Middle East Press On: Pakistan Up to Broker US-Iran Peace, War on Iraq, Palestinian Resistance, Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr, Trump Fed A Fake Victory in Iran War, New Age Islam's Selection, 26 March 2026
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
26 March 2026
No longer a bystander: Pakistan steps up to broker US-Iran peace
The relentless war on Iraq
US-Iran talks and GCC priorities
The End of Negotiation – How the US Became an International Serial Killer
In New Interview, Ramzy Baroud on ‘Before the Flood’, Memory, Palestinian Resistance
PROFILE: The Hawks of Tehran Are Back – Who Is Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr?
‘Blowing Things Up’: How Trump Was Fed a Fake Victory in the Iran War – Analysis
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No longer a bystander: Pakistan steps up to broker US-Iran peace
BY SHAHMEER GHIASUDDIN KHAN
MAR 26, 2026
For years, Pakistan has been a country the world talked about rather than one it talked to. Terrorism, economic fragility, civil-military tensions. The narrative was familiar and Islamabad had largely accepted its role as a reactive player in a region shaped by bigger powers. That may now be changing. Quietly, deliberately and at a moment of extraordinary consequence.
As the United States and Iran edge toward the most dangerous confrontation in decades, one country has emerged as the unlikely bridge between Washington and Tehran: Pakistan. Pakistan is positioning itself as the lead mediator trying to broker an end to the U.S. and Israel's war against Iran, leveraging historic ties to Tehran and the reignited warm relationship with Washington. This is not a role that fell into Islamabad's lap. It was built, relationship by relationship, phone call by phone call, over years that the outside world largely ignored.
The architecture of Pakistan's mediation is worth examining closely. Pakistan’s army chief Gen. Asim Munir spoke with Trump on Sunday, while Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif held a separate call with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, with senior Pakistani officials back-channelling communications between Tehran and Washington. Meanwhile, Pakistan has offered to host a high-level meeting in Islamabad between Iranian and U.S. officials. For a country long seen as a diplomatic afterthought, this is a remarkable set of conversations to be holding simultaneously.
What makes Pakistan uniquely positioned for this role is precisely what has historically made it difficult to categorize. It is a Muslim-majority nuclear state with deep cultural and religious ties to Iran, yet it has sustained a working military relationship with Washington that few Islamic countries can match. It holds a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia while maintaining open lines to Tehran. It hosts no American military bases, a crucial point of trust for Iran. No other country in the region holds all of these cards at once. Iran's supreme leader even namechecked Pakistan in a written New Year message, saying he had a special feeling toward the Pakistani people, a signal, however subtle, that Islamabad's outreach is being received.
There is also a domestic dimension that should not be underestimated. Pakistan’s army chief has made clear that Pakistan will not tolerate violence sparked by conflicts in other countries, a pointed message following protests that erupted in Karachi, Islamabad and Gilgit after strikes on Tehran. Pakistan is not just mediating abroad; it is managing a volatile situation at home, where public sympathy for Iran runs deep. The mediation effort is thus as much about internal stability as it is about international diplomacy.
The risks, however, are real and should not be ignored. Mediation between parties this far apart and this publicly hostile is a high-stakes act. Iran's foreign ministry rejected Trump's claims of ongoing negotiations, saying his statements were intended to reduce energy prices and buy time to carry out military plans. If talks collapse publicly, Pakistan risks being blamed for raising expectations it could not meet, or worse, being seen as a tool of American pressure on Tehran. There are no clean exits from the middle of a war.
And yet the alternative, staying on the sidelines, is no longer available to Pakistan, even if it wanted it. Geography, demographics and economics make the region's stability Pakistan's stability. Pakistani officials see an opportunity to reassert the country's diplomatic relevance by stepping into a mediating role. Islamabad could strengthen its international standing while potentially securing strategic or economic concessions from multiple directions.
