People are using the wrong timetable and the wrong standard, and many of the critics would add the wrong endpoint as well. A limited air-and-sea campaign has to be assessed by the damage it inflicts on key functions, not by the political result it does not deliver within forty days. In Iran’s case the relevant issues are concrete: whether the regime can still repress its own population effectively, replace lost matériel, keep a fractured military and security apparatus working as something close to a coordinated system, and continue projecting force outward through missiles, drones, and proxy networks. Those functions are what made Iran dangerous in the first place. If collapse comes, it follows the breakdown of those functions.

Yet since the first salvos of 28 February, a familiar line has hardened in American commentary: the regime did not fall on cue, so the campaign must be incoherent, overextended, or strategically empty. That is movie thinking. Three acts. A climax. The villain on the floor before the credits roll. Real campaigns are not built that way. Critics keep importing an endpoint the planners never formally claimed, then treating the mismatch as proof of failure.

This argument concerns American commentary on the American campaign. Israel is a separate case. Its doctrine is shaped by geography and by the Begin Doctrine: it does not tolerate the prospect of an existential weapons program within striking range and then wait for Washington’s permission. Iranian exile communities understand that distinction. They do not treat Israeli intent and American intent as one undifferentiated Western impulse. The same separation applies to rhetoric. Anyone treating “obliterated” or “regime change” on Truth Social as a serious guide to policy is reading political noise as strategy. What matters is what has already been moved into theater, the targets that have been hit, and the specific capabilities now being taken down. The critics are easy enough to name. Ali Vaez argues that in trying to deny Iran a weapon of mass destruction, Washington may have handed it a weapon of mass disruption through the Strait of Hormuz. Frank Gardner writes that Iran has broken out of its box. Daniel Levy warns of a slide toward catastrophic ground operations. Tucker Carlson, from a different political corner and a well-known master of manipulation, called this the worst possible moment for American intervention. Disappointing is that both liberals and conservatives eager to attack President Trump use the same medieval argument that Jews are behind every plague and that they certainly poisoned the wells now as well. Exactly the same logical construction that is so obvious in their arguments – “Israel made America go to war”, an argument behind many wars the US lost. This time the US didn’t even start to lose; compared to its history of engaging in “forever wars,” it looks quite different until now. The EU, making its own step as what they saw as their abandonment in the war in Europe and the pressure to give up its territories, would be more than happy to make their move – but they could not stop America. But Israel made it go to war. That’s never-ending nor helpful rhetoric. Let’s wait and see. None of that is frivolous. Much of it, though, rests on the same error: the war is being measured against its loudest political rhetoric, and because the grand finale has not arrived on television time, the operational record is dismissed as failure.

The trouble starts with the measuring stick. Force movements into position do not amount to a decision to use them. A carrier group moved into place, bunker-busters flown forward, more tankers spread across the region, expeditionary units pushed closer to theater — those are options, not verdicts. The Russian military is unable to plan properly (something I saw firsthand and which also stems from its military history), but even they construct an option set in advance, often with redundancy, because after the decision there is no time left to assemble tools. Much television analysis still blurs preparation and employment. The public ends up hearing prebuttals to invasions nobody has ordered, along with lectures about occupations that exist mainly as studio graphics.

The talk around Iran’s islands in the Strait — Abu Musa, the Tunbs, Larak, Hengam — is a good example. CNN’s own military analysts flagged Larak as a “critical military target” because missiles and small craft launched from it can cut the choke point. Kharg, further north in the Gulf, is a different kind of target — a fuel hub rather than a choking point, and the loudest speculation about an American ground operation has centered there. On air, either scenario sounds clean: seize the island, lock down the strait or the oil revenue, come away with a visible trophy. The operational logic is far messier. Fixed positions on those islands can already be struck from standoff range by carrier aviation in theater; the 1 April strikes on Hengam show how attainable that objective is without a landing. Put troops there and they become what they were meant to remove: exposed targets inside mainland missile and drone range, tied to a fragile sustainment line, politically harder to withdraw once losses begin. A landing remains possible; there are simply obvious reasons to build the option and never use it.

