Nobody told Iran the war was over

Medical workers participate in a rally in front of a hospital damaged in a U.S.-Israeli strike, in Tehran, Iran, March 7, 2026. The hospital in northern Tehran was damaged in a U.S.-Israeli strike on the night of March 1. On Saturday, Iranian medical workers rallied in front of the hospital to protest against U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iranian hospitals.

Let me tell you something about Iran that Washington never quite learns. Iranians have been negotiating with empires for three thousand years. The Achaemenids, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the British and every single one of them, at some point, declared they had broken Iran.

Every single one of them was wrong. So when Donald Trump stood up and told CBS News that the war with Iran was “very complete, pretty much”, while his own Defence Secretary was simultaneously announcing the most intense wave of strikes yet, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve been watching this region long enough to know what that kind of contradiction means.

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It means nobody in the room actually has a plan for what comes next. The original justification for this campaign, Operation Epic Fury, (a name that tells you a great deal about the mindset behind it) was Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been the central anxiety of Middle Eastern security politics for twenty years.

But here’s what you need to understand about bombing a nuclear programme: you can damage it. You cannot destroy it. The knowledge doesn’t live in the centrifuges.

It lives in the heads of the engineers. And those engineers are still in Iran. The June 2025 strikes, the ones that were already supposed to have finished the job, set the programme back by months according to a leaked Defence Intelligence Agency assessment.

The Pentagon’s own most optimistic public number was one to two years. The IAEA, which has been inspecting Iranian facilities longer than most of these policymakers have been in office, confirmed that Iran kept the industrial capacity and the technical knowledge to resume enrichment. And then it did exactly that.

Nine months later, Trump used that resumption as the reason to bomb them again. The sites that matter most, the deeply buried facilities near Natanz, Isfahan, Parchin have survived both campaigns. To physically seize and dismantle them, you would need boots on the ground, inside Iran, in some of the most mountainous terrain on earth, against a motivated population that has now had its country bombed twice in under a year.

No American general is drawing up that plan. No American general should be. The casualties would be catastrophic and the political cost would finish whoever ordered it.

So the nuclear question is not resolved. It has been deferred. Expensively.

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