History will judge whether this moment becomes a turning point or a footnote. But the image of Islamabad as the venue where Washington and Tehran might finally sit across from each other is one that would have seemed unthinkable just a year ago. Pakistan did not stumble into this role. It earned it, patiently, imperfectly and on its own terms.
https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/op-ed/no-longer-a-bystander-pakistan-steps-up-to-broker-us-iran-peace
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The relentless war on Iraq
March 25, 2026
By Jasim Al-Azzawi
For months, a war has been unfolding across Iraq with little of the fanfare that once accompanied American military campaigns in the region. There are no embedded journalists photographing convoys rolling through the desert, no prime-time presidential addresses. Instead, American warplanes and drones have been systematically dismantling the infrastructure of the Popular Mobilization Forces. American forces have carried out repeated airstrikes on P.M.F. headquarters in Baghdad, Mosul, and Anbar Province, assassinating senior commanders and reducing fortified compounds to rubble. The targets have included logistics networks, weapons depots, and command-and-control nodes that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spent the better part of a decade constructing. General Michael Kurilla, Admiral Cooper’s predecessor at CENTCOM, had for years warned that Tehran was systematically “militarizing” these groups to serve as a forward-deployed deterrent against the United States and Israel.
A PROXY NO LONGER?
What American planners may not have fully anticipated is that the P.M.F. factions have spent those same years evolving. They are no longer a monolith under Tehran’s command. P.M.F. commanders, speaking through intermediaries and in rare on-the-record interviews with Arabic-language outlets, are emphatic on this point. “We are Iraqis first,” one senior figure told Al Jazeera. “The Americans think they can erase us, but every strike only deepens our resolve.” It is the kind of defiance that American commanders have heard before in Iraq — and that has rarely proved hollow.
Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has spent two decades tracking the P.M.F., argues that American strikes are producing an unintended consequence. “The P.M.F. is fragmenting under pressure,” he said. “Some factions remain loyal to Tehran, but others are recalibrating as nationalist actors. This makes them harder to eliminate — they are embedded in Iraq’s political and social fabric.” That fragmentation, paradoxically, may be making the problem worse. A unified P.M.F. answerable to Iran is at least a known variable. A constellation of semi-autonomous Iraqi nationalist militias is something far harder to deter or negotiate with.
THE IRAQI DILEMMA
Baghdad watches all of this with barely concealed alarm. Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani’s government is caught in an excruciating bind: too dependent on Washington’s security guarantees and financial architecture to openly condemn the strikes, yet too enmeshed with P.M.F. political factions — who hold seats in parliament and run government ministries — to endorse them. Iraqi parliamentarians from P.M.F.-aligned blocs have denounced the operations as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty.
Hayder al-Khoei, an Iraqi analyst at University College London who advises Western governments on Iraq policy, described the dilemma precisely:
Former Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who negotiated the 2008 Status of Forces Agreement with Baghdad, has long argued that Washington tends to underestimate the fragility of its relationship with the Iraqi state — and to overestimate how much pressure that state can absorb before it fractures.
TEHRAN’S LOOSENING GRIP
Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has studied Iranian strategy for two decades, frames Tehran’s predicament this way: “Iran created Frankenstein. The P.M.F. was designed as an instrument of Iranian power projection, but it has developed its own interests, economy, and political identity. Iran can still influence these groups, but it can no longer control them reliably.” That loosening grip has strategic implications: an Iran unable to restrain its proxies is also an Iran less able to offer Washington a credible off-ramp.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War have been tracking what they describe as a “regenerative” capacity within the P.M.F. ecosystem.
one senior researcher there noted. It is a bleak assessment, but not a novel one.
THE LIMITS OF DOMINANCE
The deeper question Operation Epic Fury raises is not whether the United States can inflict punishment — clearly, it can — but whether punishment alone can reshape Iraq’s security landscape in durable ways. Retired General Joseph Votel, who commanded CENTCOM from 2016 to 2019 and oversaw the final campaign against the Islamic State, has cautioned against what he calls “the illusion of decisive action.” “Airstrikes are a tool, not a strategy,” he said in a recent forum. “Every commander knows you don’t win in Iraq from the air.”
Colin Clarke, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center who studies militant networks in the Middle East, argues that the current campaign may be creating the conditions for a long-term escalation cycle.
he said. The history of American targeting campaigns in Iraq bears that observation out.
