Iran Has Been A Disaster For 'The Experts'
They have been wrong about absolutely everything
Anyone who says they already know what comes next is lying and you can safely ignore them. Everyone who said that Donald Trump was doing too much, then said that he was not doing enough, then said he was doing too much again, and is once again saying he has not done enough, can be safely ignored as well.
The people who told you that words are violence not so long ago were telling you that Trump’s words were literal genocide yesterday, and today they are calling him weak. People who think that bridge strikes are war crimes are not worth listening to, thereafter. Ukraine conducts bridge strikes every day. This is basic to the laws of land warfare.
American and Israeli forces have destroyed every significant IRGC military target and most of their key economic targets that support strategic aggression. This weekend, there was “a widespread disruption in the computer network of Bank Sepah”, the state-owned IRGC bank. “Informed sources told Iran International the disruption on Sunday left the bank unable to pay the salaries of the Revolutionary Guard’s personnel and military officials.”
What I had told premium subscribers to expect has come to pass. I do not claim to be an Iran expert, just a person with reading comprehension and an interest in Iran. We are now watching a bargaining phase unfold. Denial gave way to anger and now acceptance in Tehran.
Of course, someone in Iran immediately broke the ceasefire by shooting at the neighbors. Seventeen ballistic missiles and 35 drones were reportedly launched at the Emirates alone after the ceasefire was supposedly in effect. It is unclear that a unified command actually exists in Iran and IRGC factions may be emerging. This morning, the Emiratis began pummeling refineries and storage tanks on the islands of Siri and Lavan. Infrastructure that took decades for the regime to build will not be replaced overnight.
The Emirates have had enough of the regime in Tehran. Last week, “UAE authorities detained dozens of money changers tied to financial entities linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, shut down associated companies and closed their offices.” Dubai is described by experts as “an economic lung for the Iranian regime” and “the single most critical jurisdiction in the Iranian regime’s sanctions-evasion architecture”. The critical sarraf (money changers) were banished, cutting off their informal networks. This human infrastructure is as difficult to replace as the physical plant.
Pakistan’s involvement in the “very fragile” ceasefire (J.D. Vance’s words) points to the new alignment of Iran’s Sunni neighbors against Tehran. Islamabad cannot afford a regional war. Not only do they have their old conflict with India, Pakistan has a new, active conflict with the Afghan Taliban. The Baloch region shared between Pakistan and Iran is already restive.
This is not Iran being victorious, this is Iran being contained and reduced. “Your choice is not between survival and collapse; it is about how you collapse”, Reza Pahlavi told the IRGC on Sunday. “The end of the current path is the delivery of a scorched earth to the Iranian nation following your inevitable downfall.” I do not think he is wrong. As I have maintained since the shooting started, the IRGC must decide how it wants to die.
Details are still fuzzy. Israel says Hezbollah is not included, Iran says they are. History may record that a ceasefire began at 8:00 PM Eastern Time on 7 April 2026, that it seemed to teeter, and finally held. Or, history may record that the ceasefire collapsed immediately and never recovered. Either way, it is impossible to pretend that the IRGC has enjoyed a military victory.
Regular readers will recall me harping on the difference between the IRGC and Artesh, the actual armed forces of Iran. US and IDF strikes have very clearly concentrated on the former to the exclusion of the latter. Put another way, the biggest rival military force that the Revolutionary Guard has right now is already in Iran, because it is the Army of Iran, and its command is practically untouched.
Did your commentators ever mention this nuance? If not, then why are you listening to their nuanced opinions on anything else about Iran? I am not asking because I claim expertise. I am asking because this war has been a complete disaster for the professional class of American experts. Their reputation is deservedly taking a beating every day as they embarrass themselves with Trump-deranged moodswings disguised as opinions.
They said it would be World War III. They said there would be a draft. They said there would be an invasion. They concern-trolled about Trump using nuclear weapons and called him a war criminal in advance. According to one conspiracy theory that I encountered on Monday, Pete Hegseth fired the head of the Army chaplain corps to get rid of someone who would not follow illegal orders to use nuclear weapons. This deranged tweet had been shared by thousands of idiots.
There was not supposed to be any plan, and then the plan was not supposed to work, and now the plan has failed before the first meeting. Trump refuses to put up with frozen conflicts. This confuses and bewilders professional experts on frozen conflicts. The last thing such people want is drastic change to the subject of their expertise.
