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Sunday, February 15, 2026
[Salon] The Iran Endgame - Guest Post by Leon Hadar
https://leonhadar.substack.com/p/the-gradual-militarization-of-iran
The Iran Endgame
When Bluffing Meets Reality
Leon Hadar
Feb 15, 2026
Another U.S.-Iran crisis, another round of carrier deployments and ultimatums, another set of predictions about imminent warfare. Yet here we are again, watching Washington and Tehran engage in their familiar dance of brinkmanship—a choreography that has become depressingly predictable over the past four decades.
The current confrontation, triggered by Iran’s brutal crackdown on domestic protests and America’s deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf, follows a script we’ve seen before. President Trump threatens “something very tough” while simultaneously acknowledging talks are underway. Iran’s Supreme Leader warns of “regional war” while his foreign minister pursues “fair and equitable” negotiations through Omani intermediaries. Regional powers—Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia—scramble to prevent a conflict none of them want.
How will this end? The same way these standoffs always do: not with a bang, but with a grudging return to the status quo ante, dressed up as strategic victory by both sides.
The fantasy that maximum pressure plus military threats will produce Iranian capitulation has been tested repeatedly and has failed each time. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 and subsequent “maximum pressure” campaign did not bring Iran to its knees—it brought us enriched uranium at near-weapons-grade levels. The Israeli and American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025 did not eliminate Iran’s nuclear program; they likely accelerated Tehran’s determination to acquire a deterrent capability.
Now we’re told that deploying additional carriers and threatening sustained bombing campaigns will somehow achieve what previous pressure failed to accomplish. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how coercive diplomacy actually works. You cannot bomb a country into submission while simultaneously demanding it negotiate from a position of weakness. The contradiction is not just tactical—it’s strategic.
Consider the operational realities that our saber-rattlers prefer to ignore. Even if the United States launched a sustained air campaign against Iranian nuclear and military facilities—which analysts suggest could require weeks of operations—Iran possesses formidable retaliatory capabilities. Tehran’s missile arsenal can reach every U.S. base from Qatar to Iraq. Its proxies, though weakened, retain capacity to strike across the region. The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil passes, remains vulnerable.
More fundamentally, ask the critical question that seems to elude Washington’s planning: what happens after the bombing stops? Does anyone seriously believe that pulverizing Iranian facilities will produce a pliant regime eager to accept American terms? The more likely outcome is a nationalist backlash that strengthens hardliners, accelerates nuclear weapons development (now with domestic political legitimacy), and transforms what is currently a manageable adversarial relationship into a genuine blood feud.
The historical parallels should give us pause. American military interventions in the Middle East—from Lebanon in 1983 to Iraq in 2003 to Libya in 2011—have consistently produced outcomes worse than the problems they aimed to solve. The region is littered with the wreckage of grand strategies that looked brilliant in PowerPoint presentations but collapsed upon contact with Middle Eastern realities.
Iran’s domestic upheaval, while significant, does not fundamentally alter this calculus. Yes, the regime faces genuine legitimacy challenges. Yes, the protests reflect deep-seated grievances. But the notion that American military action would somehow empower democratic forces rather than rally Iranians around the flag betrays a stunning ignorance of nationalism’s power. Ask yourself: when foreign powers bomb your country, do you blame your government or the foreigners dropping the bombs?
The regional dimension compounds these difficulties. Despite their differences with Tehran, neither Turkey, nor the Gulf states, nor even Israel’s current leadership shows enthusiasm for a full-scale U.S.-Iran war. They recognize what Washington seems determined to ignore: such a conflict would destabilize the entire region, disrupt energy markets, potentially draw in Russia and China, and create chaos that makes the Syrian civil war look manageable by comparison.
So how does this crisis actually resolve itself? Through the unglamorous process of diplomatic engagement that both sides are already pursuing even as they trade threats. The talks in Muscat represent the only realistic pathway forward. They won’t produce a comprehensive solution—the U.S.-Iran relationship is too complex and antagonistic for that. But they can establish temporary arrangements that address immediate concerns: some restrictions on Iranian enrichment in exchange for limited sanctions relief; understandings about regional behavior; mechanisms to prevent military incidents from escalating.