Admiral Cooper’s metrics of success — grounded aircraft, idle warships, diminished missile launch rates — measure Iran’s conventional capabilities. They do not measure the temperature in the streets of Karbala, or the calculus of a P.M.F. battalion commander in Anbar who has just watched his superior’s funeral draw ten thousand mourners. The silent war in Iraq is less about defeating Iran outright than about reshaping a security landscape that three American administrations have tried and failed to stabilize. As the strikes continue, and the funerals multiply, the real test may lie not in the target lists reviewed each morning in Tampa, but in Baghdad’s alleys, where P.M.F. commanders blend into civilian life — waiting for the next strike, and the next chance to retaliate.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260325-the-relentless-war-on-iraq/
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US-Iran talks and GCC priorities
DR. ABDEL AZIZ ALUWAISHEG
March 25, 2026
US President Donald Trump announced on Monday that “good and productive” peace talks with Iran had taken place. Although the focus was on restoring maritime transit through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump referred to “15 points of agreement” after those talks, saying “I think there’s a very good chance we’re going to end up in a deal.” As similar promises have been made before that turned out to be illusory, many officials and media commentators dismissed the comments as wishful thinking or a ploy to calm jittery markets, which did respond positively to his remarks.
These talks were important. Although American— and Israeli — attacks have continued unabated, the talks spared the region another round of escalation: On Saturday, Trump had given Tehran 48 hours to “reopen” the Strait of Hormuz or else the US would target Iran’s energy and power infrastructure, which was certain to elicit more attacks by Iran. Citing the progress in the talks, Trump suspended the earlier ultimatum, postponing for only five days his plan to destroy Iran’s energy installations.
Iran initially denied any talks taking place and state media claimed that Trump “retreated” from his deadline “out of fear of Iran’s response.” However, later on Monday, there were multiple reliable reports that Iranian officials had acknowledged receiving “points from the US through mediators and they are being reviewed.”
The report named Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf as the principal interlocutor. Although not part of Iran’s formal negotiating team, he has been speaker of the parliament since 2020 and is considered close to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. A former military officer and mayor of Tehran from 2005 to 2017, he is one of the most powerful remaining Iranian leaders.
The existence of the talks was corroborated by other sources but such confusion in Tehran has been quite common since the start of this war, reflecting both different attitudes between hard-liners and moderates and the disruption of communication among these competing factions.
When Trump earlier threatened to “obliterate” the country’s energy infrastructure if it did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Monday evening, Iran’s hard-liners responded with attacks on Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Israel. They also warned that Iran would respond in kind with attacks on regional energy infrastructure and by laying sea mines across the “entire” Gulf, not solely the Strait of Hormuz.
Despite Iran’s attempts to downplay the damage the US and Israeli attacks have inflicted on the country and its military capabilities, it appears that the destruction is considerable. The US alone has hit more than 9,000 Iranian targets, including over 140 Iranian naval vessels, and flown upward of 9,000 combat flights since the war began on Feb. 28, according to a statement issued on Monday by US Central Command.
Despite its downgraded military capacity, Tehran has continued its missile and drone attacks, albeit at a slower pace and with relatively limited damage so far. On Tuesday, hours after Trump announced progress in talks and the suspension of his earlier ultimatum, Iranian attacks continued. Even if the country’s conventional military capabilities were totally obliterated, it would still have capacity left for asymmetric warfare, including sabotage, terrorism and the ability to use short-range missiles. During the past few weeks, sleeper cells working for Iran have been busted in GCC countries. It can also instruct its regional proxies to launch attacks.
Trump said that the nuclear issue was at the top of the points of agreement in the talks, while media reports referred to securing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s ballistic missile program and regional proxies as also being among the 15 points under discussion.
The GCC countries have much at stake in the reported talks and it is important that these negotiations contribute to the long-term resolution of all the important issues between Iran and the international community, including its closest neighbours, which have been the primary targets of its missile and drone attacks over the past weeks. They have also been affected by the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the reduction of their ability to export oil, gas, fertilizers and other petrochemicals. The region’s image as a magnet for investors and visitors has been damaged.
Iran’s destabilizing policies, including the use of armed proxies and religious militias, have consistently targeted GCC states since the revolution in 1979 and throughout the current conflict.
