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Yes, because it'd suggest that my opponents were largely correct to treat it as another culture war side show, and demand charitable discussion of American efforts and speaking of their leaders Trump and Hegseth as imperfect, maybe not highly moral, but rational actors with non-insane motivations, who have a plausible, debatable opinion on what's best for America (specifically, another war in the Middle East). And that insisting that the war is a wholly unjustified crime perpetrated by basically murder clowns is "TDS", "twitter fried his brain", or some such.
To be clear, I expected the war to end in Iranian defeat, but not really "good terms for the US". As in – probably ground operation, some more atrocities, more losses, high reputational damage, high economic damage, attrition of stockpiles, unmanageable conflagration in the region, dangerously inflated belief in capabilities vs China, and other assorted wages of insanity and malice that make it all not worth it. American defeat was well outside my model, so this is "winning too much", as it were.
Yes, you trusted the experts, as we all did. Nothing to be ashamed of.
"Well, plan A (kill the Ayatollah and watch whole Iran collapse like Sauron's tower) failed, there must be plan B. The best and the brightest working for the world's first super power were preparing for this day for all of their lives, there must be brilliant plan B that guarantees success of this special operation!"
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I did not necessarily expect this outcome either, and I remember arguing with users here at the start of this war who were pre-emptively gloating about America having global unrestricted power to bulldoze everybody Chyna decided to associate with, that the good ol' US of A enjoyed such an overwhelming military dominance over virtually everyone else that they could just walk in, topple regimes and replace them with puppets, then walk away in slow motion while explosions detonated behind them.
Turns out none of these takes aged well at all. It was ridiculous hubris then and it's ridiculous hubris now, and at this point one would expect to see grovelling mea culpas from anybody remotely capable of updating their priors.
Eh, There's this kind of weird definitional game that's being played for what "winning" means. We've known that we have very little ability to nation build in the sense that we can use our military to get other nations to be governed the way we want them to be. Anyone paying attention to the other middle eastern adventures would have to conclude we cannot reliably do that. That this war was started with those aims was dumb and wasteful. But then there's this idea that Iran meaningfully "won" in some kind of conventional military sense which is just ridiculous. A whole lot of the arguments on this topic has been people with these two different definitions of "winning" hallucinating people who disagree with them.
If by "Iran won" you mean the US did not accomplish its war aims then absolutely, Iran won, and it seemed very plausibly they'd win from the get go. If you by "Iran won" you mean they have some kind of dominant military position then just no, they had the ability to take pain and sustain enough of a threat to close the strait.
I just don't really know what people are updating on in this conflict with respect to military might. The military executed its missions very well. The problem was our war aims basically required stoking something like an Iranian revolution to actually succeed which didn't happen.
This is why I'm not using the word "winning" to describe what occurred with Iran; they were capable of causing enough pain and creating enough attrition for the US to decide it was not worth it. The US, however, did not achieve the overwhelming bulk of its aims even in the best-case scenario for the US going forward, and that is the relevant metric when trying to assess a statement like "The US has so much global power that it can effortlessly topple every regime, and nobody can do anything in response". It doesn't matter what word you assign to the whole sorry situation, though it's more accurately described as "US failure" than "Iranian victory".
Quite evidently people who believed the previous statement about practically unchecked US power certainly need to update! That is not a hallucination; it was an actual position which was triumphantly and openly stated by some users, as the links provided by Dase illustrate.
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My diagnosis wasn't based on the rough content of your post. I even mostly agree with the analysis of Trump and hegseth as contemptable individuals. I was engaging in the, admittedly often annoying, classic past time of discourse on the discourse. Why is dase crashing out so much more frequently? Yes, lib centrists are right about everything, especially Trump, but that hasn't changed. What has changed is the xitter algorithm.
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