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Separating Rhetoric From Reality In The Middle East – HotAir

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April 17, 2026
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Trump Makes It Painful to Be a Liberal, Blue-Haired Gorgon — But Stains Gonna Stain – PJ Media

If would be so much easier to analyze the state of the seven-week old conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran if just one public figure left in the regime, whether it be from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the Basij forces, or from the politicians serving as the puppets of the Supreme Cardboard Leader, such as Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, President Masoud Pezeshkian, or Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf, could make one statement that was truthful. 

In 1997’s Liar Liar, Jim Carrey played a lawyer who was afflicted with a catastrophic ailment for a trial attorney. His son wished for him to be incapable of telling a lie, and that wish came true for the bulk of the movie. Sadly, Hollywood fiction doesn’t translate to Iranian regime fiction, even though rhetorical fiction is about all that we’re hearing from the rump regime in Tehran.

There have been remarkably bold statements in the last 72 hours from all sides. President Donald Trump has made claims. Lots of Israeli voices have weighed in on the prudence of the ceasefire with Lebanon and Hezbollah, which went into effect last night. Lots of dire predictions about how that would turn out were made. And with recent history as evidence, the heavy skepticism and doubt over the possible success of peace talks are very much warranted. The Iranian remnants, however, at least publicly, seem to be entered into a bovine excrement contest, with each statement more brash and absurd than the last. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has a theory as to why you’re seeing such a disconnect from what Iranian regimists are saying versus what they may be negotiating to Donald Trump. 





They’re running scared because of paranoia inside the regime, demanding loyalty tests from each other, which require them to be more over-the-top in support of the regime than the last. But according to the Trump administration, there do remain people with authority in the regime who do see their future, and it’s not pretty. They want to cut their losses and find a way to survive. 

What I hope to do is highlight some of the more outlandish claims, weigh them, and sort them into four piles: truth, plausibility, too soon to tell, and the fertilizer pile that makes up Tucker Carlson’s show prep.

On the Iranian front, let’s begin with Mr. Ghalibaf, who showed last Saturday in Islamabad that he has to ask permission from some unknown entity in Tehran before agreeing to use the little terrorist’s room down the hall.

It is true that a ceasefire went into effect on Thursday afternoon after Donald Trump got all parties to agree. This was a follow-up to the very short meeting at the State Department earlier in the week, mediated by Marco Rubio. The takeaway from that meeting was that both the Lebanese government and the Israelis agreed that Hezbollah needs to go. It was the first time the two sides agreed on that issue. Here’s President Trump from the White House lawn before heading to Las Vegas on Thursday. 

Even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to the ceasefire and to hold talks, there are numerous loud voices inside Israel, from inside government and from former leaders, who believe this to be a huge mistake. My initial reaction to the news was I recall being reliably told by both every elected Democrat not named John Fetterman and the crazy anti-semitic wing on the far right that this entire Iranian/Middle East Operation Epic Fury was a Netanyahu psyop. From the run-up to the beginning of the conflict, and continuing through yesterday, the narrative that Israel is driving this war and dragging Donald Trump along for various and sundry reasons has been ubiquitous. 

It seems to me that narrative just blew up like an Iranian petrochemical plant. This ceasefire is entirely of Donald Trump’s making. It’s high-stakes poker, but the President is feeling it right now and thinks there’s a deal to be had. What kind of deal? Potentially another Abraham Accord to add to the mix. 





So, getting back to the claim by Ghalibaf that this ceasefire could only be brought about by the heroism and work of their brethren in Hezbollah, here’s the reality. Israel’s effective northern border has shifted, and it doesn’t appear to be going back to where it was seven weeks ago anytime soon. 

The Israelis are holding their position at the Litani River. That was unthinkable even if one entertained the fantasy of talks between Israel and Lebanon before the war. And Israel is watching. If Hezbollah so much as twitches, Israel will do to them what they’ve done to a whole bunch of their ex-comrades, and Lebanon allegedly will be just fine with that. An Israeli response to a Hezbollah threat doesn’t necessarily break the ceasefire. 

And by the way, as for Ghalibaf’s statement of Hezbollah strength, here’s just a sample of what Israel has taken off the board from the terror regime to their north. 

Oh, and it’s true that the Lebanese government is too weak by itself to pull Hezbollah out, root and branch. Israel was doing a pretty good job until the ceasefire. What will terrorist pruning look like going forward? Donald Trump will have something to say about that. 

In addition to saying he, Donald Trump, was the difference this time in upcoming talks succeeding, he also said he would support the Lebanese Army operations against Hezbollah. I’m fairly confident Israel would be more than willing to help in that regard, too. 

