Kurdish Iranian dissident groups stationed in northern Iraq say they are moving fighters toward the Iranian border and preparing for potential military operations inside Iran, with Kurdish officials telling the Associated Press that the United States has asked Iraqi Kurdish leaders to support the effort.
Khalil Nadiri, an official with the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), said Wednesday that some PAK forces had relocated to areas near the Iranian border in Sulaymaniyah province and were waiting on standby. An official with Komala, another Kurdish opposition group, said its forces could be ready to cross the border within a week to 10 days. The groups are believed to have thousands of trained fighters between them.
The preparations come after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, triggering a new phase of conflict in the Middle East.
Three Iraqi Kurdish officials told the AP that a phone call took place Sunday night between President Trump and two of the most powerful figures in Iraqi Kurdistan: Masoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Bafel Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. One of the officials said Trump asked the Iraqi Kurds to militarily support Iranian Kurdish groups in operations inside Iran and to open the border, according to Newsmax.
The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan confirmed the call in a statement, saying Trump "provided clarification and vision regarding U.S. objectives in the war." The PUK also added that it "believes that the best solution is a return to the negotiating table."
Spokespeople for Barzani declined to comment.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt offered a more limited characterization of the conversation. Asked about the call and reports that Trump had sought military support for Iranian Kurdish groups, Leavitt said:
"He did speak to Kurdish leaders with respect to our base that we have in northern Iraq."
She denied that Trump had agreed to a specific plan. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, asked Wednesday about reports that the administration was considering arming Iranian Kurdish groups, was similarly careful:
"None of our objectives are premised on the support or the arming of any particular force. So, what other entities may be doing, we're aware of, but our objectives aren't centered on that."
Read those statements closely. Neither is a denial that contact occurred. Neither rules out coordination. What they rule out is dependency. The U.S. is not building its Iran strategy around Kurdish fighters, but it is not discouraging them either.
The Kurdish region has already absorbed a string of drone and missile attacks by Iran and allied Iraqi militias in recent days, targeting U.S. military bases, the U.S. Consulate in Irbil, and the Kurdish groups' own positions. Electricity cuts followed after a key gas field halted operations. The region is feeling the pressure from multiple directions.
Iran, predictably, wants the threat neutralized before it materializes. Iraq's National Security Adviser Qassim al-Araji said in a post on X that Ali Bagheri, deputy secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, had requested:
"that Iraq take the necessary measures to prevent any opposition groups from infiltrating the border between the two countries."
Al-Araji responded by pledging Iraq's commitment to "preventing any groups from infiltrating or crossing the Iranian border or carrying out terrorist acts from Iraqi territory," adding that security reinforcements had been sent to the border. Baghdad is caught between its neighbor to the east and the superpower that still maintains forces on its soil. That is not a comfortable position, and al-Araji's language reflects the tightrope.
The Kurdish opposition to Iran's regime is not new. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran's new theocracy battled Kurdish insurgents in fighting that killed thousands over several months. Under the Shah before that, Kurds were marginalized, repressed, and periodically in revolt. The grievances run deep and predate the current crisis by decades.
In 2023, Iraq reached an agreement with Iran to disarm the Kurdish dissident groups and move them from bases near the border into camps designated by Baghdad. The bases were shut down. Movement within Iraq was restricted. But the groups did not give up their weapons. That detail matters enormously now. The infrastructure was dismantled; the fighting capacity was not.
Reza Pahlavi, the former shah's son, has accused the Kurds of being separatists aiming to carve up Iran. That framing is convenient for anyone who wants to delegitimize an armed opposition without engaging with why that opposition exists in the first place.
The strategic logic here is straightforward. Iran is a regime that rules by coercion, and coercive regimes are uniquely vulnerable to internal pressure. Kurdish fighters with local knowledge, existing grievances, and a willingness to operate inside Iranian territory represent exactly the kind of asymmetric challenge that Tehran has spent years trying to suppress through diplomatic agreements with Baghdad.
Those agreements held when the broader region was relatively stable. That stability evaporated Saturday.
Much of the reporting relies on anonymous Kurdish officials, and the White House is clearly managing the public narrative with precision. That is not unusual when military and intelligence equities are in play. What is clear from the public record is that:
The Kurdish groups themselves are not waiting for permission slips. They have fighters, they have weapons they were supposed to have surrendered, and they have generations of reasons to act. Whether Washington is formally coordinating with them or simply not standing in their way, the effect on Tehran's calculations is the same.
Iran now faces the prospect of fighting on multiple fronts: against the U.S. and Israeli military campaign from the air, and against an indigenous armed opposition crossing its western border. That is precisely the kind of strategic squeeze that changes a regime's willingness to negotiate.
The PUK's statement said the best solution is a return to the negotiating table. Perhaps. But negotiating tables tend to appear only after the alternative becomes unbearable.
As American missiles struck Iranian targets and ended the 86-year-old theocratic dictator Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took to X with a two-word foreign policy treatise: "No new wars."
It did not go well for him.
