2026 Iran war
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The 2026 Iran war is the open-ended American and Israeli campaign against Iran that John Kiriakou covered week by week on his own show through July 2026. His running position is that it was won on its own stated terms within days, has been fought for months since without any further objective, and cannot be won on any other terms.

The decision to attack

Kiriakou reported the decision to attack before it was public. On 23 February 2026 he said a former CIA officer who had been at the White House that morning talking to friends told him "that a decision has been made to attack Iran on Monday or Tuesday", this after the president had given Iran ten days to accept an end to its ballistic-missile programme, an end to uranium enrichment, and an end to its support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. He did not expect the deadline to be honoured: "He'll give you 10 days, he'll give you two weeks, and then he'll just attack two days into it," on the theory that it keeps adversaries off balance.

The disposition of forces, as he set it out, made the timeline credible: the USS Abraham Lincoln had been in the Arabian Sea for weeks with roughly two dozen support ships across the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean, and the USS Gerald R. Ford was passing through the Strait of Gibraltar that day, bound for the Eastern Mediterranean and probably the Suez Canal. "We're going to have enough assets to attack Iran in the next couple of days."

The battle lines inside the administration

The same source described the internal split: JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard against the war, and Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth "and now the Joint Chiefs of Staff" for it. Kiriakou stopped him there, because the alignment inverted his own experience, at the start of the Iraq war "the most stridently anti-war component was the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were always the last ones that wanted to attack, because they know what war is." The explanation offered was one he says he had forgotten: over the preceding twelve months Trump had replaced every one of the Joint Chiefs, firing the four-star generals who had risen through the ranks under Biden and promoting officers he judged politically loyal.

The diplomacy it overrode

Kiriakou, who describes himself as a glass-half-full man, had been publicly optimistic until that morning. Two rounds of talks, with the Omanis in Muscat and the Swiss in Geneva, had been called productive by both sides, a third was scheduled, and the Omanis had asked Washington to relax and let them work. He rates Omani diplomacy highly and explains Iranian trust in it simply: "they're honest, so the Iranians trust them as well." His conclusion was that none of it mattered any more, "I think a decision's been made."

Wag the Dog, and the timing

Asked whether the timing was intended to distract from the Epstein disclosures then dominating coverage, he answered "probably in part," noting the simultaneous announcement that UFO files would be released, and reaching for Wag the Dog, a film whose premise, a war to distract from a presidential scandal, once made people's hair stand on end and now reads as quaint. "Same movie over and over again. Different actors, just remakes. And people have short memories."

The premise and the opening strikes

Kiriakou's objection on the merits was that the White House had "bitten right into this Israeli propaganda, the same kind of propaganda we got in 2003", that Iranians would greet an invasion as liberators and everyone would get rich on new oil deals, against a country bigger than Texas with 92 million people. "That's just not going to happen. It never happens."

The premise came from Benjamin Netanyahu: that Iran would fall apart, the Shah's son would return, and "it's going to be the land of milk and honey... they're going to be waving little American and Israeli flags." Kiriakou's verdict on the people who believed it is that they were "idiotically confident."

The decapitation campaign

The decapitation strikes at the outset were, by his account, comprehensive: the Ayatollah killed, almost every Iranian nuclear scientist killed, multiple cabinet members, and just about every senior figure in the military leadership, a pattern of scientist-killing he had already traced through the Iran 12-Day War of the previous year. "The war was supposed to last a day. A day. Because once these people were dead... the Iranian people were going to rise up." It never happened, and Kiriakou argues anyone who follows Iranian politics could have predicted it would not.

His reading of the American miscalculation is that Trump believed that once the strikes began, killing not just Khamenei but virtually the entire defence leadership, the country would collapse like a house of cards. It did not. The result is a war the United States is too deep into to leave: it cannot walk away without losing face, particularly with its friends in the Persian Gulf, who are taking missiles and losing people. "We started this. We're going to have to finish it."

"Month five of our supposedly three-week war"

Kiriakou dates the sales pitch precisely. The Iranian government "was supposed to collapse like a house of cards," and "anybody with any background in the Middle East said at the time that that was absurd." By his third episode he was calling it "month five of our supposedly three-week war with Iran."

