Michael Doran presents a longish, well-reasoned deep dive into what the assault on the Mad Mullah regime is really all about.

Seven Myths About the Iran War
Why so many, on both the left and the right, keep getting Trump wrong

Donald Trump’s actions in the Middle East continually surprise the foreign-policy establishment and the media elite. According to commentators on both the right and the left, the reason is that Trump is a megalomaniac—or, as Jon Stewart and former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently agreed on The Daily Show, perhaps addicted to cocaine.

Yet while Trump has repeatedly defied the Beltway consensus on Iran and its allies over the past year and a half, none of the dire consequences that influential commentators predicted have come to pass. World War III hasn’t erupted. The global economy hasn’t collapsed. Instead, the Iranian leadership is dead or decapitated, its nuclear weapons program is buried beneath mountains of rubble, and most of its navy lies at the bottom of the sea. While the loss of 13 U.S. servicemen is a serious matter, it is hardly the thousands of dead and wounded that were routinely predicted as the consequence of any major U.S. action. Israel still exists. So do Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, along with their oil reserves.

Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events. Tehran’s “successful” war-fighting tactics supposedly forced Trump to accept a cease-fire. Onlookers were then baffled when the United States walked away from talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, and took steps to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to the strategic detriment of China and the benefit of U.S. energy producers.

In part, the surprises keep coming because the cognoscenti refuse to credit Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a win. On April 11, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said the quiet part out loud on CNN’s podcast “Smerconish.” He admitted that while he wanted to see the Iranian regime defeated militarily “because this regime is a terrible regime for its people and the region,” the real problem for him was something else entirely: “I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war because they are two awful human beings. They are both engaged in antidemocratic projects in their own countries. They’re both alleged crooks. They are terrible, terrible people doing terrible things to America’s standing in the world and Israel’s standing in the world.”

Yeah, well, Thomas Friedman *shrug*.

Friedman’s attitude is not idiosyncratic. Across much of the American and Israeli media, seasoned pundits cannot set aside their contempt for Trump and Netanyahu and have joined the chorus portraying the operation as aimless adventurism. In doing so, they advance the very arguments that serve America’s enemies, undermining the credibility of a successful deterrent action and weakening the case for strong, burden-sharing alliances in the 21st century.

Trump’s Iran campaign is proving so difficult for many observers to parse because it is two conflicts in one. On the battlefield, it pits American and Israeli forces against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). At home, in the realm of ideological warfare, it sets two rival American strategic belief systems against each other—but with a twist. In one corner stand traditional conservatives, represented today by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. In the other stand the transnational progressives associated with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But this corner is crowded: Alongside them are influential isolationist figures such as Tucker Carlson and restraint-oriented institutions such as the Cato Institute and Defense Priorities, which routinely repeat the same arguments, often verbatim.

Why does the isolationist right stand shoulder to shoulder with the globalist left? Along with a common set of enemies in Trump and Netanyahu, the progressives and America Firsters share a dislike for American global leadership and the use of military force, and therefore they both excuse the behavior of America’s enemies while blaming it for any conflict. When it comes to interpreting Trump’s foreign policy and its results, the two groups often function as one.

Okay, enough already with the excerpting. Definitely read every word of this one, people, it’s a good ‘un.