The Iran war turned six months old on Friday, which means it's report-card season on the front pages. Before we read the grades, remember how the course was advertised. Al Jazeera, March 2: "Trump says Iran war projected to last 4 to 5 weeks, could go 'far longer.'" Euronews, March 26: "Trump says US-Iran war operations extremely ahead of schedule." Four to five weeks, extremely ahead of schedule. It is now week twenty-six. * Here's The Washington Post's anniversary headline: "After six months of Iran war, US goals have shifted. The Strait of Hormuz is now a top concern." Read that the way a headline-skimmer does. Goals "have shifted" — by themselves, apparently, the way tectonic plates do. A strait "is now a top concern" — concern just showed up one morning, unannounced. There is no person anywhere in that sentence. The man who put a four-to-five-week sticker on the war is not in it; neither is anyone who might have done the shifting. "Goals have shifted" is what it looks like when the scoreboard gets rewritten mid-game and the paper of record transcribes the new scoreboard instead of mentioning the rewrite. * Now the fun part. The very next day, the same Washington Post politics desk published this: "Friday marks six months since Trump launched war on Iran. Now, he's stuck." Look at it go! A named subject. An active verb — "launched." A blunt outcome — "stuck." Everything the first headline carefully avoided, its sibling did 24 hours later, presumably after a strong coffee. We're not even mad; we're showing you the two headlines side by side because together they prove the important thing: the honest sentence existed, cleared the lawyers, and ran. The euphemistic one wasn't a legal necessity. It was a choice. * The rest of the field, for calibration. NPR went with "After 6 months of war, Iran's battered regime remains entrenched" — which grades Tehran in the headline, though the article says plainly that toppling the regime was a chief war goal and that instead the regime "has dug in its heels," and calls Hormuz Iran's "biggest strategic weapon." Al Jazeera opened an accountant's ledger: "After six months of war, what have US, Iran gained and lost?" and a companion piece bluntly titled "In numbers." And CNN, to its credit, didn't even wait for the anniversary — back in July it ran "How four key Trump claims about the Iran war have fallen apart." Blunt grading is available at every newsstand. It's just not evenly distributed. * Regulars will remember our note from Wednesday that this war still hasn't agreed on its own name — "Iran war" in American headlines, "US-Israel war on Iran" on Al Jazeera, a naming gap that hasn't budged in six months. Anniversary pieces are where a paper can audit the sales pitch: line up "four to five weeks" against month six and let the distance speak. Or it can do what that first WaPo headline does — adopt the seller's new accounting, in which nothing failed, goals merely evolved, and concern materializes out of the sea air like fog. * A war that misses its own deadline by five months and counting isn't a story about shifted goals. It's a story about who set the goals, who missed them, and who'd rather the headline not dwell on either. The Post owns a headline that says "he's stuck." Lead with that one.