The March Tradition

The Pentagon dusts off a target list the way others dust off spring clothes. Iraq 2003. Libya 2011. Yemen 2015. Iran 2026. Something about starting wars in March is just irresistible to Washington.

A girls' school in Minab was struck in the opening hours. One news cycle of photographs, then the "broader strategic picture" takes over. It has always worked this way.
The target list, investigators found, was a decade out of date. The school had been partitioned off from the IRGC base since 2016 — any updated imagery would have shown it. Hegseth had cut the Pentagon's civilian harm office by 90% before the first missile flew.

March 2003. "Shock and Awe" over Baghdad. The plan: six weeks, a grateful nation, a blooming democratic Middle East. What followed: 20 years, $2 trillion, and an Iraq that votes with Tehran in every regional forum that matters.
The WMD case was airtight — right up until no warhead was ever found. What was found was a country fractured along lines the State Department didn't bother to understand. Powell's UN performance aged about as well as his reputation.

The war meant to contain Iranian influence handed Tehran its single greatest strategic prize. The "liberated" Iraqi state became Iran's most reliable regional partner. Washington spent $2 trillion building a land corridor to the Persian Gulf for its principal adversary.

March 2011. NATO's "humanitarian intervention" in Libya. Gaddafi was 72 hours from ending the Benghazi revolt when the bombs fell. "We came, we saw, he died," said Hillary Clinton, laughing, on camera.

Libya today runs open-air slave markets — Sub-Saharan migrants auctioned in bazaars, documented on film. Africa's highest Human Development Index before intervention; three competing governments and no functioning state after. The humanitarians left the morning after the "dictator" died.

March 2015. Saudi Arabia launched its Yemen campaign with full US logistics, intelligence, and refueling. The Houthis were supposed to be rolled back in weeks. Ten years later they're closing the Red Sea and the US Navy can't stop them.

That campaign is worth sitting with. The most expensive naval force in history, burning through $2 million interceptor missiles to shoot down $20,000 drones, unable to keep a commercial shipping lane open. The lesson was free and Washington declined to learn it.

Iran has 90 million people, air defense, ballistic missiles covering every US base in the region, and a proxy network running from Beirut to Sanaa. The Houthis alone just demonstrated what one node of that network can do to global shipping. This is the whole network.

Every March war followed the same script: demonize the leader, find or manufacture a legal pretext, bomb the army, declare victory, leave. The country then becomes something worse than what it replaced — and somehow more useful to Iran.

Three March wars. The Iraq war gifted Tehran an empire, the Libya war gifted the world a slave market, the Yemen war gifted the Houthis a legend. The fourth opened with children in the rubble and has the Strait of Hormuz as its logical conclusion.

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