For one thing I didn’t know him.

I did (as with many politicians) cross paths with him on the periphery when he visited Turkey and  gave an interview to the TV network I worked with at the time.

I was vaguely aware of the brief stir his appearance caused within our network (he was a man who knew how to say what people wanted to hear) but I was likely out in the field reporting and don’t remember giving his headline more than a cursory eye roll.

For another I couldn’t have disagreed more deeply with his hawkish brand of American exceptionalism and interventionist policies. He was as President Trump eulogised a man who “never saw a war that he didn’t like.”

Nonetheless I did and do feel sad.

Photo Credit: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service via AFP/Getty Images

Loss of loved ones has felt unusually close to the surface recently.

At the end of 2025 I lost my beloved Gramps, who I’ve already written a bit about.

Heavily pregnant with my daughter who is named after Gramp’s mother with his permission, I couldn’t travel at the time and had to watch the funeral online, which was both difficult but gave everything a sense of unreality and delayed grief with the distance.

Graham: The Protective Older Brother

Graham’s upbringing with some sort of tragedy in the background was something I sort of knew about. It wasn’t until he died I heard the full story of how Graham, after losing both his parents at 22 years old, not only stepped into the role of parent basically for his then 13 year old sister, he went on to become her legal guardian and eventually adopted her so she could receive his military benefits while he served as an Air Force lawyer.

And then I heard about Graham’s ‘there is no they’ story and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

For those who are also hearing about this for the first time the original article by Richard Fontaine in The Atlantic, ‘The Last Of The Three Amigos’, tells the story beautifully but the basic outline is that during a flight Graham was asked by Fontaine how we was so confident in his assertions when it came to foreign policy.

Graham recounted that when he was first elected to the House of Representatives, he kept searching for an elusive “they”.

“They who run things. They who know how things really work. They who know what they are doing. But I couldn’t find the they.”

When he moved to the Senate, he looked for them again, but still found no trace of them. It was only after gaining entry to top-secret briefings, high-level intelligence meetings, and the White House itself that Graham realized, “there is no "they, there is only we”.

It resonated living and reporting in Washington DC. Partly due to a sense of imposter syndrome the Capitol seems to elicit, but also a realisation when you get to a certain age (in my case 40), that this is it.

‘We’ are the ones making the decisions that will shape lives and possibly change lives.

There is no ‘they’. They is us.

It’s as powerful a realisation as it is humbling and terrifying in equal parts.

Young Idealism

I was younger than Graham (in my late twenties) when I had what I thought was an epiphany of my own following the death of my mother.

She said as she was dying something that stuck with me. I was talking about a holiday I hoped we could take and as with so many of those last conversations, they only became important later when I realised they were among the last and they were always a bit convoluted and broken because she was sick and on medication for the pain.

But she said something like ‘let’s actually do it, not just say we’ll do it. It’s so easy to say and then never do.’

Now that piece of advice or wisdom was actually very unlike my mother. First she was one of life’s doers, throwing herself at every adventure and emotion she came across. I loved that about her so much.

Secondly she wasn’t one strictly speaking for advice that could seem judgemental or authoritative. She carried a beautiful gentle soul and so that conversation with her stood out to me because the advice seemed so jarring.

It’s possible she didn’t mean it to be advice at all and was just speaking aloud her own realisation that life is very short all things considered and you should never wait.

For years after her death I incorporated that and altered it into a ‘get living or get dying mantra’ which caused me to experience such extreme moments I had to finally accept that I was not in fact saying what I would do and then doing it but recklessly doing without so much as a thought let alone a word of direction to accompany all that doing.

But it does matter what we do.

Every Action

The day before he died Lindsey Graham was in Kyiv where he spoke about the vital importance of continued American support for Ukraine and announced he had secured White House approval for the most stringent Russian sanctions bill to date.

Now, weeks after his passing, the U.S. Senate passed that legislation on Friday.

Titled the "Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026" after the late senator who championed it, the bill passed with a decisive 86–11 vote.

Graham who I long considered (if at all) as simply another American warmonger, has in fact led a remarkable life of service, long supported Ukrainian independence and freedom and with Russia had been one of the earliest to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat posed by Russia’s Putin.

In his is final days he was on the ground in a conflict zone meeting with Ukraine’s President and pushing President Trump to further efforts to reign in the dictator in the Kremlin and bring an end to his ambitions and actions on the ground in Ukraine.

A worthier last act it’s hard to think of.

Lindsey Graham’s death and the eulogies that have followed have reminded me that every little action we take, observed or unobserved, matters more than we think.

Whether you’re a young person faced with having to make sacrifices for those you love, a person in search of meaning and value or a politician shaping foreign policy in the heart of the world’s superpower, each action big and small adds up to our life and matters more than we imagine in the moment, even and perhaps especially when we feel like we’re making it up as we go along and hanging on by a wing and a prayer.

As Lindsey Graham discovered and shared so succinctly “There is only we, and we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

Postscript

This weeks Notes from America is for everyone missing someone they love.

To Iraj, Trump’s promise of liberation he views as: “A bully, or a powerful force, willing to justify its crimes by framing them as help.”

He lives in a small town and told us during the bombings “I would sometimes confuse the sound of thunder in the sky or a motorcycle passing on the back street with the sound of jets flying overhead several times a night on their way to bomb Tehran.”

“I don’t know how to characterise Iraj” his daughter tells me “but he met my mother as students in London in the early 70’s working under cover to overthrow the Shah of Iran. Once the revolution happened, he left London to help “rebuild” Iran.

He’s a man of great principles. His move back to Iran cost him a lot” his daughter says.

Image: The Pasteur Institute of Iran before the war.

Building

Though retired, Iraj, through his work, will know better than most that buildings are never just bricks and mortar.

Buildings are our houses which become our homes.

The place where if we are lucky, we feel safe, where we wake each morning and use our favorite mug to make our coffee.

Where we love and cry and read and dream.

We have our own cosy little corners. We build our lives and our families in these homes and if we have children we gather as many beautiful things as we can for their nursery.

A little white bunny propped ready to be cuddled in a carefully selected crib.

The buildings are our schools, which we send our children to learn. We wonder “will they fall in love with poetry they way we did?” “Will they become the next President?”

They will, we are all certain, change the world.

There are other buildings too of course, ones vital for human life.

Iraj knows this. “What they fail to grasp regarding the destruction of infrastructure is the impact on the lives, psyches, and—above all—the futures of today’s children. They face a future of worsening health and illness due to the loss of schools, hospitals, power plants, and industrial centers; the bombing of oil facilities in Tehran—resulting in five days of fires and smoke hanging over the city; and the constant dread triggered by any loud noise, fearing it might be another bombing.” Iraj says

“I imagine that the children of Palestine who have lived through the last three years will, in fifteen or twenty years, grow into young adults afflicted by various physical and mental ailments stemming from malnutrition, a lack of sanitation, and so much more.”

But he says “Iran is also vast. Even at the height of the bombings, the landscape of the targeted cities never looked like the ruined land of Gaza.”

Bringing the temple down on their heads

This week Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine gave testimony on Capitol Hill.

From Hegseth it was the usual glaring contradictions of his own earlier claims that Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon had been “obliterated”; its military rendered “combat ineffective for years”; its missile programme “functionally destroyed” and “every single objective” achieved.

Yet Hegseth’s own cost estimate of the war has reached $37.5 billion and he had come to Congress seeking roughly another $67 billion for the Pentagon.

Hegseth doesn’t appear to know what Iraj does: that publicly signalling you are willing to target civilian infrastructure is no way to win a war.

