CROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER: I'm Sick & Tired of All The Winning
Dan’s subhead: “Gulf War Three is not going well for the United States”. I believe Dan Drezner knows more than I do about what is currently going on with the Epstein-Netanyahu-Trump War on Iran...
Dan’s subhead: “Gulf War Three is not going well for the United States”.
I believe Dan Drezner knows more than I do about what is currently going on with the Epstein-Netanyahu-Trump War on Iran, so I turn the microphone over to him.
Briefly: In the Persian/Arabian Gulf, Tehran has escalation dominance over the Strait of Hormuz, Trump has talking points on Fox, the global economy has a bill to pay, the decapitation strike was botched—replaced an elderly shy-of-nukes Supreme Leader with a young, angry nuke-curious one whose entire family we have just killed—the Trumpists tried to buy a media photo op, and appears to have bought a grinding war instead. One in which the U.S. is burning through $10 billion of military hardware a week and looks as likely to be the side attrited here as the side doing the attriting…
<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/cp/190720523> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/im-sick-and-tired-of-all-the-winning>
Dan Drezner: I’m Sick & Tired of All The Winning <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/im-sick-and-tired-of-all-the-winning>: ‘Another few days, another raft of stories indicating that Gulf War Three is not going exactly as the Trump administration expected… all the ways in which Trump and his cabinet did zero advance planning and have subsequently been surprised by how this war has played out: “U.S. officials have had to adjust plans on the fly, from hastily ordering the evacuation of embassies to developing policy proposals to reduce gas prices…. Senator Christopher S. Murphy… said… the administration had no plan for the Strait of Hormuz and did “not know how to get it safely back open.” Inside the administration, some officials are growing pessimistic…. But they have been careful not to express that directly to the president, who has repeatedly declared that the military operation is a complete success. Mr. Trump has laid out maximalist goals like insisting that Iran name a leader who will submit to him, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have described narrower and more tactical objectives that could provide an off-ramp in the near term….
A Bloomberg Economics analysis suggests that it is easier and cheaper for Iran to build more drones than for the United States to build more interceptors that defend against such attacks…. It should be stressed that almost all of this was eminently predictable…
What did they think would happen? Kill as much of the top Iranian leadership as possible, and then the new leaders would make noises about wanting to play ball with us, and then everybody would stop?
This link is pretty amazing. In a crowded urban city the IDF can find and kill one Iranian commander in Lebanon; and anyone with a smart phone can watch it happen:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/irgc-officer-who-commanded-hezbollah-missile-unit-killed-in-israeli-airstrike-in-lebanon-idf-says/
And yet, does it matter? Iran will just send a new commander to assist Hezbollah. Casualties are irrelevant if you think your dead soldiers go to paradise and get to have sex with 72 virgins.
This is the ultimate forever war. Maybe western civilization and western values will prevail in the long run, but given world demographic trends, this is not at all certain.
One thing less often mentioned is that oil production will not come back after the war like a baseball game after a rain delay. A strait closed for even two more months could cause the loss of a few million barrels of oil a day, at least for many months and perhaps permanently.