Active Wars Across Multiple Theatres & Hantavirus
The Hormuz Stalemate, the Victory Day Parade, and Twenty Wars Nobody Is Watching
On the morning of May 6, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before reporters at the White House and declared that Operation Epic Fury had concluded. The objectives of the US-Israel war on Iran which opened on February 28 with the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and proceeded, over 38 days, to destroy what Washington claimed was more than 85 percent of Iran’s defense industrial base had been achieved. The United States now preferred, Rubio said, “the path of peace.”
By Sunday, May 10, Iran had launched drone strikes on Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait.
The sequence follows from the structure of a war that has been declared over without being settled. The formal military campaign wound down, but no resolution has been reached, and what replaced combat operations is a dual blockade in which neither party can deliver a decisive blow but both retain the capacity to impose costs on everyone in range. The US Navy maintains a cordon around Iranian ports. Iran continues to strangle traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the 21-mile passage through which, before February 28, roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas moved each day. Since the US launched its “Project Freedom” convoy operation to guide stranded vessels through the strait, exactly two commercial ships have successfully transited under American naval protection. Major shipping lines have declined to send vessels through a corridor sitting within range of Iranian missiles, drones, and mines whose precise locations Iran has admitted, in one extraordinary moment of operational honesty, it can no longer fully track. Trump paused Project Freedom on May 6, the same day Rubio declared the war concluded, then posted on social media that bombing would resume “at a much higher level and intensity” if Iran did not accept terms. The press conference and the social media post arrived within hours of each other, each addressed to a different audience.
