Selling the results of this war as positive for the US is worse than pathetic damage control - It's cultish reality denial.
Revelation of glaring air defense vulnerabilities - allowing so much destruction to Gulf oil and gas production facilities
Running through stocks of our high tech air defense weapons, for the whole world to know.
Getting dog-walked by Bibi
Empowering the evil, Iranian theocracy and Russia's war machine with cash
Letting Iran realize how easily they can effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz - We’re going to pay them bigly to behave decently - Now rant about Obama unfreezing some of their own money.
Chilling relations between Israel and the Gulf monarchies (except UAE)
Perhaps most heinous of all, proving to the world the US now has the Russian "war-fighting" mentality. Double tap a school on Day-One and deny, deny, deny .... And launching it absent a proximate provocation
Of course Obama’s fingerprints are on this ‘New Grand Strategy’ with one of his cronies pushing this nonsense.
‘Nasr is a former Obama State Department adviser and the leading voice of the engagement school, an apologist who treats Tehran as a rational strategic actor and not the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.’
Do you seriously believe the US is better off for having launched this war against Iran? While beneficial to me personally (I am long oil), this is catastrophically bad for most Americans.
I make the same challenge every time: What are the victory conditions, as we used to say in the old Avalon Hill board games, for the United States?
I suggest that these are (and you are welcome to offer alternatives)
(1) re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz without tolls or fees to Iran [which is mere return to the status quo ante];
(2) replacement of the mullahocracy with a pro-Western democratic government;
(3) surrender of Iranian enriched uranium and monitoring to prevent further enrichment [which is mere return to the situation under Obama’s JPCOA]
(4) attrition of Iranian missile capabilities
As of now, we have failed completely on (1), (2), and (3). We have partial success with (4), at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, perhaps more, to our own arsenal, which will be much slower to rebuild than Iran’s because of its greater technical complexity.
Now, there were goals in the war that I believe belonged to the Israeli government, but which do little for the security of the United States. These were
(5) looking belligerent and tough for purposes of the Israeli elections this fall;
(6) killing a great many Iranian leaders and civilians in the hope this would deter them with respect to supporting Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis;
(7) providing cover for the invasion and occupation of Southern Lebanon, to deter the Lebanese from allowing Hezbollah to operate there.
I don’t think these are good goals even for Israel, but they have almost nothing to do with the United States, which is why there’s resentment, even inside MAGA, for Bibi bringing his Power Points to persuade our senile leader that Iran was just a bigger Venezuela. The success of (5) will not be known for months, but (6) is a failure—whatever bad you want to say about the IRGC and the Iranian theocrats, cowardice in the face of mortal threat is not one of their faults. As to (7), it seems possible that the success in traditional military terms, which was inevitable, masks losses to drone warfare. The Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations made a truly absurd speech complaining about Hezbollah’s drone warfare. On what grounds? Israel uses drones, and has for years. (Israel made a similarly hypocritical complaint about Iranian cluster bombs, which many countries have agreed is a war crime, but Israel is not a party to that treaty and uses its own cluster bombs.) This is ridiculous as if Winston Churchill stood up in the House of Commons and railed against German use of bullets.
Now, it isn’t clear what Iran’s victory conditions are, much less whether they have been attained. But I don’t see where the US/Israeli victory is. Yeah, we killed more of them than they killed of us. That’s not part of the final score, though.
What you and others need to ask yourselves is where we would be in 5, 10, or 20 years had we just stood by and let Iran continue building up its arsenal of missiles, drones, and ultimately nuclear weapons that can reach most of Europe and eventually even the US. Yes, there are still major problems to be resolved, but the situation would be far worse in the future had we not acted now. Thank God we have a President and a Sec of State who understand that. Rubio is more eloquent than Trump. Listen to him -- he knows what he is talking about.
Estimates are that Iran has retained over half its launch sites and can again access its uranium. We have no idea what Iran will have in five (or twenty) years on the current trajectory, nor what it would have been had we stayed in the JCPOA, before the Master Negotiator decided he could do better than Obama.
Is there some quantified, reified metric was can apply in five years so we would at least know then if we won this war?
Iran's navy, air force, and air defenses have been completely destroyed. If they do start launching missiles again, do you think it will be easier or harder to take out the launch sites, given those massive losses? Try to think two moves ahead.
If the problem persists and/or gets worse, we can destroy their infrastructure and put an end to it once and for all, as Trump warned a few weeks ago. The only reason we haven't yet done so is that we are trying to make it easier for the Iranian people to rebuild, so that would be a last resort. The notion that we are out of options for ending the regime is nonsense.
If the US and the UK had preemptively attacked Nazi Germany before WWII started, people like you would have complained about it, but it could have saved millions of lives.
If Iran is able to make a nuclear bomb anyway, then I would view our war against them as having been even more critical. Think about it. If we had done nothing, they would probably have made many more nuclear bombs. And each nuclear bomb could destroy a large part of a major city.
What is with the pro-Iran Islamo fascist supporters? Are you people suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Your toxic sympathy for a regime that just recently killed 30,000 of its own people for protesting for freedom of women, freedom of worship, and of free speech is beyond reason and borders on mental illness.