This outcome won’t satisfy anyone completely. Hawks will denounce it as appeasement. Iranian hardliners will claim vindication. But it beats the alternative: a war that America cannot win militarily, cannot afford politically, and cannot sustain domestically. Recent polling shows 85 percent of Americans oppose war with Iran. That number won’t change just because we’re told this time will be different.
The Trump administration faces a choice. It can continue pursuing the fantasy that threats and pressure will produce Iranian collapse, risking a conflict that serves neither American interests nor regional stability. Or it can embrace the messy reality that sustainable arrangements with adversarial powers require mutual accommodation rather than unilateral demands.
This doesn’t mean abandoning American interests or ignoring Iranian malign activities. It means pursuing those interests through sustainable policies rather than maximalist positions that sound tough but prove unenforceable. It means distinguishing between core security concerns—preventing nuclear weapons, protecting American personnel—and broader regional competitions that can be managed through diplomatic and economic tools rather than military force.
The current crisis will likely end where most such crises do: with both sides stepping back from the brink, claiming they achieved their objectives, while the fundamental tensions remain unresolved. Iran will continue enriching uranium at levels that maintain nuclear threshold capability without quite crossing into weapons production. The United States will maintain military presence and sanctions while pursuing episodic diplomatic engagement. Regional powers will continue their own chess games with both Washington and Tehran.
This is not a satisfying conclusion. It doesn’t offer the clean resolution that policymakers crave or the dramatic victory that would justify carrier deployments and congressional resolutions. But it reflects the reality that some problems cannot be solved—only managed. And in the Middle East, where American attempts at problem-solving have consistently made things worse, management begins to look like wisdom.
The alternative—another American war in the Middle East, this one against a more formidable adversary than any we’ve faced in the region—would accelerate precisely what Iran most desires: American disengagement from a region where our military presence has become more liability than asset. That would be the supreme irony: we bomb Iran to demonstrate strength and end up hastening our strategic retreat.
Better to recognize now what we’ll eventually acknowledge later: that dealing with Iran requires not the fantasy of military dominance but the hard work of diplomatic engagement, regional coalition-building, and the kind of patient, differentiated approach that accepts outcomes short of total victory. The current confrontation will end this way eventually. The only question is how much damage we inflict on ourselves and others before accepting that reality.
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Friday, February 13, 2026
Thursday, February 12, 2026
[Salon] The Architect of Ghost Finance: Why the Press Failed to Decode Jeffrey Epstein - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
The Architect of Ghost Finance: Why the Press Failed to Decode Jeffrey Epstein
Summary: Jeffrey Epstein’s rise to power was not a result of "magnetic personality" or "lucky breaks," but rather his early career as a financial architect for the CIA-linked bank BCCI and the Safari Club. By mastering "mirrored oil options" to fund covert operations like Operation Cyclone, Epstein gained a level of intelligence-backed immunity that facilitated his global network and decades of criminal impunity.
The public fascination with Jeffrey Epstein has long been fed by a narrative of the “charming enigma”, a self-made Gatsby who climbed from a Brooklyn classroom to the pinnacle of global power. A recent, exhaustive investigation by the New York Times (NYT) has added significant texture to this story, unearthing what it calls the “fullest portrait to date” of Epstein as a “prodigious manipulator and liar”. Similarly, the Financial Times (FT) asks a pertinent question: “How did a college dropout from a working-class family in Brooklyn manage to do it?”. Yet, despite their rigorous investigations, both publications fall into the same trap that has ensnared Western media for decades. The Times frames Epstein’s rise as a series of “extraordinarily lucky breaks” and “unexplained magnetism”. The Financial Times suggests the answer lies in his "extraordinary ability to work out exactly what some of the world's richest and most powerful people wanted".