The 2024 vice presidential nominee joined the chorus of Democrats criticizing the Trump administration's strikes on Iran, and the internet responded with the kind of bipartisan contempt rarely seen in American politics. Walz managed to unite the left and the right, not behind a cause, but against himself.
The responses came fast and from every direction, Fox News noted. Aviva Klompas, whose bio includes time at the Israeli mission to the United Nations, dismantled the premise entirely:
"Iran started this war 47 years ago when they took Americans hostage. Honestly, can people crack open a book before posting nonsense?"
Comedian Michael Rapaport slammed Walz by retweeting Klompas's response and then offered his own assessment of Khamenei's demise:
"I'm glad that old bag of s--- and his entire regime are gone."
Rapaport, who has been vocal against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, went on to take issue with critics of the Iranian strikes more broadly. He condemned those who remained silent as Khamenei oversaw mass murders of tens of thousands of dissidents in recent months. On Monday, he added further commentary on the dictator's death in characteristically colorful fashion.
Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., a top pro-Israel voice in Congress, skipped the geopolitics entirely and went straight for the jugular: "Will this affect your Somali kickbacks?"
Conservative videographer Cam Higby, who had tweeted videos of his stringer-type visits to Minneapolis unrest, posed a different question: "Didn't you just try to start a war with Trump a month ago?"
That last one lands harder than it might seem.
Tim Walz has spent the past year as one of the most visible state leaders and Trump critics in the country. He has repeatedly condemned the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement efforts in his state. He has pushed the idea that President Donald Trump is a monarch, posting "No kings" alongside his opposition. He has positioned himself as the conscience of the resistance.
And yet the man who wants to be the moral authority on executive overreach once stood with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and declared:
"Minnesota stands with the people of Ukraine as they fight to defend freedom and democracy."
So military engagement abroad is noble when it involves a cause Walz approves of, but a strike against a regime that took American hostages, sponsored terrorism across the Middle East, and brutalized its own people is somehow a bridge too far. The principle isn't "no new wars." The principle is "no wars that help Trump."
This is the feedback loop that defines so much of the modern left. Opposition to the current administration becomes the only consistent value. Everything else, including coherence, is negotiable.
Fine's jab about "Somali kickbacks" wasn't random. Minnesota has wrestled with a Somali-linked childcare fraud problem that metastasized to other sectors, and Walz has faced scrutiny over his handling of it. The governor who positions himself as a guardian of democratic norms has presided over a state where fraud flourished under lax oversight. That context doesn't disappear because he posted two words about Iran.
Late Monday, reports surfaced that Khamenei's wife, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, succumbed to her injuries from the missile strike that killed her husband. The regime that terrorized its own citizens, hanged dissidents from cranes, and funded proxy wars across the region has been decapitated.
The appropriate response from an American governor is not complicated. You don't have to celebrate. You don't have to wave a flag. But "No new wars" in response to the elimination of one of the world's most brutal theocrats tells you everything about where Walz's priorities sit. Not with the Iranian women beaten for showing their hair. Not with the hostages taken 47 years ago. Not with the dissidents who disappeared into regime prisons.
With the narrative. Always with the narrative.
Walz wanted to score a point against the administration. Instead, he reminded everyone, left and right alike, why voters didn't send him to the White House.
Actor Michael Rapaport unloaded on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Sunday, exposing a glaring double standard: both Democrats rushed to condemn President Trump's military strikes against Iran's mullahs but had nothing to say while the regime spent weeks slaughtering its own people.
Rapaport's message to Ocasio-Cortez was blunt:
"You said 0.0 during the last few weeks as 35k civilians were slaughtered raped and arrested in Iran. Resign."
He saved similar treatment for Mamdani, writing on X:
"You said 0.0 during the last few weeks as 35k plus civilians were slaughtered raped and arrested in Iran. Shovel Snow & get me my free shit."
The backdrop is straightforward. The president authorized a series of surprise attacks on Iran's mullahs on Saturday. Democratic officials all across the country immediately rose to defend the brutal Iranian regime. Ocasio-Cortez ripped Trump and accused him of refusing to use "diplomacy" in Iran, calling him a "president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions." Mamdani blasted Trump for what he called a "catastrophic" and "illegal" war on Iran.
None of them had a word to say as the mullahs spent the last month killing tens of thousands of civilians protesting for democracy.
Ocasio-Cortez's invocation of "diplomacy" deserves particular scrutiny, as Breitbart points out. Diplomacy with Iran has been failing since 1979. Nearly half a century of engagement, negotiation, frameworks, and deals, and the theocratic regime still brutalizes its own citizens, funds terrorism across the Middle East, and inches toward nuclear capability.
At what point does the call for "diplomacy" stop being a policy position and start being a reflexive tic? When Iranian protesters are being slaughtered in the streets, and your first instinct is to criticize the American president for acting against the regime doing the slaughtering, you have revealed something about your priorities. It isn't flattering.
The pattern is familiar. Authoritarian regimes commit atrocities. The American left says nothing. The moment a Republican president takes action, they discover their voice. The outrage is never directed at the people pulling triggers in Tehran. It's directed at the Oval Office.
