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Notes -
Judging the Iran War on its initial goals:
There has been so much talk about the Straight of Hormuz, that people are forgetting this was never an initial goal of the war. It's easy to forget that the Straight of Hormuz was open and not tolled by Iran before the war. So by definition, how could a war aim be to something that you already have. This would be like the US declaring War on Canada and saying one of the aims is to take New York.
So looking back, it's important to see what they initially said. This is straight from the White House itself [https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/04/president-trumps-clear-and-unchanging-objectives-drive-decisive-success-against-iranian-regime/](This is straight from the White House itself:)
Tonight, @POTUS will address the nation on Operation Epic Fury.
From day one, the objectives have been clear: obliterate Iran’s missiles and production, annihilate its navy, sever its support for terrorist proxies, and ensure it never acquires a nuclear weapon.
Trump:
President Trump (March 2): “Our objectives are clear. First, we’re destroying Iran’s missile capabilities… and their capacity to produce brand new ones — pretty good ones they make. Second, we’re annihilating their navy… Third, we’re ensuring that the world’s number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon… And finally, we’re ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”
Vice President JD Vance (March 2): “Whatever happens with the regime in one form or another, it’s incidental to the President’s primary objective here — which is to make sure the Iranian terrorist regime does not build a nuclear bomb.”
Secretary Rubio (March 3): “Our objectives remain, as they’ve been identified from the beginning and the President laid out clearly yesterday. Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and we will not allow Iran to hide behind the immunity of a massive short-term ballistic missile inventory, or the ability to make them or launch them… As well as the destruction of their navy.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (March 4): “The mission is laser-focused: obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones and facilities that produce them, annihilate its navy and critical security infrastructure, and sever their pathway to nuclear weapons. Iran will never possess a nuclear bomb.”
It's obvious from these statements there were four goals:
The Straight of Hormuz is a red herring. The fact that we are even talking about it at all means we have gone backwards. The US has accomplished only one of its war aims and that was to destroy their Navy. The rest are not done and at best are TBD. If you had said 6 months ago that the war would still be ongoing that only one goal would be accomplished, what would you have said about the status of the war?
To me, and this is just my opinion, people would have said the war is not going well. Based on those four goals explicitly laid out by Trump, I don't see how you can say we are close to a victory.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ydld0gykpo](By the way, Trump himself says that the war will continue until at least November.)
Here he again explicitly mentions the nuclear weapons as a warm aim (that is not accomplished yet). Personally, I don't see this war ending any time soon. At this point, the Iran government has shown it is resilient and it is in a literal fight for its life. They can't back down now. Meanwhile, I don't see any way the US can accomplish its war aims without staying until the regime collapses. How long that takes I think is anyone's guess.
Meanwhile, stocks of crude oil in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to 285 million barrels last week, the lowest level since November 1982, according to data from the Department of Energy.
In other news open satellite footage has shown that daytime transit of the strait in the southern route has resumed for the first time since the mou end.
There are multiple ways to interpret this, but I suspect that Iran only has the capability to blow up one or two ships per week - irregardless of if the transit is happening during the day or if the ships are being sneaky or not. If so, and a couple ships are going to get blown up anyways every week, the logical strategy is to yolo as many ships as possible through and accept the losses. Same losses, more throughput compared to the sneaky option.
If this is indeed true, it represents a major loss of leverage for Iran. They may continue to cause economic damage in the losses of ships and cargo, but the previous total shutdown of traffic will not continue. Previously ship owners feared an overwhelming chance of getting blown up for crossing, but if the chance is only 5%, then yoloing it makes economic sense. And there is a collective action problem but the more ships that yolo it the lower the chance of getting blown up (if the interpretation is true).
For Iran to regain disruption, they would have to show they have the ability to blow up an entire convoy or most of it, but it's likely they are not being restrained, but instead lack this capability.
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Why are you in such a hurry?
All of those objectives are being accomplished. Their main navy is sunk, their missile boats are being hunted down, their missile production sites are being bombed, their nuclear program has been halted, and their terrorist proxies are being destroyed. Not to mention that most of their leadership is dead- I notice that you never mentioned who the current decision makers are in Iran, because no one really knows at this point.
Before the war, there was endless gloom and doom about what a disaster it would be to fight Iran. They would destroy cities with ICBMs, they would sink aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, they would shut down all our infrastructure with cyber attacks, and launch terrorist attacks all over the world. The entire world would plunge into some sort of Mad-Max style anarchy as we ran out of oil. Etc.
Instead we've been... mildly inconvenienced? The price of oil has gone up, but not enough to cause a recession- the economy is still growing. (Edit: 18-20) servicemen have died, and that's a shame, but that's also a very small number in historical terms- every military person knows the risks when they sign up. Iran's neighbors have suffered more, but most of them have hated Iran a long time, and this only makes them hate Iran more- they're doubling own on their alliance with the US to get rid of the local menace.
This isn't a game or a sports match, so there's no particular time limit on this. The US and its allies can keep this up for as long as it takes. As long as we're there, Iran doesn't get a nuke or ICBM program, so all objectives accomplishd, and they're rapidly running out of money. It would be nice to find a permanent solution so we can leave the middle east forever, but I'm not exactly holding my breath on that. I know that you'll bring up elections and say things like "Trumpt must end this before the midterms" or whatever, but that's not actually true, he can do whatever he wants. The bigger time pressure might be on allied nations that depend on oil imports, like Korea, which is now considering joining the war.
