Programming note: Tonight, Sunday, I'll be back here at SteynOnline with Part Ten of our seventy-ninth Tale for Our Time, Sax Rohmer's Mohammedan caper of 1914 - The Quest of the Sacred Slipper.
~In 1989 they appointed Ayatollah Khamenei as new Supreme Leader on the very day his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, expired. Thirty-seven years later, it's all a bit more complicated. It's not only the Supreme Leader who's dead but three dozen or so of his top underlings. And it's not clear those lower down the chain who had the good fortune not to be summoned to the Ayatollah's last meeting are in any hurry for a promotion.
That's the sort of high-precision opening salvo only the US military can do, as we touch on in today's episode of America Alone. And when I say "the US military" I mean the Israelis, who actually pulled it off. If it were the Yanks, some no-name JAG (a wanker army lawyer) would have vetoed the dispatch of the Numero Uno bad guy, as they did on the first night of the Afghan war vis à vis Mullah Omar.
Nevertheless, a lot of MAGA types are not too happy about the general autumn-of-2001 vibe all over "conservative" media:
"Freedom" and "democracy" have been the rationale for war for most of my adult life.
Meanwhile, I've watched my own country deteriorate and its people replaced during that same period. https://t.co/lzofh0NbOj pic.twitter.com/MHOu5eTvdn
— Adam Johnston (@adamkjohnston) February 28, 2026
Mr Johnston is not wrong. And, even if you think the Middle East should be more of a priority than the middle west, the US has demonstrated no capacity whatsoever for warmongering in the national interest. Years ago I summarised the American way of war as "shock and awe for forty-eight hours and then a long slow bleed out over two decades". The Pentagon generally wins the first two days, and then loses the next two decades.
By the way, the self-quote above is from a Fox News show on which I interviewed a chap called JD Vance. He was not then Vice President or even junior senator from Ohio, but just a bloke running in a GOP primary and languishing sufficiently in the polling basement that he thought it worth giving an interview to some "niche Canadian".
All these years later, I notice that, on "social media", Mr Vance has been silent since Thursday, which was presumably when he got a head's up about the Khamenei kaboom. So, in the absence of any new material, how about a golden oldie?
Twenty years ago we invaded Iraq. The war killed many innocent Iraqis and Americans. It destroyed the oldest Christian populations in the world. It cost over $1 trillion, and turned Iraq into a satellite of Iran. It was an unforced disaster, and I pray that we learn its lessons.
— JD Vance (@JDVance) March 19, 2023
I think it safe to say that the Vice President has grave misgivings about what this latest intervention's unintended consequences could be. For example, right now the Taliban are using all the weaponry bequeathed to them by Thoroughly Modern Milley and the rest of the Pentagon's beribboned buffoons to attack Pakistan, a nuclear power.
Moreover, as Vance made plain last year in Munich, he agrees with Adam Johnston that the critical battlefield is the home front: as the Civilisational Deathwatch clock on our home page makes plain, on the present trajectory, by 2040 western Europe will be just a cookie-cutter Krappistan while the US will be a bloody and violent Latin-American favela. Even if one accepts that the mullahs are itching to nuke the capitals of the west, they could not inflict as much existential damage on Europe as such rock-ribbed conservatives as Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson have done, and on America as Joe Biden has done. There is no point going to war for Qom and Kandahar while surrendering Malmö and Minnesota.
So on this week's episode of my ongoing audio adaptation of the bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It I consider our failure to enlist all the elements of national power. Here am I twenty sodding years ago:
So, just as the only guy in town with a tennis racket isn't going to be playing a lot of matches, the logic of America's military dominance is that both its allies and enemies have every interest to find some other form of battlefield, whether (for France) the international talking shops or (for Islamist clerics) the suburban mosques of North America, just to name two venues where the hyperpower is far less confident.
Which is why the "war on terror" has been utterly lost. More from a sod-bollocking generation ago:
If this were World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there's an excellent chance they can drag things out until western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default. An army is only one weapon a civilization wields, and the weapon of last resort, too. But, when you add up those elements of national power – military, legal, diplomatic, economic, informational – it's hard not to conclude that (as was said of the British after the fall of Singapore) at least four of those five guns are pointing in the wrong direction... We fight the symptoms – the terror plots – but not the cause.
And so here we are, taking out far-flung ayatollahs as Muslims fill Times Square to pray to Mecca.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty-Six of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, there are spy thrillers, comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to almost eighty cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio adventures, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to over six dozen gripping yarns in Tales for Our Time. Please join me next weekend for Part Twenty-Seven of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