We took out Khomeini and many upper level people from his regime. We stopped the hanging and shooting of innocent protesters as we exposed that 30,000 Iranians were murdered by Iranian leadership and the IRGC. The nothing-is-happening people fail to grasp that we took out the Iranian Navy and Trump stopped the pirating of ships traveling through the Strait. We stopped much of the terrorist activity in the region because we stopped the sale of oil going out of Iran. No money, no funding for terrorists or money to pay IRGC members. There is more, but you are apparently listening to leftist anti-Trump opinion, and missing facts. Listening to those with TDS is never a good idea.
We did indeed kill Khameini (not the long-dead Khomeini), but there seems to have been no problem replacing them with younger men who are at least as fanatical. I don't see the assassinations as an end, but a means.
Although Iran sometimes intercepted vessels to make document checks, we weren't losing cargo to pirates before the war. Now the strait is closed, there isn't a problem with piracy because there aren't any ships. There's no reason to believe the Iranians can't interdict traffic: indeed, even before the USA also closed the strait, they were doing so.
If by terrorist activity you mean Hezbollah, they are doing better than expected in southern Lebanon. If you mean near Somalia, I don't think there is any reason to believe it.
The strait is NOT closed. Ships are being escorted through by our Navy. Ten ships went through just today. As far as your claim that we weren’t losing cargo to pirates, many incidents involving state naval or patrol forces harassing shippers for political purposes is in reality, state piracy. By denying the long history of Iran funding terrorism you are proving that you refuse to accept facts.
Ten? That's one-sixth of normal, and the Iranians are threatening to cut even that off.
I don't deny Iran funds terrorism. But rather than just celebrate killing Iranians, of whom there are many millions, try to formulate a victory condition related to Iranian-backed terrorism and then compare it to where we are today.
For a bonus, consider the implications of Trump's offer to give Iran $300 billion.
The “machine” may be broken, but it endures. Damaged or not, the regime survives. The Iranian people are afraid to protest (for good reason). The Artesh has not risen up. Global trade for our allies is disrupted. The regime retains its nuclear stockpiles. I no longer hear that we’re even advocating to end the regime’s support of proxies like Hezbollah, or to curb their ownership of ballistic missiles, both earlier demands. I don’t see that we’re winning, though we could be. The constant retelling of how many of their military assets we’ve degraded has nothing to do with how this ends. It reminds me of the bragging about body counts in Vietnam,which of course had nothing to do with the ultimate outcome.
Trump, a deal guy, may have gotten in over his head on this one. This is a war, and it’s not Grenada or Panama. Any “deal” now on the table is a victory for the Islamic tyrants. The president’s legacy hangs on how he handles this. If he wants to go down as a great president, he needs to end the regime, and the best way to do this is with overwhelming assaults that completely disrupt life in Iran. Pretty? Not at all. But it’s the best outcome for every nation including Iran itself.
If he caves on some Obama like deal with the regime, it will embolden Islamic terrorists worldwide. While Biden’s sudden abandonment of Afghanistan was a tragedy, it is one mostly confined to that country’s borders. If the same happens with Iran, that country will have the capacity to wreak havoc on all its neighbors and, ultimately, on western civilization more broadly.
Wasn’t it Trump 1.0 who negotiated our surrender to the Taliban? Including release of terrorist Taliban from Afghan custody? He just left the implementation to his successor.
He had a planned withdrawal timetable for the prior May. Whether he would have stuck with it given facts on the ground we’ll never know. Biden wanted everyone out before the 9/11 anniversary. That’s why the sudden departure. Not exactly a well thought out geopolitical strategy, especially given what happened to our Afghan allies and some $5 billion of U.S. military gear.
What made the departure seem sudden was that the speed of the collapse of our puppet government ("allies") took everyone by surprise. We thought it would at limp through a few months.
The secondary lesson is that staying there even longer would not have helped. If twenty years wasn't enough to create an Afghan government that could resist Islamists for a month, how much could another twenty years have managed?
Fair enough, though things were fairly stable with only 2,500 troops and no combat role to speak of. Still, Afghanistan is pretty much ungovernable, as empires from the Romans, Moghuls, Khan, Tamerlane and the Russians allies found out.
This is about cultural change. Iran is not Japan. There are still those Iranians alive who knew a freer life. You cannot make people who have been oppressed for 40 years better off by annihilating them. By resetting political power through an economic reset, they have time to make the cultural shift they need.
I don’t think anyone is talking about “Annihilating “ anyone. But since you brought up the Japan example, our use of overwhelming power saved many Japanese lives and set the stage for the modern and successful country that is Japan today. With today’s precision weapons, you target easily repaired pipelines and power lines leading from desal plants and power plants, not the plants themselves. You need to create chaos and a state of emergency in urban areas like Tehran and Isfahan to undercut the regime’s ability to do anything at all. A war to end the Iranian regime will be messy, just as Iran made the entire region messy, responsible for many thousands of deaths, including Americans and Iranians. As former SecDef Rice said today, “we owe that to the Iranian people.” Yes, the world will criticize us, as they privately thank us.
I brought up Japan because before we fought them there were no nuclear weapons. It took many years and a lot of money to rebuild Japan. We see many, mostly Muslim countries have large populations who are moderating their stance away from Sharia law and developing into more tolerant societies. Do you really believe taking a culture down to its knees (annihilating them) only to go back and spend large amounts of money and resources to rebuild is what we need to do? The EU and countries surrounding Iran can bring about this change. We get nothing from trade with Iran. The US wants only safety in the region. Why listen to Susan Rice who is Obama’s agent? Let the neighbors decide how to return their terrorist neighbor to a respectful and peace-loving relationship. Create chaos? We are not agents of chaos, we want peace. Americans owe nothing to Iran. Susan Rice will be wanting reparations. Israel, has always supported us, and we return our support of them. Safety for Israel and the region is our goal.