Mamdani calling military action against Iran "illegal" and "catastrophic" is rich coming from a mayor whose own policy instincts have drawn fire from across the political spectrum. His concern for legality appears highly selective. Tens of thousands of Iranian civilians arrested, beaten, and killed by their own government didn't trigger a single statement about illegality. But is American military action against the regime responsible? Catastrophic. Illegal. Must be condemned immediately.
This is the tell. For a certain kind of progressive politician, American power is always the problem. Never the dictatorship. Never theocracy. Never the regime that hangs dissidents from cranes. The villain is always Washington.
Rapaport is not a conservative commentator. He's a Hollywood actor who has been willing to break with progressive orthodoxy when the facts demand it. That's precisely what makes his criticism effective. He isn't operating from a partisan playbook. He's pointing out something obvious that most people in his industry would rather ignore.
The question he posed is simple, and neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Mamdani has answered it: Where were you during the last few weeks?
Not during the strikes. During the slaughter. When Iranian civilians, many of them young, many of them women, were being killed for demanding basic democratic rights, where was the outrage? Where were the press conferences? Where were the posts on X?
Silence. Total silence. Then, the moment Trump acts against the regime responsible, the keyboards start clacking.
This is the core rot in progressive foreign policy thinking. Moral urgency is activated only when it can be aimed at domestic political opponents. Iranian civilians dying in the streets? Not useful. Can't be pinned on a Republican. File it away. But American military action? Now we're in business. Now we can fundraise. Now we can clip quotes for social media.
It isn't principled opposition. Its performance. And increasingly, ordinary Americans can see the difference.
Rapaport told them both what millions of people were already thinking. Neither has offered a convincing answer. Neither is likely to. When your silence is the argument against you, there's not much left to say.
Three U.S. service members are dead, and five more are seriously wounded following combat operations inside Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. Central Command confirmed Sunday.
The joint U.S.-Israeli military operation launched Saturday against the Islamist regime in Tehran, representing one of the largest regional concentrations of American military firepower in a generation. The cost of that operation is now measured in American blood.
CENTCOM provided minimal detail about the circumstances surrounding the deaths, noting only that major combat operations continue and the response effort remains ongoing. Several additional service members sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions and are in the process of returning to duty.
The facts are spare, and deliberately so. CENTCOM explained its reasoning plainly, according to Breitbart:
"The situation is fluid, so out of respect for the families, we will withhold additional information, including the identities of our fallen warriors, until 24 hours after next of kin have been notified."
That restraint is appropriate. Somewhere in the United States right now, families are receiving the worst news of their lives, or they are about to. The names will come in time. What matters first is that three Americans went to war and did not come home.
No unit designations have been released. No specific engagement details have been disclosed. The operational picture remains fluid, which is military language for: this is still happening.
It is easy, in the scroll of breaking news alerts and political commentary, to lose sight of what a combat death actually means. It means a folded flag. It means a knock on the door. It might mean children who will grow up learning about a parent from photographs and secondhand stories.
Three service members volunteered for this. They raised their right hands, swore an oath, trained for years, deployed to one of the most dangerous theaters on earth, and gave everything. Five more are seriously wounded, facing recoveries that may reshape the rest of their lives. Others are already rotating back to duty with shrapnel wounds and concussions, because the mission continues and someone has to carry it forward.
This is the reality of military force. It is not an abstraction debated on cable news panels. It is not a hashtag. It is young men and women absorbing the violence that their country decided was necessary.
The United States launched its major military operation alongside Israeli forces against the Iranian regime on Saturday. Details about the scope, objectives, and progress of Operation Epic Fury remain tightly held, as they should be during active combat.
What is publicly known is that this represents a decisive escalation, the kind of military commitment that does not happen without serious deliberation at the highest levels of government and military command. The concentration of American firepower in the region has been described as generational in scale.
For years, Iran's regime has operated as the central banker of Middle Eastern terrorism, funding proxies, arming militias, and destabilizing every country within reach. Whatever triggered the timing of this operation, the underlying cause has been building for decades. The regime in Tehran has spent a generation testing American resolve. Now it has an answer.
CENTCOM's statement that "major combat operations continue" tells us the most important thing: this is not over. More casualty reports may follow. The fog of war is thick, and the information environment will be unreliable for days, perhaps longer.
The appropriate response from the American public is not to politicize these deaths before the families have even been notified. It is to recognize that the men and women conducting this operation are doing so at extraordinary personal risk, and that three of them have already paid the ultimate price.
There will be time for analysis of strategy, for debate about objectives, and for assessment of outcomes. That time is not now. Now is for the fallen, the wounded, and the families bracing for a world that just changed forever.
Three warriors went forward. They did not come back. Honor them first. Everything else can wait.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro blasted President Donald Trump's decision to strike Iran early Saturday, accusing the administration of lacking a "clear plan" for the military campaign. In nearly the same breath, Shapiro acknowledged that the Iranian regime is the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism and endorsed the idea of a fundamentally different government in Tehran.
The contradiction writes itself.
