Pardon the mockery in the title but I couldn’t help it after reading this Al Jazeera article:

The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why: Every aspect of Iran’s ability to project regional power is being successfully degraded.

So many things are wrong in it, I don’t know where to begin.

Here’s one example:

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is dominating the critical commentary. US Senator Chris Murphy has called it evidence that President Donald Trump misjudged Iran’s capacity to retaliate. CNN has described it as proof that the administration has lost control of the war’s escalation.

The economic pain is real: Oil prices have surged, a record 400 million barrels of oil will be released from global reserves, and Gulf states are facing drone and missile strikes on their energy infrastructure.

But this framing inverts the strategic logic. Closing the strait was always Iran’s most visible retaliatory card, and always a wasting asset. About 90 percent of Iran’s own oil exports pass through Kharg Island and then the strait.

China, Tehran’s largest remaining economic partner, cannot receive Iranian crude while the strait is shut. Every day the blockade continues, Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.

Wait, wait, what?

That’s a glaring error.

Iran has been shipping oil to China through sanctions-evasion networks for years. They have dark fleet tankers, ship-to-ship transfers, relabeling through Malaysia and the UAE, pipeline routes through Central Asia…an entire shadow infrastructure exists precisely because it was designed to operate outside normal shipping channels.

China was taking 13% of its seaborne crude from Iran before the war started, and that trade survived years of US sanctions specifically because it doesn’t depend on the conventional Hormuz-to-Malacca route operating normally.

See what I’m talking about?

Beyond that, claims that closing the strait “severs Iran’s own economic lifeline” treats Kharg Island exports as though they’re the only mechanism. But Iran has been diversifying export routes for exactly this contingency. The Jask terminal on the Gulf of Oman was built to bypass the strait, piping crude from inland to a port east of Hormuz. It went operational in 2021. This isn’t even news.

And at the macro level, the argument inverts the dependency. China built its strategic petroleum reserves to 104 days of coverage before the war, projected to 140-180 by year end. They prepared for exactly this disruption. Iran doesn’t need to ship through the strait to maintain the relationship with Beijing that matters, it needs to survive long enough for the diplomatic settlement that gives China leverage over reconstruction. Which is exactly what’s happening.

The “wasting asset” framing assumes Iran is as dependent on the strait as the Gulf Arab states are. And it isn’t. It has alternatives and they don’t. The strait closure hurts Saudi Arabia and the UAE far more than it hurts Iran, which is why those states are intercepting Iranian drones rather than negotiating for Iranian shipping rights. They need the strait open more than Iran does.

Here’s another example.

Call it strategic disarmament. This is closer to the approach of the Allies to Germany’s industrial war-making capacity in 1944-1945 than to the US war on Iraq in 2003. The analogy is imperfect: Strategic disarmament without occupation requires a verification and enforcement architecture that no one has yet proposed, but the operational logic is the same.

No one is proposing to occupy Tehran.

The entire premise of 1945 was total unconditional surrender and occupation for 50 years. You can’t invoke that total occupation and then say no one is proposing it. That’s an analyst who saw the problem, named it, and chose not to follow their own thread because the destination was unpublishable.

All in all this article is so awful I can’t imagine how it survived editing.

Maybe it’s to serve as a warning to others who don’t know history.