture already exists.

In 2024, when US CENTCOM guided an international defense effort to thwart Iran’s missile and drone attacks on Israel, multiple Arab states joined in.

Now, Washington should turn that ad-hoc cooperation into a permanent regional shield — linking Gulf radar networks, air defenses and early-warning systems with American and Israeli assets in the region.

That means real-time intelligence on Iranian launches, integrated air and missile defense coverage across Gulf airspace, and joint command centers capable of intercepting threats.

The payoff would be immediate.

It would turn today’s patchwork of national defenses into a single protective umbrella over the Gulf, freeing American forces now defending Gulf skies to focus on the source of the danger.

It would send Tehran a message that the Gulf is part of a coordinated security bloc that won’t be intimidated by missile terror.

And if Iran continues to rain missiles and drones on Gulf cities, those same states may decide that defense is not enough — and that helping shut down the launchers is the fastest way to restore security.

Some Gulf leaders will hesitate, worrying that overt alignment with Washington or Jerusalem will spark domestic backlash and paint a target on their backs.

But last week proves equivocation doesn’t buy immunity.

The choice here is between a short, decisive confrontation and a prolonged cycle of bombardment that erodes stability.

What do you think? Post a comment.

Trump should make this clear to his Arab partners: Iran has chosen to target you.

The path to security is not to distance yourself from Washington, but coordinated action that eliminates the common threat.

Mark Dubowitz: Israel Didn't Drag the U.S. into War with Iran - They Enabled Us to Fight It Smarter and Faster

A dangerous lie has taken hold in Washington: that Israel somehow pressured the U.S. into war with Iran. Both President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio have said this is wrong. Rubio said the U.S. faced "a threat that was untenable."

Iran has spent years building nuclear weapons, developing long-range ballistic missiles, and encircling Israel with a terror army stretching from Lebanon to Gaza to Yemen. It has fired ballistic missiles directly at Israeli civilians. No Israeli government could ignore that. Jerusalem's decision to join a combined American-Israeli operation targeting Iran's missile and nuclear capabilities drew near-universal support across Israel's political spectrum. It was a national security imperative.

When Netanyahu met Trump at Mar-a-Lago last December, the president had already green-lighted an Israeli strike on Iran's missile infrastructure. When they met again at the White House, Washington knew exactly what was coming and decided to lead the war. The claim that Israel pressured the U.S. president into war is not just factually hollow - it veers dangerously close to antisemitic fringe narratives.

But the bigger point that keeps getting buried is that Iran's missiles and nuclear program and terror are America's problem. They are being fired right now at U.S. forces, American bases, our embassies, and our Gulf Arab allies. Iran is actively developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could one day reach the American homeland. Dismantling that regime's nuclear, missile, and terror infrastructure is core American national security.

Israel didn't drag us into this war. It enabled us to fight it smarter, faster, and at far less cost than we ever could have alone.

To Defend the Abraham Accords, Trump Must First Defend the UAE

The Trump administration needs to pay close attention: The UAE is not merely another Gulf monarchy, another energy partner. It is one of the clearest examples in the Arab world of a country that deliberately chose modernization over ideological stagnation and development over the old politics of grievance.... This choice is precisely what makes it so important — and precisely what makes it so threatening to the forces that thrive on disorder.

The UAE... demonstrated that sovereignty can be defended without fanaticism, and that prosperity can be built through peace rather than perpetual war. This is why attacks on the UAE are not merely attacks on a country. They are attacks on a model for peace.

President Donald Trump no doubt sees this with clarity: his extraordinary Abraham Accords remain one of the defining strategic achievements not only of the century but of history.

Defending the UAE, therefore, is entirely consistent with a hard-headed American strategy. America did not help broker the Abraham Accords only to watch their boldest Arab partner become an exposed target. A serious policy... requires seriousness: tighter intelligence coordination, stronger integrated air and missile defense, firmer deterrence against Iranian aggression and proxy warfare, and unmistakable public clarity that the United States forcefully stands by the states that choose peace over terror and an alliance with the US over revolutionary blackmail. That is not charity toward Abu Dhabi. It is a defense of American interests, and a regional balance that works in America's favor.

George Orwell invented the slogan "War is Peace" as a satire so extreme it could never be mistaken for sincere ideology. It was meant to be obviously, grotesquely absurd, the kind of thing only a totalitarian state would inscribe on its Ministry of Peace while waging permanent war.

He underestimated us.

On March 7, 2026, the Bronx Anti-War Coalition held a vigil in Manhattan - not for victims of war, but for Ayatollah Khamenei. A masked speaker chanted, to robotic responses: "We stand in full solidarity with the IRGC and the Islamic Revolution... They are materially destroying the Zionist entity and U.S. airbases and U.S. soldiers." He then called for Iran's missiles to "reply" to American drones.

This was an "anti-war" event.

