Operation Epic Fury failed on its own terms. So where is the accountability?

Quick answer: Operation Epic Fury — the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, February 28–May 5, 2026 — failed to achieve its four stated objectives: nuclear programme destruction, missile arsenal elimination, proxy network decapitation, and regime change. Intelligence assessments now confirm the nuclear setback was less than six months, roughly 50% of Iran’s missile launchers survived, and the assassination of Supreme Leader Khamenei produced a more hardline IRGC-led successor. The analysts who promised otherwise have not been held to account.

I Remember Exactly Where I Was

February 28, 2026. I was watching a cable news panel — four analysts, one graphic reading “Operation Epic Fury: What Comes Next?” — and I felt this creeping sense of déjà vu. Not the war itself. The confidence. The clean certainty. The way each pundit explained, with the authority of someone who had personally inspected Natanz, that this would be different. Surgical. Decisive. Finally.

I’d heard that word before. We all had. In 2003.

Here’s the thing about Washington’s foreign policy class: they are structurally incapable of saying “I don’t know.” Uncertainty is not a professional option. So they project. They promise. And then, when it goes wrong — as it so often does — they pivot to the next crisis and dare you to remember what they said about the last one.

I’m remembering. And I think you should too.

Four Promises. Four Failures.

Let’s be specific, because specificity is what the hawks hate most. Trump’s own TruthSocial statement laid out four military objectives for Operation Epic Fury:

• Prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon
• Destroy its missile arsenal and production sites
• Degrade its proxy networks
• Annihilate its navy

Plus the political cherry on top: regime change from within. “The Iranian people will be free,” Trump said. The pundits nodded along.

So. How’d that go?

The classified intelligence assessment — reported by multiple outlets after the ceasefire — found the nuclear strikes set Iran’s programme back by less than six months. Not a decade. Not a generation. Less than six months. CSIS noted that Iran still possesses 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, and the exact location of that material remains unknown. The IAEA inspectors who had been monitoring the facilities Washington just bombed — facilities under active safeguards — can no longer do their jobs.

The missile arsenal? By Day 4, Iran had fired over 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 drones, according to Pentagon and CENTCOM reporting. Fifty percent of Iran’s missile launchers remained intact as of April 2026. The underground missile city network — thirty facilities buried in the Zagros and Alborz mountain ranges — absorbed the strikes, fired from pre-surveyed positions, and kept operating. U.S. intelligence, it turned out, had undercounted Iran’s missile stockpile by more than 1,000.

Regime change? Let me tell you about Mojtaba Khamenei.

The opening hours of Operation Epic Fury included the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. At the time, hawks celebrated. Decapitation strategy, they called it. The regime would crumble. The people would rise. The regime did not crumble. Succession protocols — which the IRGC had clearly prepared for exactly this scenario — produced a new Supreme Leader drawn entirely from hardline military circles. Mojtaba Khamenei, described by Reuters as more hawkish than his father, who had actually issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Let that sink in. The hawks killed the man who was theologically opposed to building the bomb and replaced him with someone who isn’t.

Nobody on that cable news panel is being asked about that.

Freedom Riders
A lot of what’s going on now reminds me of the early 1960s. Specifically, it reminds me of the Freedom Riders.

The Freedom Riders: Challenging Segregation in the American South

The Freedom Riders were a group of civil rights activists who, in 1961, deliberately challenged racial segregation in the American South by riding interstate buses. Their actions forced the federal government to enforce its own laws and drew international attention to the brutality of Jim Crow segregation.

1. The Legal Catalyst

By 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled that segregation on interstate travel was unconstitutional:

• Morgan v. Virginia (1946): Ruled segregation on interstate buses unlawful.
• Boynton v. Virginia (1960): Extended the ban to include interstate bus terminals, waiting rooms, and restaurants. (Read about Bruce Boynton.)

Despite these rulings, southern states openly ignored the law, enforcing local segregation policies with impunity. The Freedom Rides were designed to expose this defiance and pressure the federal government—specifically the Kennedy administration—to intervene.

