PART THREE OF THREE

This is the concluding part of a series that began as two pieces and became three, for the same reason this war began as a targeted operation and is becoming something else entirely. Part One, “Trump’s Team at War With Itself,” was published 8 March. Part Two, “The Dealmaker’s Cul-de-Sac,” was published 9 March.

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How This War Actually Started

Axios has the story of the phone call that blew up the world. On 23 February, Netanyahu rings Trump. Between them, in the two months prior to the war, they had met twice and phoned fifteen times. The plan was to strike in late March or early April, giving Trump’s team of cronies, crawlers and crackpots, time to build public support. Netanyahu was impatient. He began “agitating,” claiming that Iranian opposition leaders sheltering in safe houses were in danger of being killed by the regime. Trump was already leaning toward another lovely war. What the vacillator had not decided was when.

Netanyahu’s call fixed all that.

On Friday 27 February at 3:38 p.m. EST, Trump gives the final order. Eleven hours later, the US bombs the living daylights out of Tehran. “We didn’t make the case in advance as well as we could have,” a US official blabs, “because the opportunity came on us so fast.” Ambushed by reality, yet again? Another admits the messaging was muddled because the White House found itself justifying the war after the bombs had already fallen rather than before. Because of Netanyahu’s push, no evacuation plan existed for American citizens in the region. More than 1,500 Americans requested emergency assistance to get out. Asked by reporters why there was no evacuation plan, Trump replied: “Well, because it happened all very quickly.” Disaster is like that.

The Omani foreign minister, who had been mediating indirect nuclear negotiations between the US and Iran in February, had publicly said just days before the strikes that “peace was within reach” and that Iran was willing to make concessions. Trump said he was “not thrilled” with the talks. Netanyahu was not happy either. Iran was negotiating in good faith. They attacked anyway.

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The Missing Face

Trump’s mad war on Iran sports a rogue’s gallery of actors in bad faith. Yet one face is conspicuously absent from the official portrait gallery of “A Battle in search of a plan, Trump’s Mad Attack on Iran.” It belongs to the man with the most to gain.

Benjamin Netanyahu is currently on trial for corruption. His coalition collapses the moment the war ends and domestic political attention returns to his legal jeopardy. He has every incentive to ensure this conflict does not end. He has provided the targeting intelligence, the political architecture, and the theological framing. Iran is an existential civilisational threat. Genius. Trump’s “unconditional surrender” demand is to Trump’s in ear a vow of statesmanship rather than stark, raving derangement.

Israel has outsourced its Iran problem to the US military, the US taxpayer, and ultimately GI Joe. The bill, as ever, will not be itemised. Netanyahu gets Trump. He sees him with all the clarity of a man whose own survival depends on it.

What does he see? Trump’s vanity and his hunger for a historic win are a winning formula. For Bibi that is. The Christian Science Monitor notes that Netanyahu has “bonded politically” with Trump “over a shared, strongman approach”. For decades, “Bibi” the man who jokes about killing Palestinians as “mowing the lawn” he’s been hell-bent on a quest to destroy Tehran.

No matter how the war ends, Netanyahu can claim vindication. For as long as it continues, he remains in office and out of jail.

The Conversation is less diplomatic: it was Netanyahu who dragged “the poorly educated Donald Trump, with a whole bunch of psychological perversions, into a war that has no linear solution.” Gaza, they note, is 4,515 times smaller than Iran. Israel spent two and a half years failing to subdue it. That alone ought to have given everyone pause. It did not give Netanyahu pause. He was not, in this reading, seeking a quick win. He was seeking to buy time: wreck Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure just enough to set the programme back years, regardless of whether the regime falls. Trump, the mug punter, on a hiding to nothing at home is chasing an historic deal. The US will pay and mop up some of the blood. Netanyahu collects the strategic dividend.

Cunning, certainly. But even Netanyahu is upstaged by Mohammed bin Salman, who executes the most elegant manoeuvre in this entire catastrophe. “Bone-saw” bin Salman provides American basing rights, watches Iranian missiles land on Bahraini infrastructure rather than Saudi, and says nothing. Iranian strikes hit Bahrain’s main airport, a desalination plant, and a university. Kuwait’s government buildings and airport are struck. US personnel are evacuated from the Saudi diplomatic mission. The Strait of Hormuz closes. MBS keeps his counsel, his oil revenues climb with every barrel above $100. In Riyadh, this passes for masterful diplomacy.