I agree with much of what you said, but not with respect to Islam, which is not moderating at all, other than countries that play both sides like Turkey and Qatar. The regime has to go for innumerable reasons. We don’t need to rebuild Iran, it’s a rich country. The costs today will be miniscule compared to this regime’s enduring presence on the world stage.
Then we are in another forever war that doesn’t directly benefit us. Kind of like Ukraine, which only benefited people like Mitt Romney, Joe, Hunter and Uncle Biden, and the war hawks. You really want our young people to have to go door to door to find the IRGC members?
"The US has announced new tariffs of 10-12.5% on dozens of countries accounting for almost all its imports over concerns they are not doing enough to tackle forced labour."
Because out of the blue, that's a massive concern.
You just can’t seem to catch up. That’s what happens when you forget to tie your boots. This is the second round of applying tariffs as the economic solution to abolishing slavery. It is a new Industrial Revolution that will save lives.
In case you have missed it Mary, Jews are leaving Canada because of antisemitism. “Antisemitism in Canada refers to prejudice, discrimination, or hostility directed at Jewish people or Judaism, and it has taken forms such as vandalism, hate propaganda, and bomb threats to Jewish institutions, with reported hate crimes rising 71% between 2022 and 2023 to a total of 900 incidents.” Carney is even back paddling. https://www.reuters.com/world/carney-promises-to-combat-antisemitism-canada-citing-surge-hate-crimes-2026-06-01/
Jews are leaving Canada, or perhaps Canada is leaving Jews, because antisemitism has been rising backward and sideways through institutions, vandalism, and reported incidents that may or may not be bomb threats to propaganda. Antisemitism in Canada refers to hostility, discrimination, prejudice, and occasionally the statistical migration of hate crimes into other categories, increasing 71% between 2024 and 2022 to approximately 700 directions at once. Jewish institutions have experienced vandalized reports and threatened bombs of hostility toward Judaism, while the incidents themselves appear to be leaving Canada. Meanwhile, Carney is back paddling, front paddling, and possibly paddling in circles, as the narrative continues to rise by 71% in relation to a total number of percentages. The prejudice remains directed at Jewish people, Canada, and sometimes the definition of reported.
My point is that for all the hype that Canadian (American, French, Andorran) Jews are in danger and should move to Israel because the governments in the West are just a few years away from going Nazi, the Jews who actually live in Israel are, on balance, leaving.
Catch me up, please. When had it been announced there would be a second stage? And how does tariffing every country in the world at the same rate address anything about forced labor (China a few points higher)? And why now?
What's Poland's role in this trafficked labour situation? His is it the same as that of every country in Europe and the world?
Any contortion for post-hoc justification of Emperor Erratic.
Just like taxation influences decision making, tariffs influence production, consumption, and in the US, creates the drive for innovation and investment. That’s the beauty behind the free market. Carrots and sticks.
Blanket tariffs do none of these things, because they affect goods for which the USA is at an insuperable comparative disadvantage. And when you say "influence consumption", what that means in plain English is that things will cost more, so less critical items will become unaffordable. That's not a win.
Nah, it’s just to wedge the tariffs Trump has always wanted (because he thinks they are paid by foreign governments direct to the US Treasury and sometimes to him personally) into another law, courts having thrown out his other attempts.
Whatever. Your view of economics has nothing to do with the war in Iran. It sucks to have TDS and realize nothing is going your way. You may want to take a break from social media or get a shrink’s help on that.
No takers for my question -New tariffs on every country except Russia are helpful and necessary because why?
"The US has announced new tariffs of 10-12.5% on dozens of countries accounting for almost all its imports over concerns they are not doing enough to tackle forced labour."
This isn’t “Bibi love” because I could seriously give 2 shitez about any of that nonsense. I refuse to play the game of ignorant commenters or people who hate Trump so much they'd rather Iran win -- where the only acceptable outcome is Iran’s total collapse, and anything short of that gets called American failure.
The actual mission was to break the IRGC’s ability to credibly threaten the region and build a nuclear weapon.
On that standard, Iran went from a force that could plausibly close the Strait and overwhelm defenses to one running a pathetic toll scam on the same waterway because it can no longer export oil normally. That’s not resilience. That’s what a degraded regime does when its real leverage is gone.
The people insisting Iran has been “remade” or strengthened are just coping by moving the goalposts until survival itself counts as victory.
A country reduced to extorting ships and smuggling Cisco routers through California middlemen isn’t winning. It’s a hollowed-out machine surviving on bluster and improvisation.
Is it time to finally admit that the only resolution to the US/Iran conflict that will have any lasting benefit is to change the current Iranian regime? Without such a change the SOH will be controlled by Iran and the possibility of resuming the building of a nuclear weapon is highly likely. How many times do we need to learn this lesson? All observers should now join in promoting regime change as the only way to win this war. Finish the job and do it soon.
Agreed. We don’t want to manage the outcome, just disrupt the terrorist regime. Besides, Iran has millions of bright, educated people. They’ll figure it out just fine on their own, once they aren’t faced with arrest, torture and death.
