At 2:30 in the morning February 28, Washington time, a president who once promised to end the forever wars posted an eight-minute video to Truth Social and announced the beginning of a new one. Operation Epic Fury, they called it. Epic. Fury. The marketing department of imperial collapse has never worked harder.
B-2 bombers. Carrier-launched strikes. Explosions across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, Kermanshah, Tabriz. A girls’ school in southern Minab struck — the death toll now confirmed at eighty-five children and counting, their bodies still warm as the Pentagon prepared its briefings on strategic objectives. And the stated goal, delivered by the most powerful man on earth from behind a podium in a white USA baseball cap at Mar-a-Lago — regime change. “When we are finished, take over your government.” Spoken to ninety million Iranians as their cities burned, as though revolution can be airdropped like a leaflet.
Then, within hours, two things happened simultaneously that told you everything about what this day actually was.
Trump reportedly asked Iran for a ceasefire. The same man who promised to “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” who told the IRGC to “lay down your weapons or face certain death,” who called this a “noble mission” — was reaching, through back channels, for an exit. Hours in. Not days. Hours. He has never looked weaker in his life, and given the competition, that is quite a statement.
And by evening, Netanyahu — the architect of this illegal and mad war, the man who called it Israel’s greatest existential opportunity, who on a Purim morning told the Israeli people that “the lion has roared, who will not fear” — boarded his official state aircraft, the Wing of Zion, which had spent four hours circling off the Israeli coast to avoid Iranian targeting, and flew west. Over Greece. On to Berlin. Away from the missiles he had launched. Away from the Israelis he left to absorb the consequences.
Between those two datapoints — Trump’s panicked back-channel and Netanyahu’s flight to Germany — is the entire story of this war. One man ordered it from a resort in Florida. The other ordered it and then departed the country it was supposedly fought to protect. The Israelis sheltering in bomb shelters from Haifa to Tel Aviv, the enormous damage across both cities, the sirens, the predictable interceptor failures — they are the ones paying for a decision made between a man monitoring his social media metrics at Mar-a-Lago and a man indicted for corruption who needed a war to survive his own electorate.
Meanwhile Iran announced it is preparing to deploy weapons “the world has never seen.” Trump announced — on Truth Social, naturally — that Khamenei is dead. For hours, Iran’s state media called him “steadfast and firm, commanding the field.” Then, by evening, Iranian state media confirmed it. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — Supreme Leader for thirty-five years, the man who outlasted eight American presidents, survived sanctions, assassinations, a brutal war with Saddam’s Iraq, the twelve-day war — is dead. The decapitation strike succeeded. Iran’s security council secretary promised an “unforgettable lesson.” Patriot systems failed to intercept the majority of the latest Iranian missile wave. China announced an immediate halt to all rare earth exports to the United States — triggered the moment the attack began. Beijing “closely monitoring.” The Iraqi resistance has officially entered the conflict. And the missiles kept flying.
What happened in the hours before the bombs fell will damn this administration in the judgment of history. The timing.
On February 26, in Geneva, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi sat across from Oman’s mediators and reached what Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi described publicly as a breakthrough. Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium above civilian levels. To full IAEA verification. To irreversibly downgrade its current stockpiles to “the lowest level possible.” Al-Busaidi said peace was “within reach.” These were not diplomatic pleasantries — these were the actual terms of an agreement taking shape in real time. What followed was aggression and perfidy in the technical sense of both words: attacking a country during active negotiations in which that country was demonstrably willing to make significant and lasting concessions.
Forty-eight hours later, the bombs fell.
And this is the second time. In June 2025, Operation Midnight Hammer struck three Iranian nuclear facilities — Natanz, Isfahan, Fordo — while negotiations were simultaneously underway. The sites were empty. Centrifuges relocated days earlier. The United States fired thirty Tomahawk cruise missiles at a mountain full of evacuated tunnels and declared it a strategic success. Trump announced he had obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. Then used that same obliterated nuclear program — the one he already destroyed — as the pretext for launching a larger war eight months later. An Israeli defence official confirmed to Reuters today that the date for today’s strikes was decided “weeks ago” — while those negotiations were still ongoing. The date was already circled on a calendar in Tel Aviv before the Geneva talks began.
You cannot make this up. You can only remember the day and wonder at the incompetence, the arrogance.
