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Even the New York Times can’t deny it anymore. Columnist Bret Stephens broke ranks with the liberal media echo chamber this week, delivering a reality check that must have stung his Manhattan newsroom colleagues. In a stunning admission in his New York Times column, Stephens told readers that President Trump’s war against Iran is actually “going better than you think.”
The numbers don’t lie, even when the narrative tries to. Stephens pointed out in his column that during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the United States lost dozens of aircraft in just six weeks. Fast forward to today, and we’ve lost only four aircraft over four weeks of operations against Iran, as Stephens noted in his piece. In the 1989 Panama invasion, 23 American soldiers died and 325 were wounded; in the current conflict, we’ve seen 13 deaths and 230 wounded, with most of those injuries resulting in swift returns to duty, according to Stephens’ historical comparisons.
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut claimed on NBC that we’ve “never seen this level of incompetence in war-making in this country’s history.” Stephens wasn’t having it, and his rebuttal in his column cuts through the political theater like a knife. The Connecticut Democrat’s hyperbole might play well on Sunday morning talk shows, but it crumbles under the weight of historical comparison, as Stephens argued. When a New York Times columnist is fact-checking Democratic senators on military matters, you know the narrative has spun completely out of control.
What we’re witnessing is the disconnect between political posturing and battlefield reality. The same voices that spent years telling us America couldn’t accomplish anything militarily without dragging us into decades-long quagmires are now scrambling to explain why this operation isn’t the disaster they predicted, as Stephens highlighted. They promised economic catastrophe, with oil prices skyrocketing beyond reason; instead, Brent crude sits around $100 a barrel, a far cry from the $175 equivalent we saw during the Obama years when tensions were far less severe, based on Stephens’ analysis of market data.
The critics wanted this to fail because they need it to fail. Their entire worldview depends on American weakness and presidential incompetence, but the facts keep getting in the way, forcing even establishment media figures to acknowledge what many Americans already suspected. Sometimes leadership matters, and sometimes the experts don’t know what they’re talking about.
Is this the foreign policy fiasco they warned us about, or are we watching something else entirely unfold? When the New York Times starts admitting the war is going better than expected, perhaps it’s time to question who exactly has been feeding us the steady diet of panic and pessimism. The truth has a funny way of surfacing, even in the most unexpected places.
Providence watches over the bold.
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