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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.
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.
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.
This is an absurd exaggeration of what the US did in Afghanistan. Like come on the US occupied it because supporting the Mujahedeen and then leaving a power vacuum worked out terribly last time and led almost directly to 9/11. And come on the NGOs in Afghanistan were doing things like teaching women to read and digging wells they weren't busting out the gender unicorn.
America committed a lot more than that. From the official Special Inspector Report "Support for Gender Equality: Lessons from the US Experience in Afghanistan":
(Pardon the bing search link)
https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=3274be0ed828a64327f591595169b4050f8cec24564f797aaf9ff874827db94eJmltdHM9MTc4OTQzMDQwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=01dcd28c-902e-6f4c-3fd6-c55991396e4d&psq=Support+for+Gender+Equality%3a+Lessons+from+the+U.S.+Experience+in+Afghanistan&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ292aW5mby5nb3YvY29udGVudC9wa2cvR09WUFVCLVMtUFVSTC1ncG8xNTY5MzAvcGRmL0dPVlBVQi1TLVBVUkwtZ3BvMTU2OTMwLnBkZg
Consider pages 42-43:
(Thrilling stuff!)
Official American policy was to implement "Gender Mainstreaming" into all aspects of Afghan policy; in effect, the US military was used to prop up NGOs who wanted to socially engineer Afghanistan into having completely modern American liberal views about gender. This included mandating all "project designs" address gender, the creation of a stand-alone Office of Gender, routine "gender analysis" -- for example:
So you want to spend some American money to support Afghan farms, but you can't do this without also making women get some of the money, but you can't do that without conducting a gender analysis which concludes that we need to encourage Afghan "men to be more receptive to a shift in power dynamics within a relationship".
Page 47 of this report, by the way, concludes that the "failure" of "gender mainstreaming" "does not necessarily mean that it should be discounted as a viable means to raise the profile of gender equality".
They think it was working.
This is not conspiracy Fox News red meat conservacon slop stuff. Washington DC used the American military to support an endless cultural revolution within Afghanistan, and their own autopsy concludes that they didn't try hard enough. This is no surprise if you have spent any time in Washington, because it is full of endless NGOs that want to use our tax dollars to promote endless impossible grifts that have all the right credentials and K Street speak.
At the same time, as anyone who served in Afghanistan can tell you, while the NGOs were running around promoting extremely unpopular social revolutions, the American military was being used to safeguard the poppy fields that grew the opium that kept Afghanis in thrall to an addiction. This was extremely unpopular and the Taliban earned a lot of goodwill by stamping out the poppy industry wherever they could.
It's silly stuff.
Donald Trump is not doing any of that!
He is simply going to bomb them until someone he can negotiate a deal with comes to surrender.
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