This is a guest post from Hassan Elbiali.
Operation Epic Fury failed on its own terms. So where is the accountability?
Quick answer: Operation Epic Fury — the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, February 28–May 5, 2026 — failed to achieve its four stated objectives: nuclear programme destruction, missile arsenal elimination, proxy network decapitation, and regime change. Intelligence assessments now confirm the nuclear setback was less than six months, roughly 50% of Iran’s missile launchers survived, and the assassination of Supreme Leader Khamenei produced a more hardline IRGC-led successor. The analysts who promised otherwise have not been held to account.
I Remember Exactly Where I Was
February 28, 2026. I was watching a cable news panel — four analysts, one graphic reading “Operation Epic Fury: What Comes Next?” — and I felt this creeping sense of déjà vu. Not the war itself. The confidence. The clean certainty. The way each pundit explained, with the authority of someone who had personally inspected Natanz, that this would be different. Surgical. Decisive. Finally.
I’d heard that word before. We all had. In 2003.
Here’s the thing about Washington’s foreign policy class: they are structurally incapable of saying “I don’t know.” Uncertainty is not a professional option. So they project. They promise. And then, when it goes wrong — as it so often does — they pivot to the next crisis and dare you to remember what they said about the last one.
I’m remembering. And I think you should too.
Four Promises. Four Failures.
Let’s be specific, because specificity is what the hawks hate most. Trump’s own TruthSocial statement laid out four military objectives for Operation Epic Fury:
- Prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon
- Destroy its missile arsenal and production sites
- Degrade its proxy networks
- Annihilate its navy
Plus the political cherry on top: regime change from within. “The Iranian people will be free,” Trump said. The pundits nodded along.
So. How’d that go?
The classified intelligence assessment — reported by multiple outlets after the ceasefire — found the nuclear strikes set Iran’s programme back by less than six months. Not a decade. Not a generation. Less than six months. CSIS noted that Iran still possesses 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, and the exact location of that material remains unknown. The IAEA inspectors who had been monitoring the facilities Washington just bombed — facilities under active safeguards — can no longer do their jobs.
The missile arsenal? By Day 4, Iran had fired over 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 drones, according to Pentagon and CENTCOM reporting. Fifty percent of Iran’s missile launchers remained intact as of April 2026. The underground missile city network — thirty facilities buried in the Zagros and Alborz mountain ranges — absorbed the strikes, fired from pre-surveyed positions, and kept operating. U.S. intelligence, it turned out, had undercounted Iran’s missile stockpile by more than 1,000.
Regime change? Let me tell you about Mojtaba Khamenei.
The opening hours of Operation Epic Fury included the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. At the time, hawks celebrated. Decapitation strategy, they called it. The regime would crumble. The people would rise. The regime did not crumble. Succession protocols — which the IRGC had clearly prepared for exactly this scenario — produced a new Supreme Leader drawn entirely from hardline military circles. Mojtaba Khamenei, described by Reuters as more hawkish than his father, who had actually issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. Let that sink in. The hawks killed the man who was theologically opposed to building the bomb and replaced him with someone who isn’t.
Nobody on that cable news panel is being asked about that.