Russia Whispers

But Tsar Putin takes the cake. Russian duplicity ought to dominate all news. A chorus of US officials confirm that Russia is quietly, on the sly, feeding Tehran intelligence on US troop positions, ships, and aircraft, directly helping Iran target its hits back across the Gulf. Iran has received Russian MiG-29 and Su-35 fighter jets and Mil Mi-28 attack helicopters since last June’s war. Its air defence capabilities have been boosted by Moscow. The US and Israel now avoid Iranian airspace largely because of Russian-supplied systems, preferring to fire missiles from jets positioned in the baking deserts of neighbouring airspaces.

Trump dismisses Moscow’s double-cross: “They’re not doing so well at the moment. If they are helping, it’s not doing much.”

Of course they are. But The Pepsi-Cola King of both Americas has decreed. This is the same imperious contempt for reality that has characterised every other assessment this administration makes about this war. It is not doing much. Until it is.

Moscow has calculated that a prolonged American military commitment in the Gulf is the single most effective distraction available from Ukraine, from NATO, from every other theatre where Russian interests are at stake. And it’s a money-spinner. Kpler’s commodity analysts note that the conflict is materially improving Russia’s competitive position in crude oil markets, with both India and China now are turning toward Russian supply as Middle East barrels face logistical sea-route-blocks. This is not altruism toward Tehran. It is venal, strategic opportunism of the highest order, and Trump the mug is providing it free.

The Mathematics of Catastrophe

Senator Mark Kelly asks the killer question: if Iran’s nuclear programme was obliterated, as Trump claimed after Operation Midnight Hammer last June, why is it now being offered as the justification for this war?

The answer, of course, is that it was not obliterated. Not remotely. The June 2025 strikes set the programme back by an estimated two years. Ten months later, the US is at war again, and Trump is now telling reporters that Iran was secretly working on enrichment “at a totally different site.” So 3,000 strikes on the original sites have led to a spend of $891 million a day, oil above $100 a barrel, and a new Supreme Leader who is more hardline than the one the bombs were supposed to intimidate?

Time for straight talking. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is not a future risk. It is today’s catastrophe. Kpler’s vessel tracking shows that commercial operators, major oil companies, and insurers have effectively withdrawn from the corridor. Qatar has halted gas production entirely and declared force majeure on gas contracts. On 6 March, Qatar’s Energy Minister warns that if the war continues, other Gulf energy producers may be forced to halt exports and declare force majeure, and that “this will bring down economies of the world.” European natural gas prices have nearly doubled. Goldman Sachs estimates the conflict has added $14 per barrel to oil prices as a pure risk premium, corresponding to the effect of a full four-week Hormuz closure. The Stimson Center puts it plainly: once insurance becomes uncertain or prohibitively expensive, trade slows faster than the formal status of the waterway changes. Shipping insurance clerks, in pinstripes, becomes the market’s bovver boys for geopolitical fear.

Chatham House’s economists calculate that if oil climbs toward $100 a barrel and stays there, global inflation could run roughly one percentage point higher than pre-conflict forecasts, with GDP growth perhaps 0.25 to 0.4 percentage points lower. For fragile emerging economies, the effect could be catastrophic. CSIS notes that global supplies are now running approximately 20 million barrels per day short of demand. The shale patch, for all its productivity, cannot fill a Hormuz-sized hole.

The sheer scale of US miscalculation is staggering. Iran’s 90 million is more than double Iraq’s population in the 2003 invasion. Its territory covers nearly half the European continent. Tehran’s metropolitan area holds 16 million people, comparable in scale to greater New York. US veterans of Iraq recall that clearing a single large building in Baghdad could take five to eight hours of exhausting, lethal room-to-room combat. Urban warfare in Tehran does not merely beggar the imagination. It bankrupts it.

Reliable data is readily available. Yet the Trump regime doesn’t do data. There is, for example, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project which began in 1997, originally at the University of Sussex and which now operates globally. ACLED’s analysts are unambiguous: full capitulation by Iran, remains unlikely even after the killing of Khamenei. Washington may be banking on rapid internal fracture or large-scale defections within the IRGC. There is, as yet, no evidence of either. A successful popular uprising is also, in ACLED’s assessment, improbable. The public is unarmed, unorganised, and confronting one of the most repressive security apparatuses in the region, one that killed thousands as recently as January 2026. The regime retains internal security institutions fully capable of suppressing civilian dissent. The IRGC has not cracked. It has consolidated.

Washington is also in danger of running out of ammo. The ever-saturnine Marco Rubio, himself, acknowledges that Iran produces over 100 ballistic missiles a month compared to six or seven American interceptors. During last June’s 12-day operation, the US burned through a quarter of its entire THAAD interceptor stockpile. The Institute for the Study of War tracks 384 Iranian drones intercepted in the Gulf states alone in the opening days of this conflict. A THAAD radar system in Qatar is destroyed outright.