Of course, it's possible that Democrats will sieze power, and then they'll give in. Give the IRGC money, give them terrorist proxies, give them nukes, give them whatever they want. That would be a huge disaster, but it's not the result of this current war, it's just Democrats being idiots. The JCPOA was basically that, with Obama giving Iran a lot of cash while they pretended to not develop nukes or missiles but kept working on them anyway, not to mention massacring anyone who protested the rule of the Ayatollahs.
So my advice to you is: relax, these things take time. The IRGC is getting the shit kicked out of it, so all they can do is spin up propaganda on the internet. I'm about to go on a long road trip, which I can do easily because gasoline is still cheap and unlimited- not what it would be if the US was actually losing this war.
literally the next paragraph:
So actually there is a particular time limit, namely the midterms and presidential elections. The Iranians don't need to destroy the US Navy to achieve victory, they just need to inflict enough pain on the global economy to ratfuck the Republicans. Pretending the political angle isn't the core of the Iranian strategy is just preemptive cope.
Going by current polling the "mild inconvenience" has been enough to set up Republicans for the worst midterm result since 2006. The Senate was supposed to be bulletproof but even typically solid red states like Texas, Nebraska and Kansas are in danger of flipping. Evidently the voters have a different standard of "mild inconvenience" than you do, though perhaps the Biden strategy of "don't believe your lying eyes, this economy is great!" will work this time around
The midterm elections aren't a time limit, because Trump will still be the president and commander-in-chief regardless of what happens, and continue the war at his disgression. Congress's powers to stop a war have proven very limited in modern times. The next presidential election might be, but that has a lot less to do with the war than it does all the other factors that determine elections. It's pointless to ascribe an election to any one particular factor, especially one that hasn't happened yet.
But more importantly: this was never the Iranian strategy. Their original strategy was to use an overwhelming missile barrage to level cities, banking up sheer destrictive power that no one would dare attack them. That hasn't happened, instead their missile attacks have been largely impotent, mostly thanks to the US (and Israel) blowing them up on the launchpad before they get a chance to aim and fire. It's easy to take that for granted now that it didn't happen, but it could have easily been a massive loss of life. They were building up longer-range missiles that could Europe and the US, and I, for one, am grateful that they no longer have that capability. "Paying the danegeld" was not a stable long-term solution.
Their backup plan was holding the strait hostage. In a similar way, this was supposed to cause enough economic damage that no one would dare to attack them. Predictions were for some sort of massive global recession, oil above $200 a barrel, and massive lines at the gas station like what happened in the 70s with the Arab oil embargo. But that hasn't happeend either. It's gone up a bit, but not nearly enough to cause a recession or act as any sort of serious deterrance.
At this point their real "attack" is just political propaganda. All of the people who already hated Trump (so, most Democrats) have simply latched on to this as the new Latest Thing to attack Trump. Iranians proxies make vague threats on twitter promising doom, and then all the useful idiots in the media breathlessly repeat them. They want the war to go badly so that Trump will lose the election. But if it wasn't this, they'd find some other excuse to hate him. It's kind of funny that now they're saying he's an Israel agent, when just a year ago everyone was saying he was a Russian agent.... which one is it supposed to be? But meanwhile the economy continues to grow, the world keeps not-being-an-apocalypse, and the regime change in Venezuela looks like a better deal every single day.
It sounds like you got this from a call of duty mission plotline. Our intel predicted they would respond as they did respond:
https://www.dia.mil/Articles/Speeches-and-Testimonies/Article/567085/2014-annual-threat-assessment/
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS26/20220317/114527/HHRG-117-AS26-Wstate-BerrierS-20220317.pdf
Even if they were evilmaxxing, it would be the dumbest decision ever to target civilian centers as it would immediately grant America et al the moral right to do the same to them.
That... literally did happen though? They've launched numerous ballistic missile attacks against cities. See the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attacks_during_the_2026_Iran_war#Iranian_and_allies_response
They're not exactly using precision weapons to carefully target military units and avoid civilian losses, they're launching whatever they have at whatever they can hit, which is mostly cities. If you don't hear about it very much, it's simply because most of them either miss or get intercepted, but they are very much trying to destroy cities, and some of them have gotten through.
The clearer example of this is North Korea, which maintains a massive artillery and rocket force aimed at Seoul. For decades, their main dettrance has simply been the threat of causing massive casualties in Seoul. It's worked well enough to let them flout international law, despite their terrible quality overall, so I'm sure Iran wants to copy their example.
No, that's not how it works, unfortunately. America is held to a far higher moral standard, regardless of what happens. So since the US military accidentally hit one school during its initial massive precision bombing campaign to overwhelm Iran's air defenses, we have to hear forever how the Americans are monsters. Iran has carte blanche to lob crude ballistic missiles at apartment buildings, and it barely even breaks the news, so people dismiss it as "something that only happens in video games."
Don't forget Iran simps defending Iran blowing up random hotels because allegedly US military could be staying in them.
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Do you actually think that the Democrats will give Iran nuclear weapons? Like, pass a law gifting them weapons from the US stockpiles, or something?
If not, what concretely do you think the Democrats will do? Winning the midterms does not make them President.
No, but Congress holds the power of the purse. If the Dems hold both houses, or even get enough Republicans to flip on the votes in question, they could defund the war. Literally attach riders to budget legislation saying no funds can be used in X region after Y date. There's a bunch of other things they could do like actually invoking the War Powers Act, repealing the AUMF, up to impeachment and removal, if they can find the supermajority for that. But defunding is probably the hard, structural counter to presidental authority here, and probably the easiest to do, funnily enough.
