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No, Trump's War in Iran Hasn't Been a Humiliating Defeat
(Telegraph-UK) Allister Heath - Does the West's expert class really believe that the war against Iran is a disaster? It is far too soon to conclude how this war will end, regardless of what Iranian propagandists and other appeasers would have us believe. There are a number of principal errors clouding "expert" judgments in the West. The first is the European establishment's inability to accept the scale of Iran's defeats since the Oct. 7, 2023, pogroms against Israel. The regime's decades-long plan for regional domination lies in tatters. It has wasted tens of billions of dollars, its proxies have been defanged, its economy plunged into depression, its mainland ravaged with 20,000 targets bombed, its navy sunk, its air defenses crippled, its missile stock and launchers decimated, its military-industrial complex blown up, and its nuclear capacity curtailed. It is a strange kind of victory which has seen Iran fail to shoot down a single U.S. or Israeli manned plane or sink a single ship. The reality is that Iran has been downgraded from regional superpower to a pirate terror state, able only to shoot a few missiles and drones at civilian targets and to blackmail the shipping industry. It proved remarkably easy to kill Ali Khamenei. Iran failed to overwhelm U.S. and Israeli defense systems. The stockpiles of allied interceptors have not run out. The Gulf states turned out to be more resilient than anticipated. U.S. combat losses have been smaller than expected.