So far, the bright educated people have lost to the fanatics who have many more guns. Of course, it doesn’t help that their uprising was primed by an Israeli intelligence operation—I would have thought this was an anti-Semitic slur, except the Israeli government owns up to it!—and the old neocons have an affection for Shah failson Reza Pahlavi, whose internal support appears to be almost nil.
There were bright, educated people in Afghanistan (for one thing, the Communists that the US-backed guerrillas overthrew were big on women in school). This isn’t as easy as it looks.
Don’t miss the point that the new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei who reportedly is “gay” and is hidden in some cave without internet service. 🤦🏼♀️ Regime change was not the goal. Defanging the lion was. Iran can be readily annihilated as they sit atop their stockpile of nuclear material. They can invoke the 12th Iman if that makes them happy, but America and Israel will still exist. The war is over.
The accommodationist crowd always grades Tehran on a curve. If the mullahs are still breathing, they call it resilience. If Tehran’s lights stay on, they call it victory. If the population is silent under repression, they call it unity. No. Iran was hollowed out. Its economy is crushed, its proxies are isolated, its naval leverage is self-strangulation, and its remaining uranium only makes the next American or Israeli strike more inevitable if it tries a nuclear dash. Muse is right: survival was never the test. The machine was the test. Trump broke the machine and left Tehran selling rubble as strategy.
What exactly have we achieved, relative to the day before the war? Many mullahs are dead, and also some schoolchildren.
Trump sees everything as a zero-sum game. War is often a lose-lose game. Nothing is better for the United States than before the war, including greater possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
"Collapsing"? So, at about 2:30 pm tomorrow, we'll be back in the Stone Age? Give me a break. That's the saddest propaganda peddling I've heard in a while. Do you actually believe what you are saying? I'm trying to gauge precisely how much of a useful idiot you are.
As usual appreciate your thorough analysis. But your spotlight this one instance - I'll not be generously excusing it's authors as you are gracious to do: this is information warfare aimed at undermining US. Larger issue is the susceptiblity of Domestic MSM to broadcast unverified, unsourced, one-sided reporting consistently detrimental to the national security interests of the US (and Israel) as US citizens of US corporations. See Ezra Klein and NYT as recently as a few days ago publishing op-ed Jew Hatred sick imagination fabricating claim of Isreal training Rape Dogs. MSM has done everything it can to convince America (and the world) that Israel is engaged in Palestinian genocide when literally nothing could be further from the Truth - they achieveed an unprecedented low ratio of civilian collateral deaths for urban warfare, approaching 1:1. How MSM uncritically publishes claims made about Palestinian People and Statehood, that Israel is not land occupied by Jews for thousands of years, but stolen by European colonizers. Publishing patently false claims it is an apartheid state when Israel has always been a democracy with Arabic Muslim citizens who voted and are elected into government positions - when the converse truth is Arab nations systematic expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews since Israel founding bowhave Zero Jewish population today and also zero democracies. And in the US we have the world's second largest Jewish population, Jews who are US citizens, facing an unprecedented surge in lethal domestic terrorism fueled by Jew Hatred rhetoric not merely amplified by MSM - but provably intentionally engaging in Jew Hatred directly by consistently obfuscating the Nationality and religion and verifiable quotes shouted as they attacked and killed innocent US civilian citizens for exactly one specific reason - the attackers recognized they were Jews. The high-trust free American society is suffering constant attacks eroding our cultural values using the freedom our society enjoys in order to destroy them. MSM is culpable beyond reasonable doubt of conspiring to repeatedly promote lies damaging to the fabric of our national institutions, fostering deep and abiding divide in the nations social fabric unprecedented loss of social comity and trust in American institutions charged with sustaining that fabric since 2015. What is an open society to do when our own Fourth Estate, an independent Institutional check on abusive power, has itself become committed, for more than a decade now, to a course of action that a plurality of reasonable observers could plausibly agree MSM conducted itself in a manner consistently meeting definition categorically operating as a successful 5th Column enemy attack against our Nation. And a thoroughly successful job of it - the serial lies now irrefutably debunked - and at least 1/3 or more of our national remains convinced the lies told them are true.
Selling the results of this war as positive for the US is worse than pathetic damage control - It's cultish reality denial.
Revelation of glaring air defense vulnerabilities - allowing so much destruction to Gulf oil and gas production facilities
Running through stocks of our high tech air defense weapons, for the whole world to know.
Getting dog-walked by Bibi
Empowering the evil, Iranian theocracy and Russia's war machine with cash
Letting Iran realize how easily they can effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz - We’re going to pay them bigly to behave decently - Now rant about Obama unfreezing some of their own money.
Chilling relations between Israel and the Gulf monarchies (except UAE)
Perhaps most heinous of all, proving to the world the US now has the Russian "war-fighting" mentality. Double tap a school on Day-One and deny, deny, deny .... And launching it absent a proximate provocation
Of course Obama’s fingerprints are on this ‘New Grand Strategy’ with one of his cronies pushing this nonsense.
‘Nasr is a former Obama State Department adviser and the leading voice of the engagement school, an apologist who treats Tehran as a rational strategic actor and not the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.’
Do you seriously believe the US is better off for having launched this war against Iran? While beneficial to me personally (I am long oil), this is catastrophically bad for most Americans.
I make the same challenge every time: What are the victory conditions, as we used to say in the old Avalon Hill board games, for the United States?