That probably would work, albeit slowly, and I wonder if by the time the new Congress seats if they won't be distracted by other outrages of the day (AI?) and/or cowed into submission by scary intelligence briefings.
I think there is hesitancy about doing this because they don't want SCOTUS to rule the WPA unconstitutional, granting POTUS more power.
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It “isn’t a game or a sports match” in another important respect, which is that America can lose even if Iran loses even more. We have been losing since the war started because we are worse off since the war started. We lost money, perhaps $100bil so far, and certainly more on the way due to crude shortages. We lost bases and free transit through two important straits. We have increased the ire of Iran for no reason, and outside of the neurotic world of Israel First media pundits nobody really cares about Iran’s domestic or neighborhood squabbles; better relations with Iran would have been justified on the grounds of cheaper pistachios alone, let alone access to their Rare Earths or whatever high IQ youths we could have poached for AI. Their navy and missile silos don’t matter to us. Nothing we have done has advanced American interests or even raw power. It’s likely we come out of this with a less powerful America, with Iran and Oman gaining normalized influence over Hormuz, Houthis gaining influence over Bab El-Mandeb, and a bunch of Arabs who are questioning why they’d make arrangements with America over China. Yeah, the war is good for Israel, but what’s good for Israel is bad for America; if Israel is unsafe, we get to poach more of their high IQ tech talent. We don’t actually want Israel to be a regional super-power such that we lose talent that’s useful in our economy.
Iran's current regime wouldn't normalize relations even if you went and begged them. They were chanting death to America long before America tried to fuck with them in the first place.
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Because every day we burn multi-million dollar missiles and interceptors to shoot down or blow up the launchers of weapons that cost tens of thousands or, at most, hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don't want to pay to throw weapons we'd need to defend Taiwan into the trash for the possibility of some distant payoff. Every single day this dynamic continues is a day Iran gets the best of us attritionally.
Hot Taiwan is not happening unless something really really dumb happens and if it does happen the ripple effects are probably not going to be much to do with how long an actual landing was held off.
My reading of history explicitly tells me not to rely on the really, really dumb thing not happening. Most of the bits we think are exciting started because of exactly that happening.
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China's capabilities are far exceeding those of Iran, so if our stockpiles are truly being completely depleted by a 2-bit dictatorship, then they never stood a chance against China.
If anything, if this is true, then it should be a wake up call that we need to buy some new weapons that are suitable for 21st century warfare.
I'd agree! I think if there is any lesson we should be learning from the new ubiquity of drones in warfare, and our own history of what actually won us the one real war we were tested in (WW2), it's that our weapons must be ruthlessly economically efficient. I don't really have an answer yet as to how you economically defend a target as big and vulnerable as a base or a ship from a remotely pilotable bomb that costs $20,000-$50,000, and is buildable in a garage.
The vast majority, by an order of magnitude, of what Iran is shooting at us is drones. Mostly Shahed variants. What we use to shoot it down depends on whether it's a boat or a land target, but at sea we're mostly using the SM-2 (approx. $2.1 million) and ESSM ($1.8 million). The workhorse for land is Patriot PAC-3 (approx. $3.7 million). That is a bad trade.
For what it's worth, the US military already has some very effective drones. Most notably the Lucas, which was based on the Shahed. They're also using the B-52 to drop cheap (but still guided) bombs, and the A-10 to do gun runs. They have no problem doing mass, economical attacks.
People have a misconception that the only way to defend against drones is to shoot them down with expensive interceptor missiles. For one thing there are cheaper ways (like using rocket pods from an A-10). But the best way is to just blow them up on the ground before they get a chance to launch, or blow up their command and control so they can't coordinate an effective launch. We're seeing the attacks from Iran become less and less as this war goes on, and the IRGC who launch them have to pretty much hide in the ground all the time for fear of being bombed the second they launch. This puts the cost burden on the enemy- now they're the ones who have to protect their expensive missiles and drone factories against cheap, ubiquitious bombs and drones. And what we've seen is that they can't, there's no way a paramilitary force like the IRGC can keep up with the operational tempo or equipment of the US military. They're losing major, expensive assets every single day. You just don't hear about it in the news much because it's so common that it's not interesting any more, they only ever report if the US loses something.
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I'm not in a hurry. I never wanted it to happen. But now that we are there, I think we have to finish the job and stay until the job is done. We also have to face reality which is that the job is not done yet, and is going to take a long time -- potentially years. I don't see any way to leave the conflict until the regime is toppled.
Case in point: Afghanistan. It took two decades of US occupation, but finally they have a nascent but thriving democracy.
Sarcasm aside, if you have not toppled the regime by bombing the shit out of them (I am Jack's complete lack of surprise) for half a year, what makes you think that more bombs will change that any time soon?
If you want to get the job done, invade. But for some reason, even Hegseth is reluctant to do so.
Militarily speaking, the US could totally defeat Iran, just like they could obviously occupy Afghanistan until the sun goes out.
However, they lack the political will to do so. Nobody thinks that the Iranian regime is the prime existential threat to the US, so occupying Iran has to compete with a zillion other cause areas both military and otherwise, and it seems like even a worse investment than GWB's wars were.
Sorry, I meant the initial war goals. Not an invasion. I just don’t see how we can stop at this point where we negotiate a deal both sides can accept. I’d love to be proven wrong because I think this war was a mistake.
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I'm not sure why destroying their Navy was a worthwhile goal at all. Russia destroyed Ukrainian Navy (such as there was). Ukraine locked down Russian one. What did this achieve? What was the purpose, just ease of subsequent blockade? Did Iran have an armada ready to invade, idk, the UAE? It seems that their Navy as well as air force always have been sitting ducks.
