Can Trump Still Win the War With Iran?

When fighting a theocratic adversary who controls their people with a near mystical aura, where the security apparatus and military coalitions exploit every tool to suppress and coerce internal obedience, … one has to be prepared for a long, drawn out process of slowly squeezing, releasing, and squeezing harder each time, until the system collapses.

Recall the last theocratic adversary we fought, Japan. We killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese, sank most of their fleet, and firebombed their cities. The family of my secretary when I worked in Japan relayed to me one day that her family camped in a cemetery near my house for months on end to avoid fires that came night after night. And when the Empire was collapsing, we dropped not one but two nuclear weapons. Yet, to the very last moment there was strong resistance by the security forces in Japan to resist the Emperor’s decision to surrender.

That is what we are facing in Iran. We took out their version of an emperor, and removed his heir apparent for all intents and purposes. We are grinding them down. It took multiple rounds of bombing, intelligence gathering and bombing to reduce their ballistic missile and most of their drone capability. Yes, they can still hit their neighbors, ships transiting nearby, and some of our assets. But, … the die-hard will die-hard. Nevertheless, they are shell of their former selves and were never very strong on the ground to begin with — outside their cheap drones and missiles, their military is a museum. And the die-hards know if the regime changes, they not only have much to lose, their lives and their family’s lives may be on the line. And like WWII Japan, there are few places that will welcome them and they know we will hunt them down and take their bank accounts.

So yes, Richard, we know you are no fan of DJT. And we know his methods are not taught in any classroom. He is erratic and intentional. Direct and indirect. Boisterous and feckless at times. But, we now see what Iran is willing to do and certainly was building a force to do by creating a massive drone and ballistic weapons to protect its massive underground nuclear development program. We see who and who does not have control and power to know that someday, sooner or later, an ayatollah would become the puppet we created with our early phase bombing (the IDF’s work). We know Iran remains committed to regional hegemony and control of the flow of around 10-15% of the world’s oil/gas, its marginal pricing to enrich themselves, and the alignment under threat of their Gulf neighbors along with whomever they can enlist along with Russia. We see how the Chinese, who don’t like or trust them, use them. We understand the Bab el Mandab and Hormuz choke points could easily be held hostage by a nuclear Iran for a century.

And while this may not entirely directly affect us, it will affect us in so many ways that go to American power and general stability. Europe is unable to get out of bed. Our Asian allies are afraid. And the other CRINK’s see advantage to an Iran vs. America forever war.

All of this affirms something had to be done, the moment of IDF/US intelligence was ripe, our advantage in the AI kill cycle was real, and our ability to bring to bear a host of less flashy embargo, banking, and infrastructure threats to create chaos within Iran and undermine the thugocracy was reaching its peak. So, the timing was not a choice, it was an opportune moment slipping away as Iran was building a mountain of drones and missiles.

The President is advised by people who know how to fight a Japan-like adversary. They understand you must cut off their supply lines, sink their ships, tighten food and water supplies, reduce gasoline and other critical production, and try not set off a national famine, plague, or human catastrophe that kills 10 million Iranians. There will be an end and Iran will need to recover.

The Iranian people have no weapons, are spied on by the theocratic web, have no secure communications, and have no real leader who is not arrested or dead. This is like Venezuela under Chavez. There is no opposition to rise up and no means to do so. The thugs running Iran have 50 calibers on the back of jeeps. The people have signs.

So, give this some time. Watch how we are patient. Observe our restraint. Watch us tighten and relax, and then tighten some more. Trump will blab — let it happen. A lot is going on.

We are not out for massive destruction of humanity and killing a few hundred thousand civilians. And there is no way we are losing — show me how. Yes, we are avoiding destroying all transport, power, oil refineries, water systems, and food supplies. But, we must not turn back. This is going to take time — and the Russians, Chinese, local Gulf States seeking special treatment, and the North Koreans will be looking for ways to take advantage of Iran’s desperation, an America that is fickle, and distract America from their mischievous along the Taiwan Strait, Ukraine, … Easter Europe.

Steady as she goes.

He can win this war in his dreams.

