The Middle East\u2019s best hope may be that the US president continues to rebadge strategic defeat as success<\/p>\n
Both the US and Iran claimed victory on Wednesday morning. Both were lying. The two-week ceasefire announced by Donald Trump the night before is not the triumph that he declared. It may not be an end to the war, as welcome as the pause is, or even last the fortnight. Mr Trump said that Iran has gone through regime change. It has not. If anything, less experienced, less readable but more hardline figures are now in charge. He said that the strait of Hormuz would be open; Iran said that ships would pass through with permission, and at a price.<\/p>\n
By Wednesday evening, Iranian state media said that the strait was closed after Israel unleashed a brutal assault on Lebanon: about 100 strikes in 10 minutes. Iran had insisted that Lebanon was part of the deal, while Mr\u00a0Trump disagreed<\/a>. This conflict has killed thousands in the region, including\u00a0children, and left many more exhausted, terrified and traumatised, while the aggressors have\u00a0openly boasted<\/a> of their intent to commit war crimes.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Middle East\u2019s best hope may be that the US president continues to rebadge strategic defeat as success Both the US and Iran claimed victory on Wednesday morning. Both were lying. The two-week ceasefire announced by Donald Trump the night before is not the triumph that he declared. It may not be an end to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}