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Notes -
Deal reached to end Iran war
Details of the deal are not publicly available right now. However, Trump has authorised an end to the US naval blockade, and Iran has agreed to reopen the Strait.
Not surprisingly though, Israel continues to bomb Lebanon and refuses to cede lands seized in southern Lebanon.
But MORE surprisingly, Trump actually reprimanded Bibi.
So it seems we were lucky to return to the pre-war status quo, even Trump had to tepidly admit that he bit off more than he can chew and Iran's regional dominance is not going anywhere.
So nobody knows what really happened, but at least we're having fun.
Does anybody else remember our discussions from a few months ago? Because what's been reported so far looks nothing like what many confidently predicted back then. Iran closing the strait would lead to massive energy spikes that would cripple the global economy and America would rush to surrender. And Iran would win on all points. Iran's nuclear program would continue uninterrupted. Iran's neighbors would be cowed into submission. Many people speculated that Iran would soon sink American ships, or innocent oil tankers, and that nobody would be able to stop them.
In fact, Iran's power was so strong that they would be able to toll the straits of Hormuz. Iran would be stronger than ever.
That seems to not have happened.
Likewise, the global energy crisis has not materialized. Where I live gas is about a buck-and-a-quarter more expensive than it was before the war. Plane tickets are more expensive and fertilizer costs have gone up. But, otherwise, nothing continues to happen. And America did not rush to surrender.
In fact, curiously, Iran is apparently giving up their greatest leverage by opening the straits. Why would they do that? We have heard that nobody can take the straits back from them, so why are they ceding it?
The terms now called losing terms were winning terms a few months ago: America bombed Iran, decapitated its leadership, destroyed the bulk of its capacity to manufacture missiles and drones, and will suffer no lasting consequences. The Straits, apparently, will be opened and a ceasefire will be maintained.
The questions now are whether this can be turned into a longer-lasting and more regional peace, and what will become of Iran's nuclear dust. (Not that they can do much with it, because we destroyed the nuclear facilities they would need to use it.) Trump, at least, is pushing to expand the Abraham Accords and lock the entire region into a broader framework for peace. Which doesn't sound like a loss of American prestige to me.
Of course it's possible that fighting will break out again or that the deal will not be as reported.
But wasn't America supposed to have lost?
Oil prices doubled and the US started to promise regularly that they were working on a surrender and oil supply would quickly come back. The expected American surrender brought prices down.
The one that was obliterated last June?
Instead they relocated 1000km from Iran and gave up on the idea of breaking the Iranian blockade.
A bunch were sunk, a bunch paid money to Iran to get through and most have been stuck.
Except sign a peace deal 2.5 months into the war in which they didn't achieve a single stated objective after Trump claimed the war is soon over 39 times?
The US spent 40% of its missiles to end up signing a surrender in which Iran gets tens of billions of dollars, gets sanctions removed and effectively has the strait of Hormuz as its bargaining chip. American bases got smashed, the US abandoned its allies after dragging them into a war and the rest of the world views Trump as crazy. The few thousand people in Iran who wanted the US to bring woke-ideology to Iran were conveniently disposed of when they tried an armed insurrection that failed spectacularly.
Iran got invaded, hit back hard and forced the US to give major concessions to end the war 2.5 months in. This is a spectacular win that showed the countries in the region that the US is untrustworthy.
This did not happen.
This did not happen.
This did not happen.
This did not happen.
This did not happen.
This did not happen.
This, flatly, did not happen.
This is what I think the problem is:
Why do you think you know how many missiles America has? Because it was in a news report somewhere?
In a fog of war environment it becomes impossible to speak with certainty about what is going on. If anything, because the terms of the deal are still not yet public, we still don't know what is going on, and everything discussed here is premature.
However, in a fog of war, there are always lots of boosters and propagandists and partisans who will speak with perfect confidence about what is going on. There has been a consistent drumbeat for three months proclaiming that America has lost, Iran is in total control, and America will surrender at any moment.
This false confidence has gotten so outlandish that it has had to explain away many things we know to be true outside the fog of war. America destroys Iranian military targets? Not important. Iran cannot destroy American planes? Not important. America sinks Iranian ships? Not important. Iran claims anyways that they have total control over the Straits? Must be real.
Take also your remark about Iran's nuclear programs being destroyed last June. This point has been aggressively misinterpreted to suggest that America can't do anything right. This is not what happened at all: Last June, America targeted specific Iranian facilities and dropped the "bunker buster" to destroy an Iranian facility buried deep underground specifically to withstand American assault. That facility was destroyed. Now, in February, America started bombing other Iranian facilities that are also part of their nuclear system. These attacks are almost completely unrelated. But through the prism of war hype, we conflate two events into one and conclude that America can't even drop bombs properly anymore. Somehow.