Shapiro, a Democrat considered a potential 2028 presidential contender, issued a statement that tried to thread a needle familiar to his party: oppose the Republican president's actions while carefully avoiding any appearance of sympathy for America's enemies. The result was a statement that criticized the mission and then validated its underlying logic.
Shapiro's first move was to question the urgency and strategy behind the strikes:
"In going to war with Iran, the President has not adequately explained why this war is urgent now, what this military campaign may look like, or what the strategic objective is."
He followed that with a broader indictment of the administration's communication:
"President Trump and his Administration have not demonstrated to the American people that we have a clear plan with this mission."
Standard opposition rhetoric. A governor from the party out of power demands more transparency. That much is predictable. What came next was not.
"Make no mistake, the Iranian regime represses its own people and is the leading state sponsor of terrorism around the world."
Shapiro then went further, referencing the tens of thousands of Iranians who have died in recent weeks standing up against the regime's brutality, and openly calling for a government in Tehran that "gives voice to these hopes, respects their rights, and pursues their interests peacefully."
So the regime is monstrous. It murders its own citizens. It sponsors terrorism globally. Its people are dying in the streets for freedom. But the American president shouldn't act against it without first filing a more detailed briefing with Josh Shapiro.
This is what positioning looks like when a politician knows his base hates Trump, but his general-election audience might not hate the mission. Shapiro can't afford to be seen defending the Iranian regime. No serious American politician can. But he also can't afford to give Trump credit for confronting it.
The result is a statement designed to be quoted selectively. Progressives get the "no clear plan" sound bite. Moderates and hawkish Democrats get the "leading state sponsor of terrorism" line. Everyone gets to hear what they want. Nobody has to reconcile the two halves.
This is a familiar pattern from Democrats on national security. They rarely argue that the enemy doesn't deserve what's coming. They argue about process, planning, and communication. The effect is to position themselves as the responsible adults who would have done the same thing, just better, with more PowerPoint slides and interagency memos.
It's worth noting what Shapiro did not say. He did not call for a ceasefire. He did not demand withdrawal. He did not suggest diplomacy with the current regime as a viable path. He effectively endorsed the end goal of regime change while objecting to the means of getting there. For a potential 2028 candidate, that's not a principle. That's optionality, as Washington Examiner reports.
The broader picture makes Shapiro's quibbling feel especially small. Israeli strikes have killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, along with some of his key advisers and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The regime has suffered massive blows to its leadership, with no successor readily apparent. Khamenei's death initiates a succession process in a government already reeling from internal unrest.
President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been urging the Iranian people to overthrow their theocratic government entirely. This isn't an ambiguous strategic objective. It's about as clearly stated as foreign policy gets.
Shapiro himself rebuked the regime for its violent crackdown on protesters in January. He acknowledged that tens of thousands of Iranians have died fighting for their own freedom. The regime he describes is one that:
If that's the regime, and Shapiro agrees it is, then what exactly is the alternative to force? The governor doesn't say. He simply insists that whatever is being done should have been explained to him more thoroughly first.
Democrats have spent years arguing that Iran is a destabilizing force in the Middle East. They've sanctioned it, condemned it, and negotiated with it. None of those approaches removed the theocratic government that Shapiro himself now says the Iranian people deserve to be free of.
When action finally arrives, the objection isn't to the goal. It's to the man pursuing it. That's not a foreign policy position. That's partisanship wearing a lanyard.
Shapiro also made sure to mention U.S. service members in the region, expressing concern for their safety. That concern is legitimate and shared across the political spectrum. But wrapping it into a statement whose primary purpose is to criticize the commander-in-chief during an active military operation doesn't strengthen the troops. It strengthens the talking point.
The Iranian regime's leadership structure is in chaos. The succession question looms over a government that was already losing its grip on a population willing to die for change. Trump and Netanyahu have made their position unambiguous: the theocratic regime should fall.
Shapiro agrees the regime is evil. He agrees that the people deserve better. He agrees that the government sponsors terrorism. He just wants it on the record that he asked for a clearer plan before any of it happened.
If Iran emerges from this with a government that stops executing protesters and funding terror, nobody will remember the governor's request for a more detailed briefing. If it doesn't, his statement won't have contributed anything toward a better outcome either.
Some moments demand clarity. Shapiro chose footnotes.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) unloaded on both Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Democratic lawmakers Saturday over their push to force a war powers vote in the wake of joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, arguing they fundamentally misunderstand the law they claim to be defending.
The rebuke came as members of Congress from both parties scrambled to respond to Operation Epic Fury, which began at 1:15 a.m. ET and targeted Iranian military infrastructure. Iran's Red Crescent told Iranian state TV the strikes killed over 200 people and injured almost 750, hitting 24 out of Iran's 31 provinces. Iran retaliated with drone and missile strikes on U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait, along with several attacks on Israel.
In the middle of all that, the loudest voices on Capitol Hill weren't focused on the threat. They were focused on procedure.
Lawler, writing on X, laid out the War Powers Act with the kind of clarity that apparently eluded his colleagues. The president must notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops or carrying out an attack. He must then withdraw within 60 to 90 days unless Congress declares war. Those are the actual requirements.