I suggest that these are (and you are welcome to offer alternatives)
(1) re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz without tolls or fees to Iran [which is mere return to the status quo ante];
(2) replacement of the mullahocracy with a pro-Western democratic government;
(3) surrender of Iranian enriched uranium and monitoring to prevent further enrichment [which is mere return to the situation under Obama’s JPCOA]
(4) attrition of Iranian missile capabilities
As of now, we have failed completely on (1), (2), and (3). We have partial success with (4), at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, perhaps more, to our own arsenal, which will be much slower to rebuild than Iran’s because of its greater technical complexity.
Now, there were goals in the war that I believe belonged to the Israeli government, but which do little for the security of the United States. These were
(5) looking belligerent and tough for purposes of the Israeli elections this fall;
(6) killing a great many Iranian leaders and civilians in the hope this would deter them with respect to supporting Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis;
(7) providing cover for the invasion and occupation of Southern Lebanon, to deter the Lebanese from allowing Hezbollah to operate there.
I don’t think these are good goals even for Israel, but they have almost nothing to do with the United States, which is why there’s resentment, even inside MAGA, for Bibi bringing his Power Points to persuade our senile leader that Iran was just a bigger Venezuela. The success of (5) will not be known for months, but (6) is a failure—whatever bad you want to say about the IRGC and the Iranian theocrats, cowardice in the face of mortal threat is not one of their faults. As to (7), it seems possible that the success in traditional military terms, which was inevitable, masks losses to drone warfare. The Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations made a truly absurd speech complaining about Hezbollah’s drone warfare. On what grounds? Israel uses drones, and has for years. (Israel made a similarly hypocritical complaint about Iranian cluster bombs, which many countries have agreed is a war crime, but Israel is not a party to that treaty and uses its own cluster bombs.) This is ridiculous as if Winston Churchill stood up in the House of Commons and railed against German use of bullets.
Now, it isn’t clear what Iran’s victory conditions are, much less whether they have been attained. But I don’t see where the US/Israeli victory is. Yeah, we killed more of them than they killed of us. That’s not part of the final score, though.
What you and others need to ask yourselves is where we would be in 5, 10, or 20 years had we just stood by and let Iran continue building up its arsenal of missiles, drones, and ultimately nuclear weapons that can reach most of Europe and eventually even the US. Yes, there are still major problems to be resolved, but the situation would be far worse in the future had we not acted now. Thank God we have a President and a Sec of State who understand that. Rubio is more eloquent than Trump. Listen to him -- he knows what he is talking about.
Estimates are that Iran has retained over half its launch sites and can again access its uranium. We have no idea what Iran will have in five (or twenty) years on the current trajectory, nor what it would have been had we stayed in the JCPOA, before the Master Negotiator decided he could do better than Obama.
Is there some quantified, reified metric was can apply in five years so we would at least know then if we won this war?
Iran's navy, air force, and air defenses have been completely destroyed. If they do start launching missiles again, do you think it will be easier or harder to take out the launch sites, given those massive losses? Try to think two moves ahead.
If the problem persists and/or gets worse, we can destroy their infrastructure and put an end to it once and for all, as Trump warned a few weeks ago. The only reason we haven't yet done so is that we are trying to make it easier for the Iranian people to rebuild, so that would be a last resort. The notion that we are out of options for ending the regime is nonsense.
If the US and the UK had preemptively attacked Nazi Germany before WWII started, people like you would have complained about it, but it could have saved millions of lives.
Ask the Kuwaiti airport.
Let me ask a hypothetical question: would this be an accomplishment if Iran was able to make a nuclear bomb, anyway?
I’m suggesting this isn’t relevant to victory, even if some people are excited looking at the rubble.
If Iran is able to make a nuclear bomb anyway, then I would view our war against them as having been even more critical. Think about it. If we had done nothing, they would probably have made many more nuclear bombs. And each nuclear bomb could destroy a large part of a major city.
Just to point out, the Pakistanis have nukes and haven't done so.
But if the victory condition is Iran doesn't get a bomb, and we find in five years they have developed a bomb, doesn't that imply we lost?
What is with the pro-Iran Islamo fascist supporters? Are you people suffering from Stockholm Syndrome? Your toxic sympathy for a regime that just recently killed 30,000 of its own people for protesting for freedom of women, freedom of worship, and of free speech is beyond reason and borders on mental illness.
I have no sympathy for the mullahs. Just pointing out that we have achieved very little so far in our war against them.
We took out Khomeini and many upper level people from his regime. We stopped the hanging and shooting of innocent protesters as we exposed that 30,000 Iranians were murdered by Iranian leadership and the IRGC. The nothing-is-happening people fail to grasp that we took out the Iranian Navy and Trump stopped the pirating of ships traveling through the Strait. We stopped much of the terrorist activity in the region because we stopped the sale of oil going out of Iran. No money, no funding for terrorists or money to pay IRGC members. There is more, but you are apparently listening to leftist anti-Trump opinion, and missing facts. Listening to those with TDS is never a good idea.
We did indeed kill Khameini (not the long-dead Khomeini), but there seems to have been no problem replacing them with younger men who are at least as fanatical. I don't see the assassinations as an end, but a means.
Although Iran sometimes intercepted vessels to make document checks, we weren't losing cargo to pirates before the war. Now the strait is closed, there isn't a problem with piracy because there aren't any ships. There's no reason to believe the Iranians can't interdict traffic: indeed, even before the USA also closed the strait, they were doing so.