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And this is the final problem with your argument: we’re not debating that the American military has made progress on its goals, we’re just debating how much.
I’m going to take these in a different order:
We all agree this has substantially happened so there is no need to belabor it.
Iran will never produce a nuclear weapon. Here is a very simple proof: since Iran would win by producing a nuclear weapon, and Iran has not produced a nuclear weapon, they can’t do it. They’ve had six months and failed.
America bombed their nuclear facilities. It doesn’t matter how much they are destroyed or “merely” trapped underneath buried-in tunnels. America has the power to stop Iran’s nuclear development whenever we want. Iran has no ability to retaliate.
Six months ago, everybody agreed that Iran could rebuild the facilities when the war was over and that the war would have to end because Iran could control the Straits. Turns out they can’t control the Straits. We could continue the war indefinitely, and they could not produce nukes. We could end the war and they could try again, in which case we bomb them again, and they can’t retaliate — again!
Or they could surrender.
Undoubtedly, Iran still has missiles and occasionally still fires them. But this is pretty reduced from where they were before. It’s undeniable that America has bombed Iran’s facilities and destroyed many. The exact numbers are up for debate.
But what does it matter? Look at it like this: when did the Iranians last bomb anything that mattered? They are totally out of juice. In March they were bombing apartment buildings. They can’t do that anymore. The last time they shot anything, a few days ago, they launched 20 missiles (lmao) and hit a few parked military assets. Causing, essentially, no change in the status quo.
Similarly to the point above about nukes, the proof is that Iran has had six months and done very little. They can still build missiles? Ok, they’ve had six months to do it now, where is the military barrage? I they would be raining down thousands of missiles on Bahrain, Tel Aviv, Jeddah. Where is it?
It’s not meaningful if Iran can still technically build missiles and launch a few that get intercepted every now and then. If I have you locked in an armbar and you are still capable of very ineffectual light punches that don’t stop me at all, then it’s all over except for the knockout.
Or they could surrender.
I think it’s undeniable here that Iran’s allies and proxies have seen serious rollbacks. Hamas and Hezbollah have been seriously hit. Iranian militias in Iraq are being rolled up as the government works to purge them in cooperation with the Americans.
Moreover, Iran’s capacity to fund these networks is seriously degraded: they’re bankrupt! They are facing massive inflation. America is squeezing them out of the financial system with sanctions on the companies that give them lifelines and denying them the power to produce oil.
It’s like watching a patient bleed out on the tarmac and concluding, well, he has a lot of blood left maybe he’ll go psycho mode.
The only exception here are the Houthis in Yemen, who are capable of rolling back the Saudis. But that isn’t much of an obstacle to Trump’s war games.
The proof, again, is in the dog that didn’t bark in the night: America is targeting Iran at will and Iran cannot retaliate. Now that the straits are clearly under America’s control there is not even a theory of how they can retaliate. They aren’t building nukes or launching swarms of thousands of missiles. At best, every few weeks, they bomb a tarmac somewhere or attack a neutral third party and kill a sailor without even sinking any ships.
Iran is totally impotent. Trump won.
The only counter argument is that maybe they still have some factories somewhere. We don’t really know. The newspapers say they do.
At the beginning of the war they fired hundreds of projectiles and sometimes hit apartment buildings! Now they fire twenty and that's enough to penetrate the most well defended airspace in the AO and hit USAF fighter jets at will (what you call "parked military assets", lol)! Soon, the pathetic Iranians will only need a single missile to hit whatever they want and that will signal their imminent defeat! If you blow up your enemy's fighter jets on the tarmac then they win!
More seriously, the Saudi East-West pipeline was knocked out of commission by, depending on you ask, either the Houthis, the Iraqi PMFs, or the Houthi branch office in Iraq. Once AD has been sufficiently drained the Iranians can let their proxies handle the dirty work. Do you unironically believe that Iran's weakest proxies can cripple Saudi oil production single handedly but the Iranians themselves couldn't hit apartments if they really wanted?
Perhaps most embarrassingly, at the beginning of the war US forces would instantly respond to Iranian attacks with airstrikes. Now they sit there like cucks as Iran rails their assets, infrastructure and allies with missiles, their multi-billion dollar AD systems powerless.
Trump is totally impotent. Iran won.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/9/us-destroys-five-iranian-tankers-iran-retaliates-with-attacks-on-jordan-base
US strikes five Iranian oil tankers, as Iran attacks 10 ships, Jordan base
…
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Iran attacks ten ships, killing no one, and launches 20 missiles, 18 intercepted, 2 allowed to hit empty fields.
America sinks five Iranian oil tankers in response.
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How long do you think it takes to make a nuclear weapon?
Longer than it takes us to bomb them.
Cute.
Let me ask this a different way: if it were possible to have built a deliverable nuclear weapon within 6 months, why don't they already have one? They were off the JCPOA since Trump's first term. Or, hell, if we're to accept the Republican narrative, they were building a nuclear program the entire time they were on it. It's been 134 months since the JCPOA was signed, and 100 months since Trump backed out. You can pick either as the start date from when the Iranians began earnestly trying to build a nuke. You'll notice both are much longer than 6 months. Where are the nukes?
