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Why Trump Can’t Just End the War in Iran

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Clarissa

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There was an oil crisis in the 1970s that devastated the economy of the developed countries and eventually brought in the neoliberal revolution that I keep talking about. I wasn’t alive back then, but people who remember it know that it was very tough.

The constant presence of the United States in the Middle East since then aimed at preventing the repeat of that oil crisis. The policy was successful in achieving that goal.

Now, sadly, everything changed. In the course of its war against Iran, the United States demonstrated that it’s impotent to effectuate a desired regime change. Iran is now emboldened to do the things that it feared doing when it thought that the United States was a lot stronger militarily than it is. Concealing defeat in the war and simply withdrawing is the worst possible thing that the U.S. can do right now. Not starting at all would have been enormously better. But we can’t go back in time. We have now painted ourselves into a corner in which every day can bring a repeat of the oil crisis of the 1970s.

The original goal was to solve the problem once and for all. Iran has a regime change, and the U.S. does not need to hover around the region any longer. We can go back home and concentrate on our own issues. Currently, the result has been the exact opposite. Iran realized that the United States is a lot weaker militarily than it was always presumed to be. Leaving the field of the battle will not erase anybody’s memory. It will not allow us to go to the pre-war status quo.

16 responses to “Why Trump Can’t Just End the War in Iran”

  1. ed Avatar
    ed

    How does staying in this war help anything? What’s the end goal here?

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      ” What’s the end goal here?”

      There’s no goal at present, they’re stalling waiting/hoping for ideas.

      What a goat fuck it has turned into….

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      1. ed Avatar
        ed

        Staying in this war is not any better than just pulling back. For all intends and purposes USA already lost this war. Fighting a war of attrition 6000 miles away is just going to make everything worse.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Let’s ask ourselves: How come Ukraine is managing to hold its own against a much larger country with an initially enormously stronger military for four and a half years? Why is the U.S. Army so impotent against Iran?

          Whenever I make observations about that, people get upset. Nobody expected this extraordinary weakness. Not the American leadership, not the Iranians, not anybody else. That happened because we are lying to ourselves. But not even faced with this disaster are people ready to be honest with themselves. We just demonstrated to the entire world the utter impotence of our armed forces. But we aren’t willing to hold our politicians accountable and push them towards changing course because this would entail letting go of long-held beliefs.

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          1. ed Avatar
            ed

            Iranians are fighting an existential war on home soil, USA is fighting a war of choice that nobody asked for 6000 miles away. The USA can walk away any moment, Iranians can’t. That’s all it really boils down to.

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            1. cliff arroyo Avatar
              cliff arroyo

              “Iranians are fighting an existential war on home soil”

              There are no (and hopefully won’t be) any US soldiers on Iranian soil. At present they’re suffering some damage from bombs (and apparently the US is spending lots of money to bomb decoys….) and attack regional US allies and/or Iranian enemies.

              Not remotely existential.

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              1. ed Avatar
                ed

                You are conflating an existential threat with a 1940s-style ground invasion. ​Their top leadership was killed, the capital was bombed for weeks, and critical infrastructure like power grids, ports, and bridges are getting flattened. In what world is decapitating a government and dismantling its state capacity not an existential attack?

                This is absolutely an existential fight for the Iranians. They cannot allow another country to do this to them and then turn the other cheek. That leads to state collapse and disintegration. This is something Trump and many people don’t seem to understand, and why the Iranians will fight to the end whatever it takes. We’re already seeing that play out.

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  2. Avi Avatar
    Avi

    “We just demonstrated to the entire world the utter impotence of our armed forces.“

    Exactly.

    On taking office, I remember Mr Hegseth denouncing the profound crisis of credibility in which the US armed forces were mired, one that had become existential in scope. It was the culmination of at least a decade of complacency and self-satisfaction, compounded by an internal ideological capture by individuals whose philosophical and political convictions were fundamentally at odds with the very principles for which armed forces exist.

    The question I cannot answer is: did the Defense Secretary think that he had solved that crisis in little over a year, and did he really think that the US armed forces were now ready to take on the region’s greatest power, Iran?

    Either he was blindsided or he’s simply self-deluded.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “Their top leadership was killed”

    And immediately replaced and harder to kill now.

    “The capital was bombed for weeks, and critical infrastructure like power grids, ports, and bridges are getting flattened”.”

    And this is supposed to encourage people to rise up against the government…. how?

