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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.
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.
It's crazy that with Strait traffic surpassing MOU levels and Iran powerless to do anything about it you would still believe this.
It’s fine if you think that’s happening but I hope you don’t invest your money on this assumption. Even TankerTrackers (imo a psy-op lite account) says it’s half the crude + products as 2025. Saudi East-West will take 1-1.5 months to repair. Houthis just struck Yasref refinery. Ships still being hit in strait and a ship may or may not have hit a mine yesterday.
What is your contention? It sounds like you're saying Iran could close down traffic in the Strait but has simply chosen not to, for some reason.
Iran has brought down transit to ~30% of last year’s average. They don’t need to hit every single ship to make an impact.
Five months ago you said that “ it would be great for mankind if Iran winds up controlling the strait”. Four months ago you said that the easiest way for America to reopen the Straits was to surrender to Iran and give them what they wanted. Two months ago you denied that America was escorting ships through the Strait.
Now we’re just debating how deep America’s control of the Strait is.
It’s probably higher than 30% because ships that can take more oil are making the crossing to maximize payout-to-risk, and a lot of ships are going dark, and many details are obfuscated by war.
For example, CNN quotes Centcom and says they achieved an 18M barrel day, 90% of pre-war levels with
40/125 vessels= 32% of pre-war traffic. Not bad for an active warzone.We should not consider the Strait “open” if shipping is down 70%, ships are struck every week, and most of the successful crossings use the Iranian corridor. Before Kpler nuked all their public posts they were claiming most known crossings were using Iranian corridor, with some mysterious amount using another corridor. This was in late August.
I denied that (1) they escorted many ships during the last closure, and (2) that they were currently escorting ships. This was in mid-July, and if you look at the Kpler historical crossing data for mid-July, there were barely any crossings and barely any escorted by the US:
So yeah I think my previous estimations / predictions were pretty good
I think they are probably telling the truth, but this doesn’t tell us the average mbps.
Even Iranian media admits that Iran isn’t exercising control over the strait; it’s time to give it up. Unless you are suggesting that those ships are using the Iranian route because they’re paying the toll.
Ships are crossing Hormuz again because America destroyed Iran’s ability to project force and everyone is starting to catch on.
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