As President Donald Trump posts AI-generated videos of Kharg Island being obliterated, one of Iran’s highest-ranking leaders is appealing to their most powerful allies for assistance. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, the second-highest…
Page A9From§Eachthe supper edition — 31 August 2026
Pentagon leak warns against Iran war; Trump threatens bombing anyway; his approval hits new low.
As it ran on the front
This reporter wants to be very clear about what happened this week, because the sequencing has been badly mangled elsewhere. A military recommendation regarding Iran leaked to the press, and the Pentagon is, understandably, furious — leaks of that kind compromise operational planning and undercut the chain of command, full stop. That fury is legitimate. That fury is the story. Nothing about a leaked internal recommendation should be read as commentary on the underlying policy, which remains sound, which remains a straightforward exercise of maximum pressure: Iran, at a summit, appealing to China and India for support, while the administration keeps the threat of bombing and economic war on the table. That is called leverage. That is called strength. That is called...
...a policy that, according to the same week's polling, is dragging the President's approval to a new low, specifically attributed to the Iran war weighing on his numbers. Did this reporter just call maximum-pressure diplomacy a policy that remains sound in the same column where the public's own scorecard says otherwise? It appears so. Let the record show this reporter is not walking that back so much as noting it happened.…
…(cont) The administration's position, and this reporter continues to find it defensible in the broad strokes, is that a leaked recommendation is a security problem regardless of its contents, and that Iran turning to Beijing and New Delhi for cover only proves the pressure campaign is working — an isolated regime looking for friends is, definitionally, an isolated regime. What this reporter cannot fully reconcile, and will simply present without further spin, is that the polling did not move in the direction the strategy promised. The public was told strength. The public returned a new low. Both of those are, per the wire, true at the same time, and this reporter's job is to report them, not resolve them.
This reporter will have more on the leak investigation as it develops. This reporter will not be revisiting the polling number, because there is nothing more to say about it that the number does not already say better.
“The Pentagon's own people leak a warning against another Middle East war, Trump threatens to bomb Iran anyway, and then acts surprised his approval number craters. That's not a mystery, that's a receipt. The people closest to the war machine are the ones telling you not to pull the trigger.”
“The leak itself is the real scandal here — unauthorized disclosures of military recommendations undermine the President's ability to negotiate from strength. The bombing threats are simply maximum-pressure diplomacy, standard posture, nothing more. That the polling moved against it during the same period is, I'll grant, not the strongest advertisement for the strategy. Strike that from the record.”
The receipts
The Pentagon has pushed back publicly on reporting from over the weekend that multiple senior military leaders have advised War Secretary Pete Hegseth about the risks that would come with further prolonging the Iran war. These warnings…
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
Trump approval dips to new low as Iran war weighs on support: PollPresident Trump’s approval rating sank to a new low in a University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst poll as the Iran war drags on. Just 32 percent of 1,000 respondents to the national survey, which the university conducted Aug. 21-26…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.