This is Becoming a Complete Disaster

We are approaching two weeks of America’s Purim war on Iran. I am increasingly astonished at what a poorly thought-out mess this is turning out to be. This is the situation America finds itself in after 12 days of war:

* This is already the least popular American war ever at the moment it began, and Americans haven’t even begun to experience economic pain yet.

* The public has still not been given a clear reason for why this war is happening. Some of the reasons given:

1. Trump “had a feeling” Iran was about to attack the U.S. that was “based on fact,” but Pentagon officials then told Congress there was no intelligence indicating Iran was about to attack United States forces.

2. Trump said in his announcement of the war that the U.S. was eliminating an “imminent nuclear threat,” and urged Iranians to overthrow their government. Trump later said Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear bomb, despite bragging last year that their nuclear facilities were “obliterated” in strikes.

3. Marco Rubio told the press that the U.S. knew Israel was planning a unilateral strike on Iran with or without U.S. support, and so the U.S. joined the war because it feared Iranian retaliation would involve striking U.S. forces in the region. In other words, the U.S. went to war for Israel. Mike Johnson said the war happened because “Israel was determined to act with or without American support" leaving the U.S. in fear of retaliation against their forces. Since everyone made the obvious conclusion that this meant the U.S. had gone to war for Israel, the administration backtracked on these statements.

4. Pete Hegseth talked about it as retaliation for Iran supporting proxies that killed American soldiers, because of which the war apparently especially resonates with his generation of millennials.

5. Trump said the war was actually “two or three days” of strikes designed to target key military assets. He then said the war was always forecast to be 4 to 5 weeks, but could go much longer.

6. Trump Truth’d a message that the U.S. was now demanding an UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER from Iran and a regime change to “Make Iran Great Again (MIGA!)”.

* On the question of the apparent nuclear threat, we have learned that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who led the U.S. negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, conducted the talks without nuclear technical experts and based their concerns on a research reactor, unaware that such a reactor is incapable of enriching uranium. When the Iranians made a good-faith offer to hand over their highly enriched uranium but keep the Tehran Research Reactor built for them by Eisenhower, Witkoff and Kushner, due to their ignorance of the subject, apparently interpreted this as a demand to become a nuclear power:

Elena Sokova, the executive director of the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, called the administration’s assessments of the Tehran Research Reactor “confusing and misleading” and riddled with “technical errors.”

“It mixes up different elements of the nuclear program and their potential proliferation capabilities,” Sokova said. “Research reactors are not capable of doing enrichment of uranium, whether for civil or military purposes.”

Witkoff defended the decision to bring no nuclear experts by saying he had “read quite a bit about it.”

* Aside from having no technical knowledge and bringing no advisors or nuclear experts, Witkoff was apparently ignorant of previous agreements and negotiations with Iran, did not bring a diplomat who was knowledgeable of these things, did not take notes, and did not understand Iranian proposals.

* Trump relayed to the press that Witkoff told him Iran’s message was "essentially, in a real nutshell: We want to continue to build nuclear weapons." None of the mediators present reported this. The Omani foreign minister who mediated the talks travelled to Washington and told J.D. Vance and U.S. media outlets that the negotiations had made “substantial, momentous, and unprecedented progress.”

Think about how insane this is — either the war was sparked by America’s representatives being totally ignorant of nuclear enrichment while negotiating a nuclear deal, and no one along the way picking up their error, or alternatively, they actively misled Trump to lead to war with Iran on Israel’s behalf. So that’s either gross negligence and incompetence or high treason.

* Iran is now laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Even if there were a sudden reversal, these would likely take weeks to clear, meaning Iran is in this for the long haul.

* Iran is wagering that the U.S. and Israel will blink first in a test of endurance where they cripple the global economy. Astonishingly, the U.S. does not appear to have a plan for the outcome that put off U.S. war planners from pursuing a war with Iran for decades.

* The U.S. apparently assumed freedom lovers in Iran would topple their regime if they helped kick the door in. There have been no signs of large social unrest in Iran since the war began. Trump has responded to Iran’s measures by promising to “hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them or anybody else helping them to ever recover that section of the world.” Whatever problems reformers have with the Islamic Republic, it seems like a reasonable conclusion that this kind of rhetoric, combined with bombing schools, is going to make it easy for the Iranian regime to convince Iranians they are now in a war for their national survival. There will be no internal revolt.