The USA has already pissed off at least one hundred nations who have watched traditional concepts of diplomacy go by the wayside. I point you to how we asked Iranian diplomats to meet for peace talks and then blown them to smithereens.

Already in Australia and New Zealand, nations that have traditionally been allies with us, there are talks of extremely high spikes in food prices. This is the time of year when farmers there buy fertilizer. (That part of the world experiences spring and summer as we go into autumn and winter.) Due to conditions in the Straits of Hormuz, the price of fertilizer has skyrocketed. Some of the price increases are due to militant activity in the ME. Other spikes are due to insurers out of Lloyds of London who now demand higher insurance rates.

So even staunch allies are less than impressed with Trump and his maniacal assessment that he can simply declare this or that and then expect everyone to believe him. Believe him they may have, if he had not gone the route of announcing peace talks and finalized settlements 39 times between Feb 28th of this year and today.

I will say this in a few words but it is so important if time permitted I should go on about this for a full page: we entered this war without the necessary defensive weapons.

On top of the lack of support from the people of the world, 61% of Americans do not approve of this new war.

Also Netanyahu's idea of fighting the war on "Eight Fronts" including the 8th front of offering "correct information" to close up what he calls the "mis-info" broadcasts simply came about too late. He thought he could close up the gap by giving $90 million if not more funding to flood social media and youtube with the propaganda he wanted put forward.

But it is too late. Already Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are now the top two podcasters in North America and in many other places as well.

Tucker is unveiling info that has us traditional Catholics and other trad Christians realize that Israel does not care to do much about avoiding destruction of Christian churches. That was apparent even when Israel was slamming full bombardment activities against Gaza. Now Israel has targeted, with brutal collective punishment, the nation of Lebanon, the only nation in the ME that is Catholic and is led by a Catholic.

Young people never supported Israel in its collective punishment of Gaza. The idea that a draft might be the only way forward for this new war to succeed is certainly something young people are talking about. They want no part of it.

And of course since Trump reverses course so often, nothing he can say or do would convince young Americans to fight for him. Many of them are fully aware of what went on inside the USS Abraham Lincoln. They know from what parents and grandparents tell them that even at the height of the US war in the Pacific against Japan, our service people went into port every few months and were able to get their "land legs" under them for a brief but necessary respite. And during that war, Americans in the Pacific never experienced slim pickings for food unless captured and made prisoners of the Japanese.

James Madison (View Comment):

When fighting a theocratic adversary who controls their people with a near mystical aura, where the security apparatus and military coalitions exploit every tool to suppress and coerce internal obedience, … one has to be prepared for a long, drawn out process of slowly squeezing, releasing, and squeezing harder each time, until the system collapses.

Recall the last theocratic adversary we fought, Japan. We killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese, sank most of their fleet, and firebombed their cities. The family of my secretary when I worked in Japan relayed to me one day that her family camped in a cemetery near my house for months on end to avoid fires that came night after night. And when the Empire was collapsing, we dropped not one but two nuclear weapons. Yet, to the very last moment there was strong resistance by the security forces in Japan to resist the Emperor’s decision to surrender.

That is what we are facing in Iran. We took out their version of an emperor, and removed his heir apparent for all intents and purposes. We are grinding them down. It took multiple rounds of bombing, intelligence gathering and bombing to reduce their ballistic missile and most of their drone capability. Yes, they can still hit their neighbors, ships transiting nearby, and some of our assets. But, … the die-hard will die-hard. Nevertheless, they are shell of their former selves and were never very strong on the ground to begin with — outside their cheap drones and missiles, their military is a museum. And the die-hards know if the regime changes, they not only have much to lose, their lives and their family’s lives may be on the line. And like WWII Japan, there are few places that will welcome them and they know we will hunt them down and take their bank accounts.

