“There are decades where nothing happens,” Vladimir Lenin is supposed to have said (but didn’t), “and there are weeks where decades happen.” Welcome to the beginning of March, Anno Domini 2026.
One week ago, on February 28, the United States and Israel commenced an attack on Iran. At first, it seemed to be merely a ramped-up continuation of Operation Midnight Hammer, the raid conducted last June when the United States, following up on Israel’s preliminary attacks, destroyed (“completely and totally obliterated”) three key nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. It was an extraordinary operation, in which four B-2 bombers, having flown for 30 hours from the United States, mounted an astonishing precision strike with fourteen 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, together with submarine-fired Tomahawk cruise missiles.
But Midnight Hammer was merely a preliminary salvo compared to Epic Fury, the pulverizing assault that the United States and Israel (under the name “Roaring Lion”) launched last Saturday. The world has not seen anything like this since 1945, when the United States and its allies crushed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Having learned from the aftermath of the Great War that armistice is often but another name for false victory, President Trump adopted as his motto the phrase that definitively ended World War II: “unconditional surrender.”
Trump understands, as so many “experts” have failed to understand, that the object of armed conflict is to win. So often in recent decades, the United States has embarked on war, or warlike activity, with no plan for victory. Early on in the War on Terror, for example, the U.S. located Mullah Omar, the Taliban head honcho who coddled al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan. The American forces were not, however, allowed simply to take him out. Restrictive rules of engagement required them to wire back to Washington to ask permission. By the time the proper authorities could answer, it was too late. Omar had vanished back into some unknown cave.
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