I will tell you the news in numbers first, because numbers are safe. Numbers are digestible. Numbers allow the mind to process horror in measured increments before the heart catches up.
By March 3, 2026, the count had reached 555 Iranian civilians killed in joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes. Among them, 148 children— girls, mostly, attending an elementary school in the city of Minab when the bombs found them. Another 95 wounded, some of whom will carry the evidence of this moment for the rest of their lives.
A command building at a U.S. air base in Bahrain was destroyed. 70 Iranian ballistic missiles and 59 drones were intercepted by Bahraini air defenses, though “intercepted” seems an inadequate word for what happens when metal meets metal in the sky and falls burning to the earth.
The U.S. embassy in Riyadh was struck by two drones, causing a “limited” fire and “minor material damage”. This kind of phrasing by the media is designed to reassure, to smooth over, to suggest that nothing of consequence really happened.
Six U.S. service members were killed in action. The first American casualties of a war that, according to Iran’s foreign minister, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself “admitted” was entered “on behalf of Israel.” It is a war of choice: freely chosen, freely fought.
Six families will receive folded flags. 555 families will either receive bodies, pieces of bodies, or news that there is nothing left to receive.
The numbers accumulate. The numbers always accumulate. You are used to seeing numbers.
Now, allow me to flood your mind with questions.
There is one in particular that lingers beneath every official statement, every press conference, every carefully worded justification for why this time, unlike all the other times, military action was necessary.
The question is this: does Iran actually have nuclear weapons? According to the headlines, they have been two weeks from obtaining them for the past twenty years. Unfortunately, the headlines have also been incorrect for the last twenty years.
On March 2, 2026, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi stood before the press and answered it. “The IAEA has not seen a systematic nuclear weapons manufacturing program in Iran,” he said. “This is the IAEA’s assessment.” He added, carefully, that “countries may have other information or act based on political considerations”— but those considerations, he implied, are not his to judge.
The statement landed with the dull thud of the already-known. In June 2025, before the so-called “12-Day War” between Israel and Iran, Grossi had said the same thing: no evidence, no program, no imminent threat.
And yet the bombs fell anyway.
One is reminded of another time, another place, another set of assurances ignored. In 2002 and 2003, as the Bush administration built its case for the war against Iraq, intelligence agencies across the West scrambled to establish evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Defectors were produced, their testimonies polished and presented. Documents were waived, their forgeries not yet discovered. The administration, historian John Prados later documented in his book Hoodwinked, “consistently distorted, manipulated, and ignored” the actual intelligence available to them, “seeking to persuade the country that the facts about Iraq were other than what the intelligence indicated”.
After the invasion, after the uncountable deaths, a senior U.S. weapons expert who had recently returned from Iraq, confessed to the Los Angeles Times: “We were prisoners of our own beliefs.”
Prisoners of belief. It is a gentle way of describing a catastrophe built on lies.
The pattern repeats because the pattern is useful. Accusations of nuclear ambition, even when unverified, create a perceived sense of threat: and when people feel their safety is at risk, any action to defend it becomes noble. They transform aggression into preemption, invasion into defense. They allow the bombers to believe themselves justified.
And when no weapons are found— when intelligence services confirm, again, that there was nothing to find— the bombers have already moved on to the next target, the next justification, the next war.
A Region Split By Favor
There is a particular strategy that powerful nations employ when they wish to destabilize without making their intentions clear. It is called, in policy papers and diplomatic cables, by many names. But its common name is simpler: divide and conquer.
The Middle East was long ago split along invisible lines. Some accept treaties or support from the West, some entertain coups, some fight to the bitter end— but never have they all received the same treatment. Iran has been pitted against its neighbors because its neighbors flourish under U.S. presence. They fear for their security when there are U.S. military bases close enough to touch— in Bahrain, in the UAE, in Qatar, in Kuwait— and so the missiles fall and the drones attack and the Middle East is, again, at odds with itself.