    “In what world is decapitating a government and dismantling its state capacity not an existential attack?”

    Islam is not a state dependent system… it was, after all, created by Arabs, notoriously bad at countries.

    The whole idea of attacking Iran was the idea that the attacks would embolden the population to rise up and take down the government, install a new Shah (as if any sane person wanted that) and then lollipops and ponies for everyone.

    As it turns out, Iranians are unwilling or unable to take down their government (doesn’t matter which, the effect is the same) and the government is now much less afraid of the US, getting help from russia (despite Trump’s great relationship with putin) and possibly China.

    Total. Goat. Fuck. Situation.

    I’m not a reflexively anti-Israeli person but a big part of this disaster is down to listening to Dictator for Life Netanyahu (and Israel-first republican donors).

    Both need to shut up for a long time (not that I have any hope that they will do so).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Thank you, Cliff. That’s exactly it. And exactly for the reasons you say.

      From the first moments of the war, I said that the expectation that Iranians would rise up against their leadership was based on a complete misunderstanding of the people of Iran. To base an entire strategy of war on this expectation was lunacy. It’s extremely incompetent.

      We have nothing to offer these people that they would remotely want. We publish a report about 200,000 raped British girls and then expect Iranians to adopt a system where that is possible. When instead they have a system where their girls are safely hidden in burkas. We publish statistics where 20% of our young people identify as some form of gender confused and expect the Iranians to be eager to conduct the same experiment on their young.

      Obviously, I’m not saying that the Iranian system is better. I am saying that it is better for the Iranians. They like it because they are they. The expectation that, instead of being themselves, they are actually us and want what we want is insane.

      I have no words for how disappointing it is to see that this was the entire strategy of the war.

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    2. ed Avatar
      ed

      “The whole idea of attacking Iran was the idea that the attacks would embolden the population to rise up and take down the government, install a new Shah (as if any sane person wanted that) and then lollipops and ponies for everyone.”

      I mean, that’s an existential fight if the objective is regime change. Putin didn’t want to kill every Ukrainian, just keep Ukraine weak and submissive to Russia under a puppet government, how is that any different than what the USA and Israel wanted to do in Iran?

      But I think we’re just arguing semantics. I agree with everything you said. Total. Goat. Fuck. Situation.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        The difference is that the U.S. is a vastly superior civilization, while Russia is a vastly inferior civilization.

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      2. PaulS Avatar
        PaulS

        Putin wanted to annex an adjacent territory. Iran is on the other side of the world from the US.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          This makes what Russians did so much worse. Killing people who look like you, who speak your language, who are your brothers and sisters, who grew up watching the same movies and cartoons is enormously worse. This breaks up families, lifelong friendships. It’s murdering people of your own race and religion. Iran and North Korea have been fighting against Ukraine as well. I hate them for it, but I have zero feeling of the enormous existential betrayal that I feel towards the Russians. If a stranger steals from you, it’s bad, and you’re outraged. Imagine if a friend who has been over to your house a million times steals your wallet that you left lying around because you know that he’s a friend and you trust him. The wallet is just as gone in either case, but when the friend stole it, it feels so much worse. When a lifelong friend says to you in the language that you both spoke to each other in since childhood, “I want you to die,” it’s a completely different feeling from when some random Iranian wants you to die.

          Besides, words cannot express the extent to which Ukrainians did not provoke it. There has never been a country so massively enamored of Russia, its language and culture. There has never been a country so deeply subservient to Russia up until February of 2022. Ukraine never did 0.01% to Russia of what Iran has done to the United States.

          I still believe that the war against Iran is a stupid idea. But there is no comparison to what Russians have done. Which major Iranian city have Americans bombed to the ground? Where is a city with a hundred thousand civilians dead in Iran? When did American soldiers rape Iranian toddlers? When did they gang-rape mothers in Iran in front of their children?

          It’s a bad analogy on every level.

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          1. PaulS Avatar
            PaulS

            This was one of the things in SA. Much of the worst violence wasn’t white vs black. It was African nationalist vs Zulu nationalist.

            https://ourconstitution.wethepeoplesa.org/south-african-constitution/negotiating-our-freedom/a-low-grade-civil-war-between-the-ifp-and-the-anc/

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  4. PaulS Avatar
    PaulS

    France famously responded to the 70s crisis by going all in on nuclear. The US would be far better off if it had spent the military budget on domestic infrastructure.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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