Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Their supreme leader and top commanders were killed. Military bases, factories and bridges were reduced to rubble. Their economy has taken blow after blow. Yet Iran’s authoritarian rulers believe they have emerged from this war in a stronger position than when it began. After six weeks of an intense U.S.-Israeli campaign and with a temporary cease-fire in place, Iran’s leadership isn’t conciliatory as it enters into renewed negotiations with the United States. Instead, it has…

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Wired reports: The last time a government official from Lebanon sat down to think carefully about national digital infrastructure, nobody expected another war with Israel. That’s how it has always gone. “We were not ready for this,” says Kamal Shehadi, the Lebanese minister of technology and AI, and minister of the displaced. “I have to admit that we didn’t expect something of this magnitude to happen.” On March 2, 2026, Israeli evacuation warnings began appearing on phones across southern Lebanon….

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The New York Times reports: Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal. Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus…

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The New York Times reports: A stark disconnect between reality and rhetoric surfaced on Tuesday as U.S. forces continued their methodical strikes on military targets in Iran even as their commander in chief raised his steady stream of threats directed at Iran to apocalyptic levels. The United States launched a series of more than 90 strikes on Kharg Island, Iran’s oil export hub, early Tuesday. A U.S. military official characterized the Kharg strikes as “restrikes” — hitting targets that have…

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Hussein Banai writes: When President Donald Trump takes to the airwaves to threaten to bomb a nation of 90 million people “back to the Stone Ages” and follows that threat — in less than 48 hours — with strikes on civilian infrastructure, the destruction of a major bridge between two populous cities and a warning, in an expletive-laden post (on Easter Sunday, no less), that the assault on the targeted country’s power grid has “not even started,” it is worth…

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The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump has continued to describe the war against Iran as an unqualified success, saying as recently as Monday that the United States was doing “unbelievably well,” while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tehran had been “embarrassed and humiliated” by U.S. forces. But Iran’s downing of an F-15E fighter jet and the high-risk rescue operation that ensued showed that Tehran retains the ability to threaten the United States’ military personnel and cast doubt on the…

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Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discusses the increasing “desperation” of U.S. strategy, Iran’s long-term economic control over the Strait of Hormuz and growing “hawkishness,” and the dangerous possibility of nuclear warfare:   Garrett Graff writes: Are we really this inured to unhinged comments that “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell” doesn’t even warrant a full 24-hour news-cycle? In a sentence that would have surprised the…

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  The greatest threat to stability in the Middle East is not Iran, but “the US working closely together with Israel”, argues United States political scientist John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer tells host Steve Clemons that the notion that the US and Israel are making a safer, more stable Middle East is “ludicrous”. And the idea that Iran is “the great destabiliser” in the region is “a myth that the US and Israel purvey”. After US President Donald Trump insisted that “We…

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