Beware, But Do Not Listen To, The Legion Of The Miserable

I follow Tennessee football closely enough to know a particular type of fan that exists in every program’s following. We call them the legion of the miserable. They hated the last coach and they hate this one. The backup quarterback is always better than the starter.

The offensive coordinator is incompetent. A loss proves everything they said. A win was lucky and means nothing. When Tennessee is up 45 to nothing at halftime, the legion of the miserable will find a way to explain why the second half is going to be a disaster.

The only people who believe them are the ones who do not know much about football.

War matters infinitely more than football. But the dynamic is identical, and right now, if you are consuming mainstream American media coverage of Operation Epic Fury, you are being worked by the most sophisticated version of that legion you have ever encountered. The difference is that this version is not just miserable. It is organized. It is ideologically motivated. And for a significant number of the people involved, an American victory in this war is genuinely, personally bad for them.

Let me show you what I mean.

I. The Washington Post Mine Story

Yesterday the Washington Post published a story with this headline: “Clearing Strait of Hormuz of mines could take 6 months, Pentagon tells Congress.”

Here is what the article actually says if you read it carefully.

The Pentagon on the record called the information inaccurate. The Pentagon spokesman said the Washington Post has made clear they care more about advancing an agenda than truth. That is not a quote buried at the bottom of the story. That is the official response of the United States Department of Defense to its own alleged classified briefing being leaked to a newspaper.

The Defense Intelligence Agency assessment from March said the operation could take one to six months. One to six. The Washington Post headline chose six. Every outlet that republished it chose six.

Iran laid 20 or more mines in and around the strait. Some were GPS-floated, which made them harder to detect while being placed. And then, according to the New York Times citing American officials, Iran lost track of some of those mines and cannot find them.

Stop there. Think about what that means for the six-month narrative.

Iran cannot charge tolls on a waterway it cannot open. Iran cannot use mine location as a negotiating chip if it does not know where the mines are. Iran cannot threaten to keep the strait closed indefinitely with weapons it cannot locate. If Iran cannot find its own mines, American mine countermeasure vessels equipped with sonar, operating alongside a coalition of thirty nations whose military planners met in London yesterday for a UK and France-led clearance mission, are going to find those mines faster than Iran ever could.

The same European governments that spent years telling us Iranian diplomacy deserved patience and respect are now committing naval assets to clean up Iran’s mess in the strait. That is not a quagmire. That is a coalition forming around an American military action. It is exactly what happened before the Gulf War, which the same press also covered as a potential catastrophe until the ground war lasted four days.

The article also noted, and I want you to see this with your own eyes, that the six-month timeline could have significant implications politically in the United States, particularly for Republicans, as November’s midterm elections draw near.

The article told you its own purpose inside the article.

II. Who Leaked the Classified Briefing

Someone in that House Armed Services Committee classified briefing walked out and called the Washington Post. That is likely a federal crime. The person who did it made a deliberate choice to potentially commit a federal crime in order to publish information the Pentagon called inaccurate, on the same day the IRGC fired on three ships without warning and seized two vessels during a declared ceasefire.

Ask the question every journalist is supposed to ask. Who benefits? Who had the motive to leak a classified assessment framed to produce the maximum impression of American failure and minimum impression of Iranian culpability, on the day Iran committed its most provocative ceasefire violation since the war began?

Ask why it went to the Washington Post rather than a defense trade publication with actual institutional knowledge of mine countermeasure operations. Ask why the framing was midterm political implications for Republicans rather than what is the methodology for clearing this corridor. Ask why the Pentagon’s on-record statement calling the information inaccurate appears near the bottom of the story rather than the top.

Then ask yourself whether the person who made that phone call to the Washington Post was thinking about American security or American politics.

III. The Moral Scoreboard

Before we get to the military scorecard, let me address the people who want to argue that this war should never have happened at all.

The regime the United States moved against is the largest state sponsor of terrorism on earth. That is not a political opinion. It is the official designation of the United States government across administrations of both parties for my entire adult life.

This is the regime that funded, trained, armed, and directed the monsters who carried out October 7. This is the regime whose proxies fired rockets at Israeli apartment buildings while the world debated whether a genocide was occurring in response. This is the regime that has led official state functions with chants of death to America for fifty years while Western academics wrote papers about the need for diplomatic engagement.

This is the regime that was lying about the range of its ballistic missiles, as the Diego Garcia launch proved to anyone who still had doubts. This is the regime that had enriched uranium well beyond any civilian nuclear requirement with zero ongoing international review. This is the regime that was months, not years, from a nuclear weapon while it ran a terror network spanning four continents.

This is the regime that killed tens of thousands of its own disarmed citizens this year alone, people who had been asking for freedom for decades, people who burned the hijab in the streets knowing what it would cost them, people who the same Western commentators now weeping about American aggression ignored with polished indifference when their oppressors were not yet inconvenient to defend.

If your position is that the United States should have allowed that regime to acquire nuclear weapons rather than accept the disruption of stopping it, you are not offering a clear-eyed strategic assessment. You are making a moral argument, and it is a morally broken one.

I have yet to encounter anyone who understands the rise of twelver shia ideology in marriage with Marxism in Iran who fails to appreciate the unique risk of giving people who embrace death and who want to usher in the apocalypse a nuclear weapon. For those who haven’t done the research, think worse than Jim Jones, but similarly a death cult.