"In this instance, Congress was notified in advance and briefed before the strike on Iran. A full classified briefing will be forthcoming."
In other words, the White House didn't just meet the legal threshold. It exceeded it. Congress got advance notice, not a 48-hour after-the-fact memo.
Lawler went further, noting that even if Congress passes the war powers resolution co-sponsored by Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), President Trump retains the authority to act under Article II of the Constitution. The resolution is a political gesture dressed up as a legal constraint, as The Hill reports.
"The notion that this strike is illegal or that the President needed Congress' authority is wrong."
Then came the line that should end the debate but won't:
"Furthermore, Biden and Obama conducted numerous strikes in numerous countries without Congress and none of the people screaming now, seemed to have any objections. For historical context, Congress has not declared war since WWII."
That's the heart of it. The War Powers Act has been invoked as a political weapon selectively for decades. Presidents of both parties have ordered strikes without prior congressional authorization. The sudden constitutional piety from Democrats who were silent under Obama and Biden isn't principled. It's partisan.
Earlier in the day, Massie posted on X that he was "opposed to this war" and vowed to work with Khanna when Congress reconvenes to force a vote on their war powers resolution. He declared the strikes were "not 'America First.'"
On the Democratic side, Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) called on senators to vote immediately on Sen. Tim Kaine's (D-Va.) version of a war powers resolution.
"Trump once again started a cycle of violence that has already escalated and could spiral out of control."
Kim's framing reveals the reflex. When America acts decisively against a regime that funds terrorism across the Middle East, the concern isn't whether the action was strategically sound or legally authorized. The concern is that America acted at all. The "cycle of violence" framework treats American military action and Iranian aggression as morally equivalent events in an endless loop, rather than recognizing one as the cause and the other as the response.
Members of Congress called on convening earlier than planned to force a vote. The urgency is telling. These same lawmakers have shown no comparable urgency in securing the border, funding the Department of Homeland Security, or addressing the fentanyl crisis. Lawler noticed, calling on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to stop Democratic opposition to DHS funding. The priorities speak for themselves.
Iranian officials claimed strikes hit a girls' school in southern Iran, killing more than 80 students. U.S. Central Command said it was looking into those reports. That investigation matters. But it's worth noting the source: Iranian state media, relaying figures from a government with every incentive to maximize civilian casualty numbers for propaganda purposes.
The operation targeted Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps infrastructure. The IRGC isn't a conventional military. It's a terrorist organization that bankrolls Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. It has American blood on its hands going back decades. Strikes against its capabilities aren't reckless escalation. They're overdue for accountability.
The war powers push isn't really about constitutional authority. If it were, the same lawmakers would have raised these objections consistently across administrations. They didn't.
It's about constraining a president who is willing to use force against Iran at a moment when Iran is retaliating against American bases across the Gulf. That retaliation, targeting U.S. service members in five countries, is the actual escalation. The response to it should not be a congressional debate about whether the president had permission to act.
Massie's libertarian instincts on war are consistent, and that deserves acknowledgment. He's raised these concerns under both parties. But consistency doesn't make the argument correct at this particular moment, with American bases under fire and an adversary that reads congressional division as an invitation.
The Democrats joining him have no such consistency to claim. Their objections are calibrated to the party in the White House, not the principle at stake.
Lawler framed it plainly. Congress was briefed. The Constitution grants the president authority. The law was followed. Everything else is theater, performed while American troops are in harm's way.
The ink was barely dry on U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran before the progressive left's most predictable voices lined up to denounce the operation. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom all condemned President Trump on Saturday, calling the strikes "illegal," "unjustified," and "catastrophic."
Not one of them spared a word for the Iranian regime's decades of sponsoring terrorism, pursuing nuclear weapons, or threatening American allies. The target of their outrage was not Tehran. It was the White House.
Ocasio-Cortez accused Trump of "dragging Americans "into a war they did not want, and alleged the president "does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions." She then delivered the sort of sentence designed more for a fundraising email than a foreign policy debate:
"This war is unlawful. It is unnecessary. And it will be catastrophic."
Omar followed the same script, accusing Trump of "unilaterally dragging this nation into an illegal and unjustified war with Iran without congressional authorization, without a clear objective, and without any imminent threat to the United States."
No mention of Iran's nuclear ambitions. No acknowledgment of the threat a nuclear-armed theocracy poses to every American interest in the Middle East. Just the familiar refrain: America is the problem, as New York Post reports.
The most revealing response came from New York's socialist mayor. Mamdani, the Ugandan-born pol who mere days earlier had briefly bonded with Trump over potential Big Apple housing investments during a visit to the White House, pivoted hard on Saturday. His statement read like a press release from an antiwar nonprofit, not the leader of America's largest city:
"Today's military strikes on Iran, carried out by the United States and Israel, mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression."
He continued:
"Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace."
The phrase "illegal war of aggression" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. No court has ruled the strikes illegal. No international body has issued a determination. Mamdani simply declared it so, borrowing the language of left-wing activists and presenting it as fact.
Then came the pivot to local governance. Mamdani said he was in contact with Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and emergency management officials to take "proactive steps, including increasing coordination across agencies and enhancing patrols of sensitive locations out of an abundance of caution." He also addressed Iranian New Yorkers directly:
"Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city, you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders."
