Programming note: Tonight, Tuesday, I'll be here with Part Twelve of our current Tale for Our Time, Sax Rohmer's Mohammedan caper The Quest of the Sacred Slipper.
~Further to yesterday's column, a third American is dead at the hands of the "Austin man" from Senegal.
Day Four began with President Trump's midnight post on Truth Social:
The United States Munitions Stockpiles have, at the medium and upper medium grade, never been higher or better - As was stated to me today, we have a virtually unlimited supply of these weapons. Wars can be fought "forever," and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries finest arms!)... The United States is stocked, and ready to WIN, BIG!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
"Wars can be fought 'forever'"?
Is Lindsey Graham now Trump's ghost-tweeter?
We know you have great weapons - because the Taliban at this very moment is using the ones Thoroughly Modern Milley et al left them in order to attack Pakistan (whose rise to nuclear status the entire money-no-object "intelligence community" managed to miss). The real question this last three-quarters-of-a-century is whether Washington is capable of using these great weapons to advance any even modest strategic goals in the national interest. Even Mollie Hemingway's generally admirable Federalist seems entirely uninterested in the subject. So we have a "free world" comprised of a bunch of Europussies (to take the Federalist framing) plus a superbutch boy who can blow things up but not to any purpose. Ask the six most photogenic moppets in Kabul. Oh, wait; you can't.
So I have grave misgivings about the latest adventure - not because I'm following the intra-right bitchfests on American social media, but because, if you'll forgive me getting a little technical, I think the Pentagon is total crap-crappity-crap. Okay, I'll nuance that John Kerry-style: it's total crap-crappity-crap at any mission lasting longer than the twenty minutes their lavishly-endowed "Afghan National Army" took to fold. I have huge personal admiration for Pete Hegseth, but I am sceptical that one man in twelve months can change the wholly corrupt, dysfunctional and self-serving culture of a military bureaucracy whose "Joint Chiefs" boast in the media that, if the President is minded to try anything, they'll dial the enemy and give him a head's up. I am still mildly astonished that the brass was so hollowed out that they issued every Afghan-bound GI with a complimentary copy of so obvious a fraud as Three Cups of Tea.
Are all those guys gone now? Anybody face a firing squad? I see the fellow who fatally stabbed a woman and a dog on the Beltway over the weekend turned out to be a career Foreign Service officer. Odd. But at least, unlike the senior adviser of Regulatory Affairs, Integrated Development and Global Health at the Gates Foundation and former head of the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (ie, the Numero Uno jabber fanatic), he doesn't appear to be a paedo. To modify Lord Acton's aperçu, power depraves and absolute power depraves absolutely.
So how's it going on Day Four?
Israel strikes Tehran and Beirut with missiles as US warns Iran 'hardest hits are yet to come'
Beirut, huh? If you're the five-star general in charge of the map-room in the Pentagon basement, you might need to order up a bigger map. (I take a great interest in life in Lebanon because that is the best-case scenario for England, Ireland, France, Austria, Sweden, etc by 2040.)
Anything else?
Oman, huh? If you're the twenty-seven-star general in charge of the map pins, you might need to order up another $147,000 jar of 'em from Raytheon. Any more?
US embassy in Kuwait closed 'until further notice'
US embassy in Riyadh hit by drones
US air base command building in Bahrain reportedly destroyed
Aw, screw it, let's cut to the chase:
'Depart now': US tells its citizens to urgently leave almost all Mideast countries, including Israel
Highly unusual directive, issued on third day of US-Israel war against Iran, affects hundreds of thousands of Americans, including over 200,000 in Israel; comes as Iran widens retaliatory attacks, Trump vows larger strikes
Well, that's the Yanks. Are you one of those Eurowimps figuring on sitting out this thing?
Iranian drone hits British airbase in Cyprus, damages runway
So the Greek colonels are on their way:
Greece, meanwhile, said it was sending two frigates and two F-16 fighter jets to Cyprus.
Greece will assist Cyprus in "countering threats and illegal actions on its territory," its defense ministry said.
Actually, Akrotiri is sovereign British territory but Sir Keir Starmer is taking time out of his hectic schedule of under-tipping Ukrainian rent-boys to give so much of it away, from Diego Garcia to Gibraltar, that I can understand why the Greek defence minister might be a little confused upon that point.
But okay, have a forty-three-star general run over to the State Department and ask if we can borrow a map of the world.
Deep breath. The Iranian urge to expand the battlefield to Saudi, the Gulf monarchies, British "overseas territories" (as we now call Crown colonies) and anything else they can reach may prove largely ineffectual, and confirm the Iranian foreign minister's weekend concession that theirs is now a regime without any command and control. However, it does provide a useful psychological insight into those officers some ranks below the late Supreme Leader, the late Interim Supreme Leader and whoever tomorrow's Interim Interim Supreme Leader proves to be. In widening the war to anywhere their drones can get to, these low-level lads seem to have decided, independently of the rubble back at head office, that either a) they might as well go down with the ship; or b) their best hope of surviving this thing is (in contrast to, say, Putin vis-à-vis Nordstream and other provocations) to buy time by escalating anywhere within reach and opting for generalised global chaos:
Qatar shut LNG production at the world's largest export facility after it was targeted in an Iranian drone attack, sending European gas prices surging as much as 54%. US prices should follow to some extent. https://t.co/U3Y2ToqKJp pic.twitter.com/ic7kvRGdww
— WWU Center for Economic and Business Research (@PugetSoundEF) March 3, 2026
Washington, meanwhile, seems to have walked back its original war aims. The President's weekend musings on "regime change" were all but repudiated by War Secretary Hegseth's briefing. And Marco Rubio's rationale was narrower still:
I'm thankful for Rubio for clearly laying out the primary rationale for why this had to happen now. There's a famous quote, possibly apocryphal, from J.P. Morgan that every man has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason, and the real reason. Rubio very straightforwardly... https://t.co/xqySEoaI8N
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) March 2, 2026
So we had to attack because the Zionist Entity was going to provoke Iran into attacking us first? Is Rubio in the pay of Tucker Carlson? Did Candace Owens honeytrap him?
Do you notice who's doing the stabbing and raping in the "free world" these days? Afghans... Iraqis... Libyans... Syrians... An estimated five per cent of all Syrians - or (as German women walking home from work can tell you) ten per cent of all Syrian males - moved to Europe in 2015 after McCain and Graham started jetting in to Raqqa for their photo-ops. That was enough strapping young Syrian "teenagers" to give that particular Swedish demographic cohort a sex imbalance it took forty years of China's one-child policy to achieve.
The equivalent percentage of Iran's population would be just shy of five million.
Whatever else may happen in the year ahead, that seems the way to bet. In fact, it's already under way. Any rallies for the Crown Prince in Qom yet?
Let's hope for better on Day Five.
~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a Gift Certificate or a Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