They're not hiding their logic. Their own website states plainly that they "support the right to resist colonial imperialism by any means necessary, including armed struggle" and that they are "not a pacifist movement."

And they've solved the definitional problem. Their "Points of Unity" adopt a redefinition of peace itself: peace is not the absence of conflict but rather the achievement of liberation through "the defeat of global systems of oppression." By any means necessary.

Literally, war is peace.

Missiles shot at U.S. soldiers, Jewish civilians and hotels in the UAE are peace work. Vigils for theocratic supreme leaders are peace activism. "Death to Israel" and "Death to the USA" are peace slogans. War is peace: not as irony, not as critique, but as a genuine operating principle stated without embarrassment on a public website.

And while they enthusiastically claim to support people's revolutions, they can suddenly oppose them when they don't align with their support for radical Islamist states.

In January 2026, the same coalition published a piece in Workers World about the popular uprising in Iran. Their verdict: "Iran is not erupting. It's being attacked." Iranians who took to the streets - many of them young women risking their lives for the most basic freedoms - were recast as tools of "U.S./Israeli hybrid warfare." The piece declared there are "only two sides," and that "neutrality here is collaboration." The group that calls itself pro-revolution condemned an actual popular revolution because it was the wrong revolution, against the wrong government. They claim to "defend people's revolutions." They mean specific people, specific revolutions — ones that fit their philosophy. People wanting to be free of their oppressive regimes are simple redefined as "imperialists" and their murders are justified.

All they have to do is redefine reality.

This is the same move made with "anti-Zionism is not antisemitism." Repeat it enough and the repetition becomes the argument. Never mind that anti-Zionist protesters routinely march behind signs calling for the elimination of the Jewish state, celebrate the massacre of Jewish civilians, and recycle medieval blood libels with a thin geopolitical coating. The label "anti-Zionist" is meant to function as a prophylactic against the charge of antisemitism — to make the question of what's actually being said, and who's being targeted, inadmissible. The word does the work so the content doesn't have to be examined. It's the same mechanism: fix the vocabulary, and reality has to conform to it.

Orwell understood that totalitarianism required controlling language. What he perhaps didn't fully anticipate was that a free society could generate its own Ministry of Truth voluntarily, through activist organizations, sympathetic media, and the social enforcement of approved terminology. And they have their own mechanisms of enforcement to ensure that no one in their "coalition" dare disagree with their tenets.

The media, in attempting to be balanced, parrot the obvious lies and perversion of language as legitimate, which gives them more power. Nobody forced journalists to describe the Bronx Anti-War Coalition as "anti-war activists." Nobody compelled them to accept the "anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism" frame at face value. They did it because the labels were available and the scrutiny was uncomfortable.

The result is that "War is Peace" is no longer a warning etched on a dystopian government building. It's on a coalition website in the Bronx. It's in press releases. And enough people in media and politics treat it as a legitimate peace movement that the satire has become indistinguishable from the reality Orwell was trying to prevent.

He thought the absurdity would be its own refutation. He didn't anticipate that the absurdity would go beyond his imagination.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Parts 1 through 3 built the diagnostic and prescriptive framework. The West's episodic war theory is a category error. Revolutionary movements identified that error and built a doctrine around exploiting it. We need to handle adversarial reality considerably better than what international law currently provides.

The question is, what should international law look like, or does it even make sense?

The first thing to say clearly is this: international law is a procedural system, not a moral one. It is a coordination mechanism among sovereign states, designed to manage conflict, reduce escalation, and create predictable expectations of behavior. What it does not do, despite the moral language that constantly surrounds it, is adjudicate right and wrong.

Terms like "war crimes," "international justice," and "the rules-based order" carry enormous moral weight in public discourse. They imply that legal compliance tracks moral legitimacy and legal violation tracks moral culpability. But the system's enforcement depends almost entirely on political power and consent. Its institutions are manipulated by the states that fund them. Its definitions are negotiated by parties with interests in the outcomes.

The UN couldn't agree on a definition of terrorism because too many member states wanted their favored terror groups excluded. Syria used chemical weapons repeatedly while sitting on the Security Council. The International Criminal Court pursued Israeli commanders while Hamas leadership walked free. This is the system operating exactly as its political structure predicts.

In other words, there is a huge gap between what is legal and what is moral. Things that are legal (like Iran's ballistic missile program) can be immoral, and things that are moral (like the Osirak strike) may be considered illegal.

Updating international law cannot work. The problem isn't technical, it's structural. Any reform flexible enough to address the capability-threshold problem and the continuous-war doctrine is also flexible enough to be claimed by Russia against Ukraine, by China against Taiwan, by Iran against Israel. The universality that gives international law its legitimacy is precisely what makes it unreformable for this class of problem. You cannot write a rule that applies to everyone and have it apply only to good-faith actors.