* The U.S. Navy is refusing all requests for escorts through the Strait.

* Just how badly was the U.S. prepared for dealing with a closure of the Strait of Hormuz? Consider that in January of this year, the U.S. withdrew its four Avenger-class minesweepers from the Middle East. The four vessels were built in the late 1980s and early 90s and forward-deployed for the next four decades. They are now sat decommissioned in a port in Philadelphia. They arrived there on Tuesday, the day Iran began laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.

* During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq laid roughly 1,200–1,300 naval mines, which coalition forces took more than 2 months to clear. Even during the operation, carried out after the war was won, two U.S. warships were still damaged by Iraqi mines. Iran has an estimated >5,000 mines it could deploy in the Strait.

* The U.S. reassured the public with footage of it bombing 16 Iranian small boats mining the Strait. But Iran has thousands of vessels that can fill this role, as well as tunnel networks and submergibles designed specifically for this role.

* The prewar traffic in the Strait was >50 oil tankers per day. During the "tanker war" in the 1980s, America escorted an average of one convoy, each containing 2 or 3 tankers, each week. This means it would take two and a half years to get all 320 or so vessels currently stranded in the Gulf out of there. On top of that, analysts have calculated the cost of a single escort would exceed the value of the cargo it is meant to protect.

* But none of this really matters, because the U.S. is never going to be able to freely clear the Strait without suffering enormous damage from Iranian counter-measures. Iran has hundreds of anti-ship cruise missiles it has yet to deploy. Many of these can be launched from small boats or mobile launchers inland, again showing how meaningless it is for people to just gesture at American air dominance. Iran also has thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Shahed drones, which U.S. ships could be vulnerable to if launched in swarms. Imagine the backlash if the U.S. has its ships sunk by Iran. Even if the economic calculus of this made sense, which it doesn’t, the risk of this makes it a complete non-starter.

* Last year, Zelensky sent the United States a proposal to stock the Gulf with Ukraine’s low-cost interceptor drones designed as a defence against Iranian Shahed drones. The U.S. dismissed this as "Zelensky being Zelensky." The U.S. and Gulf states are now asking for Ukrainian assistance, with Zelensky now offering to exchange them for Patriot missiles.

* Pete Hegseth claims there has been an 83% degradation of Iranian drone capacity, apparently based off the number of observed launches. But that doesn’t say anything about how much their capacity has been degraded, it’s likely just a sign that they are conserving more drones for use later in the war. How much can the U.S. actually degrade their drones without a ground invasion? Shahed drones can be launched out of the back of a pickup truck. They are easily stored and concealed, and can have as many storage locations as there are drones.

* Even if U.S. air power were sufficient to secure the Strait, the Iranians have disabled THAAD batteries and air bases in the region, diminishing U.S. capacity for air strikes.

* The U.S. has NO PLAN for how to open the Strait of Hormuz.

So the situation on the Strait currently is:

1. The U.S. cannot stop the Iranians mining it

2. It would take the U.S. months to clear after it’s mined

3. The U.S. cannot safely provide escorts while there is a credible risk from missiles and drones

4. The U.S. cannot eliminate the threat of missiles and drones without a ground invasion

5. No amount of bombing will bring Iran any closer to a democratic revolution

The market is still pricing in a TACO and a quick resolution, but the Trump administration’s approach has left them with no choice but to fundamentally change this dynamic and establish real deterrence. That means seizing this opportunity and imposing real pain on the U.S. by strangling the world economy. Iranian analysts say they will be willing to wait this out months and seek financial compensation for Israel and the U.S. ravaging their country. Don’t expect Russia to intervene, they are going to benefit enormously from the rise in oil and gas prices and the diversion of U.S. military focus to the Gulf. China is still getting millions of barrels of oil delivered through the Strait.

At this point, this looks like a disaster for the United States. The only plausible endgame is Trump eventually backing down and making concessions, yet this administration, with Israel and the Zionist lobby’s encouragement, seems determined to climb the escalation ladder at every stage of the conflict. That only ensures the eventual retreat will be far more humiliating.

** As I was about to hit publish on this, Trump just declared that America has won the Iran War.