On the eve of Operation Epic Fury, Trump told reporters he was “not happy” with the negotiations. Iran wouldn’t “say the key words.” He was “not happy” — while Oman’s mediator was on television describing a breakthrough. While Araghchi was shaking hands. While technical committees were scheduling follow-on meetings.
Diplomacy, in the hands of this administration, is not a path to peace. It is reconnaissance and bad theater. A mechanism to identify what Iran values most, catalogue its concessions, then bomb the table while the ink is still wet. Twice. Same play, same script, same morning-after declaration of victory over rubble. If you needed proof that the goal was never nuclear disarmament, it arrived this morning in cruise missiles and burning schools and a ceasefire request that came before lunchtime.
Twenty-three years ago, a retired four-star NATO general named Wesley Clark walked into the Pentagon weeks after September 11th and was shown a classified memo from the Secretary of Defense’s office. Seven countries in five years, it said. Iraq. Syria. Lebanon. Libya. Somalia. Sudan. And finishing off — Iran. Clark went public in 2007. He was largely dismissed. Look at the scorecard now.
Iraq: shattered, the state dissolved, conditions created for ISIS that haunt the region still. Libya: warlord-fractured catastrophe. Syria: collapsed. Lebanon: gutted. Sudan: civil war. Somalia: perpetual catastrophe. And now, at the bottom of the list, exactly where it was always written — Iran.
The plan was never a response to September 11th. It predates it. Paul Wolfowitz told Clark in 1991 that the lesson of the Gulf War was blunt: the Soviets won’t stop us anymore. “We’ve got five, maybe ten years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes.” Clean up. Like history is a mess to be tidied, and the tidying happens to require carriers and munitions priced at twelve million dollars each.
Iran was last on the list not because it was least threatening. Because it was most difficult. Because you needed the others dismantled first — Hezbollah degraded, Syria fallen, the regional architecture cleared — before striking the cornerstone. The cornerstone is now being struck, not because Iran built a nuclear weapon, not because Iran threatened the American homeland, but because the blueprint said so. And blueprints in Washington outlive every administration that claims to oppose them.
Trump didn’t write this plan. He signed it. The deep state doesn’t need loyalty. It just needs access to the launch codes and a puppet that is too incompetent, too weak to say no.
And then it truly went off
Iran launched dozens of ballistic missiles along with shahed drones simultaneously at Israel and at US military bases across the Gulf — Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria. No warning. No choreography. The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet command centre in Bahrain was struck directly. Al-Udeid in Qatar — the same base Iran surgically grazed in June 2025 as polite face-saving theatre — hit again, without the politeness. Explosions in Dubai. Jebel Ali port — the largest port in the Middle East — struck by a missile. Eighteen explosions in the city by early evening, including debris from Iranian drones falling on the Burj Al Arab hotel. Long lines at petrol stations across Beirut within hours. Fourteen thousand flights cancelled. Etihad suspended all services in and out of Abu Dhabi.
Enormous damage in Haifa after two Iranian missiles. Thirty-five confirmed strikes on Israeli territory by evening, with Israeli emergency services reporting ninety-four wounded. The Iraqi resistance officially entering the conflict. The Houthis resuming Red Sea operations. And Iran announcing weapons “the world has never seen” — brief, unspecified, delivered with the composure of a command that doesn’t need elaboration.
What made Iran’s current response different from June 2025 was not the scale. It was the discipline. Before bringing a single air defence battery online, Iran cleared its airspace of all civilian aircraft. Every commercial flight out. Then, and only then, did the military activate its integrated air defence network and begin the retaliatory launch sequence — roughly an hour after the first strikes landed. This detail, small and unreported in most Western outlets, says everything. Iran’s military took deliberate, methodical steps to ensure that would not happen again. This is not the behaviour of a regime in panic. This is the behaviour of a military that rehearsed this, lived through one version of it already, and came back eight months later with the lessons learned and the procedures corrected.
Now the man who started it and then fled.
Netanyahu addressed Israel this morning in full Purim biblical register — invoking Aman and Esther, the lion’s roar, the eternity of Israel. “The lot was cast,” he told his people. “We will stand as one person with one heart.” He told them there would be costs, “perhaps even heavy costs,” and that he knew they had the resilience to bear them.
Then he got on a plane.
