CNN's big Sunday analysis on the Iran war carries this headline: 'Iran's allied militias prove their value in Tehran's widening war.' Prove their value. That's not a war verb — that's what you say about a mid-cap stock that beat expectations. * And the piece stays in that register the whole way down. The militias are 'bouncing back.' They're 'reinforcing Iran's leverage.' The Houthis spotted a 'golden opportunity.' And then, sitting over a passage about missile strikes on two Saudi oil complexes and a blockade of Red Sea shipping, an actual CNN subheading: 'A coordinated win-win.' A weekend of ballistic missiles, filed under the language of a successful merger. * What did the portfolio return this quarter? By CNN's own reporting: a blockade of the Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint, missiles into Saudi oil facilities with 'extensive damage' at Jazan, and 'new fronts' that 'threaten to choke the global economy.' On the strategy desk, that's called performance. Everywhere else it's called the thing insurance doesn't cover. * Now, credit where it's real: as a machine explainer, the piece is genuinely good. It tracks how Hezbollah rebounded 'much faster than Israel predicted,' catches the new supreme leader's letter reaffirming support, and lays out the history that got us here better than most cable segments ever will. CNN did the homework on how the machine works. * But try ctrl+F on who the machine runs over. Yemen — eleven years into a civil war — appears in this story as an airspace and an airport. Lebanon is a clause in a memorandum of understanding. Gaza is a map label where 'influence' was once 'extended.' There is not a single civilian, resident or casualty figure in an entire analysis of organizations whose output is measured in exactly those things. * That's the trick of the strategy genre: write the war entirely from the operations floor and every explosion becomes somebody's leverage. But the 'widening war' in CNN's headline is widening into places where actual people keep the receipts. 'Prove their value' — sure. Just say what currency the value is denominated in.