The deeper issue is that universal legal systems have a scaling problem. A system that must govern hundreds of states with radically different traditions, threat environments, and political structures cannot be both universal and morally serious simultaneously. The attempt to make it both produces exactly what we have - universal enough to be hijacked, morally serious enough to weaponize as language, neither in practice.

The solution is not a better universal system. It is a different architecture entirely.

The proposed solution has two parts.

There needs to be a system where there is a basic set of laws that everyone can agree upon, like not targeting civilians, prohibiting weapons of mass civilian destruction, and not murdering prisoners of war. They are universal because they represent the floor below which no war doctrine can descend without forfeiting moral standing entirely, and every serious tradition knew this before any convention was signed.

But above that, each state publishes their own laws of war. Most states do this already - they have military manuals that go into detail as to what they can and cannot do. States must make these regulations and policies public and transparent, and they should be judged against them.

Pluralism is more realistic than universalism. Even today, there is a reason every country has its own published rules of war: there are always specific circumstances that apply to individual countries. It is the honest recognition that different states, different traditions, and different threat environments produce legitimately different doctrines - and that this diversity is preferable to a false universalism that the most ruthless actors exploit most effectively.

What makes pluralism workable rather than anarchic is transparency and self-accountability. Each state develops and publicly declares its own laws of war. Those declarations are public and criticizable. Each state is held accountable — by its allies, by its citizens, by history — against its own declared standards, not against a universal standard negotiated by parties with conflicting interests.

Voluntary treaties and signed conventions carry genuine moral obligation within this framework, because consent creates responsibility in a way that imposition does not. A state that signs the Chemical Weapons Convention and violates it is culpable in a way that a state operating outside a framework it never accepted is not.

If states voluntarily decide to be subject to rulings of the ICC, that is fine. But states that do not should not be penalized by than decision.

International law functions as a reference point — a repository of accumulated wisdom about how wars should be fought — not as a moral authority whose pronouncements supersede national survival. The ICRC can (and does) publish its own interpretation of the laws of armed conflict; it should be used as a reference but not as canon. Every state can specify which parts they disagree with and why.

You may ask, if states declare their own laws of war, what prevents a state from simply declaring chemical weapons, torture, or deliberate civilian targeting legitimate? Doesn't that dissolve the floor entirely?

Two mechanisms within the framework itself answer this, with no external enforcement required.

First: a declaration that violates the irreducible floor is itself a casus belli. This follows directly from the relational framework established in Part 3. Declared hostile intent combined with capability constitutes a state of war in Locke's sense. A state that publicly declares its intention to use weapons designed purely for mass civilian suffering has announced something about its relationship to every other state simultaneously. That declaration, combined with possession, already meets the threshold criteria. No tribunal is required, the transparency requirement enforces itself: your public doctrine has consequences you cannot later disclaim.

Second: states may include exception clauses in their own declared doctrines when dealing with enemies who themselves violate accepted rules. If observing a specific protection systematically disadvantages you against an enemy who deliberately exploits that protection as a weapon, you may relax that specific protection to the degree necessary to restore operational parity, but no further.

Hamas fires from hospitals, stores weapons in schools, and uses civilian infrastructure as deliberate military cover, meaning Israel's genuine commitment to protecting those sites becomes a tactical asset for Hamas, not a protection for civilians. In that specific context, the protection can be adjusted — not eliminated, but recalibrated to account for the systematic exploitation, with evidence, proportionality, and public justification.

An enemy that consistently uses white flags as deception reduces the operational presumption of surrender — not eliminates it, but adjusts the evidentiary threshold required before extending it.

This is not carte blanche for a nation to ignore accepted rules if their enemies do. If one side uses chemical weapons against civilians that does not mean the other side can do the same. But if one side weaponizes civilians or humanitarian symbols or religious sites, the other side can justify attacking them.

The exception clause invocation is never self-executing. It must be publicly justified — against the adversary's own declared doctrine, demonstrated behavior, and the specific operational disadvantage being created. The evidentiary burden is high, visible, and applied to the specific protection being adjusted, not to the laws of war generally. The claim is either sustained by the record or exposed as false by it.

This framework gives precise, evidence-based, proportionate adjustment to specific protections that have been systematically converted into weapons — and it requires you to show your work publicly.

This is not perfect. It can still be abused. Catching deception is not easy. But we have that situation today as well. The advantage here is not to treat international law as a moral system when it can be used for immoral purposes. A nation that hides its crimes invites others to demand answers - or suffer consequences. Transparency helps a great deal here.

Iran's revolutionary doctrine is public. It declares permanent hostility toward Israel and the United States as a founding constitutional principle, endorses proxy warfare, deliberately targets civilians through those proxies, and has consistently pursued weapons of mass destruction as instruments of that struggle. Judged against its own declared standards, Iran has placed itself outside the irreducible floor. The declaration is its own condemnation.