Carrying out those threats and intentionally attacking a civilian object may constitute a war crime.

As the war has progressed multiple attacks on infrastructure (that receive special protection under international law) in Iran have been reported.

In April the World Health Organization’s Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Tehran’s Pasteur Institute (a public health and research centre in Tehran) had sustained significant damage.

In a post on social media he said the centre was “rendered unable to continue delivering health services. It plays an important role in protecting and promoting population health, including in emergencies” adding “Health facilities and health workers must be protected at all times."

I asked Iraj whether any of the buildings or projects he has worked on in his lifetime have been damaged or struck.

“As far as I know, there has been no news of bombings on sites I have worked on. I have mostly designed universities and research institutes. But what difference does that make whether they strike the Pasteur Institute or one of my works?

Either way, my heart breaks.”

Photo credit: Esmaeil Baqaei, Iranian MFA Spokesperson

And it’s not just health facilities being targeted.

In July, Iranian officials said a U.S. strike hit the Bunji desalination plant, cutting water to twenty villages and roughly ten thousand people. The allegation has not been independently verified.

Asked about this attack in a Congress General Dan Caine said he was unaware both of the alleged strike and of any desalination plant being placed on a U.S. target list.

The damage claims are detailed, but U.S. responsibility and whether the facilities were deliberately targeted, has not been verified because America’s most senior uniformed military adviser could not answer a concrete question about the reported U.S. attacks on Iranian drinking water supplies.

Asked for a categorical assurance that the United States would not target infrastructure civilians need to survive, he spoke about procedures and lawyers, but he never said yes.

If it is verified that the U.S. deliberately attacked a facility that remained civilian, or sought to deprive civilians of drinking water, that could constitute a war crime.

The answers to these questions about action America is taking in Iran against protected infrastructure, are not merely moral, they are legal.

The Enemy Has a Vote

Iraj and people in Iran are being directly impacted by decisions made by politicians here in Washington D.C.

And because ‘the enemy has a vote’ as General Dan Caine told Congress, I think that the American and British public, everyone really, should hear from the civilians in Iran living through this.

Who is the enemy? Iran the nation? The regime that killed people protesting, before Trump decided to ‘help’ those protestors.

And what impact does the type of language to “bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong” as President Trump has previously threatened have on the civilian population you claim to be helping?

Iraj told us “psychological rebuilding takes years, and the feeling toward that country [America] is one of hatred and revulsion.”

America has turned a so-called ‘zombie regime’ in Iran, that faced enormous internal pressure from civil society, into one that is now bolstered and emboldened as it is engaged in a fight for it’s survival.

What do you know about Iran?

I asked Iraj to explain his country to someone who has never visited Iran. He told us “Iran is an ancient land with a recorded history inscribed on murals spanning four thousand years of civilization. It is a treasure trove of cultural heritage, poetry, painting, music, architecture, engraving, and subterranean aqueducts (qanats) carved into deserts to supply water—complemented by soaring mountain ranges and vast desert expanses.

He explained about Shahr-e Sukhteh, the Burnt City, where archaeologists found a roughly five-thousand-year-old goblet bearing five images of a wild goat moving towards a tree, which is often described as one of the earliest known examples of animation.

“The world's very first animated work was discovered in the Burnt City, in Zabol, Sistan, dating back thousands of years ago. It is a cylindrical earthenware goblet featuring five images of a mountain goat around its body, each showing the animal in a slightly different positions—so that when the vessel is rotated, the goat appears to jump up to eat from a tree. This utilizes the exact same principle behind 20th-century animation techniques.”

He also named al-Razi, Avicenna and Khayyam: figures whose work shaped medicine, philosophy, mathematics and the Jalali solar calendar.

“Yet” he tells us “beyond all of this, this land is home to extraordinarily warm-hearted people renowned for their hospitality.”

What comes next?

Washington is engaging in increasingly confusing messaging, deliberately ambiguous and contradictory at best and outright lying to the American people at worst.

Meanwhile the reality on the ground in the region threatens to escalate rapidly.

The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. officials and flight-tracking data, reported that additional American special-operations forces had deployed from U.S. bases to the Middle East. Fighter squadrons were being positioned across the region, bombers in the United States and Britain placed on high alert, and more than 150 medics sent to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany which is the primary hospital for U.S. troops wounded in combat in the Middle East.

CENTCOM declined to confirm the movements, citing operational security.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to be in town this coming Tuesday.

The man who is subject to an active International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, allegations he denies, is set to meet with President Trump, again, at the White House.

Dreams of a life

The human cost of decisions made here over the coming days and weeks, will be borne by ordinary civilians like Iraj, whose lives, homes, and futures hang in the balance of choices made thousands of miles away by some people who have little understanding of Iran’s incredible history or it’s proud people.

“I think Mr. Trump has not carried out these actions by mistake; rather, it is his position that grants him such a right — just as previous presidents did in Hiroshima, Vietnam, Libya, Iraq”

Iraj tells me when he returned to Iran “My dream for Iran is a good life and freedom for all its people.

And now, following these bombings, I have developed another dream—or wish: safety for the people.”

Courage

As we were nearing the end of our conversations Iraj added a message in English.

“Thanks Sara . I like to add something : the one who is more curious about atomic energy in Iran is one who has 80 atomic bombs and doesn’t answer to any one.”

Iraj is an architect. He’s spent his life building in the country America is now tearing down.

I’ve done a number of reports on President Trump’s address to the nation and I’ve started working with a brilliant colleague to build on the coverage of Minab I wrote about last week.

But after Trump’s speech this week there were a lot of memories about the Capitol riots. I was there on the ground that day reporting.

I watched police officers get trampled as people stormed into the Capitol building.

And there’s really no point pretending we don’t know the events leading up to that moment.

No one maybe could have predicted exactly what happened but nonetheless there was an air of inevitability about it.

2 years later I deployed to Ukraine.

Photo credit: Maks Levin 26th January 2022. 7:53am, Ukraine/Maks inside the car taking a photo of me as I was preparing for a live shot, usual cigarette in hand to calm the nerves. Back before the world changed unalterably again.

Maks was killed not long after I left Ukraine returning (not to my home and life in the U.S. that I’d been building) but to the U.K. where I got a PTSD diagnosis and thought I’d never report again.

All very woe is me. I never talk openly to people (other than doctors and therapists) about the PTSD, partly out of shame but mostly out of the understanding that so many others have it so much worse.

Those people can’t take time to get a diagnosis, let alone treatment, to find any peace in their soul when war is all around them.

I found myself at that time in 2022 in a barn in the U.K. countryside, and in a sort of purgatory.

I was in a very real way on the brink of life and death and I had to decide for myself which I would choose.

At the time I heard an interview with a poet about survival.

I emailed from the depths of somewhere inside me and from the way that God sometimes (I truly believe) intervenes, this incredible person wrote back to me.

I’ve thought about this person and about the many people who helped me survive that period often.

And of course I think most about Maks Levin, the journalist who was killed by the Russians for his work reporting the truth about what they were doing in their invasion of Ukraine.

I remember him every day of my life.

Even with having had my own children, restarting my career, even on days I think I’ve not thought about him, I have and I am.

I wanted to share part of an email I sent the poet after they took the time to send me an extraordinary reply.

Whilst I’m not ready to share that full story (for one thing I’d want permission from the poet and for another thing, as anyone who has experienced serious trauma might identify with, for a time you want to run as far from those memories and the people (even the ones who saved your life) as humanly possible.

