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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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And what have the warmongers got to say for themselves? @Shakes? @Iconochasm?

I was more "passively war-tolerant". War with Iran was not something I was actively rooting for, and if you'd asked me beforehand I would have urged against it, but I was willing to let bro cook and see how it played out. Both in terms of reasons for the war and how the negotiations are going, I think the degree of misinformation and chaff is so extreme that normies watching the news (including all of us) have little ability to distill a signal from the noise. Especially for the latter, as I expect everything from the Trump administration to be positional maneuvering rather than statements of fact, and of course the same has always been true for Iran.

In fairness, that's also pretty much how I interpret everything you say, and why I usually just skim your posts.

I'm not even mad anymore, after all you lost, contra my expectations. I'm just kind of curious: can you process that this was a terrible idea and many supposedly cuckoo people who pointed out that the US will lose the war (like Scott Ritter) were, actually, straight up correct, at least?

See, this is what I mean.

See, this is what I mean.

See what? You're basically hiding in the fog of war and proposing a deeply nihilistic epistemology that Trump's tendency to brazenly bullshit everyone makes every circumstance completely open to interpretation. I don't believe this is how this works. Operation Epic Fury had been declared Over in early May already, by the Secretary of State, who doesn't have remotely Trump's reputation. The US and Iran have signed - not announced, not "leaked" – an MOU which is clearly an admission of defeat relative to any claimed early-war objective of the US, and a bunch of obvious Ws for Iran. Could Trump ignore it all, restart the war, and actually beat Iran this time? Quite possibly. Such things happen in history. But that'd be another, separate war. The terms accepted now suggest the US was pretty desperate for an off-ramp.

clearly an admission of defeat relative to any claimed early-war objective

This assessment seems very far from defensible to me.

Trump on February 28 in his speech articulating the rationale of the attacks [excerpts]:

Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.

It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular, my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I'll say it again. They can never have a nuclear weapon.

They rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore. Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland. Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message. For these reasons, the United States military has undertaken a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally, again, obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy. We are going to ensure that the region's terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs, as they are sometimes called, to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans.

And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. It's a very simple message. They will never have a nuclear weapon.

Finally, to the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don't leave your home. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government.

From the MOU:

The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in paragraph seven, with the minimum methodology to be down blended on site under the supervision of the IAEA.

I think it's completely reasonable to:

  1. Question whether the objective of preventing Iran from procuring a nuclear weapon will actually succeed
  2. Interrogate the degree to which the United States accomplished all of its objectives; there seems to be (at best) mixed or conflicting evidence that the US succeeded in anything that might be characterized as "raze[ing] [Iran's] missile industry to the ground" or "totally...obliterat[ing]" Iran's military or preventing their proxies from acting.
  3. Suggest that the cost/benefit ratio was not in the favor of the United States, insist that the war went poorly for the United States, or otherwise criticize the decision to go to war or the outcomes or assess that they indicate US weakness relative to Iran

I criticized going to war with Iran before it happened on here. I still think it's too soon to tell how things are going to fall out, so I've been withholding judgment, but my preliminary assessment probably wouldn't be viewed as exactly a pro-Trump gloss.

However, I think you are badly mistaken if you to look at a US declaration of war that emphasizes "no nuclear weapons," look at an MOU where Iran agrees "no nuclear weapons" and then claim that the MOU is "clearly an admission of defeat relative to any claimed early-war objective."

The explicit early war objectives laid out by Trump and Hegseth were

  1. Destroy their missiles
  2. Destroy missile production capacity
  3. Destroy Iran's navy, broader security infrastructure
  4. Ensure they never get nukes.

What kind of benchmarks would you consider success for 1 and 2? 80%? 99%? I suspect you'd call anything short of 100% a "humiliating loss", and probably even then. Their Navy is about 90% destroyed.

And the MOU is "an agreement to talk out a future agreement", but one of the points purportedly agreed upon is 4. Which is still very far from a done deal, and very much obscured in the fog of the negotiating table. And that describes the entire situation. This isn't some trad war where a total surrender happens at a formal event. Both sides are going to posture and threaten and build contingencies, likely for years to come.

I will admit that this whole ordeal has strengthened the conventional wisdom that airpower alone is limited. But "we blew up most of their shit and crippled their economy, total W for them" seems like a retarded and delusional take.

Trump called for Unconditional Surrender and made regime change a clear goal of the war from the get-go. That objective was clearly unachieved. Replacing Khamenei with Khamenei is a joke.

On 1, 2, 3 we don't have any data that shows a significant decline in capability. The ability for Iran to project power has not been meaningfully reduced in any way that is testable, as they still possess the naval/missile capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, threaten their neighbors, and force a deal that benefits their proxy Hezbollah.

The problem here is that some people think this is Team Deathmatch rules and some people think it's Capture the Flag. The objective isn't to kill a lot of Iranians, it's to achieve some kind of strategic goal. The K:D doesn't matter, the objectives do.

Eh, "unconditional surrender" did not come up in any of the overviews and AI summaries I looked up when making that post. Totally makes sense that he said it; demanding massive asks and threatening to walk away is the man's main tactic.

Compare it to the Iranians who have sworn to fight "until complete victory" while insisting that no negotiations have even been happening. This is what I mean when I referenced a fog of bluster, threats and maneuvering. What's going on in the minds of them men involved? What do they really want, what are they really willing to trade or sacrifice, what do they really think of the situation so far? I think I don't know, you don't know, Daes definitely doesn't know (or can't say if he did, isn't he posting from China these days?) and none of us have any plausible methods for rectifying that.

People can call that cowering in the fog of war. I think I'm dispaying some epistemic humility while acknowleding the basic surface-level consideration that there does seem to be a lot of fog.

