If you're in many parts of the Commonwealth (although not Scotland), Happy Easter Monday. If you're in many parts of Europe, Happy Vízbevető, Happy Śmigus-dyngus Happy Velikonoční pondělí or Happy Veľkonočný pondelok, according to taste. If you're in the United States, Happy First Day of Yet Another Work-Week. In the Catholic quarters of Mitteleuropa, this is the day when the boys spank the girls on their legs and buttocks with gaily decorated branches in order to keep them healthy, comely and fecund through the coming year. It's always worked for me.
~As you know, for the neo-neocons now in the Republican ascendant, I endeavour to start each column by linking to a more optimistic take on the war than my own. From James E Thorne:
Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride
Very longtime readers may recall a certain "niche Canadian" eighteen sod-bollocking years ago:
The Free World as a Free Ride
It's all been said before, but inertia is the most powerful force in human affairs. Still, I think the point is less worth making two decades on in America's accelerating decline: the debt in 2008 was a smidgeonette under ten trillion dollars; now it's a smidgeonette under forty trillion. However, you may find Mr Thorne's analysis more persuasive.
The weekend news was dominated by the Pentagon's daring rescue of a downed airman in the Zagros Mountains. Here is The New York Post's stirring account:
How seriously wounded US airman climbed mountain, hid in crevice and dodged Iranian bounty-hunters for 36 hours
I had carelessly assumed that this was some sort of Saving Private Ryan caper, but my eyebrow lifted off like a Black Hawk during the first six words:
The tough-as-nails US Air Force colonel shot down over Iran was seriously wounded but still climbed a 7,000-foot ridge and hid in a crevice to evade capture for 36 hours — even with bounty-hunters on his tail.
A tough-as-nails US Air Force colonel? For the previous forty-eight hours, the media had explained that the backseat guy in an F-15 was a so-called "wizzo" - a "weapons system officer" - which sounds plucky but not especially ultra-high-rank. Only about two per cent of officers make colonel, so one can understand why that would render any F-15 a high-value target for the other side. So perhaps it is perfectly routine for a colonel to be in the wizzo seat of an F-15 taking off from RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk.
On the other hand, some military chums tell me that the recovery of the colonel had other unusual aspects. For example, for eight decades the extraction of downed airmen has been the highly specialised province of the PJs - the USAF's Pararescue Jumpers. As the media reported:
A former commander of a pararescue jumpers squadron told CBS News that a rescue operation like the reported one in Iran would involve at least 24 pararescue jumpers scouring the area in Black Hawk helicopters...
They added: "This is what they train to do, all over the world. They are known as the Swiss Army knives of the Air Force."
True enough. From the United States Air Force:
Air Force Pararescuemen, also known as PJs, are the only DoD elite combat forces specifically organized, trained, equipped, and postured to conduct full spectrum Personnel Recovery (PR) to include both conventional and unconventional combat rescue operations. These Battlefield Airmen are the most highly trained and versatile Personnel Recovery specialists in the world. Pararescue is the nation's force of choice to execute the most perilous, demanding, and extreme rescue missions anytime, anywhere across the globe. The 500+ PJs are assigned to Guardian Angel and Special Tactics Squadrons throughout the Active Duty, Guard, and Reserve Air Force components.
And yet no PJs were deployed, although they are undoubtedly present at American facilities in the region. Instead, Seal Team Six were used to extract the colonel. They have certainly retrieved individuals when they have been captured by the Taliban and the like and the hostage's location is known, but it is not usual for them to be first responders in a search-and-rescue mission. The recovery of the colonel near Isfahan - which is everyone's best guess at where the enriched uranium is - and various other details, such as the number of lost aircraft, might almost lead one to think that the heartwarming human-interest story of a rescued airman provided a useful cover for an aborted ground operation that went pear-shaped pretty bloody quickly.
Which in turn would explain why, on an American Easter that provided an additional bit of pure, unalloyed, artfully media-managed good news, the President sounded, to put it at its mildest, somewhat frustrated:
It doesn't get more straightforward than this from President Trump.
— Jim Hanson (@JimHansonDC) April 5, 2026
The gloves come off Tuesday against the Ayatollahs. pic.twitter.com/gGGwk4PrsZ
So we have moved from the shock'n'awe phase, which Trump believed would collapse the regime in three days ...to the ongoing decapitation phase, which was always an unlikely bet in a nation of ninety-three million even before Israel started using it to take out any members of the Prospective Negotiator community ...to the all-outta-targets phase of hitting random schools, hospitals and apartment houses ...and finally to the listen-you-muthableepers phase:
Regular listeners to Rush may recall that a decade-and-a-half back - way before Trump came down that escalator - I expressed on air some doubt as to whether "Now listen, you muthableepers" would prove an effective negotiating technique with China, or Iran, or Belgium or Vanuatu. I am not sure it projects the "strength" that renowned butch boys such as Princess Bubble Wand and Megyn Kelly's favourite micropenis seem to think it does - anymore than did the Administration's last descent into over-emotiveness: the promise to bomb Iran "back to the Stone Age, where they belong". As the Iranian Foreign Minister drolly responded, has Trump looked at a map from back then? By the end of the Stone Age, the Persian empire was the largest on earth, its boundaries extending north to the Caucasus and Central Asia, east to India, south to the Arabian Peninsula, west to Libya, and north-west through Turkey to the Balkans and Macedonia. Granted the strategic ineptitude of the American way of war these last three-quarters of a century, I would be surprised if even Washington could deliver Tehran a victory on that scale. But, given that they handed over to the Taliban more land than the weirdbeards controlled twenty years earlier before "Operation Enduring Freedom" and that they left them at Bagram enough weaponry to make them the eighth or nine most powerful military on the planet, I wouldn't entirely rule it out.
As I said over a month ago on March 4th:
The Iranians have it easy. They just have to survive in order to win.
That remains the case. If they win with the Americans having gifted them the Strait of Hormuz and all the Gulf monarchies except the House of Saud, that is in Trumpian terms a yuuuuuuge victory.
After an all-night telephone convo between JD Vance and Asim Munir, army chief in Islamabad, the Pakistanis, Egyptians and Turks are said to have presented a "peace plan" to the Supreme Leaders in both Tehran and Washington. It proposes a forty-five-day ceasefire starting immediately - and then the commencement of negotiations at a later date.
Tomorrow the world shall wake up to to discover whether Trump has finally made good on his threat or whether it's just the usual Taco of the Week. (UPDATE! In fact, it's been put back another twenty-four hours to 8pm US Eastern on Tuesday night - so the world will be waking up to whatever Trump has done on Wednesday morning.)
And the only peace deal on the table is one that foresees Iranian control of the Strait until at least June...
To put it in Leninist terms: who are the muthaf**kers and who are the muthaf**ked?
~We had a very busy Easter and Passover at SteynOnline, beginning with Laura Rosen Cohen's thoughts on the latter. Good Friday brought Mark's column on fire and faith plus his twenty-second-birthday take on Mel Gibson's blockbuster The Passion of the Christ. Saturday saw his adaptation of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, an Easter-ish episode of Mark Steyn on the Town, and George C Scott as Patton in the 250th edition of Rick's Flicks. Easter morn commenced with the latest installment of Mark's highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone, and the afternoon continued with the only Easter standard in the American songbook. Our marquee presentation was Steyn's Easter video poem.
If you were too busy this weekend threatening ayatollahs, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.