Persia Must Not Be Destroyed

February 7, 2026

Carthago Delenda Est, The Oldest Lie in the Warmonger’s Playbook

Cato the Elder ended every speech with the same demandCeterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam (“Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed”) regardless of whether the Senate was discussing grain prices or road construction. It was a rhetorical battering ram, a phrase designed not to persuade through argument but to saturate through repetition until the unthinkable became the inevitable. Carthage was destroyed in 146 BCE. Ninety percent of its inhabitants perished. The survivors were sold into slavery. Legend holds that Rome salted the earth to ensure nothing would grow there again.

Turn on Fox News in February 2026 and you will hear the twenty-first century Catos. Jack Keane. Lindsey Graham. Rebecca Grant. Victoria Coats. Larry Kudlow. Rebecca Heinrichs. The subject changes (trade, immigration, domestic policy) but the conclusion is always the same: Iran must be destroyed. The phrase saturates the airwaves until it no longer sounds like madness. It sounds like policy.

This article is addressed not merely to them, they are beyond argument, but to the global press corps that has learned nothing from two decades of catastrophic failure. You, the editors in London and New York, Berlin and Paris, who marched your readers into Iraq on fabricated intelligence. You, who spent four years cheerleading a Ukrainian counteroffensive that never had a chance. You, who read your masters’ scripts and called it journalism. The question is simple: Will you do it again with Persia?

What You Propose to Destroy

Before this civilization is reduced to a target list on a Fox News chyron, let us remember what the word “Persia” actually means.

The Cyrus Cylinder, dating to 539 BCE, is recognized by the United Nations as the world’s first charter of human rights. Cyrus the Great (founder of the Achaemenid Empire, which stretched from the Aegean to the Indus) freed the slaves of Babylon, declared the right of all peoples to choose their own religion, and established racial equality, all inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform on a baked-clay cylinder. In November 2025, UNESCO formally recognized the Cyrus Cylinder as a symbol of early human rights and cultural diversity. The provisions of this 2,500-year-old document parallel the first four articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This is the civilization Jack Keane proposes to destroy in its entirety (“the civilian and military leadership, the entire IRGC infrastructure, their defense industrial base, the leaders of the militias, their entire rocket and ballistic missile program”) as casually as a man ordering lunch.

Persia gave humanity algebra. Persian physicians built the foundations of modern medicine. Rumi remains the best-selling poet in the United States. Zoroastrianism shaped the moral cosmology that fed into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Persian gardens gave the English language the word “paradise.” Isfahan’s mosques stand as some of the highest achievements of human architecture. The Persian postal system, the angarium, was the model for every postal service on earth. When Athens was still a collection of warring tribes, Persepolis was governing a multiethnic empire with a sophistication that Europe would not match for two millennia.

And now a retired four-star general on a cable morning show says he has “no doubt” we can take all of that down, without a single ground soldier.

The Media’s Iraq Catastrophe, A Lesson Permanently Unlearned

The mainstream American media “utterly failed its duty to the public in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, largely opting to cheerlead rather than question the Bush administration’s arguments and plans for the war”. The New York Times cluttered its front page with Judith Miller’s fabrications, sourced from defector Ahmad Chalabi, closely allied with the Bush team. Dick Cheney would then appear on Meet the Press and cite the Times story as independent proof, a closed loop of deception laundered through the credulous press.

What happened next was “arguably the most shameful episode in contemporary journalism”. The press demonstrated that it was not liberal, not conservative, but pro-establishmentbiased toward authorized government sources, structurally incapable of challenging power when it mattered most.

Twenty years later, the New York Times still could not face its Iraq war shame, offering only the mealy-mouthed deflection that “it’s complicated”. But there is nothing complicated about it. As the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, later a Supreme Court justice, said: “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.