The same misreading shapes a great deal of talk about “no forever wars.” Critics on the left often hear retreat. Some on the right hear pacifism. Neither reading is serious. In practice the doctrine seems narrower and harder: no prolonged ground occupations in hostile environments, no infantry left holding terrain they may later have to abandon under fire. Air power remains available. Sea power does too, along with standoff strike, coercive presence, and deterrence. A country that refuses any use of force stops deterring. Rejecting indefinite occupation leaves other instruments in place. That is what this campaign is actually testing. The question is not whether air and sea power can somehow reorder Iran from the outside. It is whether they can break enough of the regime’s essential machinery to produce real strategic effect without another American ground “forever” war.

So far, the evidence points in that direction. The relevant evidence lies in friction inside the system. When radars go dark, command has to reroute, and timing slips with it. Launchers stay hidden longer. Resupply gets harder. Repair cycles stretch. Reconstitution slows down. A military system does not need a spectacular collapse to become slower, clumsier, and more brittle. That matters.

And the important evidence is not mere theater. It is friction like anyone’s screenplay. Ballistic-missile launches reportedly fell from roughly 350 on 28 February to about 25 by 14 March. Drone launches dropped from over 800 on Day 1 to around 75 by Day 15, according to US and Iranian military statements that at least converge on the trend. Iran’s integrated air-defense network appears to have been heavily degraded. Defense-industrial sites tied to missile and enrichment reconstitution were struck across multiple provinces. Much of the surface fleet has reportedly been lost, including most of the larger vessels. Repeated strikes on command nodes in Tehran and on senior military figures appear to have disrupted the chain needed for a sustained regional response. That is not an empty ledger just because the regime is still standing.

The hardest question is repression. Air and sea power can damage coercive organs from the outside. They aren’t able to provide a substitute for domestic political action. There is real uncertainty here. External pressure can weaken a regime. It can also, for a time, stiffen nationalist reflexes and help it rally parts of the population. Anyone speaking with confidence about the internal political timetable is guessing.

Still, much of the collapse-on-schedule criticism carries its own fantasy: foreign bombing should deliver regime change quickly and cleanly, from outside. Even if that were possible, it is not obviously desirable. National humiliation from the air is a poor foundation for whatever comes next. Iran has a political tradition of its own, internal fractures, and separate sources of legitimacy. The January 2026 protests — which followed Israel’s earlier and much more limited strikes the previous June, rather than preceding them — at least suggest that degrading repressive capacity from outside can open room for indigenous political action that foreign occupation would close off, which is nothing more than speculation by people whose thinking is based on stereotypes, and it’s always a good political technology – no one knows either the cultural aspect and history of Iran, nor has experienced life in an autocracy where his life wouldn’t cost a cent. Cyrus, in both Jewish and Iranian memory, is remembered as a liberator and not a conqueror. While FRA (EU agency) says 96% of Jews in Europe at least once a year experiences antisemitism, Spain having no Jewish community for the last 500 years became a stronghold of widely acceptable antisemitism in many cases promoted by people from the state institutions, in Iran, according to GAMAAN research, 67% of its population want good ties with Israel. The better outcome here is not an American- or Israeli-manufactured regime change. It is a regime weakened enough that Iranians can finish the job themselves.

So the test runs slower than the weekend panels want. Over the next three to six months, watch the concrete signs. Fewer arrests? That means the coercive arm is weaker. Slower rebuilds of missile stocks? That’s a tell. Visible coordination failures or commands that don’t get answered. And, of course, whether the regional shadow shrinks. Those questions do have answers. They just do not appear on a television schedule. Continued degradation in those functions would mean the campaign is doing what this kind of campaign can do. Recovery would leave room for the critics to be vindicated, though on better grounds than the ones they are now offering. Either way, the real world in general, and wars in particular, do not resemble and shouldn’t be judged along Hollywood lines. Who saw the war knows it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)