He added, "You will be safe here."
A mayor coordinating with law enforcement during a geopolitical event is perfectly reasonable. The rest of the statement reveals the priority. Mamdani spent far more energy condemning his own country's military action than addressing any threat posed by the regime those strikes targeted.
Gavin Newsom, never one to miss a moment with national implications, attempted a more careful version of the same argument. Writing on X Saturday, the California governor acknowledged what his progressive allies would not:
"The corrupt and repressive Iranian regime must never have nuclear weapons. The leadership of Iran must go."
Strong words. But they lasted exactly one sentence before Newsom retreated to the same conclusion as the rest:
"But that does not justify the President of the United States engaging in an illegal, dangerous war that will risk the lives of our American service members and our friends without justification to the American people."
So the regime must go, but doing anything about it is illegal and dangerous. This is the fundamental unserious posture of the modern Democratic foreign policy wing: acknowledge the threat, then oppose every action that might address it. The regime "must go," but not like this, not now, and never on a Republican president's terms.
Every one of these figures has, at some point, expressed alarm about Iran's nuclear program or its destabilizing influence in the region. Every one of them has demanded that presidents act to protect American interests abroad. Yet when action arrives, the response is instantaneous condemnation, not measured evaluation. Not "let's see the intelligence." Not "what were the objectives." Just: illegal, unjustified, catastrophic.
This is not foreign policy analysis. It is reflexive opposition dressed in constitutional language. Omar invokes "congressional authorization" as though she would vote for it if asked. She wouldn't. AOC frames the strikes as reckless while offering no alternative to a regime racing toward a nuclear weapon. Mamdani, who days ago was talking housing deals with Trump, now calls his military decisions "a war of aggression."
The pattern is always the same:
It costs nothing to say "the leadership of Iran must go" when you intend to block every path to making it happen.
Absent from every one of these statements is a simple question: What should the United States do about a theocratic regime pursuing nuclear weapons, funding terrorist proxies across the Middle East, and threatening the destruction of a key American ally?
The progressive left has no answer. It has only objections. And those objections arrive with suspicious speed, identical language, and zero engagement with the strategic reality that prompted the strikes in the first place.
When the threat is abstract, they talk tough. When the moment demands action, they reach for "illegal" and "unjustified" before the dust has settled. That is not a principle. It is positioning.
Iran unleashed a barrage of drone and missile strikes against civilian and military targets across nine countries on Saturday, killing at least six people and sending residents and military personnel scrambling for shelter from the Middle East to the Persian Gulf. The strikes targeted locations in the UAE, Bahrain, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia in what Tehran framed as retaliation for Operation Epic Fury.
Among the targets: a US Navy base in Bahrain, Dubai International Airport, Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh, and residential neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. The scope was enormous. The damage was real. And the message from Tehran was unmistakable.
This wave of violence followed Operation Epic Fury, a US and Israeli daylight attack that struck at the heart of the Iranian regime, including the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and other key regime figures. What Iran launched Saturday was not the strike of a confident power projecting strength. It was the spasm of a decapitated regime scattering fire in every direction, hitting allies and bystanders as much as adversaries.
Consider the target list. Iran didn't just strike at Israel or American military assets. It fired on Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Several of these are Muslim-majority nations. Some have spent years trying to maintain diplomatic back channels with Tehran. None of that mattered when the mullahs needed to project fury; they no longer had the leadership to sustain, as New York Post reports.
At Dubai International Airport, a late Saturday strike was intercepted, but falling debris injured four people and killed one. Smoke filled a terminal. Passengers captured the chaos on video, with one clip capturing screams of "Oh my God" as travelers fled. Near the five-star Fairmont the Palm in Dubai, apparent debris from another intercepted attack set a large fire. It remains unclear if anyone was hurt there.
In Abu Dhabi, a worker was killed in a residential area, a strike the UAE's Ministry of Defense confirmed on X. The UAE military said it intercepted three waves of ballistic missiles from Tehran, and the government's response was blunt.
"Reserves the right to respond."
That is the UAE choosing its words carefully while keeping every option open.
One nighttime barrage appeared to land direct hits in Tel Aviv, where at least 125 missiles were fired, with 35 piercing Israeli airspace. One woman was killed. At least 20 people were hurt. In the Syrian town of Sweida, four people were killed. In Kuwait, the Ministry of Defense announced it had successfully intercepted "several ballistic missiles" launched at Ali Al-Salem Air Base, with military personnel and residents warned of the incoming attack.
An Iranian missile was also launched at the US Navy base in Bahrain on February 28, 2026. The impact on the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet was not immediately clear, though a related headline referenced three US service members killed and five seriously wounded.
President Trump warned of possible casualties from Iranian attacks but reassured that proper protocols were in place to minimize American deaths. His statement framed the broader mission in terms that the American public deserves to hear from a commander in chief:
"My administration has taken every possible step to minimize the risk to US personnel in the region."
"But we're doing this not for now, we're doing this for the future and it is a noble mission."