The man who invoked Purim and the lion’s roar and the eternity of Israel was in Germany when the missiles hit Haifa. He will have his cowardly explanations — security protocols, command continuity, the Wing of Zion always evacuates during escalations. None of it changes what the image says about the distance between the man who asks his people for “heavy costs” and the man who decided not to be present for them.
Credible reporting suggests Trump was not so much the architect of this war as its willing dope of a hostage. The analysis holds that Netanyahu threatened to strike Iran unilaterally if Trump did not join him, making that threat precisely after Washington’s coercive task force was fully assembled in the Gulf — knowing the carriers and the munitions were in position, and that a unilateral Israeli strike would put American forces in the blast radius of Iranian retaliation regardless of whether Trump had ordered a shot.
The deepest irony: Israel is less safe than it was on Friday. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Iranian missiles are hitting Haifa. Patriot batteries are being depleted. The Houthis have resumed Red Sea operations. The Iraqi resistance has entered. Iran has announced weapons nobody has seen.
How does this end? On whose terms?
Trump wants this short. He is watching the markets, the oil price, the approval numbers. Americans will not tolerate weeks of this with oil heading toward $150 a barrel, and Trump knows it. The back-channel ceasefire feelers before the first day was out confirm he knows it.
Iran was in Geneva on Thursday. The deal existed. The deal was bombed. And the terms available today — with the Strait closed, Patriot batteries depleted, Coalition sortie generation constrained by standoff distances and a Chinese rare earth embargo already running — are worse than the terms bombed forty-eight hours ago. The bargaining position has not improved. It has deteriorated. And a man is in Berlin.
The “protests” that preceded all this were marginally were manipulated theater. The economic collapse was genuine. The rial at 1.4 million to the dollar. Inflation at forty-two percent. Food prices up seventy-two percent. Visceral rage — all of it the consequence of sanctions designed in Washington to produce precisely this kind of social fracture. Let nobody diminish the legitimate fury of ordinary Iranians ground down by mismanagement and clerical arrogance and an economic siege that Western press invariably forgets to mention when discussing why Iranians are angry.
But into that genuine rage, other hands reached.
On December 29, (2025), as economic pain spread from Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, Mossad’s official Farsi X account posted: “Come out together into the streets. The time has come. We are with you. Not just from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.” One point one five million views. Former CIA director Mike Pompeo responded: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.” He said this publicly. The former head of American intelligence broadcast to the world that Israeli operatives were embedded in Iranian protests. Nobody in the Western media blinked.
Iranian security arrested a confirmed Mossad operative in Tehran in early January — filmed, confessing, detailing remote recruitment via social media, handlers in Germany, instructions to photograph targets, attend protests, relay footage abroad. Safe houses raided: weapons, ammunition, bomb-making materials. Israel’s Channel 13 had reported Mossad deployed approximately one hundred agents inside Iran before the June 2025 war to sabotage missile launchers and blind air defences. Electronic jamming equipment seized in Mashhad and Rasht, designed to hijack GPS signals on tactical drone systems. Israeli Unit 8200 hacked Iranian state television on June 18, 2025, cutting to footage of women’s rights protests with a direct Farsi instruction: “take to the streets and finish the job.”
This is not Iranian propaganda. The evidence is documented, much of it from Israeli sources who felt confident no consequence would follow. They were right. Until today, when all of it was confirmed dismembered. The network that was supposed to activate inside Iran during today’s strikes activated nothing — not because the agents lacked courage, but because they were identified, arrested, turned, or killed in the preceding nine months. Iran read the lesson of June 2025 and acted on it.
The 1953 CIA-backed overthrow of democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh — removed for nationalising Iranian oil — is not ancient history to Iranians. It is the operating framework through which every subsequent Western gesture toward Iranian dissent is correctly read. Pompeo confirmed the network was real on January 2, and too few filed it under evidence.
The regime change fantasy deserves not dismissal but demolition. Last night, history has provided the demolition in real time.
The Assembly of Experts convened within the hour after the Supreme Leader’s death. The command council activated. The IRGC issued a statement not of surrender but of escalation — “the martyrdom of the Supreme Leader obliges us to respond with maximum force.” The Basij mobilised. The judiciary, the parallel command structures, the bureaucracy — every instrument of state authority continued without interruption and, if anything, hardened in resolve. Iran’s constitution was written by people who survived the Shah, who understood what decapitation looks like, who engineered succession mechanisms for exactly this scenario. The successor process is now underway with the kind of orderliness that should terrify every architect of this operation. Not chaos. Definately not fracture. But procedure.
