Are we losing?

One month into a four-week war

It doesn’t take much expertise to see that the US and Israel are dominating Iran militarily in the month-long war. The coalition of two has bombed Iran with impunity with no losses of combat aircraft over hostile territory. The only aircraft losses known are to friendly fire or drone attacks on US bases. Iran’s leadership has been decapitated, and its military is in a shambles.

So why is it then that there is a wide perception that Iran is winning the war?

A photo of Iranian warship Shahid Bagheri during US strikes on 2 March 2026. Photo: DOD/Wikimedia

The most obvious explanation is that the war is continuing after four weeks when it was originally estimated to be winding down by now. Not only is the regime still in control of the country and continuing to fire missiles and drones at its neighbors, but Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz and holding world energy markets - and the world economy by extension - hostage.

Iran’s successes at surviving and leveraging its limited capabilities are compounded by the confused response from Washington. The president’s response on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has been to issue ultimatums and then extend the deadlines, to issue calls for help from the international community and then to say that he doesn’t need help, and finally to speculate that the Hormuz crisis will end because the strait will “automatically open” when the war ends.

The overall image projected is of a military force that dominates the battlefield, paired with strategic leadership that is uncertain about where to go from the current position and that offers contradictory assessments of the state of affairs. How many times can the Iranian regime, its military, and its nuclear program be “obliterated” yet continue to offer resistance and control access to the Persian Gulf?

In his speech on Wednesday, Trump said, “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death [sic].”

“The new group is less radical and much more reasonable,” he added.

I’m not sure if Trump himself is deluded on this or if he simply hopes that America and the world will forget that he told Iranians at the onset of the war, “The hour of your freedom is at hand.” Trump may not have used the words “regime change,” but he and his cabinet officials made clear that was a goal.

Regime change, which the president simultaneously denies was a goal and claims has already occurred, has not happened. The regime is still in power with different leaders, none of whom seem any less radical and more reasonable than the old leaders, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.

There seems to be no good explanation for the failure of Trump and Netanyahu to consider the possibility that Iran would respond to the joint attacks by bombarding its neighbors and closing the Strait of Hormuz. Many deny that the attackers did not foresee the possibility of these responses, but the evidence is there for all to see in the lack of preparation for such contingencies.

Despite the long military buildup prior to the war justified by an allegedly unforeseen imminent Iranian attack, State Department employees and dependents were not evacuated, there was a shortage of bunkers for US troops in the region, and ground forces had to be moved from the US and Japan to prepare for a possible ground war. Many US aircraft losses were from planes parked in the open. Further, Trump’s own statements (for what they are worth), indicate that Iran’s response was unexpected.

But maybe there is an explanation for the lack of preparation. An Alert Reader sent me a video in which Carrick Ryan, who I am not familiar with, explains that the Venezuela operation was so successful because the US was apparently working with Delcy Rodriguez prior to the raid that captured Maduro. Ryan theorizes that there was a similar arrangement in Iran, but the leader that the US had chosen to replace the ayatollah was accidentally killed in the decapitation strikes, something that Trump alluded to early on. When the kill-and-replace option failed, there seems to have been no Plan B. It is impossible to say for sure whether Ryan’s theory is correct, but it does fit much of the available evidence.

Whether Ryan is correct or not, we are at a critical juncture in the war. Down one road is escalation and sending ground forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The other fork leads to a TACO strategy of declaring victory, ending the war, and hoping that “reasonable” elements in the Iranian regime allowing shipping to once again transit to and from the Persian Gulf.

Both options come with limited upsides and YUGE potential downsides. Escalation would mean a massive commitment in terms of American troops, treasure, and time. We would be in Iran indefinitely with all that would entail. Standing down would mean a strategic victory for Iran that leaves the regime in power and with increased stature as the de facto controller of access to the Persian Gulf.

The US military has done everything asked of it, but it seems increasingly likely that we may lose the war strategically because of massive incompetence and failure to seriously consider alternatives if the plan of Iran’s regime falling quickly did not come to fruition. What makes this even worse was that such a Hail Mary scenario was always unlikely.

This was a major reason that Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush again, Obama, and Biden did not order a war against Iran (which they probably would have done with congressional input, if they had). It wasn’t that previous presidents didn’t have the intestinal fortitude to issue order that would result in thousands of deaths, many of them American, it was that they understood the risks were very high relative to the likely rewards.

At a fork in the road with two bad choices, the most rational choice now seems to be to escalate and push for regime change in order to keep the world economy afloat and prevent the mullahs from returning with a nuclear weapon in the future, because if the regime survives, it will definitely see becoming a nuclear power as the only way to keep from being the target of another US-Israeli war. Make no mistake, this is not a good option, but it does seem to be the least bad option.

The problem for the Trump Administration is that it got this far without congressional buy-in and now we are in the midst of an unpopular war that is rapidly turning into the tar baby scenario that I wrote about a month ago. Trump will need congressional authorization and appropriations to continue the fight, but there is no guarantee he will get them. If he does, it is likely to boost the level of the shellacking that Republicans are about to receive in the midterms. There is an even-money chance that Trump TACOs for political reasons.

I wouldn’t say the US is losing at the moment, but time is on the side of the Iranian regime. The mullahs just have to hang on while public support for the war continues to plummet. The pressure is on Trump to either poop or get off the pot. Everyone knows by this point that the war isn’t going to be won in the air.

As I have said in the past, I’m tired of America winning battles and losing wars, yet it seems we are headed down that road once again, whether we leave the Gulf this week or fight for 20 years and then leave. We have the greatest military in the world, but our politicians have the habit of putting our soldiers into unwinnable situations.

This war is solely due to Donald Trump’s hubris and ineffectiveness as a leader. As many of us warned, allowing the president to do whatever he wanted with no accountability was bound to land him in trouble. Now, he is out of the frying pan and into the fire, taking America and the world with him.

Iran’s regime was a legitimate, though not imminent, threat. The irony is that the war is more likely to bring regime change in the US than Iran.

THE THURSDAY MASSACRE Heads figuratively rolled on Thursday. Trump fired AG Pam Bondi while Defense Secretary Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff and highest ranking officer, along with the heads of Army’s Training and Transformation Command and chaplain corps.

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