2. The First Ride: May 1961

Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) under James Farmer, the first official Freedom Ride departed Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961.

• The Team: A group of 13 recruits—seven Black and six white activists, including future Congressman John Lewis.
• The Plan: Travel through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, arriving in New Orleans for a civil rights rally. They integrated the seating on Greyhound and Trailways buses, and black riders attempted to use whites-only restrooms and lunch counters at stops along the way.

3. Escalating Violence and the Role of SNCC

While the initial leg of the trip met with minor resistance, the situation turned profoundly violent when the riders reached Alabama on Mother’s Day, May 14, 1961.

The Anniston Bus Bombing

An angry white mob attacked the Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama. They slashed its tires, shattered windows, and pursued the vehicle until it was forced to pull over outside of town. The mob then firebombed the bus, holding the doors shut in an attempt to trap the riders inside. When the riders managed to escape the burning vehicle, they were brutally beaten.

The Birmingham and Montgomery Attacks

The second bus (Trailways) reached Birmingham, where riders were systematically beaten by a mob armed with baseball bats, pipes, and bicycle chains. Local police, under the direction of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, intentionally gave the Ku Klux Klan 15 minutes to attack the riders before intervening.

SNCC Steps In

Exhausted and severely injured, the original CORE riders were forced to fly to New Orleans. Sensing a catastrophic defeat for the movement, Diane Nash and student activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Nashville rushed to Alabama to sustain the rides. They refused to let violence halt the momentum, declaring:

“If they stop us with violence, the movement is dead.”

When these new riders reached Montgomery, they were met with another wave of vicious mob violence that injured dozens, including federal observer John Seigenthaler.

Last week, the Supreme Court of the United States tore up and burned the Voting Rights Act.

Trump famously asked Black Americans, “What do we have to lose?” He stated that we’re living in poverty, our schools are no good, and that we have no jobs. 

Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, John Lewis, and hundreds of thousands of Americans fought for our ability to have equal representation. Their fight culminated in the Voting Rights Act. There are somewhere around 70 black representatives throughout the country. This is at the federal, state, and local levels. After the Voting Rights Act, there were more than 9,000 black representatives. It didn’t happen overnight. It took time, but slowly we gained more representation.

Without representation, blacks and minorities lose everything. We lose the ability to advocate for our neighborhoods. We lose the ability to secure funding for our schools, hospitals, roads, and utilities. We basically completely lost our voice. It’s been taken away. (If you want to see what powerless looks like, look at what happened when Tennessee tried to pass its gerrymandered maps this week. They (those in power) completely cleared the room of any dissent. Those who had the power were in the room, and those who were powerless were outside of the room.) When you don’t have resources, you have nothing.

Democracy is about “We the people.” Democracy is about representation. Without representation, we have nothing.

This was a song that the lead character sang several times when he was feeling down. The song is really a bunch of propaganda—overly happy, borderline nonsense—but that’s exactly the tongue-in-cheek humor that makes the movie work.

The State of the Union

Our president, Donald J. Trump, spent more than 90 minutes trying to convince us that everything was awesome. The economy was good. Foreign policy decisions were strong. American manufacturing was back. The stock market was booming. Several times during the speech, he even stopped to hand out Congressional Medals of Honor.

During the Joe Biden administration, the State of the Union was typically used to highlight real accomplishments and propose new legislation. As far as I can tell, Trump offered no new initiatives. The speech was exactly what we’ve come to expect—unrestrained, self-congratulatory, and often detached from reality.

Iran

Back in June, the United States bombed three Iranian nuclear sites using B-2 Spirit bombers. The targets were hit. Trump declared victory, claiming the facilities were “totally obliterated.” Pentagon estimates suggest the program was set back about two years.