That is the posture of a president who understands that the elimination of the Iranian regime's top leadership will be measured not by Saturday's retaliatory fireworks but by what the region looks like six months from now. Operation Epic Fury removed the head. The body is thrashing. That was always going to be the ugly part.
People fled to nearly a dozen countries. Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia fended off Iranian strikes throughout the day. The geographic breadth of the attack is itself an indictment of the regime. Iran didn't hit military targets with precision. It sprayed missiles across an entire region, killing civilians in airports and apartment buildings and Syrian towns that had nothing to do with Operation Epic Fury.
For years, the foreign policy establishment warned that confronting Iran would destabilize the Middle East. What Saturday demonstrated is that Iran was always the source of that instability. A regime willing to fire on nine countries, including nations it ostensibly maintained diplomatic relations with, was never a partner for peace. It was a threat waiting for a reason.
The interceptors worked in most cases. The Gulf states' defense systems, built in large part through American partnerships, absorbed the blow. Kuwait intercepted. The UAE intercepted. Israel intercepted most of what came its way. The infrastructure America spent decades building in the region did exactly what it was designed to do.
The question now is whether what remains of Iran's command structure can sustain this level of aggression or whether Saturday was the high-water mark of a dying regime's capacity. The Gulf states are watching. Israel is watching. And every one of them is doing the math on what Iran looks like without Khamenei, without its key figures, and without the illusion of untouchability that kept its neighbors deferential for decades.
The UAE's four-word statement said everything. Saudi Arabia hosted incoming fire at a base 40 miles from Riyadh. Kuwait took missiles at an air base housing coalition forces. These governments now have domestic justification for responses they may have previously hesitated to pursue.
Saturday was ugly. People died in airports and living rooms and ancient Syrian towns. But the regime that ordered those strikes no longer has the leadership that built it, the supreme leader who sustained it, or the aura of invincibility that protected it. Iran fired in nine directions at once. That is not a strength. That is the last act of a collapsing power trying to burn everything on its way down.
The Department of War is moving U.S. military assets toward Iran and putting options in front of President Donald Trump, according to press secretary Kingsley Wilson, who said the goal is to make clear that America “means business” as negotiations with Iran intensify.
Wilson told The Daily Caller that the Department of War’s role is to prepare, not posture. The message to Tehran, she suggested, is that diplomacy is on the table, but it is not the only tool in the box.
Speaking “at the White House’s media row” following the president’s State of the Union address, Wilson framed the military buildup as readiness built for a commander in chief who sets the direction, then expects the bureaucracy to execute. The Daily Caller shares.
Wilson put it plainly:
"At the Department of War, our job is to plan. We have contingency plans for every operation and every scenario. If the president says go, we need to be ready to go whatever option he chooses. So we are presenting options to the president,"
That is how serious governments operate. They do not outsource national security to vibes. They do not confuse speeches with strategy. They plan, they position, and they ensure the president has credible choices in real time.
Wilson emphasized that Trump’s instincts run toward peace and diplomacy, but she also made the Department of War’s mission clear: prepare for whatever comes next, including the possibility that Iran refuses to deal.
"This is a president who seeks peace and who always pursues diplomacy first, but it is our job to make sure that we’re prepared should he choose a different course of action, and we have to have the assets in place to do it,"
The sequence matters. Diplomacy is not “forever talks.” It is talks backed by consequences. In the real world, the credibility of your diplomacy depends on whether your adversary thinks you can and will act.
The White House is “trying to make a nuclear deal with Iran,” and it is not pretending that America is out of options if Iran declines to commit.
In a comment to Reuters, the White House warned that if no deal is made, it “will have to do something very tough like last time,” a reference to “the June strikes on the country’s nuclear facilities.”
That is not inflammatory language. It is an attempt to restore a basic reality that too many foreign regimes and too many American elites forgot: U.S. warnings are supposed to mean something.
Wilson argued that Iran’s leadership, and the Iranian people, are not guessing about what American power can look like when it is actually used. She said the administration is moving aircraft and other assets so the message lands before a shot is fired.
"We’ve got a lot of assets over there, a lot of aircraft over there, and we’re going to make sure that the Iranian people know we mean business, and the regime and the mullahs there particularly, know we mean business. They remember midnight hammer and the success of that operation. They also, like the rest of the world and our enemies, watched the Maduro raid,"
The specifics of “midnight hammer” and “the Maduro raid” are not spelled out in the provided material, but Wilson’s intent is unmistakable. She is invoking recognizable demonstrations of U.S. capability to shape Iran’s decision-making now.
Deterrence is not a slogan. It is a reputation that has to be maintained. When it fades, adversaries test you. When it is restored, they start looking for exits.
The center of gravity in this story is Trump’s red line. The material states that during his Tuesday State of the Union address, Trump “drew a red line on negotiations with Iran” and said Iran must commit to not building a nuclear weapon.
Wilson echoed that and urged Iran to choose the deal while it can:
"They see what the United States military, and only the United States military is capable of doing so, it would be very wise for them to make a deal with this president. And I would also add that the president has been clear, whether on the campaign trail or throughout his entire presidency, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That is a red line, and we at the Department of War are in full support of that initiative,"
This is what serious leadership looks like. A line is drawn, publicly, and the apparatus of the state is aligned behind it.
