An interesting one from TNR:
Somewhat related, I had a conversation with my MAGA associate, whose been pretty quite recently (he has five boys that are all old enough to have his own views and who are sick of the US supporting Israel on everything. . . I bet this war has been interesting at home. . .). He noted, however, "I almost feel sorry for those mullahs, hiding in caves".
Now, he's never served in the military and doesn't know much about military matters, at all. I noted that must be pretty bad, and then the fortunes of war became the topic. I.e., how will this war end.
"We've already lost" was my statement.
He looked stunned.
We have already lost. When you launch a war with war aims that are based on your experiences as a real estate developer, you are a fool.
Trump has no real world experience in anything. He's just been a real estate developer, and that's not much. That's based on money.
An existential war, and that's what a war between Israel and Iran is, isn't based on that. It's based on two fundamentally opposed world outlooks. Israel's war aim is to end Iran as a military threat forever, and under Netanyahu, it's been willing to commit genocide in order to achieve security. Nobody is looking at Gaza anymore. Nobody is looking at Lebanon either. Basically, Israel is fighting the war, with the US as a mercenary dupe, quite frankly, the way the mob war is depicted in the Godfather.
Trump stupidly thought that the Iranians, who have a theocracy, think like he does. He'd give them the dope slap and they'd give up, or if they didn't, there'd be a January 6 type revolution in the streets. Nope, nothing like that has happened or is going to. Even the Kurds, who would like to be independent, have so little faith in King Donald that they're not rebelling.
Now a series of really horrific choices are before him. For one thing, under the War Powers Act, he's running out of time to submit this to Congress and it appears fairly certain that there's a real chance that Congress would say "nope". He's running out of money quicker that that, and is going to have to go to Congress and ask for $200B, with some Republicans already indicating they won't support that.
It's clear, moreover, that he can't bomb his way into victory. That's never worked, and it isn't working here. Indeed, not only is it not working, the limits of airpower are really showing. We've done a massive aerial assault and yet the Iranians keep hitting back.
And the Iranians have hit on the idea of waging an economic war, which is a strategic use of airpower, missiles in the air in this case, knowing that there's little support of the war anywhere, and that people now get to think about how foolish King Donald is every time they go to the pump. Indeed, an economic war against the US as an Islamic warrior concept has been around for a long time, and is actually what Osama Bin Laden had in mind when he staged the Twin Towers attacks. Bin Laden turned out to be an economic moron as that had no effect on the economy at all, but this is.
And the Iranians have shown themselves to be able to effectively close the Straits of Hormuz, locking up 20% of the globe's oil supply. Wharton School of Business graduate Trump (I'm now at the point where Wharton ranks in my mind with correspondence courses in the back of cartoon books) apparently has no grasp at all on how the global oil market works.** His stupid, and it was stupid, reply is "well we have lots of oil". Yeah., we do, in a global market.
J. D. Vance, or whatever his name is, had the comment "well other people are suffering more than we are", which is also moronic. That's saying that yes, you are suffering.
The only way to open the Straits of Hormuz back up is to land Marines on the north shore of the Straits and make a broad beachhead. A broad beachhead is subject to broad attack, which in turn requires a deeper beachhead. Choose the analogy that you want, but pretty soon you are looking at either Da Nang in 1965, in which we went from Marine beachhead, to expanded perimeter, to full intervention in the Vietnam War, or Anzio in 1944, which turned into a man eating mess. Optimistically, a Marine force to open the Straits of Hormuz would have to be backed up, in the end, by a two division commitment form the U.S. Army, and that would be just to hold on to some real estate, not to win the war.
Of course, it'd help in the current pseudo chief executive had cracked a history book from time to time, but Trump just isn't that smart.
Winning the war would actually require a full scale ground invasion. We could probably pull that off, but it would require an investment of manpower on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. The Korean War would be a good analogy, actually. It'd require a full scale call up of the National Guard and Reserves, and the standdown would not come for many years. It'd cost something like 20,000 men killed, optimistically, and accelerate inflation at an unsustainable rate under the current tax structure. In other worlds, unlike the Cold War in which budgets were less out of control, we couldn't keep this running long and would actually have to raise taxes, and massively, something that should be done in any event.
So, here we are. Israel got a a war that Bibi wanted, although winning that war now depends more on Dick and Jane in Hastings, Nebraska, than it does on anyone in Israel. The US got into an illegal war it didn't want at all, and which nobody can honestly state has a goal that makes sense. Pete Hegseth and his Evangelical friends got a fever dream in which they bring about the end of Islam, which isn't going to happen.
Well, if its any consolation, Trump gets bored pretty easily. Marco Rubio probably still wants to invade Cuba. There's a fairly good chance that Trump will just pull the U.S. military out of the war, effectively surrendering to Iran but without his pen on anything. We'll go on to invade Cuba with just as little grasp of what that will take. Republicans in Congress will still sit around acting like they're getting paid to do something.
Sic transit Gloria Mundi.
Footnotes:
*Recalling Æthelred the Unready, the terrible Saxon king, whom after his death was lampooned as being "unready", i.e., "ill advised".
Æthelred the Unready, whom in spite of being a terrible king, was the Saxon king for 38 years, a remarkably long time.
**A very respected cousin of mine went to Wharton and went on to a fantastic career in business. He was the sort of person who was simply a natural businessman from day one. Indeed, I always though him a fish out of water in Wyoming where he really didn't fit in.
Anyhow, we were all so impressed that he went to Wharton.
My mind has really changed on Wharton, and frankly a lot of the big name schools. Both Donald Trump and Wyoming's Secretary of State, Chuck Gray, are Wharton graduates which says a lot, and not in a good way, about Wharton. Gray, at least, is clearly smart, indeed smart enough to dupe a lot of Wyomingites into voting for him. Trump appears to me to have a very modest intellect.
Pete Hegseth is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, which is even more amazing. Hegseth simply doesn't appear to be that smart.
All of this calls for a separate thread, but clearly the level of prestige these institutions have traditionally held simply isn't warranted today.