So I include my reply to the poet here on 11/07/2022, verbatim as I sent it (with the exception of giving the first poem I included in my response email a title - the same title I will give this piece. In the original email that first poem was untitled).

The email

“I want to start by thanking you. Receiving your email the very next day I had reached out to you, was such a gift.

I was happy to simply have received a response. I felt as I read your words like I’d sent out a message in a bottle and it had been found and read. That feeling is like a kind of magic.

But it went much further than that. Your advice, your words, I’ve been sitting with and really thinking on.

Your response I felt as an acknowledgment. I’m really here still. I’m really feeling these things. Here is someone experienced understanding, responding, offering solid concrete advice and I can’t thank you enough for that. 

I want to reassure you on two things. 

Firstly the words and advice you wrote to me were truthful and full of compassion. Very far from causing any disturbance it was exactly what I was looking for without really fully knowing what I was looking for. It was more than I could have expected or hoped for. 

You are absolutely correct the advice you gave not to rush made me take a step back. I wanted to respond to your email almost before I’d finishing reading and certainly before I’d absorbed what you’d written.

It made me smile a bit the advice that there’s no rush. Being in a huge rush is a characteristic I’ve long held and honestly in these last months each time I identify a part of myself that has survived, when I thought nothing survived of myself I experience a sort of reassurance. 

I smiled too a bit at the contradiction in my  own words I wrote to you, talking of writing poetry as a ‘calming exercise’ and at the same time seeking a way to fling my notebook of poetry out into the world to someone who might understand. You were right too that of course I know I cannot give that notebook away.

Whilst I sat and read your initial email the line that came into my head was ‘an abdication of responsibility’. I started writing a few words around that.

It clarified something for me that when it comes to what I’m writing now which involves just getting the words down on the page as a feel them and as they come to me but with a clear understanding somewhere that at some point I want to get better at this. Make this work stronger, make sure the truth of the matter I’m trying to get at when I write is best presented. 

I have no doubt your thoughts and advice and exercise which I will attempt is going to help me with that. 

As to my being ok. I feel perhaps I owe you an apology and please let me know if I do. What happened was so far beyond my worst nightmares, pushed me to a place I’ve never been before that even sharing the story or part of the story and even with people who have understood and found ways to make sense of their own traumas feels like a cruelty.

I don’t want to drag anyone else into the painful place I find myself and so if I’ve caused you concern I’m so very sorry. That’s the last thing I’d want.

It’s why I can talk to a former Army Major who provides me PTSD treatment called EMDR about the facts horrible as they are and reach out to a poet like yourself who has experienced and faced trauma but would never utter a word to my sisters about what happened in Ukraine.

I find these days it’s hard to know where to draw the line and I’m having to make assessments as to who I can say what to, knowing I’m not really in a place to make that assessment accurately. 

I am ok in as much as I am medicated and have therapy now. The panic attacks have receded and I feel if not stronger more able to face the days. 

A few months ago when I returned from Ukraine, writing was out of the question and I’d never have been able to send you that email. 

I want to reassure you that I have a good support around me so I wouldn’t want to cause you worry, that’s the last thing I’d want to do. Of course it would not be the full truth to say I’m ok. But I at least feel now some days the potential to one day be ok. 

It’s what I meant in writing survival is no small matter. I’d just never found myself in a place where I’d feel the weight of that fight just to survive. 

I am going to read your books and the documents you’ve sent. I’m making sure not to rush (or trying not to rush!) you’ve given me so much to go on, so much to work with. 

I have so much more I’d like to say and write to you. 

Walking along the dirt path to the little barn I’m staying in now I think to myself of the often quoted Walt Whitman line ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’

I wondered as I was walking, was he absolving himself there or mocking himself? 

I cannot stop at accepting contradicting myself because when I’m facing what’s happened I want, need actually, to find some truth that has not quite registered yet. I hope I can find it and again thank you for your thoughts and advice and direction.

I’m looking forward to writing to you again when I have better articulated my thoughts. 

I include two short poems written with instinct but not where I want them to be yet.

Mostly as well as thanking you I want to let you know just how much having that direction has meant to me. How much it is helping give my mind some focus. Rather than writing and not looking again at what I’ve written I’m thinking more calmly about what it is I want to say. 

I read your poems often and those like your words are a comfort to me. It’s hard actually to fully express my gratitude. 

Some things, once broken, can never be fixed.

When they said you were missing 

I knew you were dead… 

Then screaming bent in two 

As pain savaged me, I sank understanding 

I would not survive this truth. 

The rules

When I was 14 or 15 my father 

Flew from Germany to collect me as the school had issued me a one week suspension for breaking ‘The rules’.

I did not know even then what exactly these rules were

Except to think of them as silly little things like following orders and not going outside after dark.

On the plane to Germany he told me very solemnly I was standing at the edge of a precipice

He said these words aloud on the plane 

If I made one more wrong step he warned

I would find myself at the bottom of that precipice 

He wanted me to understand how hard it would then be to climb back up.

I didn’t understand but I did feel fear and I did feel yes, I was stood on the edge of a precipice 

When I was 6, I ran away from home. I had refused the rule that I could go to to beach with my sisters only if I promised not to swim out in the sea.

It was a rule I refused to have imposed on me.

As they drove off and I was grounded at home I simply opened my window and climbed out and walked the few miles to the beach.

I reached my sisters at the same time my frantic mother and a police car arrived.

What a lot of fuss, I remember thinking, for so small a rule. 

I offer you these confessions as an example 

That I either never learnt the rules

Or never respected them 

It is most likely both

And so I have repeatedly found myself at the bottom of the precipice 

Yes I’ve often thought my father was right the climb up is very arduous 

But what you can’t know until you’ve fallen 

is that (no what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger) what a stupid articulation from someone who probably never so much as stumbled. For how can you be stronger after such a cruel and arduous climb.

You will though be different.

As you pick your way back up, so changed in that journey 

That when you reach the top again you find you are not at the point at which you fell or jumped or slipped over the edge

You have moved on, found yourself at the top in a different location.

The rules:

In the middle of war I was ordered by men who had never been to war to evacuate. 

That rule would would mean: 

1. Leaving behind my teammates 

2. Leaving behind a bomb shelter full of terrified women and children

In this instance I understood perfectly that those rules were made to protect someone else and I understood perfectly why I was breaking them.

Perhaps I will admit, this time I did not understand the cost. It wouldn’t have mattered much. My actions would have remained the same.

For those rules I broke there was no reward.

Not that I wanted a reward.

But that precipice so familiar to me now as I flung myself with all my strength over the edge by choice,

was far steeper 

The drop far longer than I have ever encountered

And have I even landed yet? 

If rules were fair 

My teammate and friend would be alive 

People who are least deserving would not find such false success on the back of following unfair immoral rules.

Who writes these rules?

I think I am still falling so I have time to think about this 

Rules like respect your elder even if your elder is an idiot 

Don’t talk back even when you’re choking on the truth 

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you even if what they’re shoving down your throat is a poison apple Be safe, be small, don’t be any trouble.

The important rules: 

Responsibility to protect 

Thou shalt not kill 

Where then is the headmaster, or the police officer or the judge for all those who ignore these rules with such impunity.

Here is my camera. I witnessed them doing it.

And I recognise a rule breaker being one myself.

We live in a world of rules 

Where someone can execute an innocent man in cold blood, with three bullets, two to the head and one to the chest 

and the world barely blinks 

In some other place right now someone is being issued a parking ticket

They were in the wrong place, just a few seconds too long 

The punishment is immediate 

This is the world we live in 

Where all our rules are wrong. 