The most urgent priority is to stop Iran’s attacks on GCC energy targets and allow the transit of oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. The disruption of energy supplies has wreaked havoc on the global economy and caused colossal losses for many countries that are not connected with the war. Threatening the flow of trade through this passageway is a clear violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Statements from Iran have been all over the place regarding the Strait of Hormuz, from taking credit for creating the disruptions to denying that it closed the passageway. In the confused state that Iran is currently experiencing, you have officials who express pride and satisfaction in the harm they have visited on their neighbors and on the international economy, while others deny responsibility and call for calm to be restored.
It is clear that Iran wants the US and Israeli attacks to stop, despite the bravado of some hard-liners, who seem to welcome the war as a way to consolidate their grip on power. Trump, on the other hand, has made it clear that he needs to see important concessions and not a mere return to negotiations before hostilities can cease.
It is encouraging that Trump said on Monday that there has been significant progress on many issues, but skepticism is not unwarranted considering the multiplicity of factions in Tehran. There is no shortage of potential spoilers, including Israeli and Iranian hard-liners. We have been disappointed before.
For GCC countries, the first priority is for Iran to stop its attacks and targeting of civilian infrastructure, including oil and gas installations. Second is for Iran to allow unimpeded passage through the Strait of Hormuz to alleviate the global energy crisis. The third priority is to engage in good faith in negotiations on all the other remaining issues, including Iran’s nuclear and missile programs and regional policies.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2637642
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The End of Negotiation – How the US Became an International Serial Killer
March 26, 2026
For decades, the United States moved from covert assassination plots to openly embracing assassination or “targeted killing” as policy. Now, in its war with Iran, that evolution is reaching its most dangerous phase.
On March 17 and 18, the United States and Israel assassinated three senior Iranian government officials in targeted air strikes: Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij domestic security forces; and Esmaeil Khatib, Iran’s Intelligence Minister.
The missile that killed Ali Larijani also demolished an apartment building and killed more than a hundred people. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli forces were now authorized to assassinate any senior Iranian official whenever they can, and they have continued to do so, bringing the number of Iranian officials assassinated in the past year to at least seventy.
The assassination of Ali Larijani is a blow to the already fraught chances for a negotiated peace between Iran and the United States and Israel. Ali Larijani was an experienced, pragmatic senior official who had played leading roles in negotiations with the US and other world powers since 2005.
Larijani had degrees in math and computer science, attended the revered seminary in Qom, and fought in the Iran-Iraq War, rising to the rank of brigadier-general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. After the war, he managed Iran’s state broadcasting service, earned a doctorate in Western Philosophy from the University of Tehran, and wrote three books on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, before entering politics and government in 2005. In 2024, Larijani wrote a book on political philosophy, titled Reason and Tranquility in Governance.
If the US hoped to make peace and restore relations with Iran, Ali Larijani would have been a potential negotiating partner. The decision to assassinate Larijani two weeks into this war suggests that US leaders had no interest in negotiations.
Another possibility is even more chilling. Israeli leaders may have viewed Larijani as a potential off-ramp and deliberately eliminated him to ensure the war continues.
That killing was followed by an unprecedented Israeli strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field—the largest in the world and a shared resource with Qatar. Iran retaliated with missile strikes on energy infrastructure across Israel and the Gulf. In Qatar, damage to the Ras Laffan LNG terminal—one of the world’s most critical gas hubs—could take years and billions of dollars to repair.
As global energy markets reeled, US officials confirmed to The Wall Street Journal that the South Pars attack had been coordinated with Washington, contradicting denials from President Trump.
The pattern is unmistakable. As one analyst put it, Israel appears to be escalating deliberately—eliminating moderates within Iran while striking critical infrastructure—to provoke a wider regional war that leaves no room for de-escalation.
Analysts debate how much Israel is driving this escalation and how much US officials are fully aligned. But an imperial power cannot outsource responsibility. As Harry Truman’s famous desk sign declared: The buck stops here.
In its alliance with Israel, the United States has normalized the systematic assassination of foreign leaders—from Palestine, and Lebanon, to Syria, Yemen and now Iran. This is not new. In 2020, President Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that had joined with US forces to fight the Islamic State.
Yet assassination is explicitly prohibited under US law. Executive Order 12333 states clearly: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
That prohibition emerged from the Church Committee’s investigation into US assassination plots against Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and General René Schneider in Chile.
It also reflects long-standing international law, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions.
