The hostilities have returned in Iran for the first time in more than a month, as a war that's dragged on for six months ramps up again, with no end in sight. CBS News' Weijia Jiang and Aaron MacLean have the latest.
Page A4From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
Trump calls the Iran conflict 'a relatively little war'; sanctions on Iranian students continue regardless.
As it ran on the front
I wrote this down somewhere — hang on, let me find the page. Here it is: the President, telling reporters the fighting with Iran was 'a relatively little war for us.' Little. I underlined it twice, because I keep coming back to that word. Little.
Funny thing about little. My nephew's four, and when he says something's 'a little bit broken,' I go check, and half the time the whole thing's in two pieces on the floor. So I got curious what 'little' looks like on paper for this one. And what I found isn't on the same page as the President's. Same week, same government, and there's a letter — from a coalition of advocates, addressed to Treasury and State — asking them to lift sanctions that are, and I'm reading this straight off the page, 'impacting Iranian students.' Their words: 'there is absolutely no justification.'…
…(cont) Now I don't know from justification, I'm just a fella with a notebook. But I did a little demonstration at the kitchen table last night — used my wife's flour jar. My wife says I shouldn't touch her flour jar, so this is a one-time thing. I filled it up, took out about one scoop, and asked, 'is the jar still full?' She said, 'depends what you call full.' Which — that's kind of my whole problem here.
Because if the war is little, small enough to fit in a sentence with 'relatively' and 'for us' hanging off the end, does that mean the sanctions on the students — kids who didn't start any of it, near as I can tell from the page — do those get to be little too? Or is it just the war that shrinks, and the sanctions stay their regular size?
I don't have an answer. I've just got the two pages, side by side, and neither one wants to look at the other.
Oh — excuse me, one more thing, before you go. If it's such a little war, why hasn't anybody told the students it's over?
“They shrink the war down to a press-gaggle throwaway line in the same week the sanctions on Iranian kids studying here don't move an inch. Call it little and you get to keep every restriction attached to it without anybody asking why a little war needs a big paperwork trail. That's the whole trick — the size of the war is negotiable, the size of the punishment isn't.”
“'Relatively little' is a technical characterization, it refers to the scale of the exchanges, not — did I say not related to the sanctions program, because those are two entirely separate legal tracks, unless you're actually asking whether they're connected, in which case, yes, obviously, that's the whole point of sanctions.”
The receipts
A leading grassroots advocacy group for the rights of Iranian Americans called on the Trump administration Monday to rescind the recent message it sent when it announced new sanctions against ordinary Iranians—"that the US is at war with…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.