Never before has a winner of a war had to claim 39 times that the nightmare is about to end. The US would have tried to escort ships through the strait except they couldn't. Trump had to promise the markets that the war soon would end to control the oil prices and he is now giving Iran tens of billions of dollars and peace in Lebanon in order to bail himself out.
The US didn't achieve regime change, it didn't militarily defeat Iran and it didn't get rid of the nuclear program. The US once again started a regime change war and tried to spread woke ideology in the middle east and lost. At least Trump didn't drag it out for 20 years.
The US couldn't protect Bahrain, UAE or the Saudis.
Several THAAD launchers gone, 1200+ patriot missiles and several thousand cruise missiles spent trying to blow up bunkers that are deep under mountains. It didn't achieve much and Shahed drones are way easier to replace than the extremely expensive radars they blew up.
The propagandists are the ones who sold defending a regime full of Chai boy rapists in Afghanistan for 20 years because this was going to bring DEI to Afghanistan. The propagandists were the ones who lied about WMD in order to start a war that decimated Iraq's Christian population. I didn't fall for it then, I am not falling for it now.
Forgetting all the aircraft downed.
Iran has most of its missiles and drones and bunkers built to withstand nukes won't be blown up by getting bombed by conventional weapons. Irans missile cities were firing to the last day of fighting despite the US blasting through its missile inventory to try to take them out. This gives us a glimpse for what will happen on Guam when the US tries to save pride month in Taiwan.
Nightmare? Aren't you editorializing a little bit? It's usually bad epistemology to cite your own spin as evidence.
We have been doing that.
What else do you call it when we blow up hundreds of targets and they fail to meaningfully retaliate? Their navy is at the bottom of the gulf.
The debate now has moved from what to do with Iran's nuclear facilities, to what to do with Iran's nuclear dust. Do you believe Iran still has working nuclear facilities? Do you have an explanation for why we would not have bombed them?
This is a non-sequitur. You are claiming that America used up 40% of its missile stockpile over Iran. Why do you think that's true? It doesn't matter how many missiles we used in raw terms. You are claiming to have knowledge about total American military reserves. Are you posting from a SCIF?
In this universe it's not clear at all why Iran even asked for a ceasefire. Seems like they should have kept blowing up American targets since it comes at such high cost to us and such little cost to them. America is almost totally militarily depleted, Iran is impervious to bullets, they could have just kept going. I guess they decided to be nice?
It's a common pejorative for some of the more hyperbolic war coverage of the anti-US sort. Nightmare for oil markets, nightmare for Trump's election prospects, etc. It's a verbal tic of a particular sort of position, sort of like people who went straight to 'quagmire' to describe the conflict, or 'invasion' to describe the air raid campaign.
Basically the Iran conflict counterpart to the 'Put is DONE' meme variants in the Ukraine war, and about as well thought out.
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By that metric the US won in Afghanistan and Vietnam. The difference is Iran was bombed a fraction as hard and retaliated.
Yes, you can't bomb a facility hundreds of meters below a mountain without nukes. The wmd story failed in Iraq and we shouldn't fall for the same lie now.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/last-rounds-status-key-munitions-iran-war-ceasefire
There are good breakdowns of US missile stockpiles. The US was dimensioned for a regional war and blew through a large chunk of their stockpile to replace Khomeini with Khomeini.
The US was pushing for a ceasefire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war_ceasefire
I think all the dead people and blown up planes in Vietnam would beg to differ. General figures point to about a 10:1 k/d ratio in Vietnam, which while lopsided does also indicate meaningful resistance. Meanwhile the Iran conflict is more like 200:1.
I think the point is that K:D ratio is irrelevant? It's a set of goalposts that gets moved around as needed in order to claim victory. Wars are not sports or video games - you don't win them by racking up points on a board. The important questions here are to do with whether or not the US and Iran have achieved their various war aims.
I am reminded, actually, of past discussions with Americans concerning Afghanistan, and a very strong instinctive refusal to say "we lost". The Taliban won the war in Afghanistan, and the Americans lost, and no number of statistics around casualty ratios can negate that. A war should be measured by how well the participants achieved their goals.
Personally I'm not willing to call Iran yet. I do think that Iran has proven unexpectedly resilient, the US has failed to achieve its goals thus far, and the US is probably going to end up worse off compared to a timeline where it did absolutely nothing, but there is a lot of fog of war and we do not know how theings will end. But thus far I am comfortable saying that this has been bad for the US.
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If this were true, then isn't the entire war a facade? America pretended to destroy Fordow and Isfahan and Natanz a year ago, but couldn't because it's impossible to destroy facilities hundreds of meters below a mountain. Therefore Iran can acquire nukes whenever they want and nobody can stop them. So what's even the point? What's the secret reason America went to war if they know it's actually impossible to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons?
If you believe this I think you should elaborate.
Not that I disagree with your premise, exactly...but I can think of several reasons we might have started bombing. Most of them involve underestimating the resilience of Iran's government. Regime change would make destroying the facilities a moot point.
"We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."
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