I wrote the post below the line back in April, but got pulled into other things, and never posted it. But I feel pretty vindicated: since late March, the Times’s narrative has turned 180 degrees. In March, they were quoting officials quite sure that Iran’s leadership was too “fractured” to act in a unified way. Remember that? By July 29, the narrative became: “Trump Encounters a More Determined Iran as War Widens.” By August 1, it was: “In Iran, the U.S. Appears Headed for Strategic Defeat, Allies Fear.”

Good call, NYT, but how the fuck did that happen? How did Iran go from being all fractured and confused to achieving victory over the supposedly unified and all-powerful United States in four months? One possibility is that though “fractured,” Iran had the capacity to heal its “fractures” pretty fast. The other is that Iran was never all that fractured in the first place. In the first case, we’ve gotten no account from the Times of the transition from the one thing to the other; in the other, we’ve gotten no acknowledgement of its false assessment of Iranian dysfunction. Either way, the question arises: how much do these journalistic “experts” really know, anyway? To the extent that they know anything, how much of their knowledge is ultimately neutralized by the desire to generate nationalist propaganda?

“Iran’s Fractured Leadership” (written early April 2026)

The lead story in The New York Times right now [March 30] has a headline that reads, “Iran’s Fractured Leadership Is Struggling to Coordinate, Officials Say.” The article provides literally zero evidence that Iran’s leadership is in any sense fractured or struggling to coordinate anything. The crux of the article is contained in the last two words of the headline: “Officials Say.” The officials in question are “officials familiar with U.S. and Western intelligence assessments.” How familiar are they? How good are the assessments? Why should we believe a word of this? Not a word of answer. The credibility of the story turns on the reader’s faith in the unquoted assertions of unnamed sources standing at an unspecified proximity to the truth. That’s the best these assholes can do.

“While Iran’s security and military agencies continue to function, the government’s ability to plan new strategies or policies has been weakened.” Really? Then why are they winning the fucking war?

Beware of “news” that’s indistinguishable from the wishful thinking of powerful people up a shit’s creek of their own making:

The Trump administration has said a new government is in charge in Iran and has pressed it to make a quick deal. But the more degraded Iranian decision making becomes, the more difficult it will be for it to negotiate with American envoys or make significant concessions.

That presupposes that Iran wants to negotiate with American envoys or make significant concessions. What evidence is there that it does?

Princeton ROTC’s idea of a flex: zero awareness that “U.S. Army Air Assault” has lost every war it’s fought since 1945, that it’s badly losing one now, and that ROTC itself is sending newly-minted college graduates into a war of aggression and into military defeat, maiming, and death. Note the civilians in the photo: zero awareness that the ceremony is a legitimate target, and that the civilians are human shields.

And why should it? The Iranian spokesman has made abundantly clear why none of that is true, and none of it makes sense. The Iranians hold the strategic advantage. They’ve hit every American base in the region, rendering all of them uninhabitable and unusable. They’ve rendered American radar nearly useless. They’re hitting American planes on the tarmac in Saudi Arabia. They’ve wrecked the fragile Gulf alliance, and they hold the Strait of Hormuz. If that’s how they function when they’re “fractured,” the United States should be thankful they’re not whole.

The mighty American military, the same one that spent the last two years serving up pedantic lectures about how everyone else–Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia–uses civilians as “human shields,” is now hiding in hotels in the cities of the GCC and elsewhere, hiding behind civilians, and dialing into the war by remote control (see this as well, about the U.S. military retreat to Norfolk, Virginia).* How is the Iranian leadership more “fractured” than that? How is the Iranian military more fractured than a military in retreat?

The only option left to salvage any part of this war is a ground invasion, but the idea of a ground invasion of Iran is so transparently suicidal and stupid that it’s hard to believe that anyone on the American side is taking it seriously. And yet they are. It’s obvious to anyone following the course of this war that the U.S. government is understandably ambivalent about a ground invasion. It faces a dilemma either way. If it invades, it courts the real possibility of high cost defeat. But if it doesn’t invade, it does the same thing. Isn’t a government caught within a dilemma like that as functionally fractured as the Iranian government is supposed to be? But isn’t the evidence of that fracture about a thousand times more obvious than the evidence of fracture within Iran?