If by terrorist activity you mean Hezbollah, they are doing better than expected in southern Lebanon. If you mean near Somalia, I don't think there is any reason to believe it.
Again, what are the victory conditions?
The strait is NOT closed. Ships are being escorted through by our Navy. Ten ships went through just today. As far as your claim that we weren’t losing cargo to pirates, many incidents involving state naval or patrol forces harassing shippers for political purposes is in reality, state piracy. By denying the long history of Iran funding terrorism you are proving that you refuse to accept facts.
Ten? That's one-sixth of normal, and the Iranians are threatening to cut even that off.
I don't deny Iran funds terrorism. But rather than just celebrate killing Iranians, of whom there are many millions, try to formulate a victory condition related to Iranian-backed terrorism and then compare it to where we are today.
For a bonus, consider the implications of Trump's offer to give Iran $300 billion.
Well said. Muse is a highly intelligent man, so I find his war apologia baffling
He's simply a verbose maga-splainer. maga apologetics using SAT words.
Pathetic cope here, picking apart an FA piece. Where has this great success left the US?
"Tis but a scratch - The Black Knight." https://youtu.be/ZmInkxbvlCs?si=AHPsQdNEubg58MXk&t=1
🤣😂❤️
The “machine” may be broken, but it endures. Damaged or not, the regime survives. The Iranian people are afraid to protest (for good reason). The Artesh has not risen up. Global trade for our allies is disrupted. The regime retains its nuclear stockpiles. I no longer hear that we’re even advocating to end the regime’s support of proxies like Hezbollah, or to curb their ownership of ballistic missiles, both earlier demands. I don’t see that we’re winning, though we could be. The constant retelling of how many of their military assets we’ve degraded has nothing to do with how this ends. It reminds me of the bragging about body counts in Vietnam,which of course had nothing to do with the ultimate outcome.
Trump, a deal guy, may have gotten in over his head on this one. This is a war, and it’s not Grenada or Panama. Any “deal” now on the table is a victory for the Islamic tyrants. The president’s legacy hangs on how he handles this. If he wants to go down as a great president, he needs to end the regime, and the best way to do this is with overwhelming assaults that completely disrupt life in Iran. Pretty? Not at all. But it’s the best outcome for every nation including Iran itself.
If he caves on some Obama like deal with the regime, it will embolden Islamic terrorists worldwide. While Biden’s sudden abandonment of Afghanistan was a tragedy, it is one mostly confined to that country’s borders. If the same happens with Iran, that country will have the capacity to wreak havoc on all its neighbors and, ultimately, on western civilization more broadly.
Wasn’t it Trump 1.0 who negotiated our surrender to the Taliban? Including release of terrorist Taliban from Afghan custody? He just left the implementation to his successor.
He had a planned withdrawal timetable for the prior May. Whether he would have stuck with it given facts on the ground we’ll never know. Biden wanted everyone out before the 9/11 anniversary. That’s why the sudden departure. Not exactly a well thought out geopolitical strategy, especially given what happened to our Afghan allies and some $5 billion of U.S. military gear.
What made the departure seem sudden was that the speed of the collapse of our puppet government ("allies") took everyone by surprise. We thought it would at limp through a few months.
The secondary lesson is that staying there even longer would not have helped. If twenty years wasn't enough to create an Afghan government that could resist Islamists for a month, how much could another twenty years have managed?
Fair enough, though things were fairly stable with only 2,500 troops and no combat role to speak of. Still, Afghanistan is pretty much ungovernable, as empires from the Romans, Moghuls, Khan, Tamerlane and the Russians allies found out.
This is about cultural change. Iran is not Japan. There are still those Iranians alive who knew a freer life. You cannot make people who have been oppressed for 40 years better off by annihilating them. By resetting political power through an economic reset, they have time to make the cultural shift they need.
I don’t think anyone is talking about “Annihilating “ anyone. But since you brought up the Japan example, our use of overwhelming power saved many Japanese lives and set the stage for the modern and successful country that is Japan today. With today’s precision weapons, you target easily repaired pipelines and power lines leading from desal plants and power plants, not the plants themselves. You need to create chaos and a state of emergency in urban areas like Tehran and Isfahan to undercut the regime’s ability to do anything at all. A war to end the Iranian regime will be messy, just as Iran made the entire region messy, responsible for many thousands of deaths, including Americans and Iranians. As former SecDef Rice said today, “we owe that to the Iranian people.” Yes, the world will criticize us, as they privately thank us.
I brought up Japan because before we fought them there were no nuclear weapons. It took many years and a lot of money to rebuild Japan. We see many, mostly Muslim countries have large populations who are moderating their stance away from Sharia law and developing into more tolerant societies. Do you really believe taking a culture down to its knees (annihilating them) only to go back and spend large amounts of money and resources to rebuild is what we need to do? The EU and countries surrounding Iran can bring about this change. We get nothing from trade with Iran. The US wants only safety in the region. Why listen to Susan Rice who is Obama’s agent? Let the neighbors decide how to return their terrorist neighbor to a respectful and peace-loving relationship. Create chaos? We are not agents of chaos, we want peace. Americans owe nothing to Iran. Susan Rice will be wanting reparations. Israel, has always supported us, and we return our support of them. Safety for Israel and the region is our goal.
I agree with much of what you said, but not with respect to Islam, which is not moderating at all, other than countries that play both sides like Turkey and Qatar. The regime has to go for innumerable reasons. We don’t need to rebuild Iran, it’s a rich country. The costs today will be miniscule compared to this regime’s enduring presence on the world stage.
