Donald Trump has been doing his own spinning about Operation Epic Fury with a round of media interviews. But behind the confident chatter, the US President couldn’t conceal the chasm of uncertainty affecting his plans for Iran.

Speaking on the phone to a CNN presenter, he said: “We don’t know who the leadership is. We don’t know who they’ll pick. Maybe they’ll get lucky and get someone who knows what they’re doing … We don’t know who is leading the country now. They don’t know who’s leading.”

The last time a massive attack was launched on the Middle East in 2003, there was a seasoned defence secretary at the helm, Donald Rumsfeld. When asked how long he thought the Iraq war would last he replied: “It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

Rumsfeld was no neocon. He was contemptuous of nation-building, but famously observed in 2002: “There are known unknowns…but there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

This is where we are again today as rockets fly, embassies shutter and Westerners are urged to leave the Middle East. It is why a Pentagon insider told The Washington Post “the mood here is intense and paranoid” after six service members died in Kuwait.

The soldiers were killed by an Iranian strike on a makeshift operations center, at a civilian port thought to be far from harm’s way. These troops could be among the last US casualties or the first in a distressing series of........

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