Khamenei’s death has done something the bombs couldn’t: it has handed every Iranian — religious or secular, reformist or hardliner, pro-government or not — a martyr. Not a politician. Not a general. The Supreme Leader himself. The emotional unifying power of that fact inside Iran tonight cannot be overstated and should not be underestimated. The demonstrations that have run through Tehran and Isfahan and Mashhad today were already pro-government. After last night’s confirmation they will be something else entirely. Something older. Something that doesn’t negotiate.
Washington’s theory of victory was always: kill the leadership, the population rises, the regime collapses, the MEK walks into the vacuum. What is unfolding tonight is the refutation of every part of that sentence simultaneously. The leadership has been killed. The population has unified. The regime has not collapsed. And the MEK — Washington’s preferred government-in-exile, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, regarded inside Iran with the affection most populations reserve for collaborators — has no domestic base, no credibility, and no meaningful presence inside the country it claims to represent. A punchline with a Washington lobby budget.
Where this is heading…
The seismic implication of Khamenei’s confirmed death is not what Tel Aviv and Washington predicted. It is the opposite. The Islamic Republic has now demonstrated, in the most extreme test conceivable, that it can absorb the assassination of its supreme leader and continue fighting. Every movement in the Global South, every government that has quietly wondered whether resistance to American power is sustainable, every adversary calculating whether the United States can be deterred — they watched Iran’s command structure hold the line after its supreme leader was killed, watched the missiles keep flying, watched the succession activate without a single visible fracture. That demonstration, broadcast in real time, is worth more to the cause of multipolar resistance than any diplomatic communiques issued in the last decade.
Washington wanted to prove that American power can decapitate a government and trigger its collapse. It proved the opposite. And it did so in front of the entire world.
Even the Atlantic Council concluded this week that regime change from outside, without large-scale military intervention or internal elite rupture, “is not a credible near-term proposition.” They wrote that before the supreme leader was killed and the missiles kept flying. The architects know. They proceed anyway, because the goal was never the stated goal. It was the geography, the energy reserves, the dollar-bypassing trade flows, and the strategic buffer a sovereign Iran provides to the Eurasian architecture Washington finds intolerable.
Consider what this war costs America’s putative allies — the ones who privately begged Washington not to do this.
Trump’s May 2025 Riyadh trip produced two trillion dollars in investment commitments. The UAE has positioned itself as the global financial hub for capital flight from every uncertain corner of the world. Bahrain hosts the US Fifth Fleet. Qatar houses CENTCOM’s regional headquarters. All of them are under Iranian missile fire tonight. Kuwait condemned the attack on its soil as a “flagrant violation of sovereignty.” Oman’s Foreign Minister, who called the breakthrough forty-eight hours before the bombs fell, told Washington bluntly: “This is not your war.” Jebel Ali port — the economic engine of Dubai — hit by Iranian missiles this afternoon. Dubai International Airport concourse damaged. Residential areas struck. The US ambassador to Jerusalem today told American staff: if you want to leave Israel, “do so today.”
The Gulf monarchies understood though in the end still cowed, whatever their private feelings about Tehran, that a regional conflagration destroys the economic transformation projects that are their futures. NEOM. Dubai’s financial architecture. The post-oil diversification on which they’ve bet their national existence. All of it collateral in a war they did not vote for and cannot escape.
The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Confirmed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, confirmed by the UKMTO, confirmed by tanker tracking services. Twenty million barrels per day. Thirty-one percent of global seaborne crude. Twenty percent of global LNG. The sole export route for Qatar and the UAE’s gas to China, India, South Korea.
The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has fallen to 57.8% — a multi-decade low, down from 71% at the century’s turn. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System handles trillions in daily settlement. The mBridge platform — a central bank digital currency corridor connecting China, Hong Kong, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Thailand — is fully operational. Iran has been selling its oil to China in yuan for years. Russia dumped its dollar holdings from 41% to under 10%. The architecture for post-dollar energy trade exists. It was built in anticipation of exactly this moment.
