You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
Matthew, Chapter 24.
We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of War used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a War, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: each endeavours to throw his adversary, and thus render him incapable of further resistance.
Carl von Clausewitz
The irony is that Trump could make a plausible case that this war is allowable under the Authorization to Use Military Force George W. Bush received in 2001. But symbolically that would mean Trump is continuing Bush’s “forever war.”
Regardless, Republicans aren’t just under a legal clock to get this thing over with, but a political one, too. Polling shows Americans, including many Republicans, have no thirst for a long conflict, which makes sense given that they were not asked to prepare for this war. Hence, the insistence that this war will be short and tidy.
The problem is that Iran knows this. That’s why they don’t have to win, they just have to ride out the bombings until the public or Trump loses patience with this very real war.
Jonah Goldberg, Republicans aren’t willing to call war in Iran what it is.
But they were very strongly involved and all of the people that died through the roadside bombs died and are right now walking around with no legs, no arms. A face that’s been so badly damaged.
Donald Trump, alleged commander in chief.
Unless otherwise noted, every item in this updated thread is on Mad King Donny's war on Iran. Or not a war if you ask Sycophant Mike Johnson, Toady of the House.
March 12, 2026
New Hampshire National Guard’s 157th Air Refueling Wing in connection with the war with Iran.
Up to 17 ships have been hit by the Iranians in the Gulf of Hormuz.
Iran hit refinery targets in Oman.
The first week of Trump's war cost the $11.3 B.
$11.3B and they can still hit ships.
The US is releasing 172M bbls of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Oil opened today at $90.75.
And, not only is the war nowhere near ending, Iran is dictating terms to the United States and Israel, those being acknowledging Iran's "legitimate rights" are acknowledged, compensation for damages and strong international guarantees to prevent future attacks.
Iran would not have made those if it was anywhere near "surrendering" in any form. Indeed, the last item strongly suggests that they've coordinated with China and Russia who would probably back that demand. If the US accepts any variant of this, we're surrendering, but given that the war is a unilateral action by demented Donald Trump, and that the GOP will start panicking soon about this still going on in November, of which there's an excellent chance it will be, and prices are going to skyrocket enormously, and that his mind wonders, there's a pretty good chance he'll do it and declare victory, which nobody except the most deluded MAGA will believe.
This has gotten next to no press and right now, the concept of the U.S. surrendering to Iran seems absurd, but Donald Trump surrendered to the Taliban in the Afghan War and is simply not a very intelligent man. As casualties mount and inflation ramps up, he'll look like a failure, which of course, he largely is. Because of that, he'll grow anxious. I don't put it past him at all to agree to some version of this, if not this.
Cont:
Iran's Supreme Leader issued a statement vowing to avenge those killed in the first strikes and to keep hitting other states.
So, the war isn't over. It's not close to over, and we have no idea how to win it.
March 13, 2026
Two acts of terrorism occurred yesterday.
A major Jewish synagogue was attacked by a U.S. citizen of Lebanese origin whose brother was killed last week in an Israeli raid there.
Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a former Virginia Army National Guardsman attacked a ROTC class at Old Dominion. He joined ISIL after his discharge from the Guard and had been previously convicted of plotting a terrorist attack. The class instructor was killed before the ROTC cadets killed Jolloh.
These attacks are fairly clearly "lone wolf" type attacks, not sleeper cell attacks. The probable result will be howling complaints by MAGA that every Muslim in the US needs to be deported.
I will note that the Muslim population in the country is really winning the stupid prize for playing the stupid game. They rallied to some degree to Trump as they were upset about Biden's support of Israel. Well, now Gaza, which was the source of all of that, has been utterly flattened, Israel is waging war in Lebanon, and the US is in Iran. This is one of those items like Wyoming conservatives and their support of the "health care" amendment to the Wyoming Constitution wondering if maybe they have the blood of aborted fetuses on their hands (they do). Muslims who supported Trump are partiallyr responsible for this.
Trump threatened the Iranian leadership yesterday, calling them in "deranged scumbags". That's real adult.
A KC135 went down over Iraq, killing the crew of four.
Figures in the administration are quietly backing away from claiming the war will result in regime change. If it doesn't, it will have achieved utterly nothing, but then, we don't really know what the war is supposed to be about in the first place.
March 14, 2026
Is JD Vance Rooting for the Iran War to Fail?
Whatever Vance is or is not rooting for, the price of oil, now at $97/bbl, is definitely going to go up as the US hit a major Iranian petroleum loading facility yesterday, a purely economic target. Going after Iranian petroleum infrastructure means the price rise will last for years, to at least some extent.
Indeed, riffing off of this, the satirical "The Onion" has Trump getting the Greenpeace award for making oil too expensive to use. There's some truth to that. Electric vehicles are starting to look pretty good as the world's petroleum supply gets systematically destroyed.
Indeed, somewhat related to that, we have this:
Although President Trump said seizing tankers would be a financial boon, the cost of maintaining just one aging ship has already reached $47 million.
We not only aren't making money from seizing tankers, we're spending far more on them than the contents of the oil they contained.
This really should have been obvious, but it does not appear that there's anyone in the administration who understands the petroleum industry whatsoever.
Indeed, frankly, while Trump may be a businessman, the administration is amazingly dim on economics itself. This probably shouldn't be a surprise as Trump is merely a real estate developer operating on inherited wealth. M'eh.
