Iran's Pearl Harbor. . . Really Colonel?
Anti-war voices in America have increasingly denied reality in the interests of supporting their increasingly tenuous position.
I had an argument this Saturday with a friend in the synagogue over whether Americans are truly anti-war or not. He posited that since they continue to elect politicians that go to war, they must not be anti-war. I responded that this merely means those politicians say one thing to the voters and do the opposite. That being said, I think that two things can be true at the same time: Politicians can run on a platform seeking peace and win thanks to the voters shy to the risks, and yet events can overtake them. This is what I think happened with the recent outbreak of war between Israel and Iran. It is therefore understandable that anti-war personalities like Luke Rudkowski and others are enraged at what they see as Donald Trump’s betrayal of their trust as he soft supports Israel’s pre-emptive strike against Iran’s military and strategic assets. They have spent their entire adult lives making sure the US does not make the same mistake it did in Iraq in 2003 by rushing in based on faulty intelligence.
The problem here is that this is not quite the same situation as Iraq, notwithstanding the obvious close proximity of the two nations. While Iraq was defying weapons inspectors during the run-up to the 2003 invasion, it was not actively fighting any wars with its neighbours. The situation could have been resolved. Iran however has been in an active war with Israel, either through proxies or directly, since at least Oct. 7, 2023. This is why when analysts like Colonel Douglas Macgregor trot out the Pearl Harbor analogy I have to roll my eyes.
Yes, Iran was surprised to some degree by the first Israeli strike, but should it have been? Israel and Iran have exchanged volleys of attacks with varying success for years and just last year in April and October Iran launched direct rocket and drone attacks on Israel as a response to the Israeli airstrike attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. Here are some examples of Iranian proxies actively fighting the war while their sponsors in Tehran sat with arms folded and smirked:
Until December 2024 the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) were involved in repeated drone attacks in Israel in support of Hamas and allied groups.
Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have fought a conflict since Oct. 8, 2023 when the later launched rocket and drone attacks on Israel’s territory in support of Hamas and allied groups. Nasrallah repeatedly vowed up to the time of his death that there would be “unity of fronts”, meaning Shiite militias his would not cease to fight Israel until the war in Gaza was ended. Ultimately Hezbollah reneged on that commitment in November 2024 when it signed a ceasefire deal with Israel
Yemen’s fanatical Al Ansar (aka “the Houthis") ruling to this day launch ballistic missiles supplied by Iran at Israel.
The October 7 attacks were themselves coordinated and planned with extensive Iranian help according to IRGC Qods Force deputy operations commander Gen. Mohsen Chizari. While the details of Iran’s role are under dispute, it is undeniable that the Islamic republic played some role before the attacks, and a visible supporting role since the outbreak of fighting between Hamas and Israel in Gaza.
Iran’s cultivation of dedicated proxy units to project its strength abroad is so brazen that these groups can generally be recognised from their logos that mimic the raised assault rifle from the IRGC’s own flag.
The deaths of Iran’s senior military officials and attacks on strategic assets like the Natanz and Fordow nuclear facilities were entirely expected by everyone in both countries and around the world. At the moment, and I hope it remains this way, Israel is completing the job without American direct involvement. For Macgregor or anyone else to analogise the Israeli strike to Pearl Harbor is a gross mischaracterisation. It warps the definition of what prevailed prior to each event, and distorts the severity of each one:
The United States was not on a war footing prior to Pearl Harbor, even after Japanese aircraft attacked and sank the USS Panay gunboat on China’s Yangtze River in 1937. Japan paid an indemnity the following year, and by the time of the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941 US forces were not on high alert. Iran’s military had certainly had much more prior warning both on official levels and behind the scenes than the US Pacific Fleet.
Just as importantly the Japanese attack, while shocking, did not hit at the heart of American power, but at one important outpost of it. Rear Adm. Isaac C. Kidd, Sr. was the most senior officer killed in the attack, but most of America’s forces were on the Continental US beyond the range of Japanese forces. By contrast, Iran has disclosed the deaths of its military chief-of-staff Mohammed Bagheri, commander of the IRGC Hossein Salami, senior political advisor Ali Shamkhani, nuclear scientist Fereydoon Abbasi, the chief of military intelligence and his deputy and many senior functionaries. Israeli aircraft have almost total access to the interior of Iran and continue to target strategic sites throughout the country such that even their Hermes drone appear in Iran’s skies.
The aerial superiority is itself important to emphasize. It was this advantage that Israel gained at the outset of the 1967 Six Day War that sealed the result of that conflict as the forces of their Arab neighour states were basically exposed without any cover.
It should not be surprising at this point that Col. Macgregor continues to deliver these delusional analyses. During the first few months after Oct. 7 he continually vowed in one tweet after another that Turkey would enter the war to relieve Hamas, even claiming that they were cooperating fluently with Iran for the first time in years. One year later Turkey (not Israel or Qatar) played the key role in toppling Iran’s ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria while taking no action on Gaza.
Macgregor later followed those up with predictions that Egypt would intervene and warnings that Hezbollah would “not be easily defeated”.
And Col. Macgregor is not alone, the same goes for other trusted national security “alternative” voices like John Kiriakou and Andrew Bustamante, formerly of the CIA. Recently Abier Khatib, an X influencer with almost 300 thousand followers shared a video of them talking on a podcast about how Iran’s long game strategy is winning against Israel despite all of the assassinations and sabotage. The video was seen almost 700 thousand times as of this writing. So what’s the problem, isn’t it just an opinion?
Well as it turns out the assassination and sabotage they were referring to was the killing of Hezbollah Chief of Staff Fuad Shukeir on July 30, 2025, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniye the following day, not the recent ones of Iranian senior officials. The podcast they were clipped in was from last August. And they had recommended for Iran’s part to lay back and let Hezbollah fight Israel on its own terms. Around the same time Scott Ritter, a military and national security analyst, predicted the same and declared that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be humiliated. “He can’t have a war with Hezbollah, because he would lose a war with Hezbollah. He can’t have a war with Iran, because he would lose a war with Iran. . . There will be no war with Iran, there will be no war with Hezbollah.”
But less than two months later Israel did invade Lebanon and now they have also repeatedly bombed Iran. Hezbollah was completely overwhelmed in the fighting and today is a shadow of its former self. There is no counterstrike on the part of Iran nor its proxies that compares to the assassinations of Haniye, Nasrallah, the Sinwar brothers, or the mounting number of high level Iranian officials now killed by Israel. Shouldn’t these adverse results affect Kiriakou’s, Bustamante’s, or Macgregor’s credibility? Somehow the world of internet geopolitical analysis marches on, protected by the confirmation bias of its audiences.