Or, would you argue that actually this is a process that takes years? That maybe it's a long research and development cycle, but Iran was finally getting near the end of it, and only timely action now (February) was enough to stop them from nuking Tel-Aviv or whatever by March. I believe the Netanyahu standard is about two weeks away. I mean, that's plausible. Except last summer, your dude told all of us that he had "completely and totally obliterated" iran's nuclear enrichment facilities. As he said: “We’re not at war with Iran … We destroyed the Iranian nuclear program … and we did it without endangering the lives of American pilots. That’s an incredible thing.”
So like... was he lying? Did he realize that actually he totally oversold it, and Iran's way better at building a nuclear program despite being bombed than he thought, and now we have to start a whole regional war that does get our people and lots of others killed to actually do the job he told us he did? And if that's the case, and it turns out you can spool up an entire, imminently-deliverable-bomb-producing nuclear weapons program in less than a year from "complete obliteration", I ask you again, where are all their nukes? They've had years and years of being unconstrained by our bombs or our diplomacy, and seemingly nothing to show for all their very, very active work trying to build a bomb all these many long years. North Korea managed it with an economy ten times smaller, a famine, and literally nothing that resembles Iran's scientific corpus. Where's the bombs that they should have been producing all this time, if they were actually trying to do so, like your ilk keep telling me?
I won't defend what Trump said, but you have to remember (as always) that he loves to exaggerate. Take him seriously, but not literally.
In particular, this isn't our first rodeo with Iran's nuke program. This has been going on a very long time, like since the 90s. They were strongly sanctioned by most of the world during the 2000s to try and make them stop, which didn't work, but it did at least limit their resources. We used the Stuxnet cyberattack to destroy their centrifuges, and Israel assassinated some of their nuclear scientists. That helped, it did set them back a lot, but eventually they rebuilt. The JCPOA got them to stop developing it publicly, but they were still developing it secretly, just at a slower pace. After that there were a serious of cyberattacks, covert actions, and bombing raids to disrupt Iran's nuke program. Most famously, there was Operation Midnight Hammer, where a group of stealth bombers dropped 10,000 kg MOABS on the mountain where they were hiding their centrifuges. In other words, if you actively bomb them, it becomes hard to finish a nuke, although they were objectively close to finishing one before they got bombed.
However the nuclear material is still there, it's just dispursed into the soil now. It really wouldn't be all that hard for them to dig it out and re-process it into a nuclear weapon at this point. We're not talking about a Manhattan Project style leap of engineering, it's just a lot of brute labor at this point. Like you said, North Korea managed it with a much smaller economy, because we did nothing much to stop them. As a result, they feel free to do things like launch cyberattacks or send troops to help Russia. I would prefer not to give Iran the same leverage.
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Depends entirely on where a country's starting from. See also "screwdriver-ready" or "Iran is constantly X months/weeks/days from a bomb."
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Welcome back General Westmoreland, we've missed you.
Just for a little perspective, 2.7 million men were deployed in Vietnam and 58,000 died. At the war's peak in 1968, we spent about 10% of GDP on our military.
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So the argument here is that Trump started another Forever War and as long as American resolve is such that we're willing to continue indefinitely, things are fine and it counts as a win?
By the same logic do you consider Afghanistan a win until Trump/Biden withdrew and chose to lose it?
We won militarily in Afghanistan completely and then committed to occupying the country forever so that girlboss NGOs could educate the Taliban about anal sex.
We’re not doing that this time.
Very true. You actually have to win the war and occupy the country first before you can lecture them about anal sex.
We have won the war. We achieved all of the goals President Trump laid out at the beginning of the war and Iran couldn’t do anything to stop us.
The Strait was open before the war.[https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-war-hormuz-trump-yemen-houthis-2b126da67b09de2f328846eb656abe0e](It is not now). That is backwards progress. But I don't even care about this because even if it was open, it wasn't in the defined objectives before the war. At best its a return to the status quo and not a victory.
If victory requires the United States to keep bombing Iran indefinitely so Iran cannot rebuild, then Iran's nuclear/missile capability hasn't actually been permanently eliminated. This is tautological. What has been established is U.S. suppression of those programs, but nothing permanent.
Plus, you are repeatedly contradicting yourself and speaking out of both sides of your mouth. If Iran literally cannot build a weapon, there should be no need for repeated future bombing. Your argument concedes the point. The United States may be able to prevent Iran from completing a weapon through continuing military intervention, but that's very different from having destroyed Iran's ability to obtain one. The US military itself admits this hasn't been accomplished yet by the way.
You simultaneously says Iran is “totally impotent” and “cannot retaliate,” while acknowledging that Iran continues launching missiles and is attacking third parties. Again, you concede the point. Those attacks have happened in the past week. Clearly this is not a completed objective, even if they have been weakened. Plus you carve out an exception (admitting you are wrong) when you say, “The only exception here are the Houthis in Yemen." By your own admission, it is not accomplished yet.
Your argument is the classically motte and bailey. What you are arguing is that Iran is badly weakened, America enjoys escalation dominance, and Iran isn't currently capable of reversing the military balance. I don't agree that is true, but it is a defensible argument. But what you are doing is claiming Trump won, then retreating to the motte of America is winning when called out. Maybe we're in a new postmodern war when you can just say you've won and you won, but by traditional metrics (and those defined by the admin) the war is so clearly not over that it isn't even a debate.
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Your other comment you literally admit that they haven't been all accomplished. Is this performance art?
I argued that they were basically all accomplished because we can attack Iran arbitrarily and they can’t do anything in return.
Basically? More hedging.
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"Completely" doesn't seem to be true given who is currently in charge. No one intended on the forever war, it was just the quagmire they ended up with when it turns out the offramp wasn't easy. The second we pulled back they resurged.
