"In the first hundred hours of Operation Epic Fury, the United States flung munitions costing about that much at Iran, striking nearly two thousand targets. This won the U.S. and Israel nearly "complete control" of Iran's airspace, allowing them to unleash "death and destruction from the sky all day long," Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, crowed."
"American Presidents have had Iran in their sights for decades. When Bill Clinton warned of "rogue states" in the nineteen-nineties, Iran was the first example he gave. When George W. Bush spoke of a three-country "axis of evil" in 2002, Iran was in it. In 2019, Donald Trump designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization."
"The two countries have since been locked in a standoff that has lasted longer than the Cold War. Perhaps the real question is: Why is this only happening now? Whatever has held back the dogs of war, it hasn't been a lack of American ability."
The United States conducted Operation Epic Fury, expending approximately three billion dollars in munitions against Iran across nearly two thousand targets within the first hundred hours. This military campaign achieved near-complete airspace control for the U.S. and Israel. American hostility toward Iran extends back to 1979, when revolutionaries overthrew the U.S.-backed shah and established an Islamic republic. Successive administrations—Clinton, Bush, Trump, and potentially Harris—have maintained adversarial positions toward Iran. Clinton referenced Iran as a rogue state, Bush included it in the axis of evil, and Trump designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. The persistence of this conflict across multiple presidencies and decades suggests deep structural antagonism rather than temporary policy disagreements.
#us-iran-conflict #military-intervention #foreign-policy #bipartisan-hostility #middle-east-geopolitics
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]