A Middle East quagmire redux

Since the attacks on Iran in late February, Donald Trump has announced that the U.S. has won the war in Iran 68 times, as of this writing. Out of those 68 times, only one claim of victory was in September: an ominous sign, no doubt, that the war is indeed going poorly. Perhaps most unsettling are the words from retired U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer Travis Akers, who said, “Before I retired in 2024, the ‘worst-case scenario’ in the Pentagon for the Middle East was both straits