Israel's military doctrine is public, detailed, and rigorously applied. It requires distinction between combatants and civilians, proportionality relative to military objectives, warnings before strikes where operationally possible, and investigation of alleged violations. Israel has a functioning military legal system that has prosecuted soldiers for violations of its own standards. Judged against its own declared doctrine, Israel's conduct reflects genuine structural commitment to fighting within a serious ethical framework under conditions deliberately engineered to make that commitment costly.

These are not morally equivalent positions. The current system treats them as if they are. An honest framework makes the difference visible and lets the record speak.

There is no institutional solution to a world containing genuinely malign actors with veto power. The existing system's pretense that institutions solve this problem is precisely what revolutionary movements have spent decades exploiting.

Right now, the international law system has been politicized and hijacked. Strong states do whatever they want anyway, and terrorist states hide behind the law.

A theory of law must be based on reality. The only way this can happen is if the malign actors are forced to be transparent about their policies and others can act accordingly.

Law is not morality. But morality must govern what laws we build - and anticipate how they will be perverted by those who treat them as weapons rather than obligations

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/08 Links: International Law Is Becoming a Suicide Pact for Western Democracies; 7th US service member dies in Operation Epic Fury; Israel's Secret Weapon

From Ian:

Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg International Law Is Becoming a Suicide Pact for Western Democracies

Former head of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth argued in the Guardian on March 1 that joint American-Israeli strikes against the Tehran regime constitute an illegal "act of aggression." He claims that, according to the law of armed conflict, the use of force is illegitimate unless it responds to an attack that has already occurred and is acknowledged by the UN Security Council.

His simple theory is dangerously removed from the real world. Roth condemns the U.S.-Israeli decision as though it was taken totally out of the blue, and not a necessary response to aggression. He conveniently omits the central fact that, for decades, the Islamic Republic has been waging a violent war against the U.S. (the Big Satan), Israel (the Little Satan), and many of its Arab neighbors. The regime's fingerprints are on the missile arsenals targeting Israeli cities, on proxy terror militias embedded across Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, and on terror plots around the world. When an adversary arms, funds, and directs forces committed to the destruction of a neighboring state - and increasingly to the intimidation of the West - this is not peace. It is war.

The moral and legal question is whether, in the real world, states have the right - indeed the obligation - to defend their citizens against a fanatical regime that clearly proclaims its intentions to wipe out its opponents and builds rockets and centrifuges for making nuclear weapons for doing this.

Iran's own forces and proxies have launched or facilitated hundreds of lethal strikes against Israeli civilians in recent years. No international law or principle of justice requires a nation to absorb such heinous attacks while waiting for some UN body to authorize defensive action. Article 51 of the UN Charter affirms the inherent right of self-defense.

A regime that calls for the elimination of another UN member state cannot reasonably expect that state (i.e., Israel) to treat its march toward nuclear capability as a routine matter of sovereign discretion. In a world of precision missiles and nuclear breakout timelines measured in weeks, not years, waiting for the mass slaughter of a mushroom cloud is not prudence; it is abdication. The war against Iranian tyranny is not the result of lust for conflict in Washington or Jerusalem. It comes because Tehran has made the status quo untenable.

Faced with Diplomatic Impotence, War Against Iran Is Legitimate

When rogue states like Iran or terrorist organizations such as Hizbullah or Hamas sow terror, blatantly disregard signed agreements, and pursue their nuclear program, international law is rendered irrelevant and sidelined by force of arms, the only means to impose the diplomatic agenda.

How can we admit and tolerate that for more than five decades the Islamic revolution has been responsible for the majority of acts of terror and terrorist attacks around the world and that its spiritual leader has the blood of many innocent people, women, children and old people on his hands?

Western powers have tried several approaches to negotiate with the Iranian regime, including appeasement, negotiations, and sanctions. Yet the Iranian government has not been deterred or convinced to end its nuclear program, whose primary objective is the destruction of the Jewish state.

French President Macron rushed to convene the Security Council, citing the risks of renewed conflict, instead of showing solidarity with the American fight against the Axis of Evil. Macron remained completely silent on the victims of Iranian ballistic missiles targeting the Israeli civilian population, some of whom are French citizens.

During this war, we observe that the residents of Tehran can move about freely on foot and by car, aware that Israeli strikes are precise and surgical, unlike their missiles launched indiscriminately against innocent people, that only target the civilian population.

7th US service member dies in Operation Epic Fury

A US service member wounded in an Iranian attack against US troops in Saudi Arabia has succumbed to their injuries — the seventh American soldier to have died during Operation Epic Fury.

The unidentified soldier was “seriously wounded” in the March 1 attack as Iran launched missiles and drones at US installations across the Middle East at the start of the conflict, according to CENTCOM.

“Last night, a U.S. service member passed away from injuries received during the Iranian regime’s initial attacks across the Middle East,” CENTCOM wrote on X on Sunday afternoon.

“The service member was seriously wounded at the scene of an attack on U.S. troops in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on March 1.”

