WASHINGTON IS BOMBING IRAN WITH NO PLAN — AND ITS OWN SPIES JUST SAID SO
A new US intelligence assessment — reported by the Washington Post and briefed to the Trump administration — has delivered a quiet but devastating verdict: the airstrikes are not working
The CIA-led report concludes that Tehran is not going to soften its position on sanctions, on the Strait of Hormuz, on its sovereignty — no matter how many nights of bombing continue. Iran’s leadership, the assessment finds, remains resilient. It can absorb this pressure — including a naval blockade — for months.
This is the Legitimacy Principle playing out in real time. Military force cannot manufacture political capitulation where none exists. Iran’s government derives its staying power not from its air defenses, but from a domestic and regional legitimacy architecture that airstrikes simply cannot touch. Washington keeps mistaking battlefield damage for strategic victory — the same error the DIA flagged after the nuclear site strikes, and the same one being repeated now.
What we are witnessing is a superpower locked into a war it does not know how to end, against an adversary it does not understand. Eleven nights of bombing, and the CIA’s own analysts are telling the White House: this isn’t moving the needle.
The gap between American military capability and American strategic judgment has rarely been this exposed.
— The Great Game
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