IV. The Military Scoreboard

Thirteen Americans have died in this conflict. Every one of them matters. Every one of them has a family that woke up to a world permanently changed. I do not minimize that for one sentence.
Now look at the other side of the ledger.

The Iranian navy is at the bottom of the Gulf. There are still gunboats, but frigates that constitute naval vessels that could pose a threat to our naval vessels do not exist any longer for Iran. The Iranian air force has not flown a meaningful operational mission since the opening weeks of the war. Iranian missile infrastructure has been degraded past 85 percent by the White House’s own accounting. The IRGC’s financial architecture is collapsing at a claimed $500 million per day. The supreme leader if he is alive and competent is communicating through handwritten notes carried by runners because his communications infrastructure is compromised. Iranian military leadership has been systematically decapitated. Kharg Island storage is filling toward capacity, meaning Iranian oil exports face an internal shutdown regardless of what America does next.

What Iran has left in the strait is gunboats. Men with machine guns on fast boats whose paychecks are late, operating under a command structure so fractured that the foreign minister opens the strait and the IRGC closes it again within twelve hours. That is what the Washington Post is telling you might keep the strait closed for six months.

Military historians will study this campaign for generations. The ratio of Iranian military capability destroyed to American lives lost is among the most lopsided in the history of modern warfare. The press covering it as a potential quagmire heading into the midterms is not describing the same conflict the satellite imagery, the ship tracking data, the CENTCOM releases, and the financial architecture numbers are describing.

One of those pictures is accurate. I will let you decide which one based on the track record of the people drawing each of them.

V. The Legion of the Miserable Has Chosen Its Side

In my years of watching Tennessee football, I learned that the legion of the miserable is not actually interested in whether the team wins. If they were, a 45 to 0 halftime lead would make them happy. It does not make them happy. Because their identity is not invested in the outcome. It is invested in the grievance. They sadly had their heyday when our team’s fortunes were at their lowest. Fired coaches, recruiting scandals, misused players, losses to rivals, they wrote and spoke out at length at every turn.

The people I am describing in our political and media landscape are not offering honest skepticism about a military operation. Honest skepticism is legitimate and I welcome it.

Honest skepticism asks hard questions about cost, duration, endgame, and second- order effects. It acknowledges the evidence and argues about its interpretation.

What I am watching is something different. It is the same coalition that told you Hamas tunnels were hospitals. That told you October 7 was a complicated response to occupation. That told you the IRGC was a legitimate state institution deserving diplomatic respect. That told you a genocide was occurring in Gaza while Iran’s funded proxies fired rockets at civilians. That told you the regime chanting death to America at state functions was a rational actor we simply needed to understand better.

These are not people who got the analysis wrong and updated their views when the evidence changed. These are people whose ideological commitments placed them on a side, and that side is not America’s. Some of them are confused. Some are captured by an academic culture that has taught a generation that America is the primary source of the world’s problems and that any exercise of American power is by definition illegitimate. Some are straightforwardly allied with movements and governments that need America to lose.

The most dangerous are those facing an existential crisis because they are morally inverted and their whole existence is based on hatred of a man, of a party, of a movement that they would rather see lose than anything else in life. They are in positions where an American victory in this war is genuinely, personally, politically devastating for them. Because if America wins this war, if the
largest state sponsor of terrorism is defanged, if the regime that funded October 7 is dismantled, if the nuclear program is ended, then every position they staked out over the past decade was wrong. Not just strategically wrong. Morally wrong. And they know it.

A dispirited American public that believes it is losing a war it is winning makes decisions that benefit those people. It elects the candidates they prefer. It withdraws support for operations that are succeeding. It demands the negotiations and accommodations that allow the surviving pieces of the regime to reconstitute. It produces the quagmire they need because enough people believed the quagmire was already there.

Propaganda works when the target does not know it is happening.

That is why clarity matters. That is why the scoreboard matters. That is why I have been writing these essays about the war regularly for almost two months.

You do not have to trust the Trump administration. You do not have to trust CENTCOM.

You are allowed to ask hard questions about every aspect of this operation and I encourage you to do so.

What you cannot do, if you are trying to understand what is actually happening, is trust the people whose interests require America to lose this war to tell you honestly whether America is losing it.

Read the scoreboard. Iran’s navy is gone. Its air force is grounded. Its missile infrastructure is broken. Its treasury is seized and close to empty. Its supreme leader writes notes by hand
because his phones are compromised. Its parliament speaker repudiates whatever its foreign minister agrees to. Its fast attack boats fired on civilian ships during a ceasefire yesterday and the men on those boats are celebrating tonight in formations that have been observed, identified, and targeted.

The mines in the strait were laid by a military that then lost track of where it put them.

Thirty nations are meeting in London to clear them. The Pentagon called the six-month story inaccurate. Someone likely committed a federal crime to give that story to a newspaper on the same day Iran seized civilian vessels during a ceasefire, and the story was framed around midterm implications for Republicans.

The team is up 45 to nothing at halftime. The legion of the miserable needs you to change the channel before the second half starts.

Do not change the channel.

Watch and pray.

Clayton Wood
From Confusion to Clarity