These explanations are incomplete because they fail to provide the structural logic that explains Epstein's absolute impunity. When one connects the new evidence from the New York Times and the Financial Times with the geopolitical realities of the late 1970s, specifically the rise of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and the CIA’s "Safari Club" - the “monster of Wall Street” reveals himself to be something far more clinical. Epstein was not a socialite who happened to be a financier; he was a specialist in “ghost finance,” purpose-built by the intelligence-industrial complex to facilitate the clandestine movement of arms and money through the Middle East.
The story begins in 1976, the year Jeffrey Epstein joined the floor at Bear Stearns. As the NYT correctly identifies, this was an “extraordinarily lucky break” for a man who had just been asked to leave his teaching job at the Dalton School for poor performance. He was hired by Ace Greenberg, a top executive who took a liking to Epstein despite the later discovery that Epstein had lied about his entire education. Yet, rather than being fired, Epstein was protected. The NYT attributes this to his “magnetism,” but the institutional context suggests a deeper utility.
This period (1976–1981) overlapped exactly with the scaling up of the BCCI and Safari Club network. The Safari Club was a covert alliance of intelligence services from France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and pre-revolutionary Iran, formed in 1976 to bypass post-Watergate congressional oversight that had heavily restricted the CIA’s powers. It was largely financed by Saudi petrodollars and required an “off-the-books” treasury to conduct anti-communist operations across Africa and Asia. To satisfy this need, Kamal Adham (the director of Saudi intelligence) and George H.W. Bush (then director of the CIA) helped transform BCCI, a Pakistani merchant bank, into a worldwide money-laundering machine, with documented links to the Mossad, Abu Nidal, Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. BCCI was also involved in the sex trafficking of minors and high-end prostitution services throughout the Middle East, especially in the UAE.
Epstein’s post-Bear Stearns firm, Intercontinental Assets Group (IAG), specialised in "recovering stolen money" which mirrored the specialised services BCCI provided to intelligence agencies and dictators
Bear Stearns acted as a primary broker for Capcom Financial Services, a mysterious entity central to BCCI's criminality. Capcom was created by the former head of BCCI's Treasury Department and was largely controlled by Saudi spymasters, including Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil. It moved billions of dollars anonymously through the futures markets, essentially acting as the financial plumbing for operations like Operation Cyclone - the CIA-backed effort to fund the Afghan Mujahideen. By clearing trades through Bear Stearns, these clandestine funds gained a veneer of Wall Street legitimacy. Epstein’s rapid rise to partner by 1980, which the FT notes was a result of his being a “confidante” and “banker” to the elite, was actually rooted in his mastery of the “mirrored oil options” necessary to disguise these payments.
A “mirrored oil option” is a sophisticated form of wash trading designed for money laundering. In this mechanism, two distinct legal entities trade with one another, often across different jurisdictions. One entity purchases an identical quantity of financial instruments that the other sells, creating the appearance of two distinct parties while the beneficial owner remains the same. For the Safari Club, these “mirrored trades” allowed payments for illegal weapons or covert funding to look like standard market losses or legitimate hedges on the price of oil. This siphoned assets out of the official system into “safe havens” for intelligence use.
This Middle Eastern nexus explains why Epstein was found with an expired 1980s Saudi passport with his photo but a fake name. It was not a mere eccentricity but a tool for a man facilitating “crude oil deals” that were logistical covers for moving petrodollars through the Safari Club’s network. His high-profile connections to figures like Adnan Khashoggi, a legendary Saudi arms dealer and central figure in the Iran-Contra affair, were not social coincidences. Khashoggi’s own Mount Kenya Safari Club became a “safe house” for global power brokers and CIA assets during this exact era.
The NYT and FT both document Epstein’s subsequent life as a “social Ponzi scheme,” where he traded on proximity to figures like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The FT highlights how Epstein would “threaten and bully” when flattery failed, turning intimacy into a fear of exposure. Yet, neither publication admits that his ultimate protection came from his origins. His early exposure to the CIA’s proprietary banking operations provided him with a permanent “get out of jail free” card.
This is why, as the NYT notes, he was repeatedly given second chances after being caught “cheating” at Bear Stearns. It is why he was later protected by a “sweetheart deal” in Florida, where federal prosecutors were told he “belonged to intelligence”. His CIA connection gave him the immunity that allowed him to become the monster he was, orchestrating sex-trafficking operations from his Upper East Side townhouse and his private island, Little St James.
