Iran War?

[OttoVonBismarck]

I will say--the thinking on when to end the war should be different from the thinking on "was this war a good idea." It's obvious to all it was a bad idea, but now we--and unfortunately because of how this works, "we" is a bigger circle than just Trump personally, or even the United States, have to deal with the reality that the war was declared.

Prior to the war, Iran's regime was in terrible shape--years of brutal economic sanctions had tremendously weakened their country, with no prospects for improvement in sight. Their nuclear program had been heavily bombed, and since then they've taken no obvious efforts to repair or restart it.

That fact alone, IMO, should have given Trump pause. We don't know why the Iranians hadn't really gone back to repairing / working on their nuclear program. It could be they had simply concluded that they had weathered the bombing, and due to the damage to their air defenses, they knew they were vulnerable to more. They may have simply been waiting for a more opportune time.

However, it's also possible there were internal conflicts in the regime questioning the wisdom of continuing on that route--after all, this pursuit of nuclear weapons had brought the regime to the weakest point it had ever been since the earliest days of the revolution.

It's also possible Iran was genuinely willing to abandon the program in exchange for sanctions relief?

Do I personally believe that? I don't really know. I do know that in the 25 years now that Iran has clearly had a nuclear weapons program, it has had opportunities in which it could have been rushing that program to completion. For whatever reason, it never did. We also know that under the Obama JCPOA, Iran seemed to genuinely adhere to that deal and was limiting its program during the time that deal was in force.

Now that Trump has done this, I think it very likely that all that logic is now out the window. I would be very surprised if Iran does anything other than immediately rush to a nuclear device ASAP the moment this war is over.

So that then means we would have to respond to that--either by simply allowing it to happen and accept it as a fait accompli, or committing America to repeated incursions of this type into Iran--noting that each time we do something like this, it is very likely Iran is going to get better at planning how to impose pain in response and how to mitigate the risk to their nuclear program from aerial strike.

That means that unfortunately, simply ending the war as soon as possible may not be the best move for the U.S. now that we've had our leader make the unfortunate decision to start the war. I think some consideration has to be given to imposing enough genuine pain on Iran that we can force some sort of capitulation on the nuclear issue. It's an open question if that's even possible--but unfortunately it likely has to be a consideration.

Trump's reticence to hit Iran's oil infrastructure is likely limiting any effectiveness at cowing the regime. Reports are the limited strikes on Iran's oil infrastructure have been Israeli-led, and Trump disagrees with them. This shows a serious deficit of strategic thinking on Trump's part. He is prioritizing now the short term economics over the longer term strategy. 

Now that we have shown we are a faithless negotiator and untrustworthy, something more than just blowing up a bunch of military hardware that the Iranians will just rebuild is probably required to prevent Iran from immediately pursuing a nuclear breakout.

[mongers]

The petrol prices just jumped by 4-5 NOK here.
A small price to pay, I know. On the early morning of Sunday, the US embassy in Norway was attacked by "unknown" assailants with explosives. No arrests have been made.

Why quotes around the word unknown?

They were know unknowns

[Richard Hakluyt]

There is a special category for Trump and his coterie of imbeciles, "unknown knowns", there are things that just about everone else knows about but elude their comprehension.

[Norgy]

Nothing more than that some people were caught on tape, but were masked.

[crazy canuck]

There is a special category for Trump and his coterie of imbeciles, "unknown knowns", there are things that just about everone else knows about but elude their comprehension.