Trump might not want the forever war, but if there's no other plan than "just keep bombing indefinitely" then it is one.
You’re conflating two different military events. There’s a big difference between defeating a country and occupying it.
You compared Iran to Afghanistan, but in Afghanistan we defeated their military completely. We lost the occupation. We are not presently trying to occupy Iran.
So wait why do the bad guys control it now and not the good guys we put there if the bad guys had literally no military power left?
You’re conflating two different military events. There’s a big difference between defeating a country and occupying it.
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Not to comment on whether this war is a good one or not, but it is much cheaper to keep doing what we're doing in Iran (i.e. not much) than it was in Iraq and Afghanistan which we were able to keep up for 8 and 20 years respectively.
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The Strait was open before the war.[https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-war-hormuz-trump-yemen-houthis-2b126da67b09de2f328846eb656abe0e](It is not now). That is backwards progress. But I don't even care about this because even if it was open, it wasn't in the defined objectives before the war. At best its a return to the status quo and not a victory.
If victory requires the United States to keep bombing Iran indefinitely so Iran cannot rebuild, then Iran's nuclear/missile capability hasn't actually been permanently eliminated. This is tautological. What has been established is U.S. suppression of those programs, but nothing permanent.
Plus, you are repeatedly contradicting yourself and speaking out of both sides of your mouth. If Iran literally cannot build a weapon, there should be no need for repeated future bombing. Your argument concedes the point. The United States may be able to prevent Iran from completing a weapon through continuing military intervention, but that's very different from having destroyed Iran's ability to obtain one. The US military itself admits this hasn't been accomplished yet by the way.
You simultaneously says Iran is “totally impotent” and “cannot retaliate,” while acknowledging that Iran continues launching missiles and is attacking third parties. Again, you concede the point. Those attacks have happened in the past week. Clearly this is not a completed objective, even if they have been weakened. Plus you carve out an exception (admitting you are wrong) when you say, “The only exception here are the Houthis in Yemen." By your own admission, it is not accomplished yet.
Your argument is the classically motte and bailey. What you are arguing is that Iran is badly weakened, America enjoys escalation dominance, and Iran isn't currently capable of reversing the military balance. I don't agree that is true, but it is a defensible argument. But what you are doing is claiming Trump won, then retreating to the motte of America is winning when called out. Maybe we're in a new postmodern war when you can just say you've won and you won, but by traditional metrics (and those defined by the admin) the war is so clearly not over that it isn't even a debate.
Or they could surrender.
Answer my questions:
The Strait was open before the war.[https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-war-hormuz-trump-yemen-houthis-2b126da67b09de2f328846eb656abe0e](It is not now). That is backwards progress. But I don't even care about this because even if it was open, it wasn't in the defined objectives before the war. At best its a return to the status quo and not a victory.
If victory requires the United States to keep bombing Iran indefinitely so Iran cannot rebuild, then Iran's nuclear/missile capability hasn't actually been permanently eliminated. This is tautological. What has been established is U.S. suppression of those programs, but nothing permanent.
Plus, you are repeatedly contradicting yourself and speaking out of both sides of your mouth. If Iran literally cannot build a weapon, there should be no need for repeated future bombing. Your argument concedes the point. The United States may be able to prevent Iran from completing a weapon through continuing military intervention, but that's very different from having destroyed Iran's ability to obtain one. The US military itself admits this hasn't been accomplished yet by the way.
You simultaneously says Iran is “totally impotent” and “cannot retaliate,” while acknowledging that Iran continues launching missiles and is attacking third parties. Again, you concede the point. Those attacks have happened in the past week. Clearly this is not a completed objective, even if they have been weakened. Plus you carve out an exception (admitting you are wrong) when you say, “The only exception here are the Houthis in Yemen." By your own admission, it is not accomplished yet.
Your argument is the classically motte and bailey. What you are arguing is that Iran is badly weakened, America enjoys escalation dominance, and Iran isn't currently capable of reversing the military balance. I don't agree that is true, but it is a defensible argument. But what you are doing is claiming Trump won, then retreating to the motte of America is winning when called out. Maybe we're in a new postmodern war when you can just say you've won and you won, but by traditional metrics (and those defined by the admin) the war is so clearly not over that it isn't even a debate.
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This was your response when I replied to you earnestly. Why don’t you reply to the post I made above instead of snipping at me in the comments below saying I don’t have an argument. I gave you a response and you never replied to any of my arguments.
Ok the order is getting all mixed up because we’re arguing across two different text chains at once — but I only said you didn’t have an argument after I explained exactly what I meant and you called it “hedging” and didn’t add anything meaningful at all.
You seem to think there’s a contradiction between saying “America has won” and “America is winning”. There isn’t.
The Strait was open before the war.[https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-war-hormuz-trump-yemen-houthis-2b126da67b09de2f328846eb656abe0e](It is not now). That is backwards progress. But I don't even care about this because even if it was open, it wasn't in the defined objectives before the war. At best its a return to the status quo and not a victory.
If victory requires the United States to keep bombing Iran indefinitely so Iran cannot rebuild, then Iran's nuclear/missile capability hasn't actually been permanently eliminated. This is tautological. What has been established is U.S. suppression of those programs, but nothing permanent.
Plus, you are repeatedly contradicting yourself and speaking out of both sides of your mouth. If Iran literally cannot build a weapon, there should be no need for repeated future bombing. Your argument concedes the point. The United States may be able to prevent Iran from completing a weapon through continuing military intervention, but that's very different from having destroyed Iran's ability to obtain one. The US military itself admits this hasn't been accomplished yet by the way.
