We hope our readers around the world had a good Palm Sunday - or at any rate a better one than the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
~THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: From the playwright George S Kaufman upon the German invasion of the Soviet Union:
I think they're shooting without a script.
As you know, for the pro-war types - the neo-neocons reborn for another triumphant quarter-century - I endeavour to start each column by linking to a more optimistic view than my own. So here is Bill O'Reilly's take after a lengthy conversation with the President.
My own position remains that this war is a disaster. The only question is the scale of catastrophe - whether it is merely (along with Afghanistan and Ukraine) America's third lost war in half-a-decade or something more consequential and defining, as Suez was for Britain. With each passing day, I rather incline to the latter. It should not be necessary to add that that does not mean I am on the side of the ayatollahs, but apparently it is. I have been opposed to the mullahs since 1978, when, as part of his commitment to "human rights", President Carter refused to sell rubber bullets or tear gas to the Shah, leaving His Imperial Majesty with nothing but live ammo for crowd-control - a characteristically smart move from the beatific eunuch, and, more broadly, the usual strategic cock-up by Washington: the two western powers principally responsible for the existence of the "Islamic Republic" are America and France.
So I am not pro-ayatollah, although it is a melancholy fact that most of the world's population is. My objection is very simple. To avoid giving offence, I shall try to reprise it as delicately as possible: while America has many admirable virtues, the ability to wage war to any purpose is not one of them.
Many people are now advising that the President pivot to what that somewhat tedious cliché formulates as "declare victory and go home". But that's a little harder to do if you've already announced that we won "in the first hour". So Trump, as his Treasury Secretary puts it, is now having to escalate in order to de-escalate. From Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal:
Trump Weighs Military Operation to Extract Iran's Uranium
"Extract" from where? The US believes "most" of the material is at two of the sites they "obliterated" last year - a stockpile at Natanz and another deep in a mountain near Isfahan. Removing a thousand pounds of enriched uranium under combat conditions from an underground facility would no doubt be "easy" (as the President always says about seizing Kharg Island or opening up the Strait of Hormuz) but would still take a week or more.
On the other hand, for what it's worth, I heard of an even nuttier plan in recent days - that Trump is so keen for an off-ramp he's considering sending in troops to stage a head-fake operation to "extract" something from somewhere in Iran that he can pass off to cable news as a "seizure" of the "uranium". I take it that came from the Dems as a preview of next year's articles of impeachment, but you never know...
Please stop listening to this fool Mr. President.
We didn't vote for him.
We voted for you.
We voted for no new wars.
America First! https://t.co/J4Yso8fKoG
— Michael Flynn Jr (@realmflynnJR) March 29, 2026
On the other other hand, maybe he has bigger fish to fry. From the President's exclusive interview with The Financial Times:
To be honest with you, my favourite thing is to take the oil in Iran but some stupid people back in the US say: 'Why are you doing that?' But they're stupid people.
On the other other other hand, it's only a few days since Trump argued that, because "we have a lot of oil", maybe "we shouldn't even be there at all".
Possibly this is just Art of the Deal-type stuff to leave Ayatollah #437 with whiplash ahead of the talks in Islamabad. Then again, we may not even need negotiations now, since Trump says his imaginary Iranian friend has already conceded most of the points on his fifteen-point plan. For some of us, it's all hugely entertaining. For world leaders, from Macron to Putin to Carney to Xi to the Deputy Tourism Minister of the South Sandwich Islands, it allows the United States to rampage around as the rogue elephant in the room, while they just quietly get on with their own priorities. But the markets are wary of entertainment: they favour stability, no matter how boring it is. That's why the President's weekly Truth Social post every Friday afternoon to talk the price of oil back down to a hundred bucks failed this time to manipulate said markets: it opened today at $115 per barrel; they've priced in the weekend postponement of Armageddon.
For the two-points-up-in-Iowa crowd, Megyn Kelly and Jesse Kelly have been musing on the GOP being out of power for the next twenty years. As you know, I think the next half-decade is the entire western world's last meaningful electoral cycle, so I'm not worrying too much about the next twenty years, because it'll be too late by then. I am, however, worried about the next twenty days. For example, those Tomahawk missiles we hear so much about..?
The maximum rate of production is estimated to be 2,330 per year: Three contracts from Raytheon each have a capacity of 600 and BAE has a contract to produce up to 530 missiles per year, according to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which cites Pentagon budget documents.
BAE is British Aerospace, the biggest defence contractor in Europe. So 1,800 Raytheon plus 530 BAe equals a possible 2,330 Tomahawk missiles per year. However, for 2026, the alleged Department of "War" ordered only fifty-seven.
America has averaged around ninety Tomahawks per annum of late, but, presumably, having "obliterated" Iran's nuclear programme in 2025, it foresaw little need for anything beyond a smidgeonette over half the usual number this coming year. So how's that working out?
One of the sources said over 850 have been used so far in the conflict, a figure that is roughly nine times the number of Tomahawks the Pentagon buys on average each year.
So, in the first four weeks, we fired off a decade's worth of Tomahawks. Hey, why not? That's more than "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and "Operation Enduring Freedom" (Afghanistan: how's that enduring, by the way?) combined: Shock'n'awe, baby! Er, how many does that leave for the next four weeks?
President Eisenhower was not quite the last American general to win anything, although he comes pretty close. However, his warning about the "military-industrial complex" downplayed its most obvious feature: it turns war into just another racket, a supersized version of Minnesota daycares. Our generals are garbage because being a four-star general is merely a prelude to being a twenty-seven-star lobbyist - and every single one of them understands that.
The absence of the Director of National Intelligence from last week's cabinet meeting suggests that the official casus belli - the "imminence" of Persian nukes - is not shared by America's own bloated "intelligence community". Iran is not two weeks away from getting a nuke; it's two days: all Tehran has to do is wire a mutually agreeable sum to Kim Jong-Un's Swiss bank account. Or even - after another few weeks - to that of certain elements in the Pakistani government. However this war ends, one consequence of it will be nuclear proliferation - if that's the only way to stop Operation Totally Butch from ayatollahing you whenever Trump shoots the breeze with Levin or Graham.
The racket rolls on. Can you win a war when war is just another Somali daycare? The two-thirds of a century since Eisenhower's speech seems pretty clear on that.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with Mark's column on the start of Month Two. Our weekend music show celebrated spring with songs old and new. Rick McGinnis's Saturday movie date was The Palm Beach Story, while our Sunday Song of the Week revived a hit from the Vietnam era. Our marquee presentation was the latest installment of Mark's highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone.
If you were too busy this weekend negotiating with desperate Iranians, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