Then we are in another forever war that doesn’t directly benefit us. Kind of like Ukraine, which only benefited people like Mitt Romney, Joe, Hunter and Uncle Biden, and the war hawks. You really want our young people to have to go door to door to find the IRGC members?
Please explain this to me, Trump Whisperers -
"The US has announced new tariffs of 10-12.5% on dozens of countries accounting for almost all its imports over concerns they are not doing enough to tackle forced labour."
Because out of the blue, that's a massive concern.
You just can’t seem to catch up. That’s what happens when you forget to tie your boots. This is the second round of applying tariffs as the economic solution to abolishing slavery. It is a new Industrial Revolution that will save lives.
Absolute nonsense. 10% additional duties on imports from Canada because of slavery 😂 🤣
12.5% duties on China (forced labor) just like Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand (no forced labor) and dozens of other countries.
Orange could tell you to cut your dick off. You'd do it, then urge others do the same.
In case you have missed it Mary, Jews are leaving Canada because of antisemitism. “Antisemitism in Canada refers to prejudice, discrimination, or hostility directed at Jewish people or Judaism, and it has taken forms such as vandalism, hate propaganda, and bomb threats to Jewish institutions, with reported hate crimes rising 71% between 2022 and 2023 to a total of 900 incidents.” Carney is even back paddling. https://www.reuters.com/world/carney-promises-to-combat-antisemitism-canada-citing-surge-hate-crimes-2026-06-01/
Jews are leaving Canada, or perhaps Canada is leaving Jews, because antisemitism has been rising backward and sideways through institutions, vandalism, and reported incidents that may or may not be bomb threats to propaganda. Antisemitism in Canada refers to hostility, discrimination, prejudice, and occasionally the statistical migration of hate crimes into other categories, increasing 71% between 2024 and 2022 to approximately 700 directions at once. Jewish institutions have experienced vandalized reports and threatened bombs of hostility toward Judaism, while the incidents themselves appear to be leaving Canada. Meanwhile, Carney is back paddling, front paddling, and possibly paddling in circles, as the narrative continues to rise by 71% in relation to a total number of percentages. The prejudice remains directed at Jewish people, Canada, and sometimes the definition of reported.
Did you know that Israel has net negative migration?
Wouldn’t you want to leave too if bombs were constantly being lobbed into your neighborhood and community?
My point is that for all the hype that Canadian (American, French, Andorran) Jews are in danger and should move to Israel because the governments in the West are just a few years away from going Nazi, the Jews who actually live in Israel are, on balance, leaving.
Catch me up, please. When had it been announced there would be a second stage? And how does tariffing every country in the world at the same rate address anything about forced labor (China a few points higher)? And why now?
What's Poland's role in this trafficked labour situation? His is it the same as that of every country in Europe and the world?
Any contortion for post-hoc justification of Emperor Erratic.
Just like taxation influences decision making, tariffs influence production, consumption, and in the US, creates the drive for innovation and investment. That’s the beauty behind the free market. Carrots and sticks.
More incoherence please ....
Blanket tariffs do none of these things, because they affect goods for which the USA is at an insuperable comparative disadvantage. And when you say "influence consumption", what that means in plain English is that things will cost more, so less critical items will become unaffordable. That's not a win.
Kudos for a genuinely funny response.
Another Oregon student who graduated with a diploma for attendance? You might want to read about the history of the Industrial Revolution. 😘
Nah, it’s just to wedge the tariffs Trump has always wanted (because he thinks they are paid by foreign governments direct to the US Treasury and sometimes to him personally) into another law, courts having thrown out his other attempts.
Whatever. Your view of economics has nothing to do with the war in Iran. It sucks to have TDS and realize nothing is going your way. You may want to take a break from social media or get a shrink’s help on that.
No takers for my question -New tariffs on every country except Russia are helpful and necessary because why?
"The US has announced new tariffs of 10-12.5% on dozens of countries accounting for almost all its imports over concerns they are not doing enough to tackle forced labour."
I coulda beat 'm so bad, and easy, I just wanted to be nice. But next time I won't be so nice.
(The third time Trump said this it became embarrassing. Why do people imitate him?)
This isn’t “Bibi love” because I could seriously give 2 shitez about any of that nonsense. I refuse to play the game of ignorant commenters or people who hate Trump so much they'd rather Iran win -- where the only acceptable outcome is Iran’s total collapse, and anything short of that gets called American failure.
The actual mission was to break the IRGC’s ability to credibly threaten the region and build a nuclear weapon.
On that standard, Iran went from a force that could plausibly close the Strait and overwhelm defenses to one running a pathetic toll scam on the same waterway because it can no longer export oil normally. That’s not resilience. That’s what a degraded regime does when its real leverage is gone.
The people insisting Iran has been “remade” or strengthened are just coping by moving the goalposts until survival itself counts as victory.
A country reduced to extorting ships and smuggling Cisco routers through California middlemen isn’t winning. It’s a hollowed-out machine surviving on bluster and improvisation.
👏🏻🎯🎯🎯🇺🇸❤️
Is it time to finally admit that the only resolution to the US/Iran conflict that will have any lasting benefit is to change the current Iranian regime? Without such a change the SOH will be controlled by Iran and the possibility of resuming the building of a nuclear weapon is highly likely. How many times do we need to learn this lesson? All observers should now join in promoting regime change as the only way to win this war. Finish the job and do it soon.