You simultaneously says Iran is “totally impotent” and “cannot retaliate,” while acknowledging that Iran continues launching missiles and is attacking third parties. Again, you concede the point. Those attacks have happened in the past week. Clearly this is not a completed objective, even if they have been weakened. Plus you carve out an exception (admitting you are wrong) when you say, “The only exception here are the Houthis in Yemen." By your own admission, it is not accomplished yet.
Your argument is the classically motte and bailey. What you are arguing is that Iran is badly weakened, America enjoys escalation dominance, and Iran isn't currently capable of reversing the military balance. I don't agree that is true, but it is a defensible argument. But what you are doing is claiming Trump won, then retreating to the motte of America is winning when called out. Maybe we're in a new postmodern war when you can just say you've won and you won, but by traditional metrics (and those defined by the admin) the war is so clearly not over that it isn't even a debate.
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Go back and reply to my arguments I tagged you in it again.
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They can't surrender because they will all be killed or at best spend the rest of their life in prison. Their only option is to win.
Ok, then we keep bombing their nuclear sites any time they try to use them, and they continue to fail to impose any costs on us.
How is that not winning?
Well neither of those things are happening, which is why the US is losing.
Iran has not committed to developing a nuclear weapon, they haven't even left the NPT. Bombing their nuclear sites has negligible effect. The US crowed and rejoiced over the bombing in 2025, Trump said everything was destroyed. And yet apparently that wasn't enough, 6 months later he was back in.
And they're obviously imposing costs on the US. The price of oil is much higher than it was before Trump's war, even with the mysterious Chinese demand-reduction. US missile-interceptor forces have been significantly depleted.
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In another comment
So are we winning or have we won?
Iran cannot build nuclear weapons without America’s consent. It doesn’t make a difference if this is because we have to bomb them every time they try, or because they actively surrender and give up trying. It doesn’t make a difference because they can’t do anything about it. Therefore, America won.
The Strait was open before the war.[https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-war-hormuz-trump-yemen-houthis-2b126da67b09de2f328846eb656abe0e](It is not now). That is backwards progress. But I don't even care about this because even if it was open, it wasn't in the defined objectives before the war. At best its a return to the status quo and not a victory.
If victory requires the United States to keep bombing Iran indefinitely so Iran cannot rebuild, then Iran's nuclear/missile capability hasn't actually been permanently eliminated. This is tautological. What has been established is U.S. suppression of those programs, but nothing permanent.
Plus, you are repeatedly contradicting yourself and speaking out of both sides of your mouth. If Iran literally cannot build a weapon, there should be no need for repeated future bombing. Your argument concedes the point. The United States may be able to prevent Iran from completing a weapon through continuing military intervention, but that's very different from having destroyed Iran's ability to obtain one. The US military itself admits this hasn't been accomplished yet by the way.
You simultaneously says Iran is “totally impotent” and “cannot retaliate,” while acknowledging that Iran continues launching missiles and is attacking third parties. Again, you concede the point. Those attacks have happened in the past week. Clearly this is not a completed objective, even if they have been weakened. Plus you carve out an exception (admitting you are wrong) when you say, “The only exception here are the Houthis in Yemen." By your own admission, it is not accomplished yet.
Your argument is the classically motte and bailey. What you are arguing is that Iran is badly weakened, America enjoys escalation dominance, and Iran isn't currently capable of reversing the military balance. I don't agree that is true, but it is a defensible argument. But what you are doing is claiming Trump won, then retreating to the motte of America is winning when called out. Maybe we're in a new postmodern war when you can just say you've won and you won, but by traditional metrics (and those defined by the admin) the war is so clearly not over that it isn't even a debate.
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More hedging equivocation.
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How much does it cost us to bomb Iran forever? Do you want to pay that?
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Couldn't you have said the same about the Nazis and Imperial Japan?
Seem pretty irrelevant since we're probably not going to nuke them twice or do a massive ground invasion like we did to win WW2. There won't be the Iranian version of the Battle of Berlin. The US doesn't have the stomach for that. And doesn't this prove my point? Japan or Nazi Germany couldn't have been defeated unconditionally with the current limited US strategy.
The USA didn't do the battle of Berlin, the Red Army did- because they didn't give a shit about casualties(either their own or those of the unfortunate civilians ahead of them), and the wehrmacht was also defeated at that point, reduced to a bunch of ten year old boys.
I used that as an example of conquering their capital and country decisively where its total victory. Something we won’t see here.
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Seems to me that all 4 goals are accomplished with the important caveat that they are not permanently accomplished which would require Iran acquiescence or regime change.
Trump likely believed, after Venezuela, that Iran's regime was likely to collapse immediately after the attack. It certainly seemed possible at the time that a new dictator would rise and sign a deal broadly favorable to U.S. interests in exchange for being left alone.
I think it's clear now that didn't happen.
But nor did the histrionic predictions of the so-called geopolitical experts come true. Iran didn't shut the Hormuz. Iran hasn't caused more than a couple dozen U.S. casualties. Oil didn't go to $250. We didn't send in ground troops. And, to the best of my knowledge, not one of these people have come out and said they are wrong.
Why does Iran even matter anyway? Probably it doesn't except that it makes the Republicans less likely to win the midterms. As the party in power, they will be blamed for the crime against humanity of gas being slightly more expensive.