America can debate tactics. It should. But a nuclear Iran is not the kind of problem you solve with clever messaging or another round of bureaucratic process. You prevent it, or you live with the consequences.
Wilson’s comments also land as an indictment of a broader habit in Washington: to treat hard problems as permanent, and to treat American strength as something embarrassing that must be apologized for before it is deployed.
Here, the posture is different. The Department of War says it is moving assets. The White House says Iran must commit. And the administration is signaling that if diplomacy fails, decisions will not be deferred indefinitely.
That does not guarantee an outcome. It does restore leverage.
And in a world where adversaries watch for hesitation, leverage is the difference between peace through strength and chaos through wishful thinking.
The regime in Tehran is being handed a choice, and the clock is not going to stop for another round of talking points.
President Trump took to Truth Social on Monday to torch a string of media reports suggesting that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine harbors reservations about military action against Iran, calling the coverage "100 percent incorrect" and insisting that Caine knows "one thing, how to WIN."
The pushback came after outlets including Axios, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post published stories characterizing Caine as cautious, even reluctant, about the prospect of a major operation against Tehran. Trump wasn't having it.
"Numerous stories from the Fake News Media have been circulating stating that General Daniel Caine, sometimes referred to as Razin, is against us going to War with Iran. The story does not attribute this vast wealth of knowledge to anyone, and is 100 percent incorrect."
The same day, the State Department announced that all nonemergency personnel and family members of staffers should be evacuated from the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, according to The Hill. The diplomatic and military pieces are moving in tandem.
The pattern here is almost too predictable. Anonymous sources feed sympathetic reporters a narrative designed to suggest internal dissent within the administration. The stories frame a military leader as the reluctant adult in the room, quietly pushing back against a reckless commander-in-chief. The goal is never to inform the public. It's to constrain the president's options by manufacturing the perception of chaos before a single decision has been made.
Axios reported that Caine has been "more cautious in talks about planning against Iran" and views "a potential major operation against Iran as inviting a higher risk for U.S. casualties." The Wall Street Journal placed similar warnings in meetings at the Pentagon and the National Security Council. The Washington Post added that a major operation could face hurdles due to "a low stockpile of munitions."
None of the reports, notably, quoted Caine as being against military action. There is a significant difference between a military commander presenting risks, which is literally his job, and a military commander opposing his president's policy. The press collapsed that distinction because the collapsed version makes for a better headline.
A source familiar with the matter told The Hill on Monday that Caine has presented Trump and other top national security officials in recent days a range of strike options the U.S. military could execute against Iran. That detail sits awkwardly next to the narrative of a general pumping the brakes.
The president left no ambiguity about who holds the pen on this decision. He praised Caine's credentials, calling him the architect of the U.S. bombing of Iran's three premier nuclear sites last June, an operation known as Midnight Hammer. He pointed to Caine's role in the early January raid in Venezuela, where U.S. personnel captured Nicolás Maduro. This is not a president worried about his general's resolve.
"General Caine, like all of us, would like not to see War but, if a decision is made on going against Iran at a Military level, it is his opinion that it will be something easily won."
"He has not spoken of not doing Iran, or even the fake limited strikes that I have been reading about, he only knows one thing, how to WIN and, if he is told to do so, he will be leading the pack."
Trump also made clear that diplomacy remains the preferred lane. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are slated to meet with Iranian officials for another round of nuclear talks in Geneva, Switzerland. On Friday, the president said he was considering limited strikes against Iran if those negotiations over the country's nuclear program fail.
That sequencing matters. Diplomacy first, credible force behind it. This is not saber-rattling for its own sake.
"I am the one that makes the decision, I would rather have a Deal than not but, if we don't make a Deal, it will be a very bad day for that Country and, very sadly, its people, because they are great and wonderful, and something like this should never have happened to them."
Diplomatic engagement without military credibility is just talking. Every serious negotiation in history has been shaped by what happens if the talking stops. Iran's regime understands this calculus better than most. They watched Midnight Hammer level three nuclear sites. They watched the Venezuela operation succeed. The question Tehran faces isn't whether the United States can act. It's whether this president will.
The media's insistence on framing military readiness as internal conflict serves one audience: Tehran's negotiators. Every story suggesting American hesitation is a story that weakens the diplomatic hand. Whether that's the intent or merely the effect, the result is the same.
Trump acknowledged the human weight of what's at stake, calling the Iranian people "great and wonderful" and lamenting that "something like this should never have happened to them." That distinction, between a regime that has brought its country to the brink and the population suffering under it, is one the press rarely bothers to draw.
The embassy evacuation in Lebanon, the Geneva talks, and the strike options on the table. These are the actions of an administration that has prepared for every outcome and prefers the one that doesn't involve fire. But preparation is not hesitation, and presenting options is not dissent.
The media needed a story about a president at war with his own general. What they got was a president and a general reading from the same page, with the press writing fiction in the margins.