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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Saddam and his government got pretty thoroughly destroyed too, that didn’t stop the war from becoming a giant black eye for the US.

I'm not going to defend the occupation or the American foreign policy of the time, but Iraqi Freedom was objectively a sweep: Saddam's conventional forces were destroyed in little less than a week. The black eye came from the attempt at nation-building, not the military operation. Turns out the US military is good at blowing things up. Who would have thought?

The Americans can actually learn lessons. They're not going to commit to a pointless ground occupation where mujahadeen can shoot at them. Iran isn't a insurgency which passes off responsibility of statehood onto an occupying power - it's a nation of ninety million people. If Iran is a smoking, sectarian shithole like Syria with collapsed central authority, that good enough. They can hate the Americans, but if they do so impotently, that's a win.

Nobody creates a quagmire consciously, every war is conceptualized at the outset as a quick in and out affair.

Just like the Iranian regime can never just ease up about being the vanguard of Shia islam dedicated to thwarting Israel, it’s in the very DNA of the US’s position that we must dedicate our military to ensuring safe passage on global shipping lane choke points.

Thus we are now fundamentally committed to ensuring the total destruction of Iran’s capacity to choke off shopping in Hormuz, in a similar way that Israel is completely committed to wiping out the ability of Hamas to launch rockets from Gaza. But on a vastly larger scale.

The Iran before the full scale attack may have been an entity that could be negotiated with, and perhaps I’m wrong, but I think this headless group of martyrdom and honor culture infused bomb survivors is now going to hole up in the mountain fortress and commit to fighting until they cannot any longer.

As long as they continue to fight, the US cannot decide to back down. The ball is simply not fully in our court anymore.

If America destroys all Iran's missile bases and ports it doesn't matter if they hole up in the mountains. They can do that forever, it doesn't matter. It would be nice if the Mullahs were removed from power and Iran was a fair and friendly country again. But we don't need that to happen to win.

I think all Iran needs to do is slip enough attacks on boats through to meaningfully disrupt the calculus of getting an oil tanker through.

Maybe the US has advanced enough operations to be able to take away that threat, I don’t know.

In the end who ‘wins’ will be decided by who is better at that asymmetric cat and mouse game over the next weeks to months.

Shaheds are tiny and there’s a huge border where they can be resupplied, not least through Iraq which is majority Shia and sympathetic. Maybe you can get Putin to promise pretty please that he’s not going to supply them, but come on. So again you’re in an insurgent situation that maybe looks a little less like Afghanistan and more like a cross between what happened in Iraq, the Troubles, and the second intifada, except far larger, more entrenched and on larger territory, and with enemies happy to die.

The chance of Putin supplying some hardened remnant of the IRGC in the mountains of Iran with Shaheds is zero. Why would he? What would they have to offer him, compared with using the drones against Ukraine? They couldn't even pay for them.

Looking at Ural crude prices I'd say that Shaheds sent to Iran pay for themselves in increased oil revenue, though we're nowhere near the point where the Iranians have any need to import Shaheds

Because American interceptors at bases in Iran are ones that can’t be donated to Ukraine, and are worth far more than a few cheap drones?

Now that makes no sense at all. Ukraine doesn't need American drone interceptors for Shaheds. Even if they did, forcing the other side to spend one interceptor for one drone in Iran is no better for Russia than the same happening in Ukraine.

Please explain why it benefits Putin to supply Iran with infinite Shaheds to keep oil from flowing through the Strait. Is destroying China's access to oil all part of his master plan? A minute ago the theory was that Iran targeting the Strait was disastrous for the global economy -- maybe that's good for Russia?

Russia sells oil, reducing the global supply of oil benefits their bottom line.

And there's a big difference between the number of missiles required to make it physically impossible to transit the strait, and the number required to make it too risky to want to transit it.

A guy on his porch with a shotgun can't stop my bicycling club from riding down the road, he can't shoot all 20 of us before we get through! We'd probably change the route, regardless.

Please explain why it benefits Putin to supply Iran with infinite Shaheds to keep oil from flowing through the Strait.

They wouldn't even do that. Shaheds from the mountains would be shot down before they reached the strait.

But going into the mountains and fighting in the hills is fundamentally incompatible with being a functional state. They would essentially abdicate sovereign control of their own country to whoever cared to take it. They wouldn't be glorious freedom fighters, fighting the good fight against the Big Satan: they'd be cowards running away from a war they started and leaving the people they were ruling out to dry. If the IRGC wants to leave the cities and live like the Taliban, how will they control said cities? How will they keep up missile production?

All of those soldiers need to be paid and fed. Jihad doesn't pay the bills. Who is covering the tab of salaries and material?

By mountain fortress, I mean Iran itself, not actually going out to the hills. The cities might actually be the best cover. Either way it’s probably quite hard to figure out where key people are after the initial round or two of bombardment.

Also I’m not sure being a very functional state matters all that much to them while at war. A dictatorship should just need to knuckle down and keep up supply of weapons to its soldiers.

What matters is likely just simply continuing to broadcast that we’re still here while mustering enough attacks on the shipping lane to keep the snake more or less coiled around the neck of the global economy.

Good question about funding, I don’t know enough to answer it. That might become relevant but a war of attrition to see whose finances break down first isn’t ideal for Trump et al. If I were Russia I’d for sure funnel some cash in in that scenario.

Worse than a black eye - the Iraq War was a huge blow to domestic public confidence in US foreign policy, probably second only to Vietnam. One of the reasons why the US public has become so skittish and unwilling to tolerate high-effort foreign policy is the legacy of Iraq.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, not only did the US win the Iraq War, it successfully managed the nation-building part as well. Iraq was not Afghanistan.

The Iraq War directly led to the creation of ISIS.

After decades and trillions of dollars with a country that doesn’t pose any real risks to the global economy while the turmoil goes on.

I'm well aware that the US eventually brought the conflict in Iraq to an on-paper successful conclusion. The problem is that by the time that finally happened, the bed was already shat, and the outcome was not really a flourishing democracy but a messy quasi-democracy that was halfway aligned with Iran. Not really something the American public was likely to see as a 'win'.

(It also had negative knock-on effects for the US military, e.g. contributing to the dire state the USN)

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