This is where the email ended, I excluded only what I hope was a respectful sign off to someone who helped me in a moment I needed it most.

Today

The reason I am sharing this now is because I have been thinking about it every day for years, and because a kind subscriber reminded me that honesty over performance (which I laid out as an aim in my introduction of this substack) is a high bar indeed. But perhaps a worthy one.

I’ve been working in television so long I’m not sure I’d even know how to not perform. But as for honesty? I know something in me recognizes it in others. I know I feel it when I’m being honest. I know how difficult it is even to be honest with ourselves, so it’s an almost impossible standard. But we can have moments. And it takes being scared to say the things that are honest.

This story is true. It’s a tiny fragment of a story maybe I will share fully one day, and maybe I won’t. It’s the part that won’t heal, even with all the blessings since, even with all the fight I’ve put in.

I share it because it’s as powerful a reminder as I can think to give against endless war, for Americans and Brits, against what is happening in Iran, in Gaza, in Ukraine.

When civilians are being attacked and killed, we have to choose a side, and we have to fight with everything we have.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.

This warning goes further than just war. I issue it during a week where people (myself included) have been talking and reporting about what might happen next with elections in the United States.

Nothing, I promise you, nothing is guaranteed. Our democracy, our safety, our children’s safety, our own lives, it can all come crashing down in a moment.

I don’t know if Alistair Cooke would approve of this level of self-introspection and sharing, and I desperately want to go and research that, but there I would go performing again. This isn’t a performance. It’s the most honest thing I know to say right now, in this moment.

Some things, once broken, can’t be fixed, won’t ever be fully healed, and can’t be undone. I wish we could heed that warning, myself included, instead of repeatedly burning it all down.

And so, this is where you find me, Notes from America subscribers. On the floor of my child’s nursery, exhausted, sad, trying to take stock of this moment in time and history to think of something useful to impart, but caught in the past and a pain that reminds me every day that some things, once broken, can never be fixed.

Makan Nasiri

On a Farsi radio report the mother of Makin Nasiri speaks.

As it turns out you don’t need to speak Farsi to understand the break in a mother’s voice when she’s speaking about her dead son. [1]

The language of pain is universal.

Makan Nasiri was born on February 28, 2018.

He was the fourth child of the Nasiri family.

On the morning of his seventh birthday, that had fallen this year during Ramadan, he went to school.

He was a first-grade student at the Shajareh-ye Tayyabeh school in Minab.

At 10:00am that day, the schools staff began to contact parents to pick up their children according to Amnesty Internationals interviews.

Roughly fifteen minutes later Iran’s state media sent out an alert, closing schools across the country.

The U.S. along with Israel had begun bombing Iran.

The warnings before Minab

When Makan was around one year old, an American analyst working in the U.S. had reportedly identified the building as a school according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press. [2]

That information does not appear to have made its way adequately through the relevant military and intelligence organisations.

Makan Nasiri’s Father

“Makan was a kind boy; he had been going to gymnastics classes for about 2 years and followed the sport closely. Whenever there was a ceremony or event at the local Husseiniyah, he would come with us and help out with whatever he was told to do.”

That was a description from Makan’s father Syrus Nasiri in interviews with Iranian media, describing his boy.

The Fault in the System

2020: The Pentagon’s old intelligence database was no longer adequate

In 2020, two years after Makan was born, The Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] was using its longstanding database called MIDB. A newer system, MARS, was being developed to replace it.

In November 2020, the Government Accountability Office warned: “The Defense Intelligence Agency’s legacy system, the Modernized Integrated Database (MIDB) … is unable to meet current needs.”

The report explained that MIDB was more than 20 years old, relied heavily on people manually updating records and lacked the capacity to hold all the intelligence needed by military users. [3]

It also recorded a danger in the new system. MARS was intended to let many more users add and update information, but GAO said: “It is unclear how DIA will ensure that these records are checked for quality and fully validated in a timely manner.”

The Pentagon knew that its old system was no longer sufficient. But it also knew that moving to a larger, faster system [MARS] created a separate problem, how to make sure new information was accurate and reached everyone quickly enough.

The report establishes that the system’s ability to  update, validate and share intelligence had already been identified as a risk as far back as 2020.

Minab 28th Feb 2026

Brightly coloured murals on the walls of the school were clearly visible in satellite imagery according to a meticulous investigative reconstruction by The Guardian [4]

That investigation confirmed that the primary school sat directly adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy complex.

But investigators emphasized there was absolutely no evidence of military use within the school itself and that the school’s classroom building and playground is walled off from the rest of the IRGC compound.

Iranian media report that after the first strike hit, the children were gathered in a central area of the school.

Then another strike hit. The building collapsed burying children and teachers under the rubble.

After a strike hits, and I’ve reported from the aftermath of some, the frantic, desperate search for loved ones starts.

The sound emitted by a parent finding out a child has died is one you never want to hear and once heard will never forget.

But for some, including Makan’s parents, the search is longer, the hope more cruel.

Hamzeh Rahinejad, Makan's uncle was among those searching. “I was holding a piece of sterile gauze and a bag, searching through the rubble. Every piece of flesh or finger I found, I would place on the sterile gauze and take to the forensics department."

Makan’s uncle explained to Iranian media that Makan, like several members of his maternal family, had a mole-like mark on his hands, feet, and parts of his body. In winter, these marks would become darker.

So his uncle was searching for those specific markings among the dead.

2022: RAND warned that intelligence concentrated on enemies, not changing civilian life

Makan was around four years old when in America a congressionally required study was carried out by the independent think tank RAND.

It was to examine how the Pentagon understood and learned from civilian casualties. [5]

Its clearest finding was that “Intelligence efforts focus on the enemy, limiting the resources available to understand the broader civilian picture.”

Buildings do not always retain the same purpose. Something once connected to a military compound may later become a clinic or a home on in the case of Minab… a school.

The Pentagon could possess extraordinary detail about an enemy site while still failing to maintain an equally current picture of the civilians living in and around it.

RAND recommended bringing open-source information, civilian movements and contemporary local conditions into continuously updated military assessments.

August 2022: The Pentagon ordered civilian information to be added to MIDB and MARS

After the RAND report the Pentagon didn’t dismiss the findings.

Instead it seems they set about trying to fix what had been identified and produced a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan [6].

The plan acknowledged: “Historically, joint targeting processes have largely focused on analyses of effects on adversaries.”

It said fewer resources had been devoted to understanding civilian objects and the civilian environment.

The plan then called for information about schools, hospitals, civilian infrastructure and the wider civilian environment to be integrated into the Pentagon’s intelligence databases, including MIDB and its replacement, MARS.

It also ordered the creation of a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, described as the Department’s “hub and facilitator” for analysis, learning and training on civilian harm, with the aim of making those lessons part of ordinary military planning rather than something examined only after civilians had been killed.

Minab 2026

Mojtaba Ghahremani, the Chief Justice of Hormozgan Province, stated that due to the high destructive power of the missiles used, no trace of Makan Nasiri’s body has been found, even after more than 100 days and more than 100 DNA samples.

According to him, efforts to find even a strand of hair and conduct DNA testing have led nowhere.

Harm Reduction Unit Cuts

In 2024 when Makan was around five, the new Trump administration took over.

Under Trump’s new Secretary of Defence, officials were instructed to prepare plans to dismantle the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence.

