A 'Crushing Victory' and a 'Military Mistake for the Ages'
Andrew Fox on the reality of the Iran war
President Trump insists the Iran war is going “swimmingly.” Most of the big media presents it as an unmitigated disaster. But since today’s news giants get so much wrong also, how can you know what’s true?
In the latest episode, the excellent military analyst Andrew Fox joins me to break it down.
He explains:
who’s lying about the state of the war
why the first strike took place at the exact moment it did
how a 5-minute elevator ride underground fits in
the best options the U.S. and Israel have at this stage
why Iran’s “eschatology” is key to understanding the war
and lots more.
The legacy media gets SO much wrong. Paid subscribers here make the fight for truth possible.
Andrew on Who’s Lying
Andrew: Anyone who’s telling you this was a superb success that went absolutely perfectly is lying. And anyone that tells you it was a complete disaster is lying.
Let’s start with what went really well. There is no question that tactically this has been a dominating, overwhelming, crushing victory for Israel and the United States. They have taken out the entire leadership of their enemy, and they’ve hit somewhere between 10 and 20 thousand targets. Iran had no air defenses, no anti-missile defenses. When someone fires an airstrike, it’s hitting the ground. The fact that they’ve only killed something like 1,600 civilians shows you the precision and the safety care that they are taking.
Josh: So, unlike Iran, the U.S. and Israel are targeting military facilities, and the civilians are collateral.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Obviously mistakes happen in war, and we’ve seen that in Gaza. Human beings are fallible creatures, and intelligence may be wrong. The guy you’re targeting may move from position A to position B and you don’t know, so you just hit position A. All these things can go horribly wrong. The school strike is the big one that everyone beats with a stick.
Josh: That was early on when the United States launched that strike by mistake.
Andrew: And we can own it; we can say, “Look, this is a mistake. It’s horrible, how utterly tragic,” and these things happen in war.
We can talk about the sheer attrition Iran has had on its rocket capability, its headquarters command and control; these are all huge tactical successes. Israel’s missile defense held really well, as did the Gulf states’. Of course, something always gets through; even in Ukraine, the world masters at this, 8% of Russian drones get through.
But the fact that those missile defenses held up so well, that’s another huge victory. Iran had this huge missile arsenal, which it based its entire defensive plan around, and it didn’t work.
The Hormuz Blunder
When we look at what went wrong, I think we can say safely at this point that not securing the Strait of Hormuz was a military mistake for the ages. It’s had a real leverage effect on the whole war. It gave Iran the ability to choke off the world economy and put political, domestic pressure on the United States as gas prices start rising at the pump and people start paying more at the supermarket as a direct result of Hormuz being blocked.
Josh: Was it that the United States thought that they would have help from Europe or from the region in securing Hormuz and then didn’t? Or was it that the U.S. should have done it on its own in the first place?
Andrew: I think it's a failure of coalition building. If you want Allied help, you have to work those allies up to it because you're asking these countries to send their young men and women into harm's way. I don't think the Trump administration did any of that. Add in a year of friction between Europe and America anyway over things like Ukraine.
So you can’t then suddenly turn around and demand that people come and join you. But the reason they went early is because they had this opportunity to kill the whole Iranian leadership.
Josh: Why at that moment?
Andrew: The leaders came to the surface; they’ve been hiding. They had a face-to-face meeting on Shabbat, so they assumed they were relatively safe. Now, that was incredibly stupid because they had two U.S. carrier groups parked off their coast and all the noises were pointing that way.
Josh: Where are these guys usually?
Andrew: We don’t have the details. But we know, for example, the Ayatollah’s bunker was a five-minute elevator ride underground. It’s very similar to Hamas.
Josh: So when these guys came to the surface and the US and Israel launched that attack, they should have been ready to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz immediately?
Andrew: Exactly, or even beforehand.
Josh: Wouldn’t that have signaled that they were about to attack?
Andrew: Yeah. It’s all about staging and timing. And that’s why I say we have to be very careful because we don’t know all the intelligence. Maybe if we were presented with all the information they had, we’d have made the same decision.
On What’s Next
Andrew: The Iranian regime are not logical Western enlightenment-style thinkers in the way that our societies are. If they see that they have to give up all their highly enriched uranium, never to enrich uranium again, and not to make any missiles, they just won’t agree to that. I think Washington is going to have to accept limited versions of all of those things, which is going to be very difficult for Trump to sell as a victory.
The Iranian regime has a religious ideology, an eschatology (belief involving death and end times) that they have to endure suffering to get to the point where eventually the Mahdi (an Islamic messianic figure) can return and they can destroy Israel and America and establish a global caliphate. That is their religious philosophy.
Josh: The “suffering” is by their people. The leaders hide in bunkers and live rich lives. And they’ve killed tens of thousands of their own people in the protests. It’s all about keeping power for them.
Andrew: Yeah.
Josh: I’ve seen some analysts say Israel and the United States thought that the entire regime would instantly fall. Israeli leaders usually seem to understand the Iranian government. Did they think that?
Andrew: I think there’s a middle ground. I don’t think they thought that if they kill the top 40, then boom, we’ve got a new regime. I think they thought that if they could arm a group—be it the Kurds, be it someone else— to seize control of wherever they are, they could kind of inkblot control from there, and then that would cause the regime to topple. That would be in line with our counterinsurgency doctrine. But I do think they made the assumption that if they killed those top 40, the war would be over a lot quicker.
In the episode, Andrew also discusses Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Israel’s security doctrine in a post-October 7 world. Listen to the full episode, and look out for more write-ups here in the newsletter.
I'm a reader, not a listener [hearing impairment issue], so I hope/believe that all podcasts are and will be transmitted as articles. I am pleased to read something that does NOT involve Israel bashing, but rather, understanding.