China has now announced an immediate halt to all rare earth exports to the United States and we’ll see how it plays out. China controls ninety percent of global refined rare earth output — the materials required for guidance systems, missile components, jet engine coatings, permanent magnets in every advanced weapons platform the US military operates. Yttrium prices were already sixty percent higher this week, seventy times their year-ago level. Two North American coating manufacturers had already paused production. Now the tap is entirely off. The United States is attempting to prosecute a multi-day air campaign against a country whose most powerful strategic partner has simultaneously cut off the material supply chain for the weapons future campaigns require.
A sustained Hormuz closure triggers a decision cascade in every energy-importing nation not already NATO-committed. Do you accumulate dollar reserves to buy oil no longer reliably flowing through dollar-denominated channels? Or do you accelerate into the parallel infrastructure Beijing has been laying since 2018? Saudi Arabia — Vision 2030 dependent on stability, largest trade partner already China — has been offered yuan settlement for years. The moment the Strait becomes a war zone under American management, Riyadh’s calculation changes. Directionally. Irreversibly.
The pattern is not subtle. Saddam priced oil in euros. He was removed and Iraqi oil reverted to dollars within months. Gaddafi proposed a gold dinar. He ended face-down in a ditch in 2011. Iran settled in yuan. It is being bombed today. Every finance ministry in the Global South is drawing the same conclusion: dollar dependency is a liability, and the infrastructure to reduce it now exists.
The petrodollar system — the arrangement by which global oil was priced in dollars, forcing every importing nation to accumulate dollars, recycling into US Treasuries, funding the carriers now launching strikes on Tehran — is not a law of physics. It is a political arrangement sustained by trust in American management of the global commons. Every time Washington bombs a country that was negotiating in good faith, every time a breakthrough is torched from the air, every time the dollar is weaponized and another finance ministry updates its exit spreadsheet — the trust erodes.
Israel is the only state in the Middle East with nuclear weapons. Dozens of them at the Negev Nuclear Research Centre near Dimona — never declared, never inspected, never subject to IAEA cameras, snapback mechanisms, maximum pressure campaigns, or Operation Epic Furies. The state whose nuclear secrecy is protected by an American UN veto stands as the co-architect of a war fought in the name of nuclear non-proliferation. Its defence minister called the June 2025 strikes the “promo.” Its prime minister launched the main event and flew to Berlin when the response arrived.
The nuclear program was never the point. It was always the pretext.
Araghchi named it: “Trump has turned ‘America First’ into ‘Israel First’ — which always means ‘America Last.’” You may dispute the framing. You cannot dispute the observable fact that American sailors are ducking Iranian missiles at Bahrain’s Fifth Fleet headquarters while one leader watches from Mar-a-Lago and another watches from Berlin.
MAGA voters who showed up because they were promised an end to forever wars were right that America had been betrayed by elites who put foreign (Israel’s) interests above theirs. They had the wrong villain.
Fifty-three percent of Trump voters, polled before June 2025, said the US should not get involved in the Iran-Israel conflict. Forty-five percent of all Americans opposed US military action against Iran. The war proceeded. The base was ignored. The uniparty consensus — forged in think tanks funded by defence contractors who profit from every sortie, guided by lobbying infrastructure ensuring no American politician rises without pledging fealty to Israeli security interests — delivered the war the electorate couldn’t vote against and will now pay for in blood, treasure, rare earth supply chains, and the monetary arrangement that has subsidised the American standard of living for fifty years.
Final thoughts
Bismarck described preventive war as committing suicide for fear of death. He was right then. He is right now.
History will note that a deal was on the table, that the strike date was set in Tel Aviv while the deal was being negotiated, that eighty-five children died in a school in Minab, that the Strait closed by afternoon, that the ceasefire request came by evening. It will note the man at Mar-a-Lago and the man in Berlin. It will note that the supreme leader was killed and the missiles kept flying. And it will note that China turned off the rare earth supply to the military prosecuting the war within hours of it starting.
Iraq. Syria. Lebanon. Libya. Somalia. Sudan. Iran.
The list is complete. The twenty-five-year project has reached its final entry, and in doing so may have written the epitaph not of the Iranian republic but of the American one. The petrodollar that funded the carriers. The carriers that launched the missiles. The missiles that closed the Strait. The Strait whose closure accelerates the de-dollarisation that makes the next war impossible to finance. The rare earth ban that grounds the planes before the next forever war can be carried out.
The empire is eating itself. And it called that epic fury.
Reprinted with permission from The Islander.
