Look, I’m getting asked all the time now why nobody is stopping Trump from making a mockery of America with empty threats to Iran. Every time I sit down to drink my tea in peace someone says “hey, so are we going to war with Iran now?”
For the last time, I don’t know.
However, what I DO know is how stupid it is that I’m being asked this question. And I’m getting tired of it.
So here’s a quick explanation of why this is even worse than Putin expecting Ukraine to be his quick win. Or to make a better point, this is even worse than the Bush-era neocons promising Iraq was their doorway to Tehran — that taking Baghdad would see Iran fall like a domino. We stormed into Baghdad and then pivoted like a snail on scotch tape, got our asses handed to us for ten years and never saw even a glow of Tehran.
Oh, but this time, this time, it will be different. Let me explain. It will be even worse.
No End, Just Mean
A military operation is supposed to be defined with an objective, and the first thing I see right now is that nobody in the administration can articulate Iran in objective terms. Nothing. Nada.
Not Leavitt. Not Witkoff. Not Trump. These ham-fisted chaos agents oscillate between “deal,” regime change, and legacy project.
When a reporter asked Leavitt directly why strikes might be needed against a nuclear program Trump already claims to have destroyed she blew smoke rings:
There’s many reasons and arguments that one could make.
Yeah, dude, whoa so many, like really many. You thinking what I’m thinking? Go ahead. Yeah, give me just one of those reasons and arguments.
Oh, so you don’t have any?
This is exactly how the Vietnam War started. Empty-headed political vanity dressed up as strategy and going in circles.
Witkoff gets on Fox News and can’t even commit to his own phrases:
I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated’… I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why haven’t they capitulated?
I don’t want to say what I’m saying but I’m saying that I’m saying something other than what I’m saying.
Eight dimensional chess, this guy. Wizard of words.
Witkoff capitulated to using the word capitulated. A real estate guy with no diplomatic experience broadcasting his only acceptable outcome is total Iranian surrender. That’s probably how real estate deals are done. Pretending negotiations are happening in good faith while threatening total annihilation sounds like the PLO strategy. Remember them? Meanwhile he’s meeting with the exiled son of the toppled shah “at Trump’s direction.” A regime change agenda is practically an armband they wear to meetings.
Plain Numbers
Putin went into Ukraine with roughly 200,000 troops against a country of 44 million people covering 600,000 square kilometers. He promised it would be over in days. Four years later, his entire military is totally wrecked, his economy is totally wrecked, and he’s known as the meat-grinder dictator who can’t win.
Iran is big, like 1.65 million square kilometers big, nearly three times the size of Ukraine. The population also is big, roughly 90 million, so double Ukraine. The terrain is mountains and desert, with thousands of years of deep defensive warfare doctrine. And unlike Ukraine in February 2022, Iran has spent a solid 40 years excitedly planning for the day America dares to try. Every weapons program, every tunnel network, every proxy relationship, every mine in the Strait of Hormuz was designed for the President too dumb to think about it.
Iraq in 2003 had 25 million people, a hollowed-out military wrecked by a decade of sanctions and no-fly zones, and flat desert terrain made for American armor. Bush believed Wolfowitz, Feith, and the AEI crowd that they would be in Tehran by morning, despite the CIA silently banging their heads on tables and warning without authority it was never going to happen. The US pushed 150,000 troops into Baghdad in three weeks and then spent the next decade losing badly, redirecting billions into a hole in the ground they dug themselves into. Iran watched and waited.
Enemy Don’t Play House Rules
You don’t get to decide how the other side fights. Military scholars get this. Trump doesn’t. His sycophants would never dare to tell him.
Iran’s foreign minister went on CBS and gave a taste of professionalism that marks their potential for success. He was honest: they can’t hit the US mainland, so they’d target American bases across the Middle East. That’s the stuff of real danger. That’s an expert telling you their plan built around asymmetric reach makes the US “air power” projections instantly irrelevant.