CENTCOM said it is withholding releasing the identity of the slain servicemember for 24 hours pending next-of-kin notification.

The news comes a day after NYPD Officer and decorated Army veteran Sorffly Davius died during a health crisis while deployed in Kuwait with the National Guard.

On Saturday, President Trump flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the bodies of six Army Reserve members were flown to after they died when an Iranian drone struck a US facility in Kuwait.

Israel's Secret Weapon

The human element of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is our true secret weapon. Technology is only a force multiplier; it is the spirit behind it that gives it power.

Both men and women, in regular service and the reserves, are determined, committed, and deeply patriotic. Nowhere else do 18-year-olds routinely take on life-risking missions as a national duty.

In moments of crisis, volunteers emerge everywhere, caring for displaced families and assisting soldiers at the front and on the home front. An entire nation mobilizes.

Israel's air defense units operate around the clock, with nearly half of the soldiers being women.

Since Oct. 7, Israel has been living through two years of continuous war, painful losses, thousands of wounded, families shattered, and entire communities displaced. Yet Israeli society's resilience has become even more visible.

Citizens follow life-saving instructions, adapt to emergency conditions, support the war effort, and continue to function as a society, even under constant threat.

The Israeli public understands that defending the country is not only the army's responsibility; it is a collective national effort.

By Daled Amos

“Victory smiles on those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur.”
Italian Air Marshall Giulio Douhet, quoted by David Micah Stark in The Modern Character of War: A Reexamination of the Law of Armed Conflict

Those changes are in the process of happening now, right before our eyes.

Trump has described the ongoing American campaign as a “combat operation” rather than a formal war. Yet whatever you call it, this conflict is already raising questions about the modern laws of war as we know them: What does proportionality mean when a state targets civilians in countries that want to stay on the sidelines? When is a threat truly “imminent” in the age of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles? And how should democratic states respond to enemies who deliberately wage war through terrorism?

Iran Redefines Proportionality

The current Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, apparently apologized for the missile and drone attacks against its Arab neighbors--including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman--and Cyprus, which is associated with Europe.

But he soon backtracked in a post on X, claiming Iran only targets US bases:

But that is not true.

Civilian targets have also been hit: Dubai's main airport in the UAE, liquefied natural gas facilities in Qatar, the Ras Tanura refinery in Saudi Arabia, the Bapco Energies refinery in Bahrain, and assorted ports and hotels in the Gulf. This is no accident. The attacks reflect a broader Iranian strategy that Iran threatened last month, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

Ahead of the last round of nuclear talks in February, national security council chief Ali Larijani passed a letter to the U.S. via Oman saying Iran would no longer respond proportionally and would react aggressively to any attack, they said. “The Americans must be aware that if they wage a war this time, it will be a regional war.”

Proportionality, a term regularly brought up to accuse Israel of violating international law whenever it responds to attacks, has so far been absent from discussion about the current conflict. But Iran is in fact attacking Arab countries that are not actively involved in the attack, and is firing at civilian targets as well.

How long will the international community sit back and accept this?

(It is important to distinguish between two very different uses of the word “proportionality.” In international law governing the conduct of hostilities, proportionality refers to the requirement that commanders avoid attacks in which expected civilian harm would be excessive relative to the concrete military advantage anticipated. Nothing about Israel’s evolving strategy changes that legal obligation. The shift being discussed here concerns a different concept: the older assumption that military responses should mirror the scale of the initial attack rather than aim to remove the broader threat. -EoZ)

The US Redefines "Imminent Threat"

Trump's initiation of this attack raises another issue under the law of war: imminent threat. Critics have claimed that there is none, but Trump has been adamant from the start:

Earlier Saturday, Trump said that the United States had faced “imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” Tehran was continuing to work toward producing a nuclear weapon and development of “long-range missiles that … could soon reach the American homeland.”

This debate is part of a deeper problem. Traditionally, threats developed slowly and were visible well in advance. But today, nuclear programs, ballistic missile technology, and proxy terrorist networks operate on a very different timeline.

Israel’s experience illustrates the dilemma. Israel cannot afford to wait for Iran to attack first. Reuel Marc Gerech and Ray Takeyh write in the Wall Street Journal:

An Israeli consensus has developed: The Jewish state will have a continuous need to degrade the clerical regime’s proxies and home defenses, which could shield revitalized nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Threats no longer have to be imminent to be countered. [emphasis added]

Israel does have to wait for an Iranian leader to have his finger on the button before reacting to the threat of a nuclear Iran. And the long history of Iranian hostility to the US, including the 1979 hostage crisis, the 1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing, the 1996 Khobar Towers Bombing in Saudi Arabia, and the hundreds of US soldiers killed by Iranian EFPs and IEDs in Iraq, shows that the US is in a similar situation. Barton Swain rebuts the claim that Iran does not pose an imminent threat:

As for [Sen. Tim Kaine's] denial that the threat was “imminent,” I wonder what the word could mean: Iran has attempted to assassinate assorted American dignitaries, including the president. It funds terror groups across the Middle East and slaughtered 30,000 demonstrators a few weeks ago. Its rulers express Nazi-like ambitions of annihilating its enemies, even as they don’t bother to hide a mad hunger for long-range missiles and nuclear technology.

