CheezItFrog 🇺🇸

My views on the war haven't changed since the very beginning: It won't produce regime change unless it's accompanied by millions of Iranians willing to risk their lives and take to the streets in an at least a semi-organized fashion (probably not going to happen), and attacking nuke-related facilities should only be done if there's a solid plan that has a reasonable chance of setting back Tehran's bomb program for more than just a few years. Trump and the Israelis had a go at it, destroyed a bunch of stuff (a lot of it critical to the Iranian military and military-industrial complex but also too much of it with only a peripheral connection to the goals I mentioned above), killed a good deal of the regime's senior leadership (along with a lot of blameless civilians), ran their inventories of missiles and interceptors low (just as many Pentagon officials feared would happen), serially exaggerated the damage done to Iranian missile stocks, and apparently didn't touch the Iranians' enriched uranium stockpile. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime (which actually had thought through what an asymmetrical conflict with the US might look like), ended up with arguably more leverage in the Strait of Hormuz than they had before the war, a wealth of knowledge of and experience with how to engage militarily with the US and Gulf States in the future, renewed confidence in their ability to sustain themselves while on the losing end of a military conflict, and, importantly, a notably cowed civilian population. There are a few questions to ask, but the main one is this: Is Trump just going to go with the same military strategy as before, or is he going to try something different? Because there's even less chance that doing more of the same thing would produce better results now than back at the start of the war simply due to the fact that we have a lot fewer missiles and interceptors than we had before, and the Iranians know what they need to do to put the US on the defensive: Hit Gulf oil infrastructure and US regional military facilities — things that their drones and increasingly accurate missiles have shown themselves fully capable of doing. No one knows how many missiles and drones Iran has left (estimates range to as high as 70% of the baseline total), but my feeling is that Iran is fine for now lobbing its relatively inexpensive hardware at expensive infrastructure while a rapidly dwindling supply of expensive US interceptors do their best to stop them from hitting their targets. I don't pretend to know what the outcome of further military engagement might be — anything could happen — but I'm not terribly optimistic and I'm less than happy that the US entered into a war for which it was less prepared than its much weaker foe.