Some of us are old enough to remember Stephen Cohen, Jerry Hough, and Seweryn Bialer, prominent academics who resisted admitting the Soviet Union was collapsing until it was gone. All three tried to prop up the dying regime with hopes, insisting it was durable and strong and capable of change. But they were not alone, indeed there were too many prominent intelligence analysts, journalists, and officials in Washington, DC who shared the assumption that the USSR was a permanent fixture on the world map — and then called its collapse a “mystery”.
Something definitely broke the will to fight of Trump’s negotiating partners in Iran. I suspect it was the Easter weekend battle to rescue an American pilot. American units that had been created in the wake of the disaster at Desert One during the abortive embassy rescue mission in 1980 constructed a base inside Iranian territory and fought off the best fighters the regime could send with the aid of plentiful close air support. CIA operations reportedly delayed Iran’s ground response with a crowd response by Iranians.
I look forward to a more complete timeline and primary sources on this intense battle, since it was clearly a history-making event and a perfect bookend to America’s 47-year conflict with the Islamic Republic. I am hardly the first to note that many people who clearly wanted the pilot to be captured were bitterly disappointed on Sunday, and then began circulating conspiracy theories to deny the event had even happened on Monday.
But consider this: Ghost Murmur, a quantum sensor system, was reportedly used to track down the pilot. Your humble correspondent told you about the existence of these technologies last November. Quantum sensing has already altered warfare. Again, I am no expert. My point is that if the report turns out to be true, which is likely, then most of the professional experts did not see this coming. They are completely surprised by the qualitative edge of American arms in the 21st century.
Now, there are experts who do understand what has really happened. “If you're at Central Command, you've got to be reasonably satisfied with where you are right now”, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie said on Sunday. “In fact … when I was the CENTCOM Commander, if you had given me this situation at plus-30 days, I would have rejected it as being too optimistic by far.” McKenzie spoke of “effects” achieved through mass, how the US and the IDF continue to create such effects, and how Iran steadily declines at creating them. This is the language of combined arms in the quantum age.
“This operation for the first pilot and the second pilot is a remarkable exercise, demonstration of U.S. military courage, technology, power”, former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said. “I would encourage the president and the secretary of defense, consistent with operational security, share as much of that with the American public so that the American public can appreciate what goes into … this kind of operation was more complicated than the Bin Laden operation, for example.” It is to his credit that he admits this was spectacular.
Which is fascinating, because Trump shut down the White House on Saturday to personally oversee the operation. Conspiracy peddler Ed Krassenstein saw it as an opportunity to start a rumor that Trump was at Walter Reed, but Trump was in fact taking charge of the situation, the White House says.
This would suggest that Trump is similarly in charge of his own war with Iran, and that he is capable of planning and acting strategically. For example, Trump can use ‘madman theory’ to bully Iran’s remaining leadership into negotiations on a broad peace with words like “civilization” and “Stone Age” that make the political classes of the West get all up in their feels. He speaks the language that his enemies understand, the language that the experts find too gauche to learn.
Trump demands all the uranium and nuclear facilities, intrusive inspections, an end to Iran’s missile programs and drone transfers, the cutoff of IRGC proxies, the reopening of Hormuz, and regionwide de-escalation. He is demanding to buy all the carpets, not just the nuclear one, whereas JCPOA pursued temporary limits to Iran’s nuclear ambitions without demanding any of the other things.
Trump wants to buy out the carpet store. He does not want to buy one carpet at a time, which has been the advice of too many experts for too long. His Iranian partners, on the other hand, want guarantees that they will be left alone forever. They demand all sanctions be lifted, insist that their proxies be protected, and they want a $2 million transit fee for every ship that passes through the Strait of Hormuz.
Today, the experts whose cheese has been moved are pretending that Trump has already agreed to all of these demands, while Iran has agreed to none of his. They never imagined a leveraged buyout of the carpet store in Tehran would ever be negotiated at all, so they do not comprehend what is happening. It is another mystery to the experts who were supposed to know the most.
Ben Rhodes, who wanted the death cult in Qom to keep enriching uranium and also help them build a conventional weapons arsenal to threaten neighbors, said that Trump was losing the war, and now maintains that Trump has already been defeated in negotiations that have yet to take place, because he cannot imagine using lethal force to make Iranians honest.