While the FT and the NYT have performed thorough investigations that unmasked Epstein’s “monster” status, they have failed to tell the whole truth. Like most Western media, they are unable to acknowledge that Epstein’s power was structural rather than personal. He did not become a plutocrat through “magnetism” or “luck” but because he was the common denominator between the four main intelligence agencies involved in the region: he had the Saudi connections via Khashoggi and Adham, the British link via his London partner, the arms dealer Douglas Leese; the US link via his roommate in New York, Stan Pottinger, who ran the US side of illegal arms transactions; and the Israeli link via dozens of documented meetings with Ehud Barak, the head of Israeli military intelligence.
Once we understand his origins at the Bear Stearns forex desk and the BCCI-Safari Club nexus, the “mystery” of Jeffrey Epstein’s life dissolves into a very clear and elegant explanation. He did not become one of the most powerful and protected men on the planet because of a magnetic personality or an innate genius for stock picking. He achieved his extraordinary wealth and status because he was, from the very beginning, a banker to the CIA and the architect of the shadow finance that powered the secret wars of the 20th century.
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Fr. Bob's Reflection for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Guest Post
When we read the morning paper or watch the evening news, the experience can be discouraging. What confronts us is often the worst of humanity: images of death, destruction and chaos.
Our first instinct is to complain, to wish it were not so; to say we live in a sick world. Yet we must remember that Jesus lived in a world that was no less broken. In fact, it may have been worse than our own.
Government was harsh and oppressive. Human rights were virtually nonexistent. Slavery was accepted as normal. And entertainment was not a Super Bowl or a World Series, but gladiators fighting to the death. As a poet once wrote, “Those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.”
If we have reason to lament the condition of our world, Jesus had even more. And yet, He never did.
Instead of dwelling on the problem, Jesus focused on the solution. Part of that solution was the small group gathered around Him in today’s Gospel, to whom He boldly declares: “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”
It must have stunned them. They likely never thought of themselves that way. They had not caused the world’s sickness – and surely felt powerless to cure it. But Jesus saw them differently. He saw them as essential to God’s healing work. The same is true for us.
Jesus tells us today that we are meant to be distinct. We are not to hide our light, but to let it shine. If the world is a ship tossed in darkness, then we are called to be the lighthouse.
This does not mean Christians are better than others. It is not a matter of value, but of vocation. Still, this sense of distinction can be difficult to accept. In a world that prizes blending in, Jesus calls us to stand apart.
Many are content with being average, thinking as everyone else thinks, or letting the media do the thinking for them. But Jesus calls His followers not to conform, but to lead. We are the Church, and we are meant to shape the world, not be shaped by it.
When Jesus speaks of salt and light, He is not elevating us above others; He is calling us to be different. To follow Christ means we cannot simply go along with the crowd.
So how are we different? Isaiah gives us the answer in today’s first reading: “Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked.”
The source of this difference is invisible, but its fruits are clear. The source is faith; the fruit is love. Faith cannot be seen, but its impact can – whenever we care for those in need, check on an isolated neighbor, listen to a struggling friend, or offer practical help with compassion.
Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God. And in loving God, we naturally learn to love our neighbor. To claim love for God without love for others is like trying to irrigate a field without water.
So, Jesus urges us: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in Heaven.”
My friends, let your light shine. Be the salt of the earth. Dare to be different.
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Robert Warren, S.A.
Spiritual Director
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Monday, February 9, 2026
[Salon] Syrian Kurds turn to their Iraqi brethren - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Syrian Kurds turn to their Iraqi brethren
Summary: amid a series of setbacks for Syria’s Kurds in recent weeks one potential silver lining has emerged for their political future.
We thank Sirwan Kajjo for today’s newsletter. Sirwan, a regular contributor to the AD podcast, is a Kurdish American journalist based in Washington D.C. focussing on Kurdish politics, Islamic militancy, extremism, and conflict in the Middle East and beyond. He is the author of Nothing But Soot a novel about a twentysomething Kurdish man whose quest for a permanent home never ends. You can find his latest podcast here.