Iran is expending its older missiles strategically, forcing the US and Israel to burn expensive interceptors while conserving its advanced solid-fuel missiles for when its enemies are more vulnerable. Under Secretary Colby assures Congress there is “a very plentiful supply” of munitions. The mathematics suggest he is reassuring himself as much as the committee.

There is also the money. At $891 million a day, almost entirely unbudgeted, in a country already $36 trillion in debt with Elon Musk’s DOGE chainsaw tearing through domestic services, the financial arithmetic of extending this campaign toward a ground operation is not merely alarming. It is existential. The War Powers Act gives Trump 60 to 90 days before mandatory withdrawal without congressional authorisation. The clock started ticking on 28 February. It has not stopped.

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The Human Cost

The numbers are still coming in, of course. They will get much worse before they get better. Iran’s official losses stand at 1,255 dead, but human rights organisations estimate the true toll exceeds 2,400. The Iranian Red Crescent has confirmed nearly 800 killed from its own counts. More than 200 cities across Iran have been struck since 28 February.

On the first day of the war, a missile struck a primary school in Minab in southern Iran, adjacent to an IRGC complex. One hundred and seventy-five children and staff were killed. They were at school. A resident of Tehran, speaking anonymously to Jacobin, said: “When people heard the bitter news, they were worried we would be turned into Palestinians.”

Jacobin’s correspondent also reports double-tap strikes against police stations — hit the site, wait for the rescuers, hit it again. It is not a new tactic. Russia used it in Syria and Ukraine. It is, however, a war crime, regardless of who deploys it. Oil storage facilities in Tehran have been hit, sending toxic smoke across a city whose residents have already been advised to shelter indoors with windows shut. Iran’s environment minister warns of acid rain, soil contamination, and lasting respiratory damage, particularly for children and the elderly. “This is not a military target,” he said. He is correct.

Eight US service members are now confirmed dead. At least 13 Israeli civilians have been killed by Iranian strikes. The Gulf states have absorbed dozens of casualties. Over half of Tehran’s population of 17 million has fled to the countryside or to smaller towns. The Strait of Hormuz is closed and global shipping is in crisis.

These are not abstract strategic data points. They are the human arithmetic of a war launched without a plan, prosecuted without a coherent objective, and justified with claims that its own architects have been quietly walking back since day one. The Soufan Center notes, with the restraint of an institution that must choose its words carefully, that global and regional leaders are now “dissecting statements by Trump and Netanyahu for a clear exit strategy from the war in Iran.” They are not finding one.

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The Waiting Game

Trump tells a reporter he always thought this would take “about four weeks.” Vance says there will be no multi-year conflict. Hegseth says you do not need 200,000 troops. The Iranian foreign minister says his country is waiting for US ground troops and will not be seeking a ceasefire. Iran’s parliament speaker, a former Revolutionary Guard general, posts on X:

“As long as the presence of US bases in the region continues, the countries will not enjoy peace.” Iran’s Supreme National Security Council secretary tells Trump he must “pay the price.” Trump’s response: “I have no idea what he’s talking about, who he is. I couldn’t care less.”

The war the Trump administration cannot agree on why it started is drifting, at $891 million a day, toward the invasion the administration cannot agree it is planning, to achieve the regime change it cannot explain how to deliver, in a country that has survived sanctions, assassinations, a proxy war, a 12-day bombing campaign, the loss of its Supreme Leader, Russian intelligence support, and the election of a new leader under fire, and has not yet surrendered. Has not, in fact, given any indication it intends to.

A few senior Israeli officials are now quietly asking how the war ends. The Washington Post reports that some are starting to voice concern about the escalating, open-ended nature of the campaign and suggesting possible exit ramps. Netanyahu, predictably, is not among them. He has vowed “many surprises” for the next phase.

History does not repeat itself. But sometimes, watching men in suits and uniforms and crusader tattoos march cockily toward catastrophe, it rhymes with a precision that ought to stop the blood cold. The last time a US president launches a war of choice against a Middle Eastern nation on shifting justifications, with no plan for what comes after, it takes twenty years, $1.9 trillion, and 4,431 American lives to get back to where they started.

Iran is three times the size of Iraq.

Netanyahu needs the war to continue. MBS is counting his oil revenues. Russia is counting its strategic dividends. And somewhere in the tunnels beneath Tehran, the IRGC is waiting.

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This concludes a three-part series on Operation Epic Fury. Part One, “Trump’s Team at War With Itself,” was published 8 March 2026. Part Two, “The Dealmaker’s Cul-de-Sac,” was published 9 March 2026.