[jmyeet]

It's not really up to the US and Israel when this war of choice ends anymore. It's up to Iran. And Iran, justifiably, is going to demand their pound of flesh. That could require some combination of ending the (criminal) sanctions, de-militarizing the Gulf and reining in Israel.

The problem is all of these things are politically untenable. This is the only reason why I think this war could continue long term because Trump simply cannot back down.

I think the recession from this could actually get so bad that there's now a nonzero (but still small) chance Trump gets removed from office, either by impeachment or by being 25A'ed.

It is hard to adequately state what a geopolitical disaster this was and it is I think quite easily the biggest mistake by an administration in the entire history of the US. I'm not exaggerating.

[pjc50]

Still nowhere near as bad as the Vietnam war. Arguably not even as big a mistake as the CIA coup against Mossadegh, which is the poisoned tree from which the present situation grows.

I wonder how the coup in Cuba will turn out. That has to happen before the midterms, and he's unlikely to wait for Iran to resolve.

[jmyeet]

I think is a worse disaster than Vietnam. Why? Because the Vietnam War was localized. It was devastating to the people who got drafted and obviously devastating to the Vietnamese as well as the Cambodians that Nixon and Kissinger decidedly to relentless bomb for literally no reason. There was internal dissent but that was, saldy, quashed quite successfully.

The US simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Iran. It's surrounded by mountains so there's no land staging area like we had for Iraq in 1991. Am ambphibious landing would have to be on the scale of D-Day. Personnel-wise, the military is a lot smaller than it was in 1991 too.

This is why I laugh when people panic "they're going to invade" when 5000 Marines and 2-3 amphibious landing ships are moved to the Gulf. Those are so incredibly irrelevant and wholly insufficient for any kind of ground invasion that the worse they can do is be the Bay of Pigs 2.0.

The Iranian national project has been to resist American imperialism for the past almost 50 years. The military is distributed. Lots of it is under mountains or otherwise reinforced from air bombardment and missiles. Drones are incredibly cheap to produce and there's no viable path to stop the production and launch of ballistic missiles and drones.

That's how bad a decision this is. There is no viable military path to "victory" (whatever that means here). There is no way to invade, no way to hold the country militarily and no way to manufacture regime change.

Other countries in the region are way more vulnerable to loss of infrastructure (eg desalination plants). Iran has desalination plants too but it also gets a lot of drinking water from snowmelt. Many Americans are surprised by that. Iran has ski resorts. That's how mountainous it is.

Israel has been begging the US to topple Iran for 40+ years and every president has refused. Because it's completely unviable. Until this one.

There are really three wars being fought here and the objectives are different in every case. Israel wants to turn Iran into Somalia, which is to say a fail-state. The US wanted regime change. Iran simply wants to survive. And it will.

So this is why you see Israel escalate to drag the US into a war it doesn't really want. And if Israel succeeds and somehow the regime does topple it will create a massive refugee crisis that will likely topple the governments of most of Iran's neighbours. Israel is completely fine with that. The US isn't.

Every country in the Gulf had essentially been converted into a US client state other than Iran. We went so far as to put a former al-Qaeda lieutennant in charge of Syria. A likely consequence of this move is US influence in the region is going to massively decrease because the myth of the American security guarantee has been broken.

While the war is still poular with Trump's base we'll see how long that lasts when gas hits $8/gallon and food inflation hits 20%.

[srean]

The Arab allies are going to be plenty pissed if US leaves without degrading Iran. They were doing fine before the US intervened, now they are worse of than they were before.

Head hurts to think how this will play out.

[mikkupikku]

The Arab allies (aka client states) thought they had a lot more influence over America than they really do; it just happened that a lot of their asks aligned with Israel's asks. When push comes to shove and America has to choose between satisfying Israeli interests or the Arab states, not both at the same time, they're going to become disappointed. Both want Iran dealt with, but I think the tension will reach a breaking point over what the final result is meant to be. Israel would love for Iran to be a failed state like Somalia, as mentioned above, with a power vacuum they can fill and huge amounts of refugees streaming out and destabilizing their neighbors. The Arab states obviously don't want that, they want Iran stabilized with a compliant predictable government. There is approximately a zero percent chance of that happening, so they're going to be sorely disappointed.

[srean]

One complication is that the sheiks are heavily invested in US tech companies and Kushner's ilk is heavily invested in the Middle East. So neither would want the other to crash and burn but can use the threat of financial pull out as a weapon.

[polar8]

I mean, Vietnam?