It is by design, keeping the region divided. And too many times have foreign powers come to conquer.
The pattern is old. In the 1980s, Israel supported the South Lebanese Army. It supported factions within Syria’s Druze community. It helped prop up Hamas in its earliest days, viewing the organization as a useful counterweight to secular nationalist movements. Before October 7, 2023, Israel allowed Qatari funds to flow into Gaza— hundreds of millions of dollars— ostensibly for governance and humanitarian purposes, in practice sustaining a group that would later be designated a terrorist organization.
Aaron David Miller, a longtime State Department official, described this approach to the Washington Examiner as reflecting “the sort of expedient view, rather than an overall broad strategy.” Israel, he said, has a history of backing “any number of groups and supporting them in order to play them off against other groups” throughout the region.
The results of such expedience rarely follow the script.
In June 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israel had begun arming an anti-Hamas militia in Gaza called the Popular Force. The goal was to create an alternative to Hamas for future governance. Yasser Abu Shabab, the militia’s leader, denied receiving Israeli support— a denial that convinced no one, least of all Hamas, which viewed him as a collaborator and killed his brother in a crackdown.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid warned that “the weapons going into Gaza will eventually be pointed at Israeli soldiers and civilians.” Seth Frantzman, an adjunct fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, noted that the history of arming militia groups in the Middle East does not have “a great track record”. Everything is connected by a thread those men with their thumbs on red buttons somehow cannot see.
The United States knows this lesson intimately. It armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan during their war against the Soviet Union. Those fighters became the Taliban. The Taliban provided sanctuary to Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda planned and executed the attacks of September 11, 2001. Every weapon, every dollar, every tactical decision ripples forward in time, producing consequences that no strategist anticipated.
Divide and conquer is a game. But the pieces on the board are not made of wood or plastic. They are made of flesh and aspiration and the desperate hope for a better life. And when the game ends— when the great powers grow bored or move on to other contests— the pieces are left where they fell.
Tehran, 1953: The Original Wound
To understand what is happening now, one must understand what happened before. Not only in the immediate before, or only in the months of tension leading to February 28— but in the deeper before, the before that shaped the contours of possibility for generations.
In 1953, Iran had a democratically elected prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh. His great crime, in the eyes of Western powers, was his desire to keep the control of oil out of Western hands. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later British Petroleum and now BP, had extracted wealth from Iranian territory for decades while Iran itself received a fraction of the profits. Mossadegh nationalized the industry.
The response was swift. The United States, through the CIA, organized a coup. It backed street protests. It funded media manipulation. It orchestrated palace intrigue. The elected government fell. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, returned to power and ruled for decades with American support.
The resentment brewed slowly, and in 1979, it exploded into the infamous revolution. Iran has never forgotten 1953. Every American intervention since has been viewed through a lens that suggests state-backed violence is part of a pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents. They have found that imperialism is a disease, a rot in the flesh that takes and spreads.
The pattern continued. In 1958, U.S. Marines landed in Lebanon, invoking the Eisenhower Doctrine to stabilize a country whose sectarian balance was already precarious. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, the United States airlifted weapons to Israel, turning the tide of battle and cementing a military alliance that endures to this day. In 1991, America led a coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, leaving Iraq isolated, sanctioned, and smoldering. In 2003, the invasion came again— this time on false pretenses, this time to topple a regime that posed no imminent threat, this time unleashing chaos from which the region has never fully recovered.
Each intervention, in its moment, was justified as necessary. Each intervention, in retrospect, reveals itself as part of a larger pattern: the conviction that American interests must prevail, that American force can reshape foreign societies, that the lives lost are simply the cost of doing business.
The people of the Middle East have learned to recognize this pattern. They have learned to expect that every generation will witness another intervention, another justification, another wave of destruction justified by the rhetoric of liberation.
They have learned that history moves in vicious cycles.