By March 2025, Pentagon leaders were moving to wind down the wider Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response programme, rescind Biden-era directives and remove or reassign many of the specialists who had been advising commanders on civilian protection. Administration officials argued they wanted commanders to focus more on combat effectiveness and “lethality”.

There is not yet a public document proving that the dismantling of the Pentagon’s civilian-protection programme caused the bombing of the school in Minab.

But there is a documented paper trail of warnings.

The Pentagon knew its old intelligence system no longer met current needs and that records added to the replacement system would have to be checked and validated quickly.

It also knew that military intelligence concentrated more consistently on enemies than on the changing lives of civilians around them. And in 2022, it explicitly ordered information about civilian buildings and communities to be integrated into the very databases used by military analysts and target developers.

The question beneath all of this is brutally simple: how, in 2026, did information that a building was a school, fail to reach the people preparing it to be struck?

Red Flags

In an exclusive this week, CNN’s Zachary Cohen reports sources claiming U.S. commanders bypassed warnings about outdated intelligence ahead of strike on the school.

“The Pentagon is pressing everyone to move faster,” one of the sources told CNN about the decision to override warnings about the old intelligence. “A lot of former hedge-fund people and made-for-TV personalities in the mix. But leadership at CENTCOM did not push back either.” [7]

Washington D.C. July 2026

As of today the Pentagon has still NOT provided the American public and most importantly the parents of the children killed in the Minab bombing, Makan Nasiri’s parents, with a full answer.

We start where we began.

With the voice of Asieh Rahinejad, Makan's mother, breaking as she spoke of her missing son and his empty grave.

“Perhaps God heard my voice. When I thought about having to bury Makan in the ground, I never expected it, it never even crossed my mind. I was just praying that I wouldn't have to put Makan under the dirt. Maybe that’s why no trace of him was found, because I just couldn't bear it."

Makan Nasiri’s case has reportedly been closed and has been designated as “missing ."

Iranian experts believe the missile directly struck the child's body, only one of his shoes and a blue sweater were ever found.

[PHOTO CREDIT: Zohreh Saberi / Los Angeles Times]

SOURCE LINKS:

1. https://www.radiofarda.com/a/iran-minab-makannasiri/33787932.html

2. https://apnews.com/article/iran-school-strike-baluch-trump-2a134a5c74d80db763db4c3eb6d0d847

3. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-57.pdf

4. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/mar/03/minab-school-bombing-how-the-worst-mass-casualty-event-of-the-iran-war-unfolded-a-visual-guide

5. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA400/RRA418-1/RAND_RRA418-1.pdf

6. https://media.defense.gov/2022/Aug/25/2003064740/-1/-1/1/CIVILIAN-HARM-MITIGATION-AND-RESPONSE-ACTION-PLAN.PDF

7. https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/07/politics/us-commanders-intelligence-iran-school

Reporting this will be part of the history books.

Will it though?

In the lead up to the celebrations the Capitol was draped in red, white and blue.

The Washington Monument lit up, the Pentagon had the Stars and Stripes projected onto it.

Everything from national monuments to laundry delivery service vans draped in the colours of the American flag.

It was an impressive patriotic display, visually striking, but maybe because of all the reported events leading up to the day, maybe because I’m a Brit in America, or more likely a mixture of all of the above, I felt a distinct sense of underwhelm and that feeling I experienced I think was (at least partly) felt by some Americans, given the views expressed about concerns of the current trajectory they felt their country was on.

When we report history, which story gets told?

I could go for pages on the current administration’s handling of the event. I could tell you about the white supremacist-linked group march through D.C. on the day. Or the disrupted chaotic events of the day itself in part due to the intense heat and thunderstorms.

I was in NYC on the day of the 4th and as the lightning hit both there and back home in D.C. and the rain fell you could not ignore the symbolism that nature provided.

Like looking out a window to find it’s raining when you yourself are crying.

But the ideals upon which America was founded are larger than any one person or administration and so I’m not going to go into the minutiae of that particular day.

Photo Credit: Kylie Cooper/Reuters: Lightning flashes near the National Mall, as thunderstorms in the area affect Fourth of July celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.

So whose story do we tell?

Let history record that we saw it all, the blood, the bombs, the killing carried out by America and its allies and then a nation celebrated with fireworks and hot dogs.

250 years on and despite America’s Independence, Britain and America remain in many ways inextricably linked.

How many wars have we conducted together now? I’ve lost count.

Our ‘special relationship’ measured in the bodies of the people, the families, the children, we claim to have liberated.

Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya.

Gaza is currently still being bombed daily, funded and supported by America.

Since the implementation of the ceasefire, UNICEF and humanitarian updates report that Palestinians, including many children, have continued to be killed.

That’s children still being killed despite the official truce.

Doctors and humanitarian workers in Gaza use the acronym WCNSF, which stands for Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.

It was coined to logistically and medically categorize the unprecedented number of orphaned, injured children who have lost their entire extended families.

How many centuries will the trauma, which we all witnessed, inflicted by those attacks, last do you think?

Lebanon has been invaded and bombed by Israel, (despite a supposed ceasefire) again funded and supported by America.

The Associated Press has referred to Israel’s ground operations in Lebanon as an invasion in its reporting, based on the reality of what is happening on the ground.

Israel’s military actions include an intense ground escalation, thousands of troops crossing the border and mass displacement in southern Lebanon and official statements from Israeli leadership indicating intentions for a prolonged occupation.

The war in Iran is in the middle of yet another fragile ceasefire after America and Israel bombed it again under the auspices of liberation for oppressed Iranians but with the goals shifting considerably once they realised Iran could block the Strait of Hormuz without the navy that America claimed to have “completely wiped out.”

How do you write about a celebration when America is at war and Britain has been either directly or indirectly involved in all the above-mentioned conflicts, and countless more.

Cruel Britannia

In 1775, a year before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, a speech was delivered to British Parliament called ‘Conciliation with the Colonies’.

It was delivered by an Irish MP called Edmund Burke.

He had suffered the loss of a child and the speech reflects, to my reading, an understanding anyone who has not suffered significant loss could not grasp.

He was not for American Independence but speaking to Parliament, he identified with clarity a warning:

“In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.”

That warning seems to me to carry as much weight today as it did then.

The price a nation pays when it betrays its own ideals.

This year, like the 250 years before it, Americans marked the dream, the idea, laid out by the founding fathers: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

If only. Happy 4th.

President Trump painted the reflecting pool what he called ‘American flag blue’ in a renovation project that cost $14.7 million and ran over budget and is now plagued by algae and peeling paint.

It’s part of the 250th anniversary of America’s Independence celebration on July 4th.

It bothered me later how when you get down to the reflecting pool and look at the colour of the water, it is, patently obvious it is not, as the administration tried to claim after initial reports of the issue, ‘crystal clear’.

Once again, an American administration is asking us to ignore the evidence before our own eyes.

America Then

This isn't the first time the Reflecting Pool has mirrored a distorted reality.

At the 1922 dedication of the Lincoln Memorial the then President Harding lauded national harmony (Lincoln was known as the enforcer of emancipation) whilst Black attendees were forced into a roped off segregated section.

From that crowd, the ceremony's only Black speaker, Dr. Robert Russa Moton delivered a speech that was heavily censored by white officials.

Photo Credit: Dr. Robert Russa Moton delivers his keynote address at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. Library of Congress photo.

America Now

Today, that roped-off boundary has expanded globally under American sponsorship.

In 1922, the rope was not just a physical barrier, it marked a moral one.

The nation celebrated liberty while simultaneously deciding that some people would experience those ideals from a segregated area.