Why the war cannot be won

Population, geography and the troop requirement

Kiriakou's argument against victory is demographic and geographic before it is political. Iran has 93 million people. "We couldn't defeat Afghanistan with less than a quarter of that population. We couldn't defeat Iraq with... less than half that population." The country is the size of the whole of Western Europe and is "surrounded on three sides by formidable mountain ranges." Actually replacing the government, he estimates, "we would need a million ground troops. It's not going to happen."

Degraded, not obliterated

He grants the degradation and disputes the word used for it. When a cable host repeated that the United States had "obliterated" Iran's military, Kiriakou's correction was flat: "No, we haven't. We have degraded Iran's military, but obliterated, that's a word that the president used. That's just simply not true." And degradation of the leadership is temporary: "there's always going to be somebody else that pops back up into a leadership role."

The drone asymmetry

Where Iran has succeeded, he says, is with suicide drones, and the exchange rate is the war's defining fact. The United States was firing "$100,000 missiles against five or ten thousand dollar drones." Iran can produce tens of thousands of them and buys whatever it does not build from China and Russia, sending "wave after wave after wave."

The logic that follows is what makes air defence futile: "if you've got this cheap drone and you just strap some explosives to it, and then you send it to its target, what do you care if it's shot down by a $100,000 missile? It doesn't make any difference."

He applies the same arithmetic to missile defence and to carriers. The United States deployed two carrier strike groups, each an aircraft carrier plus eleven or twelve escorting ships, against an adversary fighting with drones costing between five and ten thousand dollars to build. Systems like Iron Dome can shoot down incoming missiles, "but you can't shoot down 5,000 incoming drones. You don't have 5,000 missiles." And a carrier strike group has no answer to "suicide drones that are just going to fly into its side."

"We can't beat Iran. Nobody can beat Iran."

His summary is unqualified: "we can't beat Iran. Nobody can beat Iran." The reasons he lists are the age of the culture, seven thousand years old, the fact that the Iranians "live in the area," and that the nature of warfare has changed.

The comparison he reaches for is Afghanistan and Iraq, twenty-year wars entered on the advice of people who thought a country of ninety-three million the size of Western Europe, backed by Russia and China, could be beaten in a week.

The infrastructure exchange

Tit-for-tat strikes

The escalation Kiriakou treats as most dangerous is reciprocal strikes on civilian infrastructure. Iran hit a desalination plant in Kuwait, "That's technically a war crime. You can't hit infrastructure", a day after the United States destroyed an Iranian desalination plant. These are tit-for-tat.

He also notes Iranian state media reporting that a US strike hit a nuclear power plant still under construction, "That would be a violation of international law if that turns out to be true."

Iran's reach, and allied restraint

The strategic dilemma he identifies is that Iran's reach is wider than the Gulf. Its ability to strike partners extends past Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the UAE and Saudi Arabia to Jordan, Iraq and the Red Sea. So while Washington has threatened Iran's bridges, power plants and desalination capacity, Iran retains the ability to do the same across the Gulf Cooperation Council states.

That, he argues, is what restrains the White House, the allies. "US allies in the region have little interest in seeing this conflict expand. I'll rephrase: they have zero interest." His prediction follows: "the United States probably will not ramp up attacks on civilian infrastructure."

The legal case against the war

An undeclared war

Kiriakou's structural objection is constitutional. "Congress never declared war on Iran. It's an undeclared, illegal war. We did it at the behest of a foreign government, Israel, and we can't get out." The analogy he reaches for is the one he has used since the first missile: "To me, this feels like the start of the Iraq war." His warning then was that there was no exit strategy, "It's easy to bomb a country. It's easy to overthrow a government if you want to put troops on the ground. It's almost impossible to get out. And we never learn our lesson."

The three lawful reasons, and none of them

Kiriakou's fullest statement of the illegality sets out the exhaustive list first. "International law allows you to attack another country for three reasons. Number one, they've attacked you. Number two, they have asked you to come in and attack in order to save them. And number three, the United Nations Security Council authorized a use of military force."

His accounting is that all three are absent, alongside every domestic authority: no congressional declaration of war, no authorisation for the use of force, which he calls "a limp-wristed way of declaring war without actually declaring it", and no Security Council vote. "None of those three things have happened. We just attacked because the Israelis asked us to. That's it. That's an illegal war. It's a violation of international law and in fact it's quite literally a war crime, something that I've been saying from the very beginning."