None of Trumps economic plans are working out. We're losing jobs, businesses are not moving to the US like he claims, and we're about to get hit by inflation in a ramped up fashion. Folks who bizarrely feel that Trump is some sort of super genius should read this:
Those folks should read this:
The gravity of the current situation can hardly be overemphasized. Trump doesn't know what he's doing. As far as anyone can tell, this war was launched as he thought it would be easy. It's not turning out to be at all. There's no plan on how to end the war and we don't really have solid war aims. Pete Hegseth and his company have a radical Calvinist view of what they'd like to do with US power. Marco Rubio is probably chomping at the bits, in his too big shoes, hoping to invade Cuba. We're nowhere near the end of any of this, including what will be endless price rises to fuel a war most Americans did not want and do not want now.
Cont:
As if any more evidence was needed that Trump had utterly no idea whatsoever about what he was doing, we have this:
Last week Trump rudely dismissed a vague suggestion from the UK that it might send ships to the region as we didn't need the help of Allies when we'd already won the war.
Today, Trump is begging for the help of allies.
March 14, 2026, cont.
Edgar Paxon's depiction of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. More thought appears to have gone into the deployment of the 7th Cavalry in this July 1876 event than went into "what if the Iranian regime doesn't collapse when we attack" this month.
An editorial note.
When we started tracking Wars and Rumors of War as a series, the United States was not in a full blown war. Indeed, back in 2020, when the series started, the U.S. wasn't really in any major conflicts at all. That first entry is here:
The first mention of the U.S. in the context of a war in that thread was in an entry on a prospective war with China over Taiwan, something that remains very much a possibility.
Now, the U.S. was to some degree at war, but in a minor way. We still had troops in Afghanistan although Trump had sealed the fate of that war by surrendering to the Taliban. And a U.S. military mission remained in Iraq and Syria, as they still do. Still, these missions did not meet the definition of war by any reasonable standard. The tread didn't really anticipate tracking anything major, let alone a major war involving the United States.
That first changed with Putin's invasion of Ukraine, bringing about the Russo Ukrainian War. That ongoing conflict remains a very serious one, one which a serious President would be aiding Ukraine to help bring about a Ukrainian victory.
We don't have a serious President.
We have King Donald, an octogenarian with dementia who admires Putin.
And now we have our own major war.
Given that, the time has come to sperate out the two big wars, Czar Vlad's war on Ukraine, and King Donald's war on Iran, into separate training threads. We should have done that when we started this entry, rather than try a Part 5 to the Wars and Rumors of War series for 2026. However. Every single entry here is on Kind Donald's War, so we'll run with this and make it a joint entry until something on the world stage gives us an entry for Part 6 that doesn't involve Iran, or Ukraine. The Russo Ukrainian War will also have a separate thread.
This also gives me a little more room to freely comment on both ongoing wars. I'll just note now that King Donald's War will stand as a monument to hubris for the ages. No plan to win it, not plan to get out, the Iranians were supposed to just quit.
Incredible.
Czar Vlad's war has a different set of lessons, one being that the Russian Army has always sucked. The Japanese defeated it in the Russo Japanese War, the Germans in World War One and darned near in World War Two. They never got over their own propaganda about winning the Second World War are now bogged down, and losing.
To paraphrase an older judge I heard the other day, well, if things look bad, at least we have a front row seat to the Apocalypse after all these years.
cont:
The U.S. has instructed Americans to leave Iraq after a second attack on the embassy there.
The Administration seems to have been caught flat footed all the way around. It didn't warn anyone, and it didn't bother to get the support of the American people. It seems to have thought things would be over by now.
There's a fair amount of "this wasn't my idea" going on right now, and no wonder. A week into the war, there's no end in sight and, frankly, Iranian predications of oil hitting $200/bbl don't seem that far fetched. Terrorism is ramping up. Things aren't looking good.
March 16, 2026
King Donny was in fit mode over the weekend, threatening NATO if they don't help with the Straits of Hormuz and begging China for help.
Nobody is promising to send ships. Why would they? The US even asking is proof that this was wasn't thought out. What China would probably like to see if the US commit to keeping the straits open and tie up the U.S. Navy.
Iran rejected opening up a dialog with the United States and hit an oil target in the UAE.
Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is reportedly in Russia where he received surgery.
March 17, 2026
Headline from the NYT.
Joe Kent, a Top U.S. Counterterrorism Official, Resigns Over the Iran War
Mr. Kent is the first Trump administration official to quit in opposition to the conflict. He said pressure from Israel had pushed the president into war against Iran.
And with that, we'll close this edition.
March 19, 2025
Israel his Iranian gas fields yesterday.
The price of oil leaped up to $118/bbl yesterday as a result, but is now down to $96.59.
It's increasingly obvious that Trump has no idea whatsoever how to bring the war to a conclusion. I've seen one commentary from a respected journal now nothing that Iran will dictate the terms on how the war will end, which we already noted. This is going to get worse, followed by a humiliation for the United States.
The Administration appears set to go to Congress and ask for $200B to prosecute the war. I've now seen, for the first time, a suggestion that its time to reprise the protests of the late stage of the Vietnam War and have a protest march on Washington.
cont:
The price of natural gas in Europe has jumped 35% due to gas fields being hit by both sides.
The US is reportedly considering deploying troops to the north shore of the Straits of Hormuz as the US war effort can't get the straits out of the line of fire.
And as we cannot get this to update, on to the next installement.
Last edition:
Labels: 2020s, 2026, 2500 BC, Afghanistan, Carl von Clausewitz, Cuba, Hezbollah, J. D. Vance, law, Lebanon, Marco Rubio, MIddle East, Pakistan, Protestant, religion, Sumer and Elam, United States and Israel v. Iran, Wars and rumors of wars
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