by Roger Kimball
While commentators trade in familiar fears, events on the ground point to a far more decisive outcome than the online debate suggests.
A commentator in (mirabile dictu) The Washington Post made an excellent point about how the war in Iran is being understood. “We are living through the first alt-war,” the Tel Aviv University scholar Jen Brick Murtazashvili wrote. On the one hand, we have the war as it is fought online. On the other, we have the war as it is fought in reality, on the ground. The two “have diverged so completely,” Murtazashvili noted, “that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information; it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality—one that confirms what they already believe.”
The online narrative—I hesitate to call it “reality”—takes place not just online but in the propaganda press more generally. The dominant theme here is excited angst and handwringing, typified by a recent cover story in The Economist, “Advantage Iran.” Yes, really. “A month of bombing Iran has achieved nothing. . . . For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic.”
The painful truth is that this is essentially the same narrative being peddled by the Iranian regime itself. See, for example, the silly Lego videos the regime has been releasing. They are supposed to expose the U.S.-led anti-regime coalition to ridicule. The effect is a self-deconstructing farce. What genius, I wonder, came up with that embarrassing gambit?
Most of the legacy media is caught in the grip of painful nostalgia. Not only do generals tend to fight the last war, but media hacks also reach into yesterday’s satchel of clichés to describe the new conflict. Thus, we see Politico solemnly opining that “The administration’s interest in pinpointing a negotiating partner signals a desire to find some way out of the quagmire that Iran has quickly become, jolting world markets, spiking oil prices, and renewing concern about inflation.”
“Quagmire”? The war against the theocratic lunatics who have oppressed Iran since 1979 began just a month ago. Is that enough time to become mired in anything, let alone a quag or swamp? Hugh Hewitt treated this lazy, politically charged gambit to some portion of the contempt it deserves:
Quagmire? 70-year-old B-52s are lumbering across defenseless Iranian skies using precision JDAMs at will to continue pummeling the military-industrial complex of #Iran and that’s a ‘quagmire?’
‘Quagmire’ was appropriately applied to Vietnam in 1968–1969 when LBJ had 538,000 American troops in the country, up from the 11,000 JFK had there in 1962. By the time RN ended deployment of American troops there in 1973, more than 58,000 troops had died there. That is a quagmire.
Hewitt is right: The campaign against the Iranian regime is an astonishing success story, “achieving its military objectives in rapid fashion with near total dominance of the battlefield. It is not a quagmire in any way. Looking for a sane actor to guide the radicalized elite out of its fanaticism is not a ‘signal’ of anything other than appropriate planning.” Game, set, and match.
Reaching into the same lexicon that produced “quagmire,” the legacy media warns about this conflict becoming an “endless war” à la Iraq or Afghanistan. We’re only four weeks into this campaign; almost all of Iran’s leadership has been killed, its navy sunk, its air force destroyed, and its offensive capabilities largely neutralized. But the media remembers the neocons. It likes President Trump even less than it liked them, so they cast Trump in the role they both know and love to hate. The problem is, Trump is not a neocon. He did not start a war with Iran. He is ending the war against the West that Iran’s mullahs started in 1979. This internet commentator is right: “The President is no neo-con; he’s a calculating strategist focused on results, not rhetoric. Once American objectives are secured, he’ll let the Middle East resolve itself on its own terms.”
Meanwhile, as the legacy media crows that President Trump is “backtracking,” “blinking,” and so on because those crafty Iranians reminded him that a lot of oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz—why hadn’t he thought of that?—the U.S. and Israel continue their strikes against Iranian infrastructure and regime personnel. That’s the reality side of the disjunction Murtazashvili discerned. Last week, President Trump issued an ultimatum. Open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, or we will destroy your energy infrastructure. He then decided to extend the deadline. Then he extended it again. But that wasn’t blinking. It was smiling. The U.S. and Israel continued to destroy military targets and eliminate key government personnel and scientists. Trump temporarily exempted Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi from the coalition’s kill list. Weakness? Blinking? Backtracking? I think it is searching.
President Trump sees the incidents of the Iranian people targeting IRGC and Basij forces. He hears people like the Iranian-American actor Sam Asghari, who just said on X that “The people of Iran are in love with America. The gap between Iran’s regime and its people is vast. They want freedom. And I’m happy this situation is happening.” President Trump is searching for plausible candidates for Iranian leadership with whom he can negotiate. This is not an alternative to victory. The U.S. and Israel have already won the military victory. That is the reality. Now it just needs to be codified by a new Iranian regime. That will happen very quickly, in a matter of weeks, if not days. The imminent arrival of two Marine Expeditionary Force contingents and paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne will help concentrate the mind.
I don’t expect the legacy media to be happy about it. I am not even sure they will acknowledge the victory. But what they do or do not do hardly matters. They are more and more like those computer-generated figures in Iran’s pathetic anti-Trump Lego clips. Those online battles are the only ones they can win. The alternative is the war we have been fighting with deeds, not memes. On that battlefield, America, the Iranian people, and the Middle East as a whole have won a remarkable victory. It remains only to discover the names of the people President Trump decides he can do business with.
Photo: WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 28: A White House news reporter participates in a TV interview on the White House driveway on February 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States and Israel had launched an attack on Iran Saturday morning. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/03/29/the-first-alt-war-online-fantasy-vs-reality-in-the-iran-campaign/
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