A rogue action, and the factional split

Asked directly in May 2026 whether the war could fairly be called a rogue action by the Trump administration, Kiriakou answered "Yes. Yes.", and mapped the split inside the government against the one he watched form before Iraq.

In 2003, he says, "the battle lines were clearly drawn right down the middle in the US government." The pro-war factions were the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council; the anti-war factions were the CIA, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs.

For Iran the alignment has moved. On his reading of what has leaked, the war has not had the support of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and consequently the CIA, nor of the Office of the Vice President or the Joint Chiefs, while "the White House, the NSC, the State Department, that's all been the pro-war faction."

What the public is not told

The undisclosed attacks

Kiriakou repeatedly flags the reporting gap rather than the fighting. The New York Times, he notes, found that in the week before an Iranian attack that killed two American soldiers and left one missing in Jordan, Iran had carried out three other strikes on US forces there, injuring dozens of service members and damaging several helicopters, none of which the Pentagon disclosed.

His explanation is legal, not conspiratorial, and he anticipates sounding repetitive about it: "they are not compelled. The Pentagon is not compelled to report these figures. There's no law that says they have to." And there is no law "because Congress is asleep at the switch. And they never passed any such law." The consequence is predictable, "Why would we inform Capitol Hill? Why would we inform the media... when we don't have to?"

The cost

The cost figure he cites is about $132 billion and rising, "thousands and thousands of dollars for each American... not even a taxpayer, for each American citizen", and his gloss is that this is "a bigger problem over a longer term than our government has led us to believe."

The press, confused

Kiriakou's description of American coverage of the war is that no outlet's usual commitments survive it intact. Fox News is "just beating itself up over this," having bought into "the whole MAGA no foreign wars thing" while Sean Hannity became a cheerleader for the war, Kiriakou was booked onto his programme two days later and expected the two of them "to go to the mat over this", and Jesse Watters hesitated before coming down for it, with other hosts against.

The mirror image applies on the other side: MSNBC "really loving the idea of the war because it's for Israel, but then hating the idea that the war is being prosecuted by Donald Trump," and CNN "trying to be not biased, but we kind of like the war because we like Israel, but we don't like Donald Trump, so we're going to kind of be against the war. They don't know what to do. They're just kind of stuck."

The grade, and how it ends

A grade of D

His assessment is delivered as a report card: "I want to give a grade of D for how this war is going." The reasoning is that the objectives were all met and the fighting did not stop. If the goal was to kill the Iranian political leadership, "they've all been murdered." The military leadership, "they're gone. They're all dead." Almost all the nuclear scientists are dead. "So why are we still fighting in Iran?"

The Truth Social ending

He expects months more, ending not in settlement but in announcement. Asked how the war ends, he gave a procedural rather than a military answer: "It ends when we wake up one morning and we look at Truth Social and the president said in the middle of the night, it's all over. We won. I'm bringing everybody home. We win. Big parade on Constitution Avenue", and, he says, "sure enough the next day that's what he said for like the fourth time." Told the same way a month later, the forecast was that one day "we're probably all going to wake up and Donald Trump will have posted on Truth Social: 'We won. It's all over. Everybody's coming home. It's the greatest victory in the history of victories.'" And then: "really, in the end, nothing's going to change."

"Dog walked into that war"

His ledger of the position at that point: "now here we are almost out of missiles, unable to protect two aircraft carrier strike forces and no end in sight to this conflict," with the strait still closed and the cost visible at the gas pump. His read on how it began is that the president "got dog walked into that war" and did not want it.

The war's effect on Iran

The outcome Kiriakou treats as the war's most durable is the one it was least meant to produce. "What we've done with this war against Iran is we've driven Iranians together. And now the Iranians are united against us, against Israel, and against our Arab allies."

"Willing to fight to the very death"

He is equally sceptical of claims that Tehran is suing for peace. When Trump told reporters that Iranian officials had "called a little while ago and want to make a deal," Kiriakou's response was that it was "just simply not true... That's made up. That's for domestic US political consumption. The Iranians are willing to fight to the very death to protect their country."

