Asher Bennett retweetledi
I despise Al Jazeera. But this analysis by Exeter University professor Muhanad Seloom is worth reading:
• “Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war.”
• “But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.”
• “When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.”
• “When proxies launch retaliatory attacks across the region, this is not evidence of an expanding network; it is evidence of predelegated response authority, which is what a centralised command system activates when it anticipates its own destruction. Predelegation is a sign of desperation, not strength. It means the centre can no longer coordinate. The attacks will continue, but they will become increasingly uncoordinated, strategically incoherent and politically costly for the host states where these groups operate.”
• “Seventeen days in, Iran’s supreme leader is dead, his successor is reportedly wounded and every principal instrument of Iranian power projection – missiles, nuclear infrastructure, air defences, the navy, proxy command networks – has been degraded beyond near-term recovery. The campaign’s execution has been imperfect, its public communication poor and its post-conflict planning incomplete. War is never clean. But the strategy – the actual strategy, measured in degraded capabilities rather than cable news cycles – is working.”
aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/…
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