As the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) came under attack by forces aligned with the Syrian interim government, Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) stepped into a leading role, both diplomatically, in efforts to prevent the violence from spreading further into Kurdish areas, and politically, by offering direct support to embattled Kurdish actors in Syria.
The rapid pace of developments in northeast Syria in recent weeks was met by an equally swift humanitarian and political response from Iraqi Kurds in support of their counterparts in Syria. The scale of solidarity, demonstrated by both political forces and ordinary citizens across Iraqi Kurdistan, has few parallels in the Kurds’ complicated political history. It has even surpassed the cross-border mobilisation seen when Kurdish communities in both countries faced attacks by the Islamic State more than a decade ago.
Kurdish women in Erbil braid their hair in an act of defiance in solidarity with a Kurdish fighter who had her braid cut off by a Syrian soldier, 23 January 2026
Despite the loss of much of their hard-won de facto autonomy in recent events, Syrian Kurds may yet find long-term benefit in the strong support emerging from Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. If the current ceasefire between the Syrian government and the SDF holds and evolves into a durable political settlement, Syrian Kurds stand to gain significantly from a close and sustained relationship with the KRG. Here is why:
The KRG possesses substantial diplomatic reach across the region and in Western capitals. In recent weeks, the ruling Barzani family and its Kurdistan Democratic Party, as well as their rivals in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by the Talabani family, demonstrated their ability to leverage this political influence in support of Syria’s Kurds. Even before the latest crisis, Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, had emerged as a key destination for regional and international diplomats seeking to defuse tensions between Syria’s Kurdish actors and the central government in Damascus.
For Iraqi Kurds, support for their brethren across the border is not only a moral imperative but also a strategic calculation. The threats confronting Syrian Kurds are not confined to Syria alone. This is a reality Iraqi Kurdish leaders and society recognised clearly during the recent crisis in northeast Syria. With Kurdish autonomy in Syria under pressure, Iraqi Kurds perceived potential spillover effects on their own autonomous region. Although the Kurdistan Region of Iraq enjoys a more institutionalised form of autonomy within Iraq’s federal system, Kurdish leaders nonetheless view the Kurdish political experiment in Syria as strategic depth that reinforces the security and viability of their own political entity.
Syrian Kurds, many of whom have long supported the historic leadership of the Barzanis, also recognised that at this critical juncture it was the Iraqi Kurds who stepped in to support them at a time when most countries – including the United States – aligned with Damascus.
It is important to note, however, that solidarity in times of crisis does not necessarily translate into political consensus among divergent actors. In the Kurdish case in particular, ideological differences between Kurdish political movements across national boundaries run deep. Over the past century, Kurdish political history has been marked by fragmentation and ideological divisions, shaped in large part by the fact that Kurds are spread across four different states (Iraq, Iran, Syria and Türkiye), each with distinct political environments that have compelled Kurdish elites to adopt differing strategies and priorities.
This polarisation has been most evident in Syria and Iraq, where Kurds have adopted two distinct models of governance, largely reflecting ideological differences between the dominant political forces in each region. In Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) is generally characterised as conservative and nationalist. In contrast, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the de facto ruling party in Kurdish Syria, espouses a leftist ideology heavily influenced by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). These divergent ideologies have frequently placed the two Kurdish groups at odds and, at times, led to confrontation.
There are, therefore, clear limits to how far political alignment between Syria’s and Iraq’s Kurds can extend. Yet the recent developments in northeast Syria have been significant enough that many Kurdish ideologues and political figures on both sides have openly called for setting ideological differences aside and prioritising the protection of what remains under Kurdish control in Syria.
It is this shift in attitude, unthinkable even months ago, that has led many Kurds to believe a durable political partnership between Kurdish actors in Iraq and Syria may no longer be far-fetched. With a new generation that is increasingly politically aware, both within the region and across the diaspora, Kurdish unity, at least in a political and strategic sense, appears increasingly realistic more than ever before.
Sunday, February 8, 2026
Saturday, February 7, 2026
Friday, February 6, 2026
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