Waiting until the danger is literally moments away may no longer be a defensible strategy.

Israel Redefines Proportionality

Israel, meanwhile, is redefining proportionality in a different way.

Unlike Iran, Israel is not holding its neighbors hostage in an attempt to blackmail the US into a draw. Amit Segal writes about what he calls The New Israeli Rules of Engagement, pointing out that "Proportionate’ responses are a thing of the past. Now we understand we can’t live with terrorists." Terrorism is a form of warfare that has yet to be adequately addressed by international law. It is a form of warfare that exploits the protections of international law while violating them. Before October 7, Israel limited itself to carefully calibrated strikes against Hamas that would avoid escalation. Instead, the strategy produced the opposite effect: attacks against Israeli civilians became a regular occurrence.

Israel came to the conclusion that you don't mow the grass; you remove it:

When you respond, overwhelm your foe. For years, the enemy fired rockets and Israel replied with “proportional” force. This normalized the firing on civilians, kidnapping and invasion. But this changed after Oct. 7. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah thought he was still playing by the old rules, launching a few rockets daily. It ended with his elimination, the decapitation of his organization, and the destruction of 80% of their missile stockpile.

This new approach does not only apply to proxies like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. This policy also applies to their sponsor. Iran established and backed these threats and will have to be dealt with the same way:

The Jewish state can’t accept the existence in Iran of production facilities and thousands of ballistic missiles, with every launch sending half of Israel into shelters and threatening mass casualties. It can’t tolerate a regime that continues, even today, to fund its greatest enemies with more than a billion dollars annually.

The actions Iran is now taking against its neighbors, attacking airports, hotels, and refineries, demonstrate just how right Israel is.

Historically, war has always forced nations to revise the rules that govern it. Over the past week, we have seen Tehran demonstrate its own interpretation of “proportionality” by targeting civilian infrastructure and threatening to widen the war across the region. Israel, facing terrorists who don't even abide by international law, has found that the old doctrine of proportional responses only guarantees perpetual attack. Meanwhile, the US is confronting a similar dilemma of whether the concept of “imminent threat” can still apply in an era of nuclear proliferation, ballistic missiles, and terrorist proxies.

Let's face it. The character of war has changed. States confronting regimes that openly seek their destruction cannot wait for the perfect legal threshold before acting. It is time for international law to account for this new strategic reality where deterrence, preemption, and decisive force may be the only way to avoid catastrophe.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Egyptian media think-tank says Jews control the media - using information outdated by decades

The Insan Center for Media Studies says it promotes an agenda of supporting peace and human rights in the media/. Its goal is "Spreading the culture of peaceful transfer of power and respect for the opinions of others, confronting the organized aggression against freedoms, human rights and democratic aspirations of the peoples of the Arab region, exposing the practices of authoritarian regimes, and always siding with the truth."

It just released a study of how, it claims, Western Zionist media pushed the US into war with Iran.

I found this section particularly interesting:

American Jews also wield considerable influence in mainstream media outlets, most notably:

ABC Network : The American Broadcasting Network, which is controlled by a number of Jewish media leaders, including its chairman Martin Rubenstein and his assistant Efrain Weinstein, in addition to a large number of editors and correspondents affiliated with the AIPAC organization.

– CBS Network : Columbia Broadcasting Company, headed by William Liplin, with Richard Salant as its general manager, is one of the most prominent media platforms that provides media and political services in support of Israel.

NBC Network : The national broadcasting company, headed by Alfred Silverman, succeeding its founder Robert Sarnoff, and includes a large number of editors and engineers associated with Jewish institutions in the United States.

These three networks have a wide influence on shaping American public opinion, as their media messages reach about 250 million Americans, as well as millions of followers in Europe and Latin America.

All of these people are dead.

ABC: Martin Rubenstein Martin Rubenstein was briefly vice president and general manager of ABC News in the 1970s but left the role by 1979 and died in 1994. No "Efran Weinstein" appears in any verifiable ABC leadership history.

CBS: There is no William Liplin; this could be a garbled reference to CBS founder William Paley who stepped down in the 1980s and died in 1990. Richard S. Salant was president of CBS News from 1961–1964 and 1966–1979 and died in 1993.

NBC: Fred Silverman was president of NBC from 1978–1981 and died in 2020. Robert Sarnoff (son of NBC founder David Sarnoff) was president of NBC from 1955–1965 and died in 1997.

