Tag: Strait of Hormuz

US amphibious assault ship at sea with Kharg Island visible on the horizon, Persian Gulf

Iwo Jima, They Said: Marines Move on Iran as Tel Aviv Burns and the Alliance Dissolves

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Lindsey Graham is evoking Iwo Jima. Iran is mining Kharg Island’s shoreline. Seven thousand five hundred US Marines are days away from the Persian Gulf. The war is 26 days old, has cost $18 billion, and the White House’s official position is that they need about a month to “get Iran by the balls.” Australia is calling for de-escalation. The crease in the trousers remains arrow-straight.

Satirical editorial cartoon showing a dancing monkey in a gold tie on a Middle East map, flanked by two organ grinder figures – one in a Western suit, one in Gulf robes holding a bone-saw. A burning oil tanker sits on dark water behind them. A dragon watches from above. A small applauding figure stands in the corner. Illustration in the style of George Grosz and Gerald Scarfe.

Don’t blame the organ-grinder; the monkey had a choice.

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Trump didn’t stumble into the Iran disaster alone. Every catastrophe has its infrastructure – the courtiers, the flatterers, the transactionalists, the true believers, and the merely opportunistic who supplied the scaffolding. Bibi and MBS worked the organ grinders’ handles with professional dedication. But the monkey chose to dance. And in the corner, a daggy bloke from Cronulla was clapping.

An evangelical church interior with a Middle East map projected above the pulpit, flanked by American and Israeli flags.

The Fog of Holy War: How America and Israel Blundered Into a Conflict They Cannot Win, Cannot Define, and Cannot End

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There is an old military principle, so obvious it barely needs stating: before you start a war, know what winning looks like. Know how it ends. Have a plan for the morning after. The United States and Israel, in launching Operation Epic Fury against Iran … Continue reading The Fog of Holy War: How America and Israel Blundered Into a Conflict They Cannot Win, Cannot Define, and Cannot End

Silhouetted figures seated at a circular table in a bare, harshly lit room, backs turned to a door standing slightly ajar, light bleeding through the crack.

No Exit

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Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a play about three people locked in a room with an unlocked door nobody would walk through. He called it No Exit. He was writing about Operation Epic Fury seventy years before it happened. A forensic anatomy of a war built from mutual imprisonment, strategic miscalculation, and the fatal habit of assuming the other side thinks like us.

Dark editorial illustration of shadowy figures in ornate portrait frames on a gallery wall, a burning city visible through a window behind them, suggesting the architects and beneficiaries of a catastrophic war.

Netanyahu, MBS, Putin and the Useful Idiot 

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Russia feeds Tehran American targeting intelligence. Netanyahu needs the war to continue. MBS counts his oil revenues. One hundred and seventy-five children were at school in Minab when the missile struck. The mathematics of this catastrophe have been visible from the start. That nobody in Washington appears to have done the sums is the most damning fact of all.

Dark editorial illustration of a suited figure shouting into a microphone at a podium, facing a vast labyrinth of ruins under a bruised purple sky with a distant burning city on the horizon.

Trump, The Dealmaker’s Fatal Error

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Trump demands unconditional surrender from a nation of 90 million. Iran elects a hardline new Supreme Leader and rules out any ceasefire. The MAGA
coalition fractures. What began as targeted strikes has become a war without an exit, a plan, or a president capable of admitting either.

Satirical illustration of a chaotic war cabinet: an orange-tinted central figure gestures at a Middle East map while two suited advisers argue across a table strewn with classified folders. A pale isolated figure sits apart in shadow. A screen shows Tehran under attack. A Caribbean fishing boat is visible through the window.

Trump’s Team at War With Itself

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There is a peculiar kind of drama playing out inside the Trump Bunker of the Bizarre. Its theme? The accidental Armageddon. A government so witless it could not run a bath has launched the most ambitious US military operation in living memory — and nobody in Team Trump can agree on why, for how long, or what winning looks like. Urban Wronski reports in two parts.

Editorial illustration representing a small power directing a large military force — a metaphor for Israel's strategic influence over US military action against Iran in 2026.

The Tail That Wags the Dog: Israel’s War, America’s Blood

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Three American soldiers are dead. A girls’ primary school in Minab is rubble. The Strait of Hormuz is under threat. Regional war has arrived — exactly as every credible analyst, diplomat and international lawyer predicted. Urban Wronski on how Israel wagged the most powerful dog in the world into the most dangerous Middle Eastern conflagration since Iraq 2003.

Satirical illustration of a large cartoon dog in the Oval Office, its wagging tail scattering military documents, while a small figure holds its leash and an aircraft carrier is visible through the window against a blood-red sky.

America’s Wag-the-Dog Moment

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A flailing administration, a nuclear pretext recycled from the WMD workshop of 2003, and an Israel that appears to be setting the tempo of a potential world war. Before the missiles fly, Urban Wronski asks the question Washington’s press won’t: is this about Iran — or about saving Trump from himself?