After 9/11, however, the United States systematically ignored or circumvented many of the constraints of U.S. and international law. As US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq led to widespread armed resistance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began arguing for what he called “manhunts,” to deploy US special operations forces to hunt down suspected resistance leaders and kill them, as Israeli undercover units already did in occupied Palestine.
General Charles Holland, the head of US Special Operations Command, refused to authorize such operations, but his retirement in October 2003 allowed Rumsfeld to appoint more like-minded officials to senior positions and bring in the Israelis to train American death squads in Israel and North Carolina.
“Dead men tell no tales,” as the saying goes, and there has been almost no accountability for the resulting killings, which systematically killed thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two senior US commanders told the Washington Post that only about 50% of “kill or capture” raids by Joint Special Operations Command targeted the “right” or intended people or homes, while troops involved in these raids said that that assessment greatly overstated their rate of success.
Drone warfare accelerated the trend. Under President Obama, strikes expanded tenfold, turning targeted killing into a central pillar of US policy. By 2011, night raids in Afghanistan numbered in the hundreds each month, alienating the Afghan people and ultimately ensuring the defeat of the US occupation and the return of the Taliban.
Now US and Israeli forces are using air and drone strikes to assassinate Iranian leaders and kill civilians in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. The language of restraint has disappeared, replaced by open celebration of “lethality” and threats of further war crimes.
What was once covert, controversial, and constrained is now overt, normalized, and defended.
The cumulative effect is stark: the United States has made assassination and extrajudicial killing routine instruments of policy, as it tramples the UN Charter, the Hague and Geneva Conventions and its own laws—undermining the very international legal order it claims to uphold.
Meanwhile, a multipolar world is emerging, driven largely by nations of the Global South. But the transition to a peaceful, sustainable world is far from certain. The greatest obstacle in its way is the continued reliance of the United States on the illegal threat and use of military force and economic coercion to try to maintain its own dominance.
Iran exercised restraint for decades in the face of false accusations regarding nuclear weapons, “maximum pressure” economic sanctions and escalating threats and attacks by the US and Israel. It quietly built up its defenses and military strategies for the day that it would need them, and that day has come.
The failure of the international community to stop successive US wars of aggression poses an existential threat to the UN Charter and the post–World War II order. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned at the CELAC Summit on March 21: “The more serious humanity’s problems become, the fewer tools we have for collective action. And that path leads only to barbarism.”
The United States now faces a stark choice: to continue down this path of lawless violence, or to turn the page on our nation’s life of international crime and finally, genuinely embrace diplomacy and peaceful coexistence with our neighbors, as the UN Charter requires.
For Americans—and for the world—that choice is becoming a matter of survival.
– Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, now in a revised, updated 2nd edition.
– Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
-Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-end-of-negotiation-how-the-us-became-an-international-serial-killer/
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In New Interview, Ramzy Baroud on ‘Before the Flood’, Memory, Palestinian Resistance
March 25, 2026
A new interview featuring Ramzy Baroud offers insight into his latest book, Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir, focusing on the lived experiences of Palestinians across generations.
Speaking with renowned journalist Rachel Blevins, Baroud discusses how the book recounts the story of the al-Badrasawi family, beginning with their forced displacement during the Nakba and continuing through life in Gaza’s refugee camps.
The memoir centers on intergenerational survival, documenting how one family’s experience reflects the broader Palestinian condition under decades of occupation and exile. Baroud emphasizes the importance of reclaiming Palestinian narratives, arguing that storytelling is itself a form of resistance.
He also highlights the need to challenge dominant representations of Palestinians, placing their struggle within a wider historical and political context shaped by dispossession and resilience.
Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle and author of several books on Palestine, has long focused on documenting Palestinian history through personal and collective narratives.
The full interview is available on YouTube.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/in-new-interview-ramzy-baroud-on-before-the-flood-memory-palestinian-resistance/
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PROFILE: The Hawks of Tehran Are Back – Who Is Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr?
March 25, 2026
Who Is Zolghadr?
Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr is not a temporary appointment brought in to manage a crisis. He is a figure shaped by the revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and decades inside Iran’s security institutions.
Born in 1954 in Fars province, Zolghadr emerged from the pre-revolution Islamist opposition networks and later joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps after 1979.
