Why is the West pretending Iran is winning the war against Israel, the US?
Despite Iran's military collapse, Western analysts continue to push a false narrative of victory. The facts don't align with the rhetoric surrounding the conflict.
Despite Iran's military collapse, Western analysts continue to push a false narrative of victory. The facts don't align with the rhetoric surrounding the conflict.
www.jpost.com
7 Apr 2026 ~~ By Nadim Koteich
Let us be precise about what is happening here. A war is being fought in the Middle East. Another
war is being fought in the pages of newspapers, on the panels of cable networks, and in the faculty lounges of institutions that have confused sophistication with a reflex. The second war has a declared winner: Iran. It just has nothing to do with what is actually happening in the first one.
The claim, repeated with the solemnity of established fact, is made by smart and credentialed people, who know and want you to know they know. However, they are wrong. Not subtly wrong. Not wrong in ways that require careful qualification. They are wrong in the way that requires ignoring ninety percent of
Iran's missile capacity destroyed in week one, a navy that no longer exists, a Supreme Leader killed in the opening hours of the campaign, and a proxy network that is fracturing from Lebanon to Yemen.
Wrong in the way that requires looking at the Gulf states, which are doubling down on the relation with the US and Israel, and concluding somehow that Iran has outmaneuvered everyone.
This is not an analysis. So, what is it?
Start with the cultural reflex that makes it possible. There is a tradition in Western intellectual life, old and deeply rooted, that assigns moral value to resistance independent of what the resistance actually represents. The weaker party defying the stronger carries a charge, almost aesthetic in nature, that bypasses any serious accounting of the defiant party's actual character. Content is irrelevant. Posture is everything.
So the theocracy that massacred thousands of its own citizens in January, that has bled Lebanon dry through
Hezbollah, that has sustained proxy wars across four countries at its own people's expense, gets cast as a proud country holding the line against imperial aggression. Few, in this context, question what the country actually does to the people living inside it. The template does not require that question. Power versus resistance. Empire versus defiance. The weaker party is always the more sympathetic one, and sympathy, in this world, travels quickly into presumed strategic vindication.
~Snip~
The liberal international order has two problems with this war. The first is structural. America is the last Western democracy that still believes military force is a legitimate instrument of order, not a confession of civilizational failure. Europe settled that question in its own mind decades ago and built an entire political identity around the settlement. American willingness to remain the enforcer was tolerable when it meant keeping Soviet tanks out of Bonn. It is intolerable now because it validates a vision of the world, one where power and deterrence are the actual foundations of stability, that the European liberal project has spent fifty years attempting to replace with institutions, dialogue, and the softly spoken authority of multilateral consensus. A successful American military campaign does not just win a war. It wins an argument they thought they had closed, and it wins it twice. Because Ukraine already cracked every institution built to make war obsolete on the European continent, proving decorative the moment Russia invaded. The entire post-Cold War security architecture, gone in seventy-two hours.
The second problem is simpler and more raw. If America did it, it must be wrong. Not as a conclusion, but as a premise. American power is suspect by definition, its exercise presumptively illegitimate, its victories either temporary, tainted, or both. This is not a position that arrives after examining the evidence. It is the lens through which the evidence is examined, which means no evidence can ever change it. That is not a political view. It is a religion with better footnotes.
And then there is Trump. A Trump failure ratifies everything the liberal order has argued since 2016, whereas a Trump success is an ideological catastrophe. Because it means the man they identified as the singular threat to civilized governance managed to accomplish something consequential and real in the one domain where their own preferred approach produced the JCPOA, the engagement doctrine, and two decades of elaborately reasoned accommodation with a revolutionary theocracy that never moderated and never intended to.
They cannot let that be visible. So the goalposts move. Every civilian casualty becomes evidence of strategic bankruptcy. Every Iranian missile that gets through becomes proof of resilience. Every European condemnation becomes a harbinger of American isolation. The war must be failing because the alternative, a world in which this worked, is a world that does not fit the story they have been telling.
There is a test for this. Ask any of them directly: what would American victory look like to you? If the answer keeps changing, if every benchmark met produces a new benchmark, if success in their telling is always just out of reach, you are not in the presence of an analyst. You are in the presence of someone who decided the verdict before the trial began and is now selecting evidence accordingly.
The facts are not difficult. The enemy's supreme leader is dead. His navy is at the bottom of the Gulf. His missile arsenal is a fraction of what it was. His neighbors are not mourning. They are urging Washington to finish the job.
That is not a war Iran is winning. Saying otherwise is not sophistication. It is not moral complexity. It is a political project dressed in the language of seriousness, executed by people who know exactly what they are doing and are counting on the rest of us not to notice.
Commentary:
Good question for Democrats, the Media and their goat copulating IRGC 5th columnists and Tehran Tiffanys.
If the goal of the United States is to overthrow the mullahs and effect regime change, then Iran does appear to be winning.
This is ridiculous. If Iran is winning, then Japan was “winning” right up until the Emperor surrendered. Germany was winning until Hitler offed himself and Lee was winning until…
The media is playing for the other team. It is no longer the Fourth Estate; it has grown into the Fifth Column and a direct threat to National Security.
Who can forget the Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Geraldo Rivera, Peter Arnett, Lester Holt and the rest of the blame America first media screaming the preferred media talking point of the day for the Afghan war - constant weeks of repeated coordinated messaging of “quagmire, quagmire, quagmire, quagmire, quagmire , quagmire , quagmire ,quagmire followed by a croaking. “We won”. “Whenever you hear the media coordinated talking point campaign you can be certain the people are being played, bluffed, baffled and bullshitted.
The news media and their fellow traveler Democrats talking points this time are "War Crime" and "Escalation".
Democrats are men and women that enslave others.
There have been slave owners since the beginning of time. If you control education and information, what will your population develop into?
Cooperative slaves.
Who dominates in Education and media? Democrats and their Marxist Socialist friends
Who dominates in productive industry? God fearing men.
I’m not always sure the military is a productive industry,
But their oath (and mine) ended with “So help me God.”
Personally. I believe there's no such thing as an Atheist in a war, and surely we are at war.
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