Exactly what I said nearby, Mark. Has America become incapable of winning a war?
With enough time, effort, and deaths we could at least temporarily depose the mullahs.
You may notice that in Afghanistan (for both us and the USSR) these operations are too costly to maintain.
Agreed. We don’t want to manage the outcome, just disrupt the terrorist regime. Besides, Iran has millions of bright, educated people. They’ll figure it out just fine on their own, once they aren’t faced with arrest, torture and death.
So far, the bright educated people have lost to the fanatics who have many more guns. Of course, it doesn’t help that their uprising was primed by an Israeli intelligence operation—I would have thought this was an anti-Semitic slur, except the Israeli government owns up to it!—and the old neocons have an affection for Shah failson Reza Pahlavi, whose internal support appears to be almost nil.
There were bright, educated people in Afghanistan (for one thing, the Communists that the US-backed guerrillas overthrew were big on women in school). This isn’t as easy as it looks.
I’ve spent a lot of time in both countries. There is no comparison between the two.
Don’t miss the point that the new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei who reportedly is “gay” and is hidden in some cave without internet service. 🤦🏼♀️ Regime change was not the goal. Defanging the lion was. Iran can be readily annihilated as they sit atop their stockpile of nuclear material. They can invoke the 12th Iman if that makes them happy, but America and Israel will still exist. The war is over.
FBI just cancelled future secret shipments to Iranian military.
https://nypost.com/2026/06/03/us-news/tech-boss-arrested-at-newport-mansion-on-charges-of-selling-us-hardware-to-iran/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=pasteboard_app
Awesome! Another game changer. Of course the operation was located in CA. Thanks SCP!
The accommodationist crowd always grades Tehran on a curve. If the mullahs are still breathing, they call it resilience. If Tehran’s lights stay on, they call it victory. If the population is silent under repression, they call it unity. No. Iran was hollowed out. Its economy is crushed, its proxies are isolated, its naval leverage is self-strangulation, and its remaining uranium only makes the next American or Israeli strike more inevitable if it tries a nuclear dash. Muse is right: survival was never the test. The machine was the test. Trump broke the machine and left Tehran selling rubble as strategy.
Western oil supplies are collapsing.
Inflation is heating up.
What exactly have we achieved, relative to the day before the war? Many mullahs are dead, and also some schoolchildren.
Trump sees everything as a zero-sum game. War is often a lose-lose game. Nothing is better for the United States than before the war, including greater possibility of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Collapsing? Then why is the price going down? It’s at $92 and change. https://www.oilpriceapi.com/oil-price
What are the victory conditions? How much above the pre-war price is a ‘win’?
"Collapsing"? So, at about 2:30 pm tomorrow, we'll be back in the Stone Age? Give me a break. That's the saddest propaganda peddling I've heard in a while. Do you actually believe what you are saying? I'm trying to gauge precisely how much of a useful idiot you are.
Another brilliant Luthmann take! ❤️🤍💙
Ukraine same bluff
Hardly, putinista
As usual appreciate your thorough analysis. But your spotlight this one instance - I'll not be generously excusing it's authors as you are gracious to do: this is information warfare aimed at undermining US. Larger issue is the susceptiblity of Domestic MSM to broadcast unverified, unsourced, one-sided reporting consistently detrimental to the national security interests of the US (and Israel) as US citizens of US corporations. See Ezra Klein and NYT as recently as a few days ago publishing op-ed Jew Hatred sick imagination fabricating claim of Isreal training Rape Dogs. MSM has done everything it can to convince America (and the world) that Israel is engaged in Palestinian genocide when literally nothing could be further from the Truth - they achieveed an unprecedented low ratio of civilian collateral deaths for urban warfare, approaching 1:1. How MSM uncritically publishes claims made about Palestinian People and Statehood, that Israel is not land occupied by Jews for thousands of years, but stolen by European colonizers. Publishing patently false claims it is an apartheid state when Israel has always been a democracy with Arabic Muslim citizens who voted and are elected into government positions - when the converse truth is Arab nations systematic expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews since Israel founding bowhave Zero Jewish population today and also zero democracies. And in the US we have the world's second largest Jewish population, Jews who are US citizens, facing an unprecedented surge in lethal domestic terrorism fueled by Jew Hatred rhetoric not merely amplified by MSM - but provably intentionally engaging in Jew Hatred directly by consistently obfuscating the Nationality and religion and verifiable quotes shouted as they attacked and killed innocent US civilian citizens for exactly one specific reason - the attackers recognized they were Jews. The high-trust free American society is suffering constant attacks eroding our cultural values using the freedom our society enjoys in order to destroy them. MSM is culpable beyond reasonable doubt of conspiring to repeatedly promote lies damaging to the fabric of our national institutions, fostering deep and abiding divide in the nations social fabric unprecedented loss of social comity and trust in American institutions charged with sustaining that fabric since 2015. What is an open society to do when our own Fourth Estate, an independent Institutional check on abusive power, has itself become committed, for more than a decade now, to a course of action that a plurality of reasonable observers could plausibly agree MSM conducted itself in a manner consistently meeting definition categorically operating as a successful 5th Column enemy attack against our Nation. And a thoroughly successful job of it - the serial lies now irrefutably debunked - and at least 1/3 or more of our national remains convinced the lies told them are true.