Why the rest of the world stays out

Cost and casualties

Kiriakou gives three reasons why other countries have not joined the American campaign. The first is cost: "We are spending $2 billion a day bombing the Iranians. It's crazy expensive." The second, especially among NATO allies, is that "they don't have the stomach for casualties that we have."

The legal objection

The third is legal, and applies particularly to the Germans, Spanish, Portuguese and Italians: attacking Iran is a violation of international law. There was no clear and present danger, no imminent threat and no nuclear programme, and even had there been a programme, no delivery system. The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court and, in Kiriakou's account, does not care whether Trump is charged with crimes against humanity; the Israelis care less still; the Europeans care very much and do not want to be part of it.

Russia's position

Russia sells Iran guidance systems, radars and surface-to-air missiles, but has been very clear that Iran does not fall under the Russian defence umbrella, and has never said it would protect Iran in the event of hostilities.

Day three: the ceasefire feeler and the missile clock

Speaking on 2 March 2026, Kiriakou raised two things he had picked up in the previous hours. The first was European reporting, not carried in the United States, that over the weekend the administration had asked the Italian foreign ministry to approach the Iranian foreign ministry and offer a ceasefire. If true, he said, "that tells me that they thought the entire Iranian government would collapse as soon as hostilities were initiated. That hasn't happened, and they're starting to worry about a plan B."

The second was an inventory problem. "The United Arab Emirates has seven days' worth of surface-to-air missiles left, and Qatar has four days' worth ... Both countries have reached out urgently to the United States asking for replacements, and there are no replacements. So something's got to give."

What Iran was actually striking

Kiriakou describes the Iranian target set as narrow: American military installations in the Gulf Cooperation Council states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, rather than the civilians or governments of the host countries. The exceptions he lists are a handful of suicide drones aimed at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Jebel Ali free port south of it, and, "oddly", the port of Oman and a small town outside Muscat, odd because it was the Omanis who had been trying to negotiate between Washington and Tehran.

He put the toll at that point at eighteen casualties including four dead, and noted three American pilots shot down "supposedly by mistake" by the Kuwaitis, whom he expected to be safe.

Whose intelligence killed the leadership

Asked whether CIA officers had been on the ground in Tehran, Kiriakou said that a day earlier he would have called the suggestion ridiculous. The New York Times had since reported the reverse of the assumed picture: not that Mossad had the Iranian government infiltrated from top to bottom, but that "it was actually the CIA that had the Iranian government infiltrated, and it was the CIA that passed locational targeting information on the Iranian leadership to the Israelis, that the Israelis then used to kill Supreme Leader Khamenei and former President Ahmadinejad and virtually the entire military and nuclear leadership. It was a CIA operation, not a Mossad operation."

On how Khamenei's location was known, his answer is that it was largely volunteered: Khamenei had said publicly that if the Iranian people had no bunkers to run to, he would not run to one either, so he was likely to be at his house or his office, which shared a compound. "I don't think anybody could have guessed that his family would be there." The strike killed Khamenei, his daughter, his son-in-law and a grandchild. The street-level method he believes produced the targeting is at recruiting from the bottom.

Killing the Pope

On whether the decapitation achieved anything: "killing Ayatollah Khamenei is like killing the Pope. You're not going to bring down Catholicism by killing the Pope, there's just going to be another Pope appointed. And it's the same situation in Iran." He expected another cleric to be elevated to supreme leader, possibly Khomeini's grandson, "who is one of the senior clerics and an insider, and who's far, far more conservative than Ayatollah Khamenei was. So we've opened up a Pandora's box here, and I'm not sure that there's a way to close the lid."

The opinion collapse, and the two hundred in Los Angeles

He cited polling showing only 27 per cent of Americans supporting the conflict, worse figures in Europe, and, "for the very first time here in the United States since polls began being taken on this issue", more Americans supporting the Palestinians than the Israelis.

Against that he set the footage the networks kept replaying: a Los Angeles demonstration of two or three hundred people celebrating the attack. "These are mostly Iranian Jews, most of whom settled in southern California, many of them in Beverly Hills. These were pro-Shah people who fled in 1979, took their wealth with them. That's not the average Iranian." Tehran, he noted, had produced pro-government demonstrations of hundreds of thousands. "I think we've grossly underestimated the domestic support that this Iranian government has." Asked whether killing the supreme leader would deepen it: "absolutely."