The verdict on Ghalibaf’s claim? The Late Vin Scully used to be an accomplished lip-reader during Dodgers baseball games when fights or arguments with umpires broke out. Whenever a certain obscenity that will get you a big FCC fine was uttered, Scully would say, “Fertilizer.” That about sums up Ghalibaf. 

Here’s another regime claim from Ali Abdollahi, their armed forces commander. 

Pre-eminent military historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson says the Iranian regime just lost half a trillion dollars of military readiness, at least. 

As for President Trump, again from the White House lawn, this upcoming Round Two of talks in Islamabad will either result in a deal to Trump’s liking, or, well, something General Abdollahi is not ready for. 





Both War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan “Raizin'” Caine, reiterated that U.S. forces are still forward deployed, rested, reloaded, and ready to strike literally on a moment’s notice should the order come. 

Abdollahi’s claim? Fertilizer.

One of my personal favorites from this week is from Iran’s army commander-in-chief, Abdolrahim Mousavi. 

I think he’s doing Iranian Mad Libs to describe the rescue operation a couple of weeks ago of our F-15E pilot and WSO. This is not only fertilizer, but he’s playing bad jazz on sax on top of Bandini mountain inside the fertilizer plant. 

One more from the bad guys. This is Mohsen Rezaei, the military advisor of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, the Cardboardatollah.

I’m sorry, Mohsen, you misunderstood how American politics works. You don’t just get to replace Eric Swalwell in Congress by instantly speaking like him.

After defiantly reacting to news that Donald Trump was going to close the Strait of Hormuz to Iranians, or more accurately, not allow any ship in or out of any Iranian port in the Gulf, spouting stuff like ‘this will be the biggest mistake the Americans ever made’ and ‘we will sink every ship they have’, the regime flipped completely in 24 hours. 

Now, they’re going to send their oil inland thousands of miles through Central Asia, into Russia and China. That’ll show us foolish Americans. They’ve abandoned the idea of defeating the U.S. Naval blockade. So is their claim of a land route accurate or possible?

Sure, they could make a run for the Caspian Sea. The problem? All the oil is in the southwest of Iran. The Caspian Sea is to their north. It would be crossing the equivalent of three Texas’ to get to the Sea, where they have no tankers or military escorts for those tankers, nor any pumping ability to move it from truck or rail onto the ships, where they also have a port, which they don’t. And the Caspian isn’t exactly a pleasure cruise these days. Is there a pipeline in the Caspian to get to Russia? Sure. Unfortunately, that belongs to Azerbaijan, which is one of Israel’s closest allies in the region. I’m not so sure they’d be willing to cooperate. What’s that leave? The hard way.  

Iran could certainly try to move across Central Asia to China directly using the Five Countries Rail Corridor. 

See the fly in the ointment here? There are about a thousand miles of dotted line leaving Iran, going through Afghanistan. As Mongo said to Bart and the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, “Mongo don’t know. Got to do where choo-choo go.” There’s no track. There are plans one day to put track there, but if you think for one second that a truck convoy moving all the way across Afghanistan carrying oil A) won’t be a target for hijackers, or B) will make up the difference in the regime’s export business they’re losing to two million barrel tankers even if they safely made it the 3,000-plus miles to China, you’re out of your mind. 

The reality is their “alternative route” is the California high-speed rail project. It doesn’t exist. And even if you give them a train that doesn’t exist, Iran is flat busted right now. They wouldn’t have the diesel to put in the train to push the oil up the mountains into Afghanistan. 

How broke is Iran right now? Here’s a clue. 





Remote learning, you say? How is that going to work with the country not having internet? They have some local access to stuff, but it’s buggy and excruciatingly slow. This means the kids stay home, and education has, for all intents and purposes, ended in Iran. Why? Because the regime is already starting to conserve power. No school means no buses, no parents driving their kids to school, and maybe parents having to stay home and not go to work. The regime is facing an economy that is beyond horrific. Besides losing half a billion a day in lost revenue, they can no longer export petrochemicals. They cannot import grain. Iran is a net oil exporter, but it never had the refining capacity to meet the gasoline needs of their population. They export oil, but they import gas…or did. 

If everyone walks in Tehran, including Basij and IRGC forces, the odds begin to even out, or perhaps tilt in favor of an angry mob also facing 180% inflation. 

Now, how about the claims of Donald Trump? 

Before he left the White House for Nevada and Arizona on Thursday, he said the regime begging for a deal had already agreed to the biggest two items on his list – giving up their nuclear program entirely and handing over the highly-enriched uranium. 

