Pentagon retires the war's name; the missiles that ended it didn't.

…(cont) Two days after that, on September 5th, U.S. forces destroyed three Iranian oil tankers after Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles at two Navy warships. The carrier and the destroyer evaded them; Central Command called it a failed attack. The operation the Pentagon says ended in May was still producing incidents in September.

By Thursday, the pattern held. The Wall Street Journal reported Iran has resumed producing ballistic missiles — new ones, assembled from existing components at underground sites including Khojir, in more limited quantities than before the war, but produced all the same. This is the program the administration says the strikes destroyed.

That same Thursday, Iranian missiles hit U.S. jets parked at a base in Jordan. And that same day, President Trump said the war would end "immediately" after the midterms — eight days after saying the midterms wouldn't affect the timeline at all. Pick a version. The missiles didn't wait for him to settle on one.

The New York Times reported this week that Vice President Vance had been getting private assessments of the war that didn't match what he, Trump, and other officials were saying in public. There's what gets said at the podium, and there's what the Vice President reads before he walks out to it.

The operation has a retired name, an official end date, and a missile program that kept getting built. It has jets hit the same week officials promise a deadline, and a deadline that already contradicts the one from eight days before. The public got the retired name. The Vice President got the sober briefing. Only one of those describes what's actually happening on the ground.