Iranian reporting presents him as a long-standing pillar of the state’s security structure — a man whose career reflects continuity rather than change.
What Is His Background?
Zolghadr’s trajectory runs through nearly every major security institution in Iran.
During the Iran-Iraq war, he served in key military roles, including overseeing training and commanding irregular warfare operations.
He later became one of the figures involved in the formation of structures that would evolve into Iran’s external military networks, including early frameworks associated with what later became the Quds Force.
His career continued upward through the IRGC hierarchy, where he served as chief of staff and later deputy commander-in-chief.
Why Is He Considered a ‘Hawk’?
Zolghadr’s entire institutional life has been rooted in security, military strategy, and ideological commitment to the Islamic Republic.
He has also been linked to conservative political currents and has held positions within the Popular Front of Islamic Revolutionary Forces, a key hardline political coalition.
His authorship of works such as The Fall of Israel reflects a worldview in which confrontation with Israel is not tactical but structural.
This is not the profile of a negotiator. It is the profile of a strategist shaped by prolonged conflict.
What Roles Has He Held?
Beyond the IRGC, Zolghadr moved across multiple centers of power.
He served as deputy interior minister for security affairs and later as acting interior minister, overseeing internal security and law enforcement structures.
He then transitioned to the judiciary, where he spent years working on social protection and crime-prevention policies before becoming a senior strategic deputy.
Most recently, he held the position of secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council, a key body that resolves institutional disputes at the highest level of the state.
Why Now?
His appointment comes in the aftermath of a major shock: the assassination of Ali Larijani.
Larijani, a senior figure within the Islamic Republic with a long record in security, diplomacy, and state institutions, was closely associated with strategic decision-making at the highest levels.
Zolghadr’s appointment does not replace one kind of strength with another, but signals a shift in emphasis — from a figure rooted in institutional coordination and political management to one shaped primarily by military and security command structures.
Iranian and regional reporting suggest that this transition reflects a broader recalibration under pressure, where figures with extensive battlefield and security backgrounds are being brought more directly into central decision-making roles.
What Does This Signal?
The timing of Zolghadr’s appointment carries clear political meaning.
The Supreme National Security Council is one of the most powerful bodies in Iran, coordinating defense, foreign policy, and internal security decisions.
Placing a veteran IRGC strategist at its center during an ongoing war signals a shift toward a more security-driven approach to governance.
It suggests that decision-making is being shaped increasingly by those with direct experience in conflict, rather than political negotiation.
What Is the Irony?
There is a broader irony in this transition.
The assassination campaign targeting senior Iranian figures was widely understood as an attempt to weaken the state’s strategic capacity.
Instead, it appears to have accelerated the rise of figures like Zolghadr — individuals whose careers are rooted in confrontation rather than compromise.
In that sense, rather than fragmenting Iran’s leadership, the pressure may be consolidating it.
What Comes Next?
Zolghadr now sits at the center of Iran’s security decision-making.
His role will involve coordinating responses to ongoing military pressure, shaping Iran’s regional posture, and navigating the balance between escalation and strategic restraint.
Given his background, his approach is likely to reflect the logic of deterrence, resilience, and long-term confrontation.
If his appointment signals anything, it is this: under pressure, Iran is not retreating. It is reverting to its most hardened core.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/profile-the-hawks-of-tehran-are-back-who-is-mohammad-baqer-zolghadr/
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‘Blowing Things Up’: How Trump Was Fed a Fake Victory in the Iran War – Analysis
March 25, 2026
The News: What Did NBC Reveal?
A new report by NBC News has exposed a striking — and deeply consequential — feature of how President Donald Trump has been consuming information about the ongoing war on Iran.
According to NBC, “each day since the start of the war in Iran, U.S. military officials compile a video update for President Donald Trump that shows video of the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours,” citing three current US officials and one former official.
The briefing, described as a “daily montage,” typically runs “for about two minutes,” and, in the words of one official, consists largely of clips of “stuff blowing up.”
While this video is not the only source of information available to the president, NBC reports that it has become a central feature of how Trump experiences the war. The concern, however, is not merely its existence — but its selective nature.
The same officials warned that the montage “has raised concerns among some of the president’s allies that he may not be receiving — or absorbing — the complete picture of the war.”
