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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 'Putin 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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