America’s war against Iran is continuing in its third week without any reduction in intensity or imminent signs of its conclusion, despite statements from senior American officials about the successes already achieved.
U.S. forces have struck more than 7,000 targets in the first two and a half weeks of the war, which began on February 28. Comparatively, Iran has launched three hundred attacks on about a dozen countries in the region that, aside from Israel, did not attack it first.
U.S. officials, including President Donald Trump, have said the U.S. military has already had significant success, but they have not yet indicated that all their goals have been accomplished.
“The joint force remains focused on three military objectives: continue to destroy Iranian ballistic missiles and drone capability in order to prevent attacks on the U.S. and others throughout the region. And this means attacking launch sites, command and control nodes, stockpiles before they can threaten our personnel, our facilities, and our partners,” Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Staff, said last week.
“Second, we continue to strike the Iranian Navy and their capabilities in order to do things like sustain movement through the Straits of Hormuz,” he continued. “And third, we continue to start working on and going deeper into Iran’s military and industrial base in order to prevent the regime from being able to attack Americans, our interests, and our partners for years to come and project power outside their borders.”
U.S. forces have largely destroyed Iran’s air force and navy, but they still have the ability to launch ballistic missiles and one-way attack drones, though they’re decreasing in frequency.
“The United States is decimating the radical Iranian regime’s military in a way the world has never seen before. Never before has a modern capable military, which Iran used to have, been so quickly destroyed and made combat ineffective, devastated,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said last Friday.
Opening the Strait
Despite U.S. successes in the war, Iran has largely been able to shut down shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway off Iran’s coast that is vital to global oil shipping.
Roughly 20 million barrels of crude oil and other oil products normally pass through the strait daily, equivalent to 20% of global oil demand, though traffic has dropped dramatically since the war began.
Trump administration officials have suggested the military could escort ships through the waterway and provide security for them in the event of an Iranian attack, while the president has also discussed the possibility of American allies helping in such an effort.
“We think that there will be a natural opening that the Iranians are letting out, and for now, we’re fine with that. We want the world to be well supplied,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a CNBC interview on Monday, adding, “We are seeing more and more of the fuel ships start to go through. The Iranian ships have been getting out already, and we’ve let that happen to supply the rest of the world. We’ve seen Indian ships go out now.”
As a part of the broader effort to lower inflated energy prices, the administration intends to release 172 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, after an agreement among International Energy Agency member countries to release 400 million barrels of oil and refined products from their emergency reserves.
Over the weekend, Trump called on China, France, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and others to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz. He also suggested that NATO allies should get involved in securing the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump warned in an interview with the Financial Times, “It will be very bad for the future of NATO” if countries don’t support the U.S. mission.
Israel intensifies Lebanon ground incursion
The Israel Defense Forces announced on Monday that it began “limited and targeted ground operations” targeting key Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon.
“This activity is part of broader defensive efforts to establish and strengthen a forward defensive posture, which includes the dismantling of terrorist infrastructure and the elimination of terrorists operating in the area, to create an additional layer of security for residents of northern Israel,” the IDF said in a statement on social media.
Hezbollah is one of Iran’s primary proxy forces in the region. Israel and Hezbollah have fought on and off since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack, which was a catalyst for conflict across the region that continues to this day.
Israel and Hezbollah did agree to a ceasefire in November 2024, which called for Israel to stop its military campaign and to remove their ground forces in southern Lebanon in exchange for Hezbollah to willingly move all of its personnel and military equipment north of the Litani River. This which would create a roughly 20-mile buffer in southern Lebanon separating the U.S.-designated terrorism group from the Lebanese-Israeli border.
Hezbollah has not lived up to its end of the deal, and Israel has continued bombing Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon. In recent days, the conflict has heated up again, with both sides launching projectiles at one another, beginning with Hezbollah launching rockets into Israel on March 2.
Hundreds of thousands of Israeli and Lebanese civilians near the border have been forced to evacuate from their homes.
“Hundreds of thousands of Shiite residents of south Lebanon who have evacuated and are evacuating from their homes will not return to the area south of the Litani [River] until the safety of the residents of the north is guaranteed,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said.
Mojtaba Khamenei?
Iran’s Assembly of Experts selected Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his late father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on March 8, but it’s unclear if he’s even alive, Trump said on Monday.
“We don’t know who their leader is,” Trump said of Iran.
“A lot of people are saying that he’s badly disfigured, they’re saying that he lost his leg, one leg, and he’s been hurt very badly. Other people are saying he’s dead; nobody’s saying he’s 100% healthy. And, he hasn’t, he hasn’t spoken because the ayatollah would sit and he’d spew hate from a form of a throne,” the president said. “This one we haven’t seen at all. So that could be for a lot of different reasons. We don’t know, Peter, if he’s dead or not.”
Last Thursday, Khamenei delivered his first-ever address as ayatollah, but he did not do so personally. Since then, reports have trickled out about the younger Khamenei’s personal life, and his father’s belief that he did not consider him suitable for the role.
Targeting rank-and-file officers
Israel has also recently begun targeting Iran’s internal security forces, known as the Basij, including after they had set up traffic checkpoints in multiple areas across Tehran. The Basij is the internal security paramilitary force tasked with maintaining civil and domestic control. They are tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has sought to reassure the public that it is still in control.
“These armed forces are part of the Iranian regime’s security apparatus and have for years been responsible for carrying out terror activities,” the Israeli military said, adding, “these forces lead the main repression operations against internal protests, particularly in the recent period, employing severe violence, widespread arrests, and the use of force against civilian demonstrators.”
Going after the Basij specifically could assist Iranian civilian protesters should they try to rise up and overthrow the weakened regime.
The Basij were the entity linked to the crackdown on nationwide civilian protests in late December and early January, allegedly killing thousands. They have also been responsible for cracking down on every iteration of those protests that began nearly a decade ago. In January, Trump said publicly, “Help is on the way” in a message intended for the Iranian people.