The neocons in the Bush administration “desperately wanted this war” and took “to the airwaves preying on a still shell-shocked public that knew even less about Iraq or the broader Middle East,” deliberately misinforming Congress and the public about the impending war. The pattern is identical today. Swap “WMDs” for “nuclear program.” Swap Rumsfeld for Keane. Swap the Coalition of the Willing for an armada parked in the Persian Gulf. The script has not changed because it does not need to, because you, the press, never held anyone accountable the first time.

The Ukraine Coverage Catastrophe, Exhibit B

If Iraq was the original sin, Ukraine was the proof that absolution never came.

A rigorous study across nine countries confirmed that Western media, including the BBC, “paid little attention to the Russian perspective, put their own perceived national interests as defined by their government front and center, ‘supported’ Ukraine, and relied mostly on established Western sources and news agencies”. Academic research found that “Western media coverage disproportionately represents the Ukrainian perspective, with the Russian standpoint largely marginalized or stereotypically characterized,” while normalizing or trivializing “the role of neo-Nazi organizations in the conflict” and “downplaying potential war crimes committed by the Ukrainian side”.

In dominant media discourses, “the West’s role in contributing to the conflict in Ukraine continues to be ignored: for example, its not very subtle support for toppling President Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014 sparked a crisis in eastern Ukraine and thwarted the Minsk-2 agreement a year later, which might have offered a compromise and averted the Russian invasion of 2022”.

The media told you the 2023 counteroffensive would break through Russian lines. Ukraine’s forces met well-established Russian defenses (ditches, trenches, landmines prepared since November 2022) and in five months recaptured fourteen villages with a combined pre-war population of roughly 5,000. The counteroffensive was “basically over” by November 2023, having failed to achieve the sweeping territorial gains promised. General Zaluzhny himself admitted the war was a “stalemate”. The BBC, conducting rare frontline reporting, concluded the counteroffensive had failed.

Yet for months, the Western media sold the narrative that “superior training and the wunderwaffen of the Ukrainian brigades trained in the west would smash through the Russian lines”. The media “went on and on” about breakthrough weapons and tactics that never materialized. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands died.

By December 2025, Western academic institutions were censoring scholars who attempted to discuss forced mobilization in Ukraine, the very liberal institutions that “publicly position themselves against authoritarian trends” were suppressing empirical research on “phenomena such as mass draft dodging and forced mobilization” that exposed “growing tensions between hegemonic discourse and social realities in Ukraine”.

This was not journalism. This was information warfare designed to sustain a policy that everyone in private knew was failing. And now these same outlets, these same editors, these same correspondents are being handed new scripts. This time the target is Persia.

The Fox News War Machine, Delenda Est on a Loop

Rolling Stone reported in mid-2025 that “Trump’s heavy consumption of Fox News content is increasing his appetite for military confrontation with Iran,” citing an administration insider and a close confidant of the president. The president was “captivated by the channel’s combative anti-Iran coverage, alongside footage of Israeli airstrikes,” reportedly commenting “Wow” at what he perceived as the impressive intensity of Israel’s military actions.

As Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a four-time combat veteran, explained after watching Jack Keane’s Fox News performance, what Keane described was “an absolute full-on full-scale war” requiring “three or four hundred thousand ground troops along with a lot more air and naval power” sustained for months. The United States currently has one aircraft carrier strike group in the region. No ground forces. No sustainment for more than roughly ten days of high-intensity operations.

Davis’s assessment was blunt: Keane’s statement was “either a bald-faced lie, something that he knows is grotesquely inaccurate, or he’s more incompetent than I’ve ever given him credit for”. The parallel to Rumsfeld’s 2003 bravado is precise. When asked what would happen when troops reached Baghdad, Rumsfeld declared with supreme confidence: “The outcome is clear. There is no question but that that regime is through”. We know how that worked out.