The Iranian strategy is obvious: it’s to exact an unforgettable cost, not only on the United States but on everyone complicit in American machinations. Don’t aggress against us again. Better yet, leave the region and don’t come back. How is that “fractured”? It not only has an obvious internal coherence, it has an obvious justification: the U.S, and Israel aggressed against Iran. Whatever their differences, Iranians don’t like being the victims of aggression. So whatever the state of this or that member of their leadership, they’re unifying against the aggressors. How difficult is it to grasp that, or report it? It is for American journalists. Everything becomes difficult when reality is your enemy.

Welcome to Norfolk! Taken from the grounds of the Sheraton Norfolk Waterside Hotel (February 2025), which might as well have been called the Sheraton Norfolk Naval Hotel.

Julian Barnes, Adam Goldman, and Ronen Bergman have hugely inflated reputations as “experts” on military affairs. But it takes no expertise to see right through the fairy story they’re telling here. They’re trying as hard as they can to conjure up evidence that the Iranians face some terrible quandary. They present no evidence whatsoever for this claim. It’s the Americans, not the Iranians, who face a quandary, and it takes an act of projection to think that you can turn an American quandary into an Iranian one by citing the wishful thinking of the people who need that to be true. But this is their idea of journalism.

How about a bit of Ockham’s Razor? What if the actual explanation is that what’s happened is exactly what the Iranians predicted would happen, and planned for? The visible leaders, like their visible weapons systems, have been hit by the indiscriminate firepower of the United States and Israel. But there are no actual “intelligence assessments” about the rest–no bona fide evidence that the leadership has been fractured in any functional sense, and no evidence that Iran’s weapons systems have so adversely been affected as to render it incapable of fighting. Intelligence is precisely the missing link here, in both its technical and its colloquial senses. These are journalists desperately parroting the desperation of frightened, ignorant people (aka, the United States Government) whose only hope is to convince the electorate that the miracle of victory is around the next corner. If only we show patience, the suggestion seems to be, our great military will produce it.

There is no miracle. It’s not around the next corner. What we’re witnessing is simply the return of the repressed–the revenge of the reality principle. An imperial nation elected a sociopath and made him a dictator. A morally lax nation made every excuse for him, and cut him all the slack he ever needed whenever he needed it. Now he’s gotten himself into a bind, dragging half of the rest of the world into it with him. At just the moment when journalists might be relied on to expose the nature of the failure, they show up to obscure it through obfuscation, confabulation, and wishful thinking.

The sick truth here is that at some level, every American “patriot” wants America to defeat Iran, even if victory comes at the price of justice by doubling down on aggression. It takes a traitor to see and tell the truth. The only journalism worth reading today is one comfortable with treason. When a country is as far gone as ours, the normalization of treason becomes the first approximation to impartiality. That’s why Iran’s propaganda has become the guilty pleasure it is. Eventually, the guilt itself gives way to acquiescence. You can’t fight reality. You just have to join it. Who will tell The Times?

*Note the coy (and frankly dishonest) failure in this piece to describe where the soldiers in Norfolk are staying. “One thing that’s missing from our understanding of the war,” we’re piously told, “is much detail of the experience of American troops.” Right. What’s missing is any acknowledgement that sailors and soldiers routinely stay in commercial (“civilian”) hotels in Norfolk, home to the largest concentration of U.S. naval facilities in the world. You can’t spend a day in Norfolk without finding yourself in the company of military personnel: no civilian can avoid them.

If there are no military facilities available to house military personnel, the standard practice in the U.S. military is to request a Certificate of Nonavailability (CNA) authorizing a stay in an ordinary hotel, and authorizing reimbursement for it. And obviously, the influx of personnel evacuated from the Gulf was such that many had to request CNA’s, not that any American news outlets had the honesty or integrity to report this. When I stayed at the Sheraton in Norfolk back in February 2025, it was full of naval personnel: their presence in the hotel and throughout the city was taken for granted. It takes real dishonesty to ignore a fact this obvious while fixating on Hamas’s or Hezbollah’s supposed proximity to civilians, as virtually all Western outlets have. But such dishonesty, re-described as patriotism, is par for the course within the American media establishment. That dishonesty is a major driver of Americans’ embarrassing ignorance of the world, and of the double standards they’re routinely expected to take for granted.