A century later, the boundaries are no longer confined to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

They are expressed in foreign policy, in whose suffering commands outrage, whose deaths are investigated, and whose rights are treated as universal.

As Washington spent millions attempting to paint the pool a pristine, artificial blue and billions on its war in Iran, this week the UN Independent Commission released a report on Gaza.

I will provide a reader warning that below I include some extremely harrowing details from the report

Genocide

On Tuesday a UN Independent commission released a report of their findings that “based on the evidence reviewed… the Commission finds on reasonable grounds that the Israeli authorities and the Israeli security forces have continued to commit the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Gaza Strip”

The Commission also finds a “clear pattern” of intentionally targeting Palestinian children.

20,179 Palestinian children have been killed, and 44,143 injured by Israeli security forces since October 7th, 2023, according to the Commission of Inquiry.

The report is 92 pages long. It is an eviscerating document that details with horrifying clarity the mechanisms of genocide and its application to children backed by evidence including eyewitness interviews, testimony from medical professionals, medical scans, videos and photographs.

I challenge anyone with any doubt in mind (or not in mind) about what Israeli soldiers are doing to Palestinian children, to read it and not cry.

I want to lift verbatim some of the evidence the Commission documents in the report -

On page 16:

“On 12 April 2024 at 13:00, a 10 day-old-baby boy was shot by a quadcopter while being breastfed by his mother inside their tent in Nuseirat camp. The mother was alone in the tent, breastfeeding her baby, when a single bullet from a quadcopter hit the baby in the head and exited through the back of his head, hitting the pillow behind her. The baby survived but sustained brain injuries and now suffers from seizures.”

The Commission concludes that the quadcopter controller would have been able to see inside the tent and assesses that the target was a mother and a baby.”

On page 22:

“On 25 January 2025, at around 20:30, in Muthallath Al-Shuhada, south of Jenin, a two-year-old girl was shot in the back of her head while she was having dinner with her family and died immediately. She is the youngest child to have been killed by the Israeli security forces in the West Bank since 7 October 2023.”

I urge you to find time to read the full report -

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session62/a-hrc-62-crp-2.pdf

Photo credit: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

The image shows Inas Abu Maamar, holding her 5-year-old niece, Saly, who was killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza on October 17, 2023.

America Then and Now

The modern rules of war were forged in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials.

The international community codified the 1949 Geneva Conventions to try and establish a strict boundary, that civilians must never be targeted, and the weapons of war must distinguish between the combatant and the innocent.

A way to ensure that even in war, there’s a bare minimum of how you treat people.

The United States championed this, but from the first moments of inception, there was an awareness that these rules were built on a fault line.

An American, Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Chief U.S. prosecutor of Nuremberg, in his 1945 opening statement delivered this explicit warning:

“We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”

Photo credit: Justice Jackson Delivering the Opening Statement at Nuremberg. Courtesy of the US Army Signal Corps. Katherine Fite Lincoln Papers, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum.

There’s an interesting historical link I came across in the speech delivered in 1945 by Justice Jackson and Robert Moton’s 1922 speech at the opening of the Lincoln Memorial.

Some of the most powerful sentences often quoted from both of them were written in their original statements but were not actually spoken out loud.

For Justice Jackson that line

“To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”

Decades later, and today, that chalice has reached American lips, and the global legal system faces a reckoning.

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry’s report assembles extensive evidence of Israel’s military operations it says demonstrates the systemic killing, starvation, and direct targeting of Palestinian children and legally constitutes continuous acts of genocide under international law.

The Commission’s report also places renewed scrutiny on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who already faces an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court on alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Now, as then, (though it most certainly will not have been what President Trump was intending) the pool is reflecting the truth back to us.

For decades, the United States has steadily chipped away at the very global architecture it helped construct after the Second World War.

We saw it when Washington bypassed the UN Charter to wage war in Vietnam. We saw it in the unilateralism of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and we see it today in the selective enforcement of human rights and the devastating war in Gaza.

The America of today has not only not demonstrated the principles of freedom were of universal application, both Democrats and Republicans alike have diminished and degraded the internal norms and rules of war and protection for children and civilians to such a great extent that rules of war and international norms are now as murky as the Reflecting Pool itself.

The devastating consequences of this are documented in the Gaza report.

America’s 250th

Here is the uncensored line in Dr Robert Moton’s speech at the 1922 opening of the memorial to Abraham Lincoln:

“My fellow citizens, in the great name which we honor here today, I say unto you that this memorial which we erect in token of our veneration is but a hollow mockery, a symbol of hypocrisy, unless we together can make real in our national life, in every state and in every section, the things for which he died.”

A more fitting tribute for America’s 250th I cannot think of.

President Trump has spoken on the man who would be Britain’s next Prime Minister saying he’s heard he’s “extremely liberal, extremely,” when asked about what he knew him.

I am of course talking about Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor or as Trump referred to him ‘he was, I guess, the mayor of a town.”

That ‘town’, the City of Manchester, is one I came to know and deeply respect (and first encounter Burnham) during the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, that killed 22 people.

The people, the city, their mayor, all showed a humbling resilience I usually only witness in war zones.

President Trump also reminded those gathered at the White House Wednesday that he “gave Keir Starmer some pretty good advice: “I said open up the North Sea,” which he said he doubted Burnham would do.

That is the advice of the President of the United States, “whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.”

(Credit: Mary Schmich)

No. 1: Call him Daddy.

Flattery will get you everywhere with Trump.

Take a leaf out of Mark Rutte’s book (known here by some in D.C. as the Trump Whisperer) and praise him effusively before you call him out or negotiate with him.

When Rutte made his now famous off the cuff remark at a NATO summit, Trump absolutely loved it.

What is it they say about keeping your friends close…

No 2: Two Birds One Stone.

Up commitments to defense spending and NATO cooperation in a major way.

In very specific scenarios, and with massive caveats, Trump has been right about some of Britain’s defence challenges.

Across both his first and second terms, Trump has successfully pressured NATO member states to commit more to their own security.

He recently hit the roof over Keir Starmer’s initial refusal to let the U.S. military use our joint strategic base at Diego Garcia for strikes against Iran, a high-stakes standoff that deeply frustrated Washington before London finally relented.

But Trump isn't the only one sounding the alarm.

Back home, Britain's own military commanders have been openly warning that our hollowed-out defense resources are woefully, dangerously inadequate after years of budget cuts.

I’d also just add it would be worth taking a cheeky look at Donald Trump’s advice to "open up the North Sea."

I’m told there are some possible (and not entirely inconceivable) regulatory backdoors that could potentially benefit everyone whilst maintaining environmental protections.

“If you succeed in doing this, tell me [and every recent former PM] how.”

(*Schmich again)

No.3: Pick your U.K Ambassador to the U.S. wisely

Now, let’s be fair, Sir Christian Turner has been a fantastic steady hand in Washington, quietly bringing some dignity back to the embassy after the appalling Mandelson saga.

But if I were to have a wild card piece of advice it would be to use a Trump trick and alongside Turner appoint a ‘Special Envoy’.

And (please stay with me on this one!) it would be Nigel Farage.

He’s more than just chummy with Trump. They’ve got a personal history and relationship.

Burnham badly needs a direct backchannel to the Trump administration and Nigel Farage is one of the few British politicians who has it.

Now I don’t doubt he’d turn it down, because of other key priorities he has right now, like running the Reform Party and other highly questionable dealings but… Parliament’s Standards Commissioner HAS launched a formal investigation into Farage over a £5 million gift he received from a crypto-billionaire and major Reform UK backer Christopher Harborne, so there is a very real (albeit unlikely) possibility under parliament's rules that the investigation could see Farage kicked out of Parliament and his seat threatened.