The Strait of Hormuz closes on day one. That’s roughly 20% of global oil transit. The economic shock alone could trigger a worldwide recession before the second sortie lifts off. Iran doesn’t need to win a naval battle. It needs to drop enough mines and fire enough anti-ship missiles to make tanker traffic snarled and financially toast. We’re talking hours, people, not weeks.
Carriers in the Arabian Sea? Might as well ride circus elephants towards a machine gun nest. A country with modern anti-ship cruise missiles, fast attack boats, and sea mines sees a bold target presentation. Yoo-hoo over here, sink this ship. The Navy experts know all this. The Pentagon knows all this. The Russian ships at the bottom of the Black Sea prove this. I’m not saying anything new.
Carriers are just Witkoff’s presentation aids to look big and tough like a John Wayne for his Fox News segments, with zero relevance to modern warfare.
The June 2025 Iran-Israel war already gave us the math. Israel’s Arrow interceptors were heavily expended. The US rushed to backfill with THAAD batteries and burn through ship-launched SM-3s. Tactically there was a solution established. Strategically, it proved that Iran’s approach of exhausting missile defense systems through volume works well enough. Intercept 90% and you still lose when the 10% are all that’s needed for infrastructure to fail.
Day One Doesn’t Matter
You blow up the air defenses and bomb the nuclear sites, sink the navy. It’s a flash bang start. Then on day two every problem in the Middle East that you currently blame on Iran is yours to handle and fast. The Shia militias in Iraq. Hezbollah. The Houthis. The influence networks across the Gulf. All of it becomes your problem, on your bloody hands, with no plan. You’re staring at 90 million people with a 3,000-year-old playbook. And you have … what?
We already saw this. The US invasion of Iraq was the single greatest strategic gift Iran ever received because it eliminated their biggest regional rival, installed a Shia-majority government next door, and gave Iran’s proxy networks room to metastasize across the region.
The whole “we’ll be in Tehran” concept of the US flattening Iraq had the opposite effect and significantly weakened American approaches to Iran.
Vietnam Failure in Fast Forward
Trump keeps threatening war without understanding the enemy, without defining victory, and without any theory of how military force would produce a political outcome he desires. It’s probably because he never served in Vietnam. The draft dodger wants to play general.
That’s the failed logic of Vietnam being compressed into weeks instead of years: escalation as substitute for strategy, military deployments driven by domestic political needs rather than operational logic, demands on the enemy that demonstrate zero understanding of their decision-making calculus, and complete absence of planning for what happens after the first shots are fired.
Trump thinks he can demand zero enrichment, dismantle ballistic missiles, cut all ties with regional allies. Yet all of it is untenable to any Iranian government, even the most pliant one. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty enshrines low-level enrichment as a right for all 191 signatories. Obama figured this out early in negotiations. It’s a non-starter, so he adjusted. Trump people haven’t learned anything because apparently they don’t think that thinking helps them.
We aren’t seeing strategy. We aren’t seeing military planning. The only thing at all here is political theater with live ammunition.
Sheldon Adelson used to rattle on about dropping a nuclear bomb in the Iranian desert as his preferred opening negotiating move. That nutjob spent hundreds of millions making sure the people who shared his big bang fantasy got into power. Now they’re there and he’s dead. The only thing separating Adelson’s fever dream from policy is the question of whether the modern-day Nixon thinks he can get away with it.
Iran will be harder to handle than Serbia, Libya and Iraq combined. The current administration struggles to even handle trans troops who are friendly, so I wouldn’t expect them to be able to punch their way out of a wet paper bag at this point. Hegseth literally said there’s no more special anything allowed in his military, only one voice going forward. And yet, we all know the best thing in the military was always the special operations.
The question everyone keeps asking me is whether there will actually be war. The honest answer is that the people in charge would be bigger idiots than Putin invading Ukraine, and unfortunately that might be their actual goal.