What it costs beyond Iran

The damage he thinks is least reversible is to the credibility of American negotiation. "Who would negotiate with the United States again after this? This is the second time in eight months that they figuratively speaking killed the negotiators. They attacked the country with which they were negotiating, as the negotiators were literally on their way to the next session."

He also puts the original miscalculation on Israel: "the Israelis, I think, were the ones who actually convinced the Americans that as soon as the first strikes began the Iranian government would collapse. And it hasn't collapsed. So I think the Israelis today are saying: oh no, what have we gotten ourselves into."

The constitutional objection

"It's congressionally undeclared. The Constitution is very clear, there should be a congressional declaration of war, and that hasn't happened. Not only has that not happened, Congress hasn't even been briefed. And so our elected officials have no idea what the policy is." He noted the president had said in the morning the war would last a few weeks and by the afternoon that it could go on for months, and returned to the sequence he applies to every such war: "it's easy to start a war, it's easy to overthrow a government, it's very very difficult to stabilise a region and then pull out safely. Did we learn nothing in Iraq or Afghanistan?" The comparison he reaches for is 2002: all anybody in the policy community wanted to discuss was initiating hostilities, "and there was no plan to get out ... It's like history repeating itself."

What the Iranian missiles reached

Speaking on John Kiriakou's programme in April 2026, the economist Richard D. Wolff gave a tally of what the Iranian arsenal had actually accomplished. Iran had developed missiles of a very wide range, hundreds of kilometres, and that range was why it was able to "destroy or damage the 13 American military bases that are in the Gulf region" and why it "was able to penetrate very severely the Iron Dome and David's Sling, the two protective mechanisms the Israelis have developed." Those defences, he concluded, "turned out to be vulnerable."

The war aim he attributed to Iran was expulsion rather than victory. Having been victimised repeatedly across seventy-five years, the Iranian position was that its only defence was to drive the United States out of the region altogether: "Close your 10 bases. Forget about it. ... We're not going to let you stay here. We're going to bomb your bases if you rebuild them." The object was to make the American presence "wildly more dangerous, wildly more expensive." Wolff's own count of the bases is inconsistent between the two passages, thirteen struck, ten to be closed, and he does not reconcile them.

The accompanying claim was endurance: "you can bomb us till you're blue in the face. Won't make any difference," which Wolff judged not to be an empty threat, on the evidence that Iran had sustained it for forty days.

The cost to the alliance

The war's effect on the United States' European allies, who were not warned it was coming, refused Trump's request for help mid-war, and were attacked publicly for refusing, is treated separately under Europe and the 2026 Iran war, along with Wolff's verdict that the alliance did not survive it.

The decapitation that failed, and the retaliation not taken

Speaking from Vietnam in August 2026, Kiriakou described an administration whose theory of the war had already been falsified. "The administration really believed that Iran would collapse on top of itself" once the bombing started; instead, having killed the Ayatollah, most of the cabinet, almost the entire military leadership and every nuclear scientist, "all that did was it drove the Iranian people together. It didn't lead to collapse." Asked abroad what the endgame was, he reports telling people there does not appear to be one, and that they were "less pleased" for hearing it.

The episode's occasion was Iran striking ships in the Strait of Hormuz with anti-ship cruise missiles while Washington declined to hit back. Kiriakou credits the restraint rather than the strength: "kudos to them for not retaliating because that would have to come with a counter retaliation and then it just gets worse and worse and worse." Trump's own account, given to Axios, was that "We are lowkeying it. We are only semi-negotiating with them," on the reasoning that Iran has "huge inflation", no money and cannot pay its troops, a claim Kiriakou neither accepts nor rejects, noting only that the Iranians say there are no negotiations of any kind, "not like negotiations light."

He also traces why the threatened strikes on Iranian civilian infrastructure were dropped. His statement of the law is unqualified, "It is a war crime to attack civilian infrastructure. Period. It's black and white law", followed by the reason it happens anyway: "because who's going to do something about it?" What changed the calculation was that Iran applied the same logic to American allies, striking civilian infrastructure in Qatar and Bahrain, which left Gulf partners furious with Washington; when Washington threatened escalation, Iran demonstrated it on a cargo ship, and Washington backed off.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Strait of Hormuz
- Lindsey Graham
- Yemen
- Iran 12-Day War