Can Ben Rhodes articulate what winning a war with Iran would look like? I suspect he would rant about World War III and a draft and Vietnam and impeachment. His scenario would probably resemble Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency blather weaponized against action in the frozen conflict. For that matter, no one ever articulates what military victory for Iran would look like, anymore. Talk of hypersonic missiles sinking aircraft carriers has been quite muted of late.
Iran keeps striking out at Qatar and Oman and the UAE this week, as if to aggravate their displeasure with Emmanuel Macron for pursuing a separate peace with the IRGC. Controversial denials of overflight rights suddenly have staunchly pro-NATO Americans questioning the value of NATO in ways that a decade of Putinian propaganda had failed to achieve. Spain in particular is failing the stress test that Trump could not have better designed to illustrate the reasoning behind his desire for Greenland that gives Denmark the vapors.
China got involved in the Pakistani initiative because they have had enough of Hormuz closures. To be clear, the strait was never really closed — Greek captains began to transit weeks ago, followed by ships with flags (or transponder codes) of Chinese convenience. About ten vessels a day have been passing through the strait while Iran was unable to make good on its announced closure. However, Xi Jinping has seen enough. He wants the energy threat to his economy ended.
For those of you keeping score at home: an incomplete cutoff of fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf to China for 38 days was enough to make Beijing intervene and end Iranian resistance(?) to negotiations. The strategic vulnerability of the CCP to any fuel blockade resulting from aggression against Taiwan has just been laid bare. Anyone who calls China the strategic winner in Iran is a fool. Anyone who believes them is twice the fool that person is.
Iranians have used their nuclear program transactionally before, so Trump might just get this carpet, after all. It is widely believed that Iran put all their uranium eggs in one basket at Isfahan, while the US and Israel have the technical capabilities to monitor activity at the site. International inspections and transportation out of the country can be arranged in exchange for sanctions relief, for example.
The alternative was to let Iran build a conventional arms shield that would protect its nuclear ‘breakout’ capability, a revised version of the “Seoul hostage” problem that led past presidents to inaction against North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, most notably when Jimmy Carter finagled Bill Clinton into a terrible deal with Kim Jong Il. The Ben Rhodeses of the world were happy to let history rhyme in Iran. Now their plans might be in ruins, so of course they believe they have been vindicated by history. Of course they do.
As far as regime change goes: if Trump gets what he wants from Iran, the IRGC will simply not exist anymore. Ending foreign proxy support, and regional de-escalation, would eliminate their mission. Trump’s negotiating demand is that the IRGC chooses to die peacefully. Rather than a whopping ship toll that the IRGC splits with Oman, Trump describes a Hormuz toll system that would benefit all the regional parties involved.
Americans are by and large confused by this war, in no small part because the people who are supposed to explain it to them cannot, or will not, do so honestly, because Trump is the president. That so many former neocons-turned-Bulwark-of-democracy types who wanted to invade Iran five minutes ago are among this caste of experts is proof that politicized expertise is the worst kind. Personally, I suspect that the war will become more popular when it is over, pending the outcome of negotiations.
One final note. Long after the war is over, when the truth is finally free, we will perhaps reckon with the ridiculous outcries about murdered schoolgirls, and reach acceptance of the reality that Iran built unreliable rockets. In the meantime, here is yet another video of a ballistic missile that launched into the ground, with a Farsi commentary that has been altered to protect the identity of the witness. One of the biggest losers in this war has been the phrase ‘war crime’, now stripped of all meaning, along with the word ‘genocide’. Either term in conjunction with the word ‘expert’ can be taken as a reliable indicator of jello-brain.
No one has suffered a greater defeat in Iran than ‘the experts’. All too often, their alleged expertise is actually a political nest of some kind. Degrees and elite access and media platforms give them an inflated sense of self-importance. We have watched too many of them surrender principles, reinvent the meanings of words, and cheer against Americans who were in harm’s way now to unsee what we have seen. I do not think we are ever going to see our ‘national security experts’ in quite the same way.
They keep saying Donald Trump is an idiot, a fool, a disaster, and they may even be right, but somehow they always end up looking worse than him, in the end. I will not bet against that happening again. It has happened too many times, now.