Davis laid out the math: Iran is three or four times bigger than Iraq, with a population between 80 and 90 million. It has had years to prepare, with technology and assistance flowing from both Russia and China. Its missile forces are dispersed, hardened, and largely underground. Its drone swarms number in the tens of thousands. And unlike every previous confrontation, Iran has communicated clearly, through its foreign minister, that any attack, no matter how small, will trigger a full-scale response.

Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke confirmed this assessment: Iran has told the Americans “absolutely no” to any symbolic exchange of strikes, declaring that “as soon as we are attacked, immediately upon being attacked, we start the war altogether”. The armada itself has become “slightly something of a liability”, pushed further and further from the Iranian coastline due to anti-ship missiles from shore batteries, submarines, and fast boats.

The Constitutional Obscenity

Vice President JD Vance appeared on a podcast and stated flatly that if Trump “feels like the military is the only option, then he’s ultimately going to choose that option”. As Davis noted, “it doesn’t even enter his mind” that the Constitution reserves the war power to Congress. Article I, Section 8 is not a suggestion. It was “designed that way so that we don’t get some pernicious idea that one guy just decides, you know what, I don’t like those guys. Let’s go kill them”.

Every military operation of this administration (Nigeria, Yemen, Venezuela, last year’s strikes on Iran) has been conducted “completely without any congressional authorization, therefore in direct violation of the Constitution, Articles One and Two” and “against international law” and “against American law”. The guard rails are gone. The question is no longer whether the constitutional order has deteriorated. It has. The question is whether the press will say so, or whether it will once again launder executive lawlessness as “decisive leadership.”

The Grotesque Double Standard

On what authority does the United States propose to destroy the Iranian state? Davis posed the question the press will not: “What power, what law, what authority gives you the right, United States or Western Europe or whoever, to say that because you didn’t treat your people right, we’re going to go in and kill you and destroy your regime?”.

Consider: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly admitted that the United States deliberately debased Iran’s currency to cause the protests that are now being used as the humanitarian pretext for war. Mike Pompeo acknowledged intelligence operations on the ground. Approximately 40,000 Starlink terminals were discovered, smuggled in to coordinate the unrest. The administration manufactured the crisis and then pointed to it as justification for military intervention.

Glenn Diesen, speaking with Davis, framed the absurdity perfectly: the Europeans who enthusiastically endorse interference in Syria and Iran suddenly discover international law when Trump eyes Greenland. Venezuela was invaded, its president extracted by special forces in a made-for-television operation, and the same regime, minus one man, was left in power, its oil signed over. “As long as you keep giving us your oil money,” Davis observed, the pretense of democracy evaporates.

If another nation applied our own logic to us (intervening in American domestic unrest, bombing federal buildings because of January 6th, or during the Minneapolis riots) we would call it an act of war. But the rules-based order has never been about rules. It has been about who makes them and who enforces them.

What War With Iran Actually Looks Like

For those who still think this would be a replay of the Venezuela snatch-and-grab, the military realities are unambiguous:

No ground forces. Rumsfeld had 300,000 troops in 2003 and still underestimated the insurgency. The current deployment has zero ground combat troops.
Limited sustainment. Commodore Steve Germany, a Falklands veteran, estimated five days of high-intensity operations. Col. Doug McGregor estimated ten.
Iranian missile capability is proven. In June 2025, Iranian missiles penetrated the best integrated air defense system Israel and the United States could assemble together.
Drone swarms. Iran possesses tens of thousands of Shahed drones. A swarm of 300 would deplete the air defense of multiple destroyers, which carry roughly 50 to 100 interceptors each.
Strait of Hormuz. Iran can close the Strait at will, not through mining but through selective denial of passage, potentially crashing global oil markets and triggering financial panic.
No insider help. Unlike Venezuela, where a mole neutralized air defenses and ensured a bloodless extraction, Iran has spent the last year rolling up CIA and Mossad networks, cracking Starlink communications, and arresting insurgent coordinators.
Existential framing. Unlike every previous confrontation where Iran absorbed strikes because the regime’s survival was not at stake, the explicit rhetoric of regime destruction means Iran has “no incentive to withhold anything”.
Regional escalation. Gulf states have refused to allow their airspace or bases to be used in an attack. Saudi Arabia has taken a “quite strongly anti-Israeli line”. Senior Shia clerics across Iraq and the region have signed declarations that an attack on Iran’s supreme leader would trigger a global fatwa and mass martyrdom mobilization.
Russian and Chinese naval presence. Joint exercises are now scheduled in the region. A Chinese intelligence-gathering vessel has moved into position near Hormuz. The presence of Russian and Chinese naval vessels alongside the American armada would massively complicate any military operation.