As you recall, the United States, along with the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany, signed an agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)) with Iran in 2015. In the agreement, Iran agreed to reduce its nuclear enrichment so it could use uranium for civil power but not for nuclear weapons. It agreed to this for 15 years. It also agreed to reduce its nuclear stockpiles from over 10,000 kg to just 300 kg. It also agreed to reduce its centrifuges. It also agreed to redesign one of its heavy water reactors so that it could not produce weapons-grade plutonium. Finally, Iran agreed to international inspections. In exchange for all of this, the international community would gradually lift sanctions and return some of the money that we had confiscated (billions of dollars). By all counts, the treaty was working. Yet Donald Trump tore up the agreement in 2018.

Without an agreement in place, Iran restarted their nuclear program. So, now, we have a problem of Trump’s own making. Trump wants a signature deal that would include ballistic missiles. From Iran’s standpoint, why would they make another treaty? Trump and the United States are not unreliable. Trump says Iran wants to negotiate, but I’m not so sure.

Trump, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, decided to bomb Iran. Exactly what our goals were is really unclear. It appears we wanted to remove Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We killed him, but now what? And this is the part that makes me question the sanity and intelligence of folks in the White House and the Pentagon. What are the next steps? Ayatollah Khamenei had been ruling Iran for over 40 years. All opposition has been crushed. There is no “other” party. There is only the power structure of the current Iranian government. So, killing the Ayatollah will only produce another radical cleric to take his place.

Trump has trying to justify this war by telling us that Iran’s nuclear program was a threat to our national security. If that is true, then the bombing that we did several months ago was not the complete success that Trump told us it was. Trump has also claimed that Iran was developing a ballistic missile that could reach the US. I’m sure that they were, but how close were they to making that weapon a reality? A week? A year? 2 years? Who knows? We haven’t been shown any convincing evidence. The bottom line is that Trump got played by Netanyahu again. It is Netanyahu who was threatened by Iranian medium-range missiles. It is Netanyahu and Israel who want to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age, but they couldn’t do it alone. They needed our help. Netanyahu played Trump like the sucker he is. So, now, we are in a Middle East war with no clear exit strategy.

Everything is… awesome.

Well, the White House has posted a racist video of apes. The apes’ faces have been replaced with those of Michelle and Barack Obama. This is no accident. Trump is a control freak. Whoever posted the video did so with full knowledge of Donald J. Trump. We know that Trump is a racist. This is not open for debate. Following outrage from both the Left and the Right, the video was removed. I suspect that Trump wanted this uproar. He wanted this spectacle as a distraction from the Epstein files (see below) and his terrible performance on the economy. I don’t think that we needed further proof that Trump is a racist. We have known this for decades.

Thank God for Video

If it weren’t for video, we would have had to believe the government narrative. We were told that Renée Good tried to kill an ICE officer with her car, and he defended himself by shooting her at point-blank range. We were told that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist and was trying to harm ICE agents. The ICE agents were just defending themselves when they shot him in the back multiple times.

But the video tells a completely different story. Renée Good seems to have been trying to comply with ICE commands by moving her car out of the middle of the street when an ICE agent shot her. The worst part of the whole ordeal is that ICE didn’t provide any CPR, and they prevented a doctor who was a bystander from rendering aid.

Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse—a dedicated caregiver who worked at the Veterans Administration hospital, caring for soldiers and patriots who served their country. At the demonstration in Minneapolis, he seemed to be protecting a woman who was being pushed around—and allegedly tear-gassed—by ICE. For his trouble, he got pepper-sprayed and wrestled to the ground. He told the ICE agents that he had a registered, licensed concealed weapon. One ICE agent took his gun. Another agent walked around Pretti, who was lying face down on the concrete. He was then shot and killed by the ICE agent. He wasn’t a threat to anyone. He was disarmed and on the ground. Several agents had him pinned down. He wasn’t fighting back. Another agent fired several bullets into Pretti while he was lying on the ground bleeding. Once again, no one tried to render aid.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that America has been shocked and outraged by these killings. This reaction may be similar to what happened after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1963, which killed four Black girls. Or the use of attack dogs on peaceful marchers across the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965. Following these attacks, America was shaken out of its indifference to the civil rights movement. Now, in Minneapolis, two white Americans were murdered for no reason, and America saw it all because of cellphone video.