The issue is not theoretical. According to NBC, “the information Trump gets about the war tends to emphasize U.S. successes, with comparatively little detail about Iranian actions.”
One concrete example underscores the problem: when Iranian forces struck five US Air Force refueling planes at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, Trump was not briefed on the incident and instead learned about it through media reports. When he inquired, he was told the damage was minimal.
This asymmetry between battlefield reality and presidential briefing appears to be systematic. As one official put it bluntly: “We can’t tell him every single thing that happens.”
The result is a curated narrative — one that privileges spectacle over substance, success over complexity, and destruction over consequence.
Why Does Trump Believe He Is Winning?
The NBC report offers a rational, evidence-based explanation for a phenomenon that has puzzled observers: Trump’s repeated public assertions that the war against Iran is a decisive success.
The answer lies not in strategy, but in information architecture.
When a president’s daily exposure to war consists of carefully selected images of explosions, destroyed targets, and “successful strikes,” the psychological effect is predictable. The war becomes a sequence of victories — visually confirmed, emotionally reinforced, and politically exploitable.
NBC reports that Trump has repeatedly pointed to the success depicted in these videos to question why the media narrative does not align with what he sees. He has “privately questioned why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative,” asking aides why news coverage fails to reflect the apparent success of operations.
In other words, the president is not merely consuming intelligence — he is consuming a story. And that story is one of uninterrupted triumph.
This helps explain his increasingly combative stance toward media reporting. After learning about the strike on US aircraft through news coverage, Trump publicly accused media organizations of wanting the United States “to lose the War.”
The contradiction is stark: a president watching victory on screen, while reality — fragmented, contested, and costly — intrudes through external reporting.
What Is Missing From the Picture?
The central issue raised by NBC is not that Trump is uninformed, but that his information may be structurally incomplete.
The curated videos, by design, “don’t reflect the full scope of the conflict.” They exclude not only setbacks, but also the broader strategic environment — including Iranian responses, regional escalation risks, and the limits of US military effectiveness.
Officials cited in the report explicitly warned that this imbalance could have serious consequences. Without access to the full picture, Trump “may not be equipped to make critical decisions” about the next phase of the war.
This concern is not new. NBC draws a historical parallel to previous US wars, where administrations were accused of “groupthink” — systematically downplaying inconvenient facts and reinforcing internal narratives of success even as strategies faltered.
From Vietnam to Iraq, the pattern is familiar: selective intelligence produces strategic overconfidence, which in turn sustains escalation. What makes the current case distinct is the medium. This is not merely a filtered briefing — it is a visual narrative, engineered for maximum impact.
Who Benefits From This Narrative?
The NBC report does not directly name the actors shaping these briefings. But the political context makes the direction of influence difficult to ignore.
Many analysts and observers argue that this is, in effect, Israel’s war — or at minimum, a war whose continuation aligns closely with the priorities of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
NBC itself confirms that Trump is in “near-daily conversations” with Netanyahu. That level of coordination is not incidental. It reflects a shared political and military trajectory.
Within Washington, this raises a sharper question: who benefits from a president who believes he is winning?
The answer points toward those inside the administration who are invested in prolonging the war — officials, advisers, and political allies who consistently advocate escalation, not restraint.
If Trump is being shown a steady stream of “successful strikes,” while setbacks and Iranian responses are minimized, then the effect is not neutral. It reinforces a single conclusion: continue.
That conclusion aligns with Netanyahu’s stated objective of sustaining pressure on Iran, and with a broader current inside the White House that views the war as necessary, even desirable.
In that sense, the issue is not simply that Trump is receiving incomplete information. It is that the information he is receiving may be structured to produce a specific outcome — continued war.
This does not make the president an outsider to the process. He is actively amplifying the narrative, repeating claims of victory, and attacking dissenting coverage.
But it does help explain the disconnect between rhetoric and reality — and why the administration’s internal “confidence” appears increasingly detached from the actual trajectory of the war.
The result is a closed loop: curated success feeds political messaging, which in turn justifies further escalation.
And at the center of that loop is a president watching a war that looks very different from the one actually being fought.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/blowing-things-up-how-trump-was-fed-a-fake-victory-in-the-iran-war-analysis/
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