On 1, 2, 3 we don't have any data that shows a significant decline in capability. The ability for Iran to project power has not been meaningfully reduced in any way that is testable, as they still possess the naval/missile capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, threaten their neighbors, and force a deal that benefits their proxy Hezbollah.

Maybe. Their rate of fire did plummet something like 90% over the first few weeks. I am definitely open to the position that the Iranian decentralized method is overly difficult or impossible to completely stamp out with just air power. There's a lot of middle ground between "strong enough to shut the Strait", which seems not really true since we've been running ships through it, and "plucky enough to kick shipping insurance premiums into intolerable territory", which seems reasonably true.

There's a fair bit of room for criticism of the US here, but I do think this hUmIlIaTiNg LoSs line is just nakedly motivated reasoning.

The objective isn't to kill a lot of Iranians, it's to achieve some kind of strategic goal.

And this is exactly what I'm taking a wait-and-see approach about.

The ability for Iran to project power has not been meaningfully reduced in any way that is testable

From Wikipedia:

Power projection (or force projection or strength projection) in international relations is the capacity of a state to deploy and sustain forces outside its territory.

Perhaps you're unfamiliar with how the term is used, but when it comes to power projection Iran's navy (which I don't think anyone seriously contests was "meaningfully reduced") is much more relevant than their ballistic missile arsenal (which was also "meaningfully reduced," if only because they launched off such a large portion.)

they still possess the naval/missile capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz

"Shut the Strait" is self-contained motte/bailey inasmuch as it suggests that Iran has much more complete control over the Strait than they actually do (nobody denies that cargo ships successfully passed through the Strait under the nose of Iran, do they?), thus successfully spreading a misleading idea, but if challenged the person using it can always say that they mean Iran has the ability to threaten traffic there (which is also true), not that Iran actually shut the strait, making it tedious to address, even though it may mislead the underinformed.

For this reason, I wish you (and everyone else on here) would stop using the phrase and switch to more precise language instead.

"He didn't have the choke on me. I could still breathe in little gasps! I just tapped out because of the choke."

Trump himself has said, when justifying the peace deal:

“We run out of reserves at about four weeks,” Trump said in France while at the Group of Seven summit, discussing the recent memorandum of understanding with Iran. “You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there’ll be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it.” He said it would be “bedlam” if the oil ran out. “What this does is it allows the ships to go,” he said of the Iran deal. “If we keep bombing, those ships won’t be going.”

And again:

"I didn't want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened," Trump told reporters in the lakeside resort of Evian-les-Bains. The Republican president said he did not want to be like Herbert Hoover, who was U.S. president in October ⁠1929 when the stock market crashed, triggering what became known as the Great Depression. "All I know is every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship," Trump said. "Every time we said something negative, like, guess what, we're not going to be able to settle, it would go down very big."

Trump himself has made one of the clearest statements he's made about the war, saying that the strait of Hormuz was insufficiently open. We can get pedantic about what exactly "closed" means or whether we just needed gutsier ship captains if you want, but I don't think that really matters in assessing the success of "America" or "Trump & Hegseth" as strategic actors. Trump stated directly: the restrictions placed on the strait of Hormuz worked to force Trump to make a deal.

A general or an admiral can claim a "stabbed in the back theory" that "we didn't lose we left" that "we won the war on the battlefield and the politicians lost it at the negotiating table" or that "the civilians followed the traitors at home and didn't support the war enough."

A politician, a POTUS, can't claim that, because rallying public support is kind of his whole job. Coordinating with international insurance companies is within his purview. The home front is his war. Trump can't whine that we were winning the war if it wasn't for public opinion and the markets, public opinion and the markets is his job. The buck stops here. He needs to go to war with the public he has, not the public he wishes he had.

Trump and Hegseth made the specific decision not to attempt to build a public case for going to war with Iran, not to coordinate with international partners, not to plan ahead for the business consequences of the war. They chose speed and surprise over those things. That turned out to be a bad decision.

Trump himself has said, when justifying the peace deal

Are the things Trump claims when he is justifying his actions trustworthy or not?

We can get pedantic about what exactly "closed" means

That's...why I'm here.

I don't think that really matters in assessing the success of "America" or "Trump & Hegseth" as strategic actors.

The context of the conversation had to do with achieving war aims which is a separate-but-related question, since achieving war aims can actually be really bad if your war aims are strategically stupid. The ability to achieve war aims is a question of military capability, and whether or not military capability is exercised successfully is a different question from whether or not it is being exercised wisely.

So: there's a difference between the economic considerations of Iran's ability to threaten transiting ships and their military capabilities to threaten ships. In a discussion about Iran's military capabilities Iran's military capabilities matter. And their military capabilities are sufficient to credibly threaten ships passing through the strait, but insufficient to reliably follow through on that threat. This indicates that they have imperfect ability to complete the kill chain required to strike ships transiting the strait, which is more directly relevant to a discussion of Iran's military capabilities than the degree to which civilian shipping is willing to take on the risks of a transit. For people who think about conflicts in terms of things like kill chains, sensor webs, and material capabilities, that's an important distinction that tells you something about the military capabilities of Iran (and the United States).

It's the difference between saying that German U-boats targeted Allied shipping, imposing a grievous economic cost, and saying that they "closed the Atlantic for the duration of World War Two." It is entirely possible to point out the success of unrestricted submarine warfare without exaggerating its effectiveness.

Trump stated directly: the restrictions placed on the strait of Hormuz worked to force Trump to make a deal.

I did not claim otherwise. You said things that were either untrue or, I am arguing, misleading. I think you can make your case without doing that.

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