Notice that this media think-tank doesn't even pretend to distinguish Jews from Zionists. And they clearly copied this from some neo-Nazi site.

But, hey, they claim to be all about human rights!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The UN uses the PLO's definition of "Jerusalem"

The UN issued a press release on Friday from its "experts:"

UN experts warn against the irreversible ‘de-Palestinisation’ of Jerusalem

Irreparable harm is being inflicted on Jerusalem, as violence engulfs the region, and genocide continues in Gaza and spills into the West Bank, UN experts* warned today.

“Under the cover of an existential war against the Palestinians, Israel is accelerating measures that alter Jerusalem’s demographic composition, religious character and legal status, destroying the remnants of the pluralistic fabric that Jerusalem has represented for centuries, for Muslims, Christians and Jews, ” the experts said.

“What is being done to this world symbol of spiritual coexistence and shared heritage is irreversible.”

In occupied East Jerusalem, extrajudicial killings, large-scale demolitions and forced displacement have escalated. Checkpoints and closures are severing the city from its Palestinian hinterland, isolating communities from their social, cultural, economic and religious life and undermining their rights to self-determination and development. Punitive policing and systematic interference with freedom of worship are designed to coerce Palestinians to leave.

“These are not security measures,” the experts said. “They are components of a systematic project of demographic engineering and domination to entrench exclusive Jewish control.”

The scale is stark. Between 2021 and 2025, 144 Palestinians were reportedly killed in Jerusalem’s Governorate. At least 11,555 were arrested, amid allegations of arbitrary detention and ill-treatment. Authorities issued 2,386 deportation decisions and carried out more than 1,732 demolitions and land-levelling operations, often coercing residents to demolish their own homes under threat of heavy fines or imprisonment. Thirty-three Bedouin communities, home to more than 7,000 Palestinians, are being pushed toward displacement through repeated demolitions and land seizures.

If you read it carefully, you can see that it has a very expansive definition of Jerusalem. It is referring to the Jerusalem (or Quds) Governorate, which was created by the PLO in 1995 during Oslo. It reaches the Dead Sea, as this UN map shows:

It does not even include the parts of Jerusalem on the west side of the Green Line.

The "experts" know very well that when they say Jerusalem people think of the city, but they want to make Israel sound as evil as possible, so they include brand new illegal Bedouin encampments as part of their definition of Jerusalem to say Israel is pushing them out, and include Islamic Jihad terrorists Israel has killed as "Palestinians reported killed."

No one calls the Jerusalem Governorate "Jerusalem" except the UN. These "experts," including Francesca Albanese, know exactly how to manipulate the language for propaganda purposes.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/07 Links: Day 7 of the U.S.–Israel War: The Strategy Appears to Be Working, and Iran Is Losing; Mehdi Hasan Claims American Sailors Are Worse Than Nazis; Anti-Iranian regime protester pummeled at deluded vigil for Ayatollah

From Ian:

John Spencer: Day 7 of the U.S.–Israel War: The Strategy Appears to Be Working, and Iran Is Losing

None of these possibilities need to occur in order to create strategic pressure.

Their mere plausibility forces Iranian decision-makers to confront multiple simultaneous dilemmas.

A ground invasion of Iran would be one of the most complex military operations in modern history. Iran is geographically vast, mountainous, and home to nearly ninety million people.

The United States appears to be pursuing a strategy designed to achieve political objectives without committing to that form of war, while ensuring that Iranian leadership cannot assume such an option is impossible.

Seven days into the conflict, the military balance clearly favors the United States and Israel.

Iran’s attacks against Israel and other regional states have been significantly reduced. Its missile and drone forces are being systematically degraded. Its naval capabilities are being destroyed. Its leadership structure is under continuous pressure.

The Islamic regime in Iran is no longer shaping this war. It is reacting to it.

Just as importantly, the United States, our forces, and our interests are already safer today than they were seven days ago. The regime’s ability to secretly pursue a nuclear weapon, threaten American troops in the region, intimidate neighboring states, and hold global commerce hostage through missile and naval coercion is being steadily degraded.

None of this guarantees the final outcome of the war.

No one can say with certainty whether the Iranian regime will abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, agree to intrusive international inspections, surrender its stockpile of roughly 400 kilograms of sixty percent enriched uranium, dismantle its expanding ballistic missile program, stop using the Strait of Hormuz as a coercive threat against the global economy, or end its decades-long investment in proxy militias and terrorist organizations.

And yes, President Trump’s demand for “unconditional surrender” is consistent with the political objectives stated from the beginning of the war. It does not necessarily mean the surrender of the Iranian state. It means the unconditional end of the behaviors that caused the conflict. The regime must abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons, dismantle its missile program, end its support for terrorism across the region, and stop threatening the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and global commerce. In strategic terms, it is a demand that Iran accept the political outcome this war is designed to achieve.

But what can be evaluated now is the strategy.

