Rooting for Iran

The MSM does all it can to pretend that America and Israel lost.

The 12-day forever war that Israel and the United States waged against the world’s leading state sponsor of terror was a flop, according to the MSM. The announced aim — to take out Iran’s nuclear weapons-grade uranium producing facilities — failed. They were only taken out until tomorrow after lunch, or some such thing. And Iran’s resolve to build The Big One has only become more determined.

That, anyway, is what you’ll hear if you listen to CNN and MSNBC. Is their assessment of the strike true?

I can’t say for certain and neither can anyone else. What I can say is that the weight of presently known evidence is that it’s false. The actual amount of damage done to Iran’s nuclear facilities is probably substantial but unknown by anyone who (a) is in a position to have good information and (b) would disclose it publicly.

So what’s actually going on with the rushed and gushing reports of failure?

The answer could be the same slipshod, biased journalism we’ve seen for a very long time. But I think it’s more and worse than that. In my view, one thing that’s going on reflects the recent, sharp increase in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment among those on the Left, certainly including (if not leading off with) the media. See also newly minted Leftist hero Zohran Mamdani. They see failure because they want to see it, and they want to see it because it’s painful to them to see Israel (and the world, while we’re at it) become stronger and safer.

The more important, though related, reason is hatred — not just for Israel but for the United States. This was evident only recently from an ostensibly obscure but actually, once you think about it, quite illuminating source: The fawning coverage of the death of Jimmy Carter, the man whose cowardice and incompetence handed Iran to Jihad, and who thus bears enormous responsibility for the lethal spread of Islamic terror throughout the world for 46 years. The press accounts of Carter’s legacy could barely bring themselves to mention this, and still less the degrading hostage crisis that Carter helplessly hosted for more than a year. But Carter’s failure of guts, understanding and character brought us to the ominous situation in Iran we faced two weeks ago. Let’s just say it out loud: Trump had to act in 2025 because Carter was too feckless and too yellow in 1979.

Have you seen that in the press? Me neither. The coverage was all about Jimmy Carter, Man of Scruples. That’s MSM talk for his sanctimony and self-righteousness, which was perhaps his second most prominent feature, just behind incompetence.

“Commentary’s” Daily Newsletter summed it up nicely a few days ago:

It’s not surprising that certain quarters of the media and foreign-policy establishment can’t accept the straightforward success of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. These institutions are staffed with people who despise Donald Trump, Bibi Netanyahu, and American force. So when the three came together to accomplish something spectacular, it was a gut punch. But the inventiveness of the attacks on the 12-day operation is astounding. It’s as if these critics are typing with fingers crossed, hoping to write dark scenarios into the aftermath of victory.

It may (or may not) be that the long-term success of the mission was “spectacular.” But what was spectacular was America’s willingness to use massive force against a malignant enemy power that had been using its sham participation in endless “negotiations” simply to buy time, counting on American timidity and foolishness to let them get away with it until it was too late. That was a good bet with Joe Biden, or whoever was running things for the last part of his administration. It wasn’t such a good bet with Trump.

[L]egacy news outlets ran with the leaked Defense Intelligence Agency’s assessment claiming that U.S. bombs barely damaged the Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz facilities and set Iran’s program back a mere couple of months.

This “low confidence” claim was almost immediately contradicted by more detailed assessments from Israel, the CIA, and the UN saying that it would take Iran years to rebuild the program. Turns out when you drop a combined 420,000 pounds on something, you destroy it.

Again, I can’t say for sure that it was “destroyed;” we just don’t know yet. But that isn’t, for present purposes, the question about the attitude of the press. When the DIA report got such lightning fast and enthusiastic coverage from, for example, CNN, did you once hear them disclose that it was “low confidence” (governmentese for “we’re guessing”)? I didn’t. I heard it for the first time a three hours later on Fox.

The leak failed to snatch victory from the U.S. and Israel…

“Snatching defeat” from what was at the minimum a clear tactical victory is phrasing that nicely sums up what the MSM coverage has been about.

…so critics focused on why that victory was bad anyway. Here, they began to summon the fantastical. Today on the podcast, John read a from a piece in the Economist that claimed the airstrikes took out a cohort of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’s moderate commanders, who had been contemplating whether to “ditch their anti-Israel stance.”

Ah yes, the much-heralded “Iranian moderates.” Abolhassan Banisadr, call your office! The “Iranian moderates” have been a sick joke for nearly half a century with anyone even remotely sane, but the MSM still thinks we’re stupid enough to keep laughing.

Yesterday, Ian Bremer spun a different haunting fairy tale. “If you’re sitting in Tehran, the lesson from this war is simple,” he wrote, “being a nuclear-threshold power is not enough—the only way to avoid being bombed is to become un-bombable.” And that, he says, “makes the US-Israeli tactical victory potentially counterproductive.”

As if a broken country whose entire defense apparatus is buried in rubble or penetrated by enemy spies is going to just dust itself off and become magically “un-bombable.” Oh, and while Iran works to achieve Bremer’s fictional state of impregnability, the U.S. and Israel will presumably stand by and watch.

Bremer and those like him have, perhaps understandably, become addicted to America seen as weak and feckless. But if last week’s bombing proved nothing else, it proved that that vision of America has, at least for the moment, become outdated.

These pieces dovetail with the contention of Barack Obama’s former National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes’s that the strikes ruined any chance of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear aspirations. But when there’s no chance to begin with, there’s no chance ruin. If anything, the strikes establish the credible threat of U.S. force should we ever decide to go back to the negotiating table.

That’s a key point. To the extent a “diplomatic solution” was or is realistic, the only serious question is: A diplomatic solution on whose terms? There was already a “diplomatic solution, to wit, the one reached by Obama. That was, intentionally, geared to Iran’s terms, because that’s what Obama and his Amerika Stinks administration wanted. Trump wants one on America’s terms (which was among the most important reasons to vote for him regardless of his flaws). The now-proven fact that we can and will use force Iran can’t match will dramatically improve the prospects for such negotiations as there now may be.

The Left can’t possibly be stupid enough not to know this. Thus, sad and tragic (and ominous) as it is to say, the conclusion seems unavoidable: The Left is so upset about the bombing, and so eager to dismiss its results, because in its heart-of-hearts, it hates America so much that it wants Jihad to win.