A cushy, ceremonial role in Washington might not look so bad after all.

A more realistic choice: Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston.

Despite her fancy title (and in case you hadn’t noticed Trump LOVES our pomp and ceremony) Stuart has the ‘anti-elite’ appeal that Burnham himself does.

Her charm has always been that she doesn't sound like a typical Westminster insider.

The former Labour MP rose to national prominence (and gained the respect of Farage himself) as the chair of the official Vote Leave campaign.

Stuart bridges the massive chasm between a progressive Labour government and a populist U.S. administration.

And wait for it… the Trumpian ‘pièce de résistance’ if you will… Stuart was born in Bavaria, the same region from which Trump’s paternal grandparents emigrated to the United States.

Appointing Gisela Stuart would offer a cultural connection to Donald Trump’s own family history.

It is a small historical footnote, but it’s the kind of thing that plays disproportionately well in the Trump administration.

That’s it.

Those are my three main pieces of advice for Burnham, if he wins, to become (if not a Trump Whisperer) at the very least a well informed Prime Minister, with a back channel to the President he can lean on, and be kept up to date on the debacle of the day from here in America.

Most importantly though, far from capitulating to Trump, these are ways I’ve witnessed time and again, as some of the most successful techniques to get what you want out of America’s mercurial President.

And as much as Westminster shouldn't underestimate President Trump and his MAGA supporters, nor should Americans underestimate Britain's likely next Prime Minister.

Meeting and interviewing Burnham

Having interviewed Andy Burnham myself, in the awful aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing, I can tell you this.

Not only did he capture with his words and actions the immense grief of his city and its need to mourn, he showed what is in my opinion, the rarest of signs of a true public servant: genuine kindness and empathy for the people he represents.

[Photo Credit: Mayor of Manchester Andy Burnham arrives to pay his respects for the victims of the Manchester bombing, Manchester, England, May 25, 2017, Nigel Roddis/EPA]

Burnham made time to provide me (an unknown correspondent for a fledgling network) an interview, rather than just chasing the major legacy networks.

And he earned my personal respect for that and what it represented to me then and I’ve remembered now. It stayed with me.

Burnham is no bougie Westminster politician with a plummy accent. He is a tough, no-nonsense Northerner who speaks the language of anti-establishment defiance fluently.

As the recent UFC event that took place at *checks notes* oh yes, the White House, proved, Trump loves a blood-sport.

He may find himself unexpectedly impressed by the savage, unapologetic taking-down of Keir Starmer that his potential new counterpart in Downing Street just executed.

To borrow a nickname (from what the Americans like to repeatedly term the ‘working class’ North - they’ve clearly never watched ‘The Real Housewives of Cheshire’) and that is actually the toughest, most beautiful, part of the U.K. that built Burnham)…

‘The King of the North’ is coming, and he isn't likely to play by London's (or hopefully Washington’s) rules.

Before the ink had even dried on the memorandum signed on Wednesday separately by President Trump in Versailles and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, it appeared that the Secretary of Defense (and former Fox TV host) Pete Hegseth had directly contradicted point number 1 ‘to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other’.”

Speaking to reporters, he warned that if Tehran fails to comply with the terms, the U.S. will react aggressively: “If Iran doesn’t comply, then we’re more than able to reimpose an ironclad blockade.”

FUBAR

Hegseth has long stated what we’ve been more than aware of here in D.C., which is that Hegseth himself favours what is termed as ‘peace through strength’ which in his own words means ‘bombing’.

Speaking to reporters after the deal was signed he concluded, “This agreement came after months of bombing and a blockade that was impenetrable. Iran was put in a position where they had to come to the table,” which he contrasted to Obama’s approach of what he claimed was “begging and talking.”

Not to bog us down in the details, but this is paragraph one of the MOU:

“The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war by signing this M.O.U. declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph.”

For those interested in the detail, the NYT has a solid breakdown paragraph by paragraph.

Luckily no one seems to pay too much attention to Hegseth’s ‘bro talk’ these days, since he gathered the good and the great of the military last year to deliver the historic warning “to [America’s] enemies FAFO,” the acronym for “F**k around and find out.”

That was before the war in Iran but after he had ‘risked the safety of U.S. service members’ by sharing information about targets, timing and aircraft of an operation on the Signal messaging app.

Hegseth has also during his ‘reign of error’ (as I think of it) adopted the White House rebranding of the Department of Defence to the Department of War.

A little on the nose if you ask me, but historically a return to the original 1789 name of the department.

But back to Iran and the MOU.

For clarity, it is NOT a peace deal.

It’s a framework that starts off a 60-day clock for a peace deal.

Love or loathe President Trump, he did do something many administrations have long wanted to do, which is degrade Iran’s military capability significantly.

The slight issue with that though is that not only did it hand the Iranian regime a powerful new weapon (the realisation that they could cause worldwide economic disruption in the Strait of Hormuz) and despite this administration’s repeated claims, the regime in Iran has NOT ‘changed’.

All of that is before you even consider that if Iran (long having proven itself untrustworthy when it comes to negotiations and deals) didn’t think it needed a nuclear weapon before this war, it doesn’t seem improbable to assume it sure as heck will now.

The memorandum of understanding though IS a pause, and so (even as this deal is already being seriously tested) I think it’s worth reflecting on what it cost to get here.

The claim is that the deal cost the American taxpayers zero dollars. Whilst that might be true of the deal itself, the war it took to get the framework in place so far has cost billions.

But I want to talk to you today about the cost of war. The real cost.

GROWING UP IN A MILITARY FAMILY

When I was a little girl and my father—a fighter pilot in the RAF—was away on deployment, I would say a little prayer to myself.

It was always to another little girl I imagined being somewhere out there on ‘the other side’ of whatever it was grown-ups were fighting about.

It went something along the lines of ‘I promise my daddy will take care of your daddy, if your daddy takes care of mine’. Prayer completed, I felt a sense of relief.

Such was my childish understanding of war.

The reality of course (as I’ve come to understand a little, and learning the hard way, in my career as a foreign correspondent) is this:

War costs the lives of people who are loved.

Not just the enemies destroyed. The civilians ‘collateral damage’ and of course the men and women serving their country to protect us all, including my own children.

So with all this in mind, I decided to speak to my father.

I wanted to get Dad’s thoughts on what calls you to serve your country, or rather him specifically.

The below interview is verbatim but edited for brevity.

Dad: I think anyone joining the armed services has to have patriotism as an element of it. Now it might be in the background, it might be there largely as a result of family members.

I was very aware that my grandfather (John Charles Kubale), my mother’s father, had served in the Second World War. My other grandfather, although he wasn’t military, he was superintendent of Brighton General Hospital, so he was very much a part of the war effort at home, and I think without ever being right at the forefront of my mind, very much in the background was the knowledge that serving one’s country is something that you might have to do one day, is something that not too long ago people in my family were engaged in.

My own father was bombed, basically, because he lived on the South Coast. He used to spot the Doodle Doodle bugs coming over [the nickname Brits gave to the V-1 flying bombs], so although it wasn’t something that was on my mind every day, that was part of the context.

