The U.S. military said late on Thursday it completed its latest round of strikes on Iran, marking a 13th consecutive night of American attacks. The latest strikes lasted more than two hours, according to U.S. Central Command. That’s the machinery of state power in motion: jets, command centers, and a war room deciding who gets to live under the blast radius while officials talk about “diminishing the threat” to civilian mariners and commercial vessels.
CENTCOM said it targeted Iranian military command centers, drone storage facilities, communication networks, coastal surveillance sites and maritime capabilities to further diminish the threat Iran poses to civilian mariners and commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The language is antiseptic. The reality is not. The apparatus keeps widening the war, and the people who pay are the ones nowhere near the conference tables, the committee rooms, or the command screens.
Who Has the Power
President Donald Trump said he was weighing a resumption of major combat operations against Iran but had not made a final call or set a deadline. In a Thursday interview with Axios, Trump said, "I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it." He also promised "major military punishment" for Iran and its Houthi allies on Thursday after the Yemeni fighters struck two Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea, extending the war into a second major shipping chokepoint.
Trump has also threatened to target Iranian energy facilities and bridges. Iran has warned that if the U.S. carried out such threats, Iranian forces would target regional oil, gas, electricity and economic facilities. Tehran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz. The 1949 Geneva Conventions on humanitarian conduct in war prohibit attacks on sites considered essential for civilians, and international law experts in the U.S. said in April that such attacks could amount to war crimes after Trump's previous threats. Trump's threat that month to destroy Iran's entire civilization also drew wide condemnation.
The war didn’t start in a vacuum. The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28. Tehran responded with its own strikes on Israel and Gulf states that host U.S. bases. U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and Israeli attacks on Lebanon have since killed thousands and displaced millions. That’s the human ledger behind the slogans: dead, uprooted, and scattered while leaders speak in the language of “security” and “conclusion of hostilities.”
Who Gets Crushed
Republican defense hawks urged President Trump to unleash major combat operations as he weighed a "massive attack" on Iran. Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said he spoke to the president multiple times this week on Iran and encouraged him to continue pounding the country, with negotiations appearing fruitless. "I’ve expressed publicly and privately my approval of finishing the job, and realizing that negotiations were getting us nowhere," Wicker told The Hill on Thursday. "I’ve made it clear that Iran, in my judgment, has no intention of negotiating in good faith or keeping a promise and that it’s pointless to pretend that they are a trustworthy negotiating party." He added, "I believe we can keep the strait open on our terms, and that’s the key to a successful conclusion of hostilities."
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), a close Trump ally who is vying to be the next chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said the U.S. military needs to clobber Iran "as hard as we possibly can right now." "I would do everything I possibly can right now to turn them around. So that’d be my thought," Jackson said Thursday. "I just think maximum pressure from the air and maximum security of the strait — anything they have that they could possibly use to cause problems in the strait needs to be destroyed," he said.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.), who also sits on the Armed Services Committee, praised Trump for being the only president to "have big enough balls" to bring Tehran to the negotiating table and said what brought them there were "massive bombing strikes." "We got to remember the goal. This is to make sure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon ever. They’ve been able to open and close the straits willy-nilly for 50 years with conventional weapons. If they had a nuclear umbrella over that, it becomes a binary choice: nuclear war, which no one wants, or these radical Muslim mullahs having control over the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity," Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL, said in an interview. "Those are unacceptable choices."
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who retired as a brigadier general in the Air Force, said Iran "needs to initiate peace," because if the U.S. does it, "they’re going to think it’s weakness." The Nebraska Republican said Tehran needs to believe it is being "crushed" militarily and feel forced to "stick their hand out to say please stop." "That’s what we got to wait for," said Bacon, who also is a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), a former Marine helicopter pilot, said Iran has shown nothing but "defiance" and has not displayed "good faith" in diplomatic talks. He said Trump is in the delicate position of handling the conflict in the Middle East with the midterms encroaching and the administration hoping to keep the Republican majority in both chambers. "This should be one of those things that I think we need to bring to the end swiftly. It’s an unfortunate cycle of politics right now. I used to teach the evolution of warfare, and wars never become more popular over time. The faster you end them, the better," McCormick, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. "Even when it’s violent, because you’ll save lives. Ultimately, you save lives by being decisive and violent and turning the people against their own leadership. There’s no way that Iran bends to us until we make it so uncomfortable that their people rise up." McCormick, who was in the Navy Medical Corps, said the U.S. needs regime change in Iran and advised Trump to trust his instincts on the matter. "It’s the only thing that I think is going to solve this," he said. "It would be transformational to world politics. It would bring peace to the Middle East, which we haven’t had in my lifetime; it would literally reinforce the Abraham Accords."
What They Call 'Order'
Democrats criticized Trump’s decision to launch Operation Epic Fury and worked to halt U.S. military operations in the region through war powers resolutions. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a senior member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said, "It’s clear, they had no plans." He added, "This administration keeps people in the dark, and the president just makes the decision that he thinks, as he usually says, ‘I just call it right.’ … It is a stunning way to approach foreign policy." Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Middle East and North Africa, said the conflict has been "so botched" that it is "by no means clear what is the right move at this time." He said, "I think it’s critical that the Strait of Hormuz be a free shipping lane, not subject to Iranian control. But I have no idea what steps are necessary to achieve that goal." Sherman also said Iran is "incredibly vulnerable" and that the country’s electrical generation facilities are "legitimate military targets" to the extent that they provide power to the Iranian military or to weapons manufacturing facilities. "It is entirely legal for the United States to try to stop them from manufacturing drones that are terrorizing ships in a free navigation strait," Sherman said, adding that he has not received a classified briefing on the Iran war recently.
The U.S. has surged firepower to the Middle East in recent weeks, sending F-35s and F-16 fighter jets to the CENTCOM theater. Multiple Air Force C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft were flying from Germany to Israel and Jordan last week, as reported by The Hill and other news outlets. More than 150 medics recently arrived at Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a U.S. Army post near Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. official familiar with the matter told The Hill on Thursday. Since the major hostilities resumed in early July, the U.S. military has suffered casualties, and the number of injured service members has risen. Eighteen service members have been killed in the conflict, and more than 500 have been injured. The Pentagon confirmed Monday that nearly 100 service members have been wounded since July 7, but 96 percent of them have returned to duty.
The uptick in kinetic action comes as public support for the war is declining, including among Trump’s supporters. Just 24 percent of Americans think the conflict has been worth the cost, a June poll by Reuters/Ipsos found. Nearly 80 percent of respondents said in a Reuters survey released last week that the U.S. military will remain engaged in the war for "an extended period of time." Earlier this week, a Politico poll found that nearly 1 in 5 MAGA voters said the U.S. should end the conflict regardless of the costs. Still, Trump claimed the U.S. is doing "very well" in the war against Iran. "I would say better than anybody expected could be done," the president said Thursday.
The people at the bottom keep getting the bill. The commanders, committee chairs, and presidential operators keep talking about pressure, punishment, and leverage. The rest are left with the wreckage, the wounded, and the long shadow of a war that keeps expanding because the people with power keep deciding it should.