That’s a very big claim to make. As Ed said in another column, even the Washington Post admitted those concessions would be yuuge if true. Have the regime negotiators agreed to it? Their public rhetoric doesn’t indicate it, but that’s a very high limb onto which Trump is walking. Thus far, he has not felt the need to bluff, and for good reason. He’s had military superiority from the first moment of the kinetic phase of Operation Epic Fury, and there has been no weakening of his hand now, especially with the blockade’s stranglehold simultaneously squeezing the life out of Iran while restoring commercial travel through the Strait of Hormuz unabated. 

Remember all that talk just a week ago from people all-in on the sunk costs of rooting for Donald Trump’s defeat? They were boasting about how the regime was in control of the Strait, charging $2 million dollar tolls on ships to pass, paid in Chinese yuan or crypto, destroying the petrodollar in the process. The people claiming that today are lonelier than Jessica Tarlov at a book signing. 

In fact, the blockade is such a smashing success, thanks indirectly to the Iranian regime fighting back at us by shooting at all of their Middle East neighbors, their ability to traffic oil on the black market in defiance of international sanctions is in the process of being destroyed as well. Here’s Treasury Scott Bessent from the White House on Wednesday. 





We can now financially track every illicit oil transaction. We know the account numbers, we know the shell companies, we know the dates of expected deliveries and the routes to be taken. The Treasury Department followed up this press conference with a formal letter to all countries partaking in the shadow oil market to cease immediately or else face the consequences. And those consequences will bite more than an angry genie after being slighted by Daffy Duck.  

And speaking of consequences, thanks to the bonus intel from Iran’s now-pissed-off neighbors, our military doesn’t have to interdict ships transiting illegal and sanctioned oil at the Strait or in the Gulf. We can go full Johnny Cash. Our Navy has been everywhere, man. 

As we enter into Week eight of the conflict, the United States is exporting more oil than they ever have, and that’s before all of the empty tankers have made their way into the Gulf of America to load up. 

The price of oil continues to drop a dollar here and a dollar there every day as speculators realize that shipping through the Strait is getting closer to normal every day, and plans to increase oil flow from harm’s way in the future through Saudi pipelines are moving just as rapidly. If you want proof about traffic through the Strait, this is what it looked like on Wednesday. 

As for Iran, they’re within two weeks of overflowing their storage tanks. Once that happens, they have to stop the flow of oil. They lose the siphon. It’s not as easy to restart as priming a water well pump like in the old west. Once you’ve stopped the flow of oil into the pipelines from the oil fields, it takes quite a lot of effort to get that oil moving again. Effort and energy – something they’re running quite short on these days. Here’s Peter Doocy on Fox News. 





Hezbollah is isolated from Iran. Iran is isolated from Russia and China. No one is coming to help either one of them. The black market for oil is being disrupted and dismantled in real time. The President, for all his personal antics that give his critics the sticks to hit him with, is handling this entire Middle East campaign with extraordinary deftness. The second you think he’s boxed in, he applies just the right amount of pressure in a different spot, and the deal he desires, one that’s not only tremendous for the United States but for the rest of the world, becomes more realistic by the week. 

The rhetoric on all sides, but mostly within the regime, can be inflammatory, depressing, entertaining, and discouraging. It’s also largely irrelevant. I live in the world of reality. After seven weeks of kinetic military and economic pressure, I could not script a better position in which the United States finds itself. And at the same time, I could not imagine a more bleak, dire, and desperate position for the world’s soon-to-be-former largest state sponsor of terror than it faces right now. 

UPDATE: That’s what I get for getting a few hours of time in the rack. In a blow to Trump haters everywhere, it appears there was good reason for the President’s optimism on the White House lawn Thursday. 

As for whether Trump’s statement that Iran would agree to Trump’s preconditions for a second round of talks, which included having the authority to sign a deal and opening up the Strait, looks like we can put that down in the true pile. Regime Foreign Minister Araghchi released this just before the President’s social media post. 

It still has to happen, of course, but this is the first time in seven weeks anyone from the regime has ever said publicly they were willing to take this step. Trump demanded that Iran bend the knee before any future talks would be held. Looks like Operation Epic Fury and Operation Economic Fury have combined to present the regime with the conditions that indeed bent that knee.

Axios is reporting part of the forthcoming deal when talks resume include lifting of $20 billion in sanctions, but only after the highly-enriched uranium is turned over to the Americans. It still has to be agreed to and carried out, and it’s Axios reporting, so this definitely goes down in the ‘we’ll have to wait and see’ pile. But this development is another one that was deemed impossible by those rooting against Trump just a few weeks ago.

Oil will most likely finish below $80 dollars by the end of U.S. trading today. The markets are ecstatic with the news.  

If you’re the Houthis and/or Hezbollah, how strongly do you feel about taking on the United States and Israel now? 

If you ever wanted to see what a decisive win looks like, stick around. All indications are you will very soon. 












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