So yes, Richard, we know you are no fan of DJT. And we know his methods are not taught in any classroom. He is erratic and intentional. Direct and indirect. Boisterous and feckless at times. But, we now see what Iran is willing to do and certainly was building a force to do by creating a massive drone and ballistic weapons to protect its massive underground nuclear development program. We see who and who does not have control and power to know that someday, sooner or later, an ayatollah would become the puppet we created with our early phase bombing (the IDF’s work). We know Iran remains committed to regional hegemony and control of the flow of around 10-15% of the world’s oil/gas, its marginal pricing to enrich themselves, and the alignment under threat of their Gulf neighbors along with whomever they can enlist along with Russia. We see how the Chinese, who don’t like or trust them, use them. We understand the Bab el Mandab and Hormuz choke points could easily be held hostage by a nuclear Iran for a century.

And while this may not entirely directly affect us, it will affect us in so many ways that go to American power and general stability. Europe is unable to get out of bed. Our Asian allies are afraid. And the other CRINK’s see advantage to an Iran vs. America forever war.

All of this affirms something had to be done, the moment of IDF/US intelligence was ripe, our advantage in the AI kill cycle was real, and our ability to bring to bear a host of less flashy embargo, banking, and infrastructure threats to create chaos within Iran and undermine the thugocracy was reaching its peak. So, the timing was not a choice, it was an opportune moment slipping away as Iran was building a mountain of drones and missiles.

The President is advised by people who know how to fight a Japan-like adversary. They understand you must cut off their supply lines, sink their ships, tighten food and water supplies, reduce gasoline and other critical production, and try not set off a national famine, plague, or human catastrophe that kills 10 million Iranians. There will be an end and Iran will need to recover.

The Iranian people have no weapons, are spied on by the theocratic web, have no secure communications, and have no real leader who is not arrested or dead. This is like Venezuela under Chavez. There is no opposition to rise up and no means to do so. The thugs running Iran have 50 calibers on the back of jeeps. The people have signs.

So, give this some time. Watch how we are patient. Observe our restraint. Watch us tighten and relax, and then tighten some more. Trump will blab — let it happen. A lot is going on.

We are not out for massive destruction of humanity and killing a few hundred thousand civilians. And there is no way we are losing — show me how. Yes, we are avoiding destroying all transport, power, oil refineries, water systems, and food supplies. But, we must not turn back. This is going to take time — and the Russians, Chinese, local Gulf States seeking special treatment, and the North Koreans will be looking for ways to take advantage of Iran’s desperation, an America that is fickle, and distract America from their mischievous along the Taiwan Strait, Ukraine, … Easter Europe.

Steady as she goes.

Before Japan attacked the USA, Japan had built up its weaponry. Its leaders had correctly assessed that we would be a formidable force against them. Because of the wisdom of their assessment, for the first long months after Pearl Harbor, they had the upper hand. Why? They made sure they possessed the necessary weaponry before they did their initial strike.

In this matter, our president was apparently told that he could go against Iran and win this thing in two weeks. However no one informed him a pertinent bit of info: we had used up most of our defensive weaponry by offering it up to the military fighting our proxy war, a war we are losing by the way, there in The Ukraine.

Because of that, we have been able to offer little in the way of defensive weaponry to our allies and to our naval vessels to avoid the horrors of Iranian incoming. Vast sectors of our ME military bases have been made inoperable. The allies who have allowed us to have our bases inside their nations are now reluctant to continue with such support. The only upside, if we believe what is being said officially, is that at the moments when our barracks were hit, our people had already been evacuated.

You state that "The President is advised by people who know how to fight a Japan-like adversary." That is a good analogy of a group of people who goofed up in a most spectacular and tragic manner. After all, we lost over 3,000 people at Pearl Harbor. All through the month preceding the Dec 7th attack on the harbor, people tried to get the word out that our having moved the naval fleet from San Diego to HI was going to be a problem. After all, it appeared that the Japanese were putting their navy in an area suggesting they were considering a an aerial attack on HI.

An American secretary had read various cables and other information that in the course of her work week had passed across her desk. She tried to tell the Admiral she worked for in Washington DC that an attack was coming. But the timing was off. It was late in the day on Friday Dec 5th. And her commanding officer was on his way home. His response was "We can deal with what you think you have on Monday morning."

Of course we now have AI to help with these matters. But that modern technology of AI was the reason we did not know that the building we bombed as one of our first sorties against Iran was not the HQ's of the Iranian National Guard but that of schoolchildren and the staff.

God help us all.

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