As Davis concluded: “We could get annihilated. We could get crushed. Nobody in the West thinks that’s even possible… But I’m telling you, it is possible”.

A Message to the Global Press

You failed on Iraq. The evidence was there (the fabricated intelligence, the defector testimony laundered through compliant reporters, the weapons inspectors who said there was nothing to find) and you buried it under patriotic bunting and expert panels of retired generals with defense contractor board seats.

You failed on Ukraine. The evidence was there (the military math that never added up, the counteroffensives that never materialized, the negotiation opportunities sabotaged at every turn) and you ran victory graphics over casualty lists that you refused to tally.

Now you face the same test with Iran. The same retired generals are on the same networks telling the same lies with the same confidence. The information warfare apparatus that Davis identified (“designed to misinform and to deceive the western public, the United States people”) is running at full capacity. And you, the press, are the transmission belt.

Jack Keane tells millions of viewers that the United States can simultaneously destroy Iran’s civilian and military leadership, the entire IRGC, the defense industrial base, all militias, the ballistic missile program, and prevent retaliation, with one carrier strike group and no ground forces. This is not a difference of opinion. This is malpractice. This is a lie that, if believed, will lead to a catastrophe that will make Iraq look like a border skirmish.

The question for every editor, every bureau chief, every foreign correspondent is this: Will you interrogate the claims, or will you be the megaphone? Will you ask Jack Keane how many ground troops his plan requires, or will you let the chyronRetired Four-Star Generaldo the work of persuasion? Will you note that the administration admits to engineering the very protests it now uses as a humanitarian pretext, or will you run the footage of Iranian riot police without context?

Will you, for once in this blood-soaked century, do your job?

Persia Servanda Est

When Cato demanded the destruction of Carthage, there was one Roman senator who consistently opposed him, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Corculum. He ended every speech with the counter-phrase: Carthago servanda est“Carthage must be saved”. His argument was not sentimental. It was strategic. He believed that the fear of a common rival was necessary to maintain Roman discipline and unity, that without Carthage, Rome would turn on itself.

He was right. The destruction of Carthage did not make Rome safer. It inaugurated an era of internal conflict, civil war, and the eventual collapse of the Republic.

Persia servanda est. Not because the Islamic Republic is virtuous, no state is. Not because its governance is beyond criticism, every governance is. But because the destruction of a 2,500-year-old civilization to satisfy the blood-lust of cable news commentators and defense contractors would be a crime of historic proportions. Because the military math says we cannot win. Because the constitutional order says one man cannot decide. Because the humanitarian pretext was manufactured by our own intelligence services. Because the last two times the press cheered for war (Iraq, Libya) we shattered nations and created hells that burn to this day.

The Cyrus Cylinder sits in the British Museum. It says that all peoples have the right to choose their own religion, that the enslaved shall be freed, that racial equality is the law of the empire. It was written 2,564 years ago by the civilization that Fox News wants to turn into rubble.

Persia must not be destroyed.

The global press must, for once, tell the truth.

Scott Ortkiese

President and CEO of Faulkner Capital Holdings. He writes on geopolitics, energy markets, structured finance and American decline, and is the author of the forthcoming book The Decline of the American Empire.

About/so@throughlinesynthesis.com/LinkedIn/Substack