Image credit: A German Fiesler Fi 103 flying-bomb (V1 ‘Doodlebug’) in flight, seen by the gun camera of an intercepting RAF fighter, moments before its destruction. Image credit: © IWM (C 5736) ROYAL AIR FORCE: AIR DEFENCE OF GREAT BRITAIN (ADGB)

Dad: Initially I wanted to fly. But then when it comes to actually joining the air force, of course, you reflect on the fact that, yeah, okay, hopefully you’ll end up flying some nice fast jets, but you might have to actually go to war with them.

Once I joined, I was very much aware of it and I realised that, yeah, sorry, matey, you get to fly fast jets, but actually this is why, this is your war role.”

I wanted to make my grandfather proud of me and my parents, particularly my grandfather [John Charles Kubale], and it was a shame that he died whilst I was finishing officer training.

The one person in the family who would have really understood and appreciated what it means to graduate as an officer in the Royal Air Force, in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, was granddad, and unfortunately he died and his funeral was right at the end of my officer training.

I’ve [still] got his photo by my bed in his uniform. So I was very close to my granddad.

Sara: “People here in America are calling this war with Iran a war of choice, and you know there’s no doubt that Iran is a threat to America, a threat to the world. But there’s a lot of discussion about the sort of breakdown of international order, and I know that the military tends to be quite sort of isolated in terms of, you follow the orders that you’re given when you’re in there, I imagine, but, I suppose, what I’m trying to ask is what is the weight of having the politicians deciding when and where men and women will go to war, what impact does that have on you as a person serving?”

Dad: “I think a mixture, really a mixture. You do get a bit cynical about the politicians, because you see that they’re not military types at all.

That then fell into quite a bit of cynicism about the leadership of the services as well, and a feeling that these were guys who very much got where they are by being yes-men and toeing the party line and not necessarily defending our interests.

Maverick leaders used to sticking up for the front line will not go far, and that was the sad fact, and that’s what made us quite cynical.”

When I asked what ‘sticking up for those on the frontline’ means, Dad told me: the right equipment.

I asked my father about the reality of life on the frontline.

Dad: “So if [we] take out the target as [we’ve] been trained it’s a success, and the post damage assessment report, PDA, shows that it’s been a good hit, then you feel great because you’ve done a good job, and that’s what you’ve trained to do. You might think you’re good, but you want to produce the goods when it happens, when it matters.

You don’t want to cock it up. Cock-ups do happen, not always their fault, it could be the equipment, could be bad intelligence, they could get shot down, they could get killed.

So these things happen, but if you survive and you’ve done the job and you’ve taken out the target, that’s what it’s about. You feel very good, and that’s the frontline experience in a nutshell.

On the front line when you’re actually on operations, you’re so focused on the operation, you’re given targets, you’re not selecting targets, you’re given targets.

Your job is to produce the plan using all the assets, engage with the big package. It won’t be just you, it’ll be 100 other parts, you’ll be one part of it. You’ll be told to do this, this is your part, this is your time on target, etc.

And you would just be totally engaged in doing that.

Later on you’ve got the luxury of sitting back in your armchair and thinking, oh, so when we did all of that attacking all those months ago, all those years ago, that’s the time that you think, you read the papers, you read the analysis, you discuss it all, and often it gives you a much bigger picture.

In the armed forces, you have to gee yourself up; they’ll be quite gung-ho in terms of, yeah, did we hit the target? Did we achieve the mission? That’s great. They’re not going to be immediately analysing when they get back to the debrief, ‘Was that really high value? Do you think there were any civilian casualties?’

In the quiet of the night, individuals might well ask this question.

But for the morale and the esprit de corps, that tends to come later, because you’re trying to get through a difficult situation, you know, operations where some people might not be coming back, so you just want to just kind of get the job done to the best of your ability.

You leave the deeper analysis to when it’s all over, all the tea and medals have happened, and you’re back to family life.

On the front line, you’re totally involved in doing your job.

You trust, you trust that the people above you, who’ve given you these targets, who’ve given you these missions, know what they’re doing, but it’s not your place to question that. You have to trust the system—that the people who are trained, paid, talking to lawyers (because we know that lawyers are very much engaged, certainly on the British side, every target goes to lawyers) so it’s kind of not our place.

When it lands on us as a task, as a mission, we’ve got to accept that that has been given the green light, and our job is now to do the mission.”

TRUST

The deal, already looking shaky, doesn’t provide clear answers.

And those that deserve those answers are not just the American public and indeed the British and every country involved or bombed by Iran and put under serious economic strain because of this war.

No one deserves those answers more than the families of the American service members who made the ultimate sacrifice and the families of the schoolchildren who died in a bombing of an Iranian school on the first day of the war.

You probably don’t know their names. Such is the way of war.

But the families and friends who lost them do, and they won’t ever forget.

The service men and women remaining on the frontline still have to trust those at the top know what they’re doing.

Every time President Trump describes the bombing campaign as a ‘skirmish’ or Hegseth avoids releasing information on the investigation into what happened when the school in Iran was hit, I wince at the thought of families whose sons and daughters and fathers and mothers didn’t come home.

However hard they prayed.

This was no ‘skirmish’. It was, it still might be, a war.

And the President who promised Americans “no more forever wars” and the Secretary of Defense have paid the price of this war by (in my opinion) by undermining something critical to any leadership, any memorandum of understanding, any chance of lasting peace: trust.

I will end this by saying something that profoundly touches me about the way Americans in general respect their military members.

You regularly hear people here say what I will end this piece on now.

To the service men and women who have given their lives in defence of their country, for those who made the ultimate sacrifice, and for my great-grandfather, for my own Gramps (Peter Firth) who survived the bombings as a child to go on to become a doctor and help women as they brought new lives into this world and as my father once described him a ‘irrepressible’ man (and the kindest Gramps I could ever have hoped for.)

And of course to my own father, a man who I was told once when I was very young watching him fly, ‘your father is extraordinarily talented’ or something along those lines.

I just remember the swell of pride at the words (and Dad, I have no doubt your own grandad would have been extraordinarily proud of you, as indeed your own father and the rest of us were and are)…

Thank you for your service.

I registered the domain name ‘Letters from America’ whilst I was at the airport, not realising until weeks later it was of course called ‘Letter from America.’

The humbling thing about journalism is you’re constantly being reminded of the basics - do your research.

(Reporting from outside the White House Fri 12th June 2026. Photo Credit: Mohamad Dankar)

When I arrive in a new country as a correspondent, I like to hit the ground running and get out and talk to people.

But this time was different. Two pregnancies and two beautiful children altered my ability to do things as usual.

In fact, to be perfectly honest, it’s changed my entire life.

That is to say I have skin in the game now.

As annoying as it is for a Brit to admit, America remains the centre of global power. What happens here rarely stays here.

From Iraq to Afghanistan, Ukraine to Gaza, decisions made in Washington often come with a high cost.

And at a time when journalists in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere are risking or losing their lives to tell the world what is happening, any promise to report the truth I make with deep humility.

I have tried to begin this many times. Cooke was the inspiration, but after hours of listening to his old broadcasts and reading his journalism, I can say with certainty I am no Alistair Cooke.

Where he was measured, my reporting is often frenetic and forceful.

I find political reporting processes and protocols and gossip and cliches deathly boring.

I do however feel a genuine calling to accurately report the consequences of power and document the impact on those who so often pay the price.

One trait I hope to learn from Cooke (whose voice and dispatches have become my companion here and ease moments of homesickness) is not his style but his seriousness, the sense that the listener, the reader, the viewer, deserves honesty, not performance.

In this Substack ‘Notes from America’ (a nod to Cooke) I will try with every bit of me to give you the truth straight and from the heart and I hope you’ll follow me along on this journey.

Sara Firth Paksoy