Antiwar.com’s Week in Review for Thursday March 5, 2026

The report said that US Central Command is asking the Pentagon to send more intelligence officers to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to support operations against Iran for at least 100 days, but likely through September.

The news of the Pentagon preparing for a long war comes as US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said that the US is sending more forces to the Middle East and will be escalating its bombing campaign.

The Israeli military ordered tens of thousands of civilians out of Dahiyeh, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich issued a video talking up the planned strikes against the suburb, vowing to turn Dahiyeh into Khan Younis, a city in the Gaza Strip which the Israeli military has more or less totally destroyed.

The displaced from Dahiyeh are only a fraction of the number of people Israel is chasing out of their homes nationwide, with the current estimate of the displaced being in excess of 300,000 and rising all the time. Just two days ago, the evacuation orders effectively covered the entire south of the country, and with attacks growing in the north, the east, and around the capital city, it�s not clear where in Lebanon would not be subject to an Israeli strike at any given time.

Trump made clear to Axios reporter Brak Ravid that Khamenei�s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has reportedly emerged as a frontrunner to replace his father, wouldn�t be acceptable to the US.

“They are wasting their time. Khamenei�s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela,” the president said, referring to Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodriguez.

These apologists believe that calling a war something else means it is not a war, and so moral and constitutional justifications are unnecessary.

No rational observer looking at 2,000-pound bombs being dropped on military targets and thousands of missiles being fired indiscriminately at both civilians and military personnel in Iran can conclude that these events constitute anything but a war.

That recognition triggers a series of analyses – moral, constitutional and legal.

The moral dimension addresses both the causes and the conduct of war.

The report said that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the Iranian drones are more difficult to deal with than anticipated. Sen. Christ Murphy (D-CT) said after the briefing that he was told more American troops will die.

“They told us in that room that there are more Americans that are going to die, that they are not going to be able to stop these Iranian drones that are going to continue to fly into the Middle East,” Murphy told reporters.

Since the US and Israel launched the war against Iran on Saturday, US Central Command has confirmed the deaths of six American soldiers, who were killed by an Iranian drone that hit a makeshift operations center in Kuwait. According to media reports, they had no notice or warning to evacuate before the drone struck.

Now that war is again underway – the third attack on Iran in two years – people of healthy human consciousness must pray that the destruction and carnage is limited.

Yet the trajectory appears to be grim.

Wars often progress in unexpected ways. The Persian Gulf region is a tangled spaghetti plate of interests including economic, religious, cultural, and geopolitical. None of our politicians have proved capable of comprehending those interests and foreseeing the consequences of their elective wars. President George W. Bush was stunningly uninformed about the existence of Sunni and Shia factions when he invaded Iraq, a war that inadvertently empowered Iran. Officials who assured us that they knew where the phantom Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were, were quite wrong. Just as they were wrong when they foolishly assured us that the war would last “six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

Similarly, as many quipped after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Washington took twenty years, trillions of dollars, and four presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.

Dave DeCamp

For more information, contact

akeaton@antiwar.com

323-512-7095