The dissident right view on this conflict seems to be that Iran is not worth the squeeze because domestic electoral victory is more important than foreign policy goals. For the record, I agree. But at the same time, Trump has never thought like that, and that's why he's where he is. Mike Pence would have been happy to sit on his hands and let Iran develop nukes to keep his poll numbers in tact. But there's a reason he's not around anymore. For better or for worse, Trump acts rather than reacts. Will this be his undoing? Maybe, but so far he has kept getting away with it.
It was very clear at the time that it was stupid to believe this and indications are Trump was warned of this by all of his advisors except Hegseth. If there was a time to intervene, it would have been in early January when there were massive anti-government protests, not at the end of February when the government had shot everyone who was feeling inclined towards revolt. Unfortunately, at that point the Trump admin was busy with Operation Caribbean Shakedown.
This sounds like cope. Wasn't Trump touted by both himself and his supporters as a guy who wasn't going to get snarled up in neocon adventurism? Why should voters cut him some slack on starting a war that drove up gas prices (and is continuing to do so), has killed thousands of civilians, alienated allies, and didn't achieve any of its substantive goals (i.e. regime change or denuclearization)?
Also, I'm not clear on what Mike Pence has to do with this, considering he was and is significantly more hawkish than his replacement.
Didn't the US start building up assets right after the protests? It unfortunately takes time to move things into the region... US logistics is good, but not magical.
The US had deployed numerous naval assets to support Caribbean operations (leaving a gap in coverage in Centcom) and was quite slow to redeploy them if it was planning to intervene in support of protestors. The most charitable interpretation is that the Trump admin imagined their intervention would reignite protests, but, as mentioned, this was pretty questionable given the massacres that had already taken place.
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As they should. This sounds like when Democrats were whining that voters were stupid to be angry at Biden just because of the price of eggs.
I do note the lack of a broad propoganda campaign hammering a "What are you talking about, inflation is low?" vibcession line. Republicans do seem to be acknowledging that gas prices did indeed go up, and are having discussions about if it was worth it and the tradeoffs involved.
Just seems worth pointing out to the honesty and standards and perverts for nuance crowd.
This probably says more about the lack of influence the Republicans (or perhaps more accurately the Trump wing thereof) have within US media than it does about Republican integrity. Trump and members of his administration have repeatedly attempted to present their version of reality to the media and the world, declaring the strait to be open, that the Iranians are on the verge of capitulation, etc, etc. The difference has been that the US media isn't running with it.
Or perhaps a lack of imagination/sophistication in messaging.
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The voter is never wrong. Do data centers use too much water? Of course they do and I will ban them. Are eggs too expensive? Of course they are. Grocery stores are greedy and I will make them pay. Is gas too expensive? Yes. You deserve cheap gas. The cheapest gas.
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Trump is saying Iran won’t surrender even though they’ve lost. Because their only hope left is that Democrats win. Because they can’t win on the battlefield.
Were the Jews winning at Masada because they held the surging Romans at the gates? Were the Prussians losing in 1871 because the Commune controlled Paris and refused to surrender for months? What’s the argument being made? Trump is losing the war with Iran because Iran refuses to surrender?
It worked for the North Vietnamese, it worked for the Taliban, it is not unreasonable to expect that it will work for Iran.
Especially considering the lack of a solid theory of victory for the Americans beyond the usual feather puffing about nuking the region or launching a ground invasion (neither of which seem politically feasible for the US at the moment, nor particularly wise).
So far as I can see the Trump administrations policy is to try and find a way to wriggle free and declare victory, ideally after returning to something like the pre-war status quo. Failing that, a vague idea of an internal revolution brought about by choking Irans economy, which again seems a little dubious considering the regimes demonstrated commitment to gunning down internal opposition.
Technically speaking, as I point out over and over and over again, North Vietnam accepted defeat. The US withdrew, then North Vietnam invaded again, and South Vietnam actually won the first time- then they sacked their best general out of paranoia and North Vietnam winning the second time shocked everyone, including the North Vietnamese. The US believed that it had accomplished its war goals of building a functioning South Vietnamese state which could defend itself and preventing North Vietnam from total war.
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This entire discussion has been about specific military goals and whether America achieved them or not.
Most of this list seems more tactical than strategic. By contrast, when the US entered WW1 to stop Germany from taking over Europe, their theory of victory was not that they would let their sons die in the trenches indefinitely.
On the strategic front, I guess that the destruction of three Kilo-class submarines (USSR, 1980) counts -- Iran likely has no way to replace them.
Most of the other stuff is more of a setback than anything of long-term consequences. Sure, you can keep Iran from getting a nuke if you keep dropping bunker-busting bombs on them indefinitely. This is not going to happen because the US foreign policy is never that consistent for long.
Take the previous effort to keep Iran from gaining a nuke, the JCPOA. Politically, it was a lot more sustainable than indefinite bombing -- economically net positive, no military commitment, enforcement through well-established institutions. It lasted for about three years before the US elected a narcissistic buffoon who thought that he was the master negotiator and any deal negotiated without him was therefore bad.
GWB's adventure in the ME permanently changed the strategic landscape there (but arguable for the worse). None of the things Trump did to Iran will have a long-term effect aside to further antagonizing them.
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Pre-war status quo is not when the Americans can destroy your military at any time, kill all your leaders, and you can’t do anything about it.
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Yes, because everyone predicted that Iran would take over the Straits so any American victories didn’t count. It was said that America was losing because Iran controlled the straits, so it didn’t even matter if America achieved its original gains. I was criticized many, many times for saying that oil would continue to push through the straits and that Iran would never toll it.
Now that this is undeniably true that Iran does not control the Straits we move onto some other goalpost. The straits of Hormuz never mattered at all! Whew lad
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