The use of force appears to be systematically reducing the regime’s capabilities across multiple domains. Nuclear facilities continue to be targeted. Missile forces are being degraded. Naval assets are being destroyed. Leadership within the regime’s military and security apparatus is being eliminated.

The measure of strategy is not noise, destruction, or headlines. It is whether force is bending the enemy toward your political objective.

Seven days into the war, the evidence suggests that is exactly what is happening. One example is the Iranian president publicly apologizing for attacks on neighboring countries, an early signal that the regime may already be recalculating its behavior, though such statements must ultimately be judged by actions rather than words.

A final caution is necessary.

In the information age, analysis is everywhere. But not all analysis is equal.

Just as a reader should examine the biography of an author before purchasing a serious book, it is wise to examine the background of anyone claiming expertise on this war. Review their professional and academic history. Examine their previous commentary on military operations. Look at their social media posts and past analysis.

If someone has a long record of purely political commentary, whether anti-Trump, anti-American, anti-Israel, or driven by ideological positions, it becomes difficult for that individual to separate political preference from objective strategic analysis.

War demands clear thinking.

The coming days will reveal whether Iran chooses escalation, endurance, or negotiation. For now, the strategic duel continues.

Jonathan Sacerdoti: Is the US preparing for a long war against Iran?

The war in the Middle East shows no sign of slowing. Instead, there were heavy air strikes inside Iran and missile barrages across the region over the last 24 hours, with indications that the United States is preparing for a longer and potentially wider conflict.

Israeli fighter jets carried out a major new wave of attacks on Iranian military infrastructure overnight, striking targets in Tehran and central Iran. According to Israeli military statements, more than 80 Israeli Air Force aircraft took part in the operation, guided by intelligence that identified key Revolutionary Guard facilities.

Earlier in the day, 50 Israeli aircraft also struck a vast underground bunker beneath the regime’s leadership compound in central Tehran, a command complex spanning several city blocks with numerous entrances and meeting rooms used by senior Iranian officials. The facility was designed to serve as an emergency wartime command centre for Iran’s Supreme Leader. The bunker was hit with around 100 munitions, according to the IDF spokesperson.

They also struck the Imam Hossein University, the main military university of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which Israel said was being used to assemble officers and military assets during the campaign. Other targets included missile storage sites containing underground bunkers and launch infrastructure, as well as additional launch locations across western and central Iran in an effort to reduce the scale of Iranian missile fire against Israel.

The strikes are part of a rapidly expanding military campaign. US Central Command said American forces have already hit more than 3,000 targets during the first week of the operation, known as Operation Epic Fury, and signalled that the pace of attacks will continue.

Jonathan Sacerdoti: Is this Iran’s first climbdown?

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has announced that the country’s temporary leadership council has approved the suspension of attacks against neighbouring countries unless those countries launch attacks on Iran themselves. He said that the council decided the day before that Iran will stop attacking surrounding states unless attacks on Iran originate from those territories. The statement was delivered publicly as the war in the region continues to intensify, and while Iran continues to launch attacks in the region in response to the US-Israeli strikes on the Islamic Republic.

This new Iranian position comes after just one week of intense military action carried out by Israel and the United States against the Islamic regime.

In that single week, a carefully planned and determined campaign has inflicted major damage on Iran’s military infrastructure and leadership networks. Despite implementing its so-called mosaic defence strategy – a decentralised approach which gives individual commanders autonomy to keep fighting when cut off from leadership structures – the speed with which Tehran has now adjusted its posture toward neighbouring states shows the degree of pressure the regime is already under.

At the beginning of the war, the Iranian leadership attempted to widen the conflict across the region. Iranian missiles and drones were launched not only toward Israel but toward surrounding Gulf and Arab countries. With the help of its regional proxies, Iran spread the extent of its attacks from Cyprus all the way to the coast of Sri Lanka, including an attack on Nato member Turkey (which Iran denies), a European Union country, Gulf states, Israel and altogether 12 different nations.

Iran not only targeted military facilities, but also civilian locations. Hotels and other civilian sites have been struck alongside military bases and airports. The regime attempted to expand the battlefield across the region in the hope that neighbouring states would distance themselves from Israel and the United States and pressure them to halt the campaign. Instead, the opposite has happened.

The Iranian attacks on Gulf and Arab countries have reinforced the alignment between those states, Israel and the United States. Israeli planes and other defence mechanisms have actively been protecting Arab countries – something once unimaginable.

This dynamic represents a real-world demonstration of a strategic idea pursued for years by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump through the Abraham Accords. The central concept was that shared security threats from the Iranian regime would gradually produce deeper cooperation between Israel and Arab states. The events of the past week show that this logic works in practice. These Arab states did not distance themselves from Israel. The Islamic Republic attacks strengthened their alignment with Israel and the United States.

The Iranian leadership now clearly sees this reality. Continuing those strikes would only strengthen the coalition already confronting the regime.