Name the move: the next escalation is being pre-sold as free. Larry Kudlow, on Fox Business, says 'our great fighting Marines can land and take' Kharg Island - 'in a very limited way' - because 'The Iranians would be near helpless in the face of that kind of move... It's not a thing they can do about it' [1]. Seizing the island would 'completely cripple what's left of Iran's already decimated economy' [1]. This is not idle: 'We may take over Kharg Island,' Kudlow reports of the president. 'It's in his head' [1].
Whether Marines could take and hold an island off Iran, and at what cost, is a prediction about a battle that has not happened. We do not rate predictions true or false. We put the record beside them, and this one comes with an unusual courtesy: the record is on the predictor's own network.
On June 10, Fox's own John Roberts played the montage on Special Report. March 31: 'Two or three weeks, we leave.' April 15: 'very close to over.' May 7: 'any day.' May 22: 'dying to make a deal.' June 9: 'final throes... two or three days' [2]. Roberts's arithmetic on his own air: 'That's nine weeks of we're close to a deal... at some point you've got to acknowledge it's not happening' [2]. Four more weeks have passed since he said that. The war is in its twentieth week, the ceasefire was declared over on Wednesday, and the strikes are running in both directions [3].
The adversary gets a vote, and Tehran has cast it in public: Iranian officials answered the Kharg talk by promising that invaders would not leave the island alive. Take that as bluster - it probably is - and it still falsifies the premise, because a country promising a contested landing is advertising the opposite of helplessness. Between 'not a thing they can do about it' and 'we will contest the beach,' somebody is wrong, and the people who find out first wear a uniform that is neither Kudlow's nor ours.
There is a version of this argument worth airing: Kharg is a real pressure point, and blockades and seizures are real tools of war with real histories. A commentator who made that case with a price tag attached - casualties, escalation risk, what Tehran hits back - would be doing opinion journalism about a war. 'Near helpless' does something else: it removes the price tag from the next rung of the ladder at the moment the man with the ladder says the idea is in his head. The prediction is labeled. The nine-weeks tape is the record. The audience can weigh one against the other.
