From Lost War To Forever War in Iran

Edited by Sam Thielman

IT'S THE ONE THING the Trump administration swore wouldn't happen. There is "no chance" that Donald Trump would ensnare the United States military in yet another endless war, Vice President J.D. Vance told the Washington Post on the eve of the Trump-Netanyahu aggression. The lying media wants you to think, "just 19 days into this conflict, that we're somehow spinning toward an endless abyss, or a 'forever war,' or a quagmire. Nothing could be further from the truth," promised War Secretary Pete Hegseth. If you don't trust these two highly trustworthy people, surely you have faith in their supremely trustworthy boss, Donald Trump, for Trump's superior judgment, swore Vance and Hegseth, would keep America out of a protracted and indecisive war. 

Well now. 

Allow me to leave it to Jamie McIntyre, a veteran defense reporter who currently writes the defense newsletter of the conservative Washington Examiner, under a header line beginning "Trump Caves, Iran Attacks, Strait Closed": 

EXTEND THE CEASEFIRE AND WAIT: In an afternoon post on Truth Social, President Donald Trump revealed that nothing he said over the past few days reflected the reality of what was happening in an effort to end the Iran war.

No, the Iranians had not agreed to a second round of negotiations. No, Vice President JD Vance was not leaving for Islamabad. No, Iran hadn’t “agreed to everything.” No, the U.S. would not be “going in with Iran with lots of excavators,” to retrieve the “nuclear dust.” No, “lots of bombs” will not “start going off,” if the ceasefire expired without a deal. At 4 p.m. Tuesday, Trump threw up his hands, and blamed Iran for the “fractured” government that was the inevitable result of a methodical assassination campaign carried out by the U.S. and Israel to eliminate all of Iran’s top leaders.

“We have been asked to hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal,” Trump wrote, saying he was honoring a request from Pakistan, based on the fact that the “Government of Iran is seriously fractured, not unexpectedly so.”

“I have therefore directed our Military to continue the Blockade and, in all other respects, remain ready and able, and will therefore extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”

Trump keeps saying the surviving leaders, with whom the U.S. has been dealing, are more “reasonable” and “rational.” However, indications are that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps is the one calling the shots. [Emphasis the Examiner’s.]

Jeremy Scahill interviews an Iranian official, and you'll be shocked to learn there is no internal Iranian disarray. The immediate Iranian position is that there will be no talks until the U.S. lifts its blockade on Iranian ports. Trump imposed the blockade as a leverage ploy to force Iran to stop throttling the Strait of Hormuz. Yet, as we wrote on Monday, the blockade pushes Trump further away from his imperative of a settlement to a war he's decisively lost. 

But there is a way to disguise a lost war: Turn it into a forever war. 

All of the drivers of the war, for the American side, remain in place. None have reached any resolution. The Iranians have and will continue to test the blockade. Lloyd's List reported seeing "a steady flow of shadow fleet traffic in and out of the Middle East Gulf," with at least two dozen vessels breaching the lines set by the U.S. Navy. They will also continue to impose tolls on ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz and forbid others from passing at all, to include intercepting and firing upon ships, as they announced they did on Wednesday. While I doubt that the Iranians have truly heavily mined the Strait, an unnecessary task for control of the waterway and one dangerous for their own tankers, the Pentagon told Congress on Wednesday that mine clearance is a six-month task. Whatever else that announcement is, it is a bureaucratic proxy for conceding the lengthening nature of the Iran fiasco.  

Because that is the situation emerging after the talks-that-weren't in Islamabad. Trump cannot force Iran into capitulation, nor can he break their hold on the Strait. But there is something the Iranians really want, and it's something Trump can deny them. That's a reassurance committing the U.S. to non-aggression. Since that is an unambiguous concession of defeat, that's off the table. And that leaves the combatants—and the world—without a clear pathway to a negotiated resolution. Again, all the drivers of the war remain in place, until something gives. Sooner or later, Scahill reports, the Iranians expect the bombing to continue. It is a rational calculation. Trump is already saying that Iran may only have "days" before bombing resumes. At the same time, the bombing has not been able to resolve anything, and won't resolve anything the next time. Trump is locked into a closed loop, and we're locked in there with him. Bomb, watch the retaliatory missiles fly, pause for terms, watch talks break down or never begin at all, repeat. 

The U.S.S. George H. W. Bush will soon arrive on-station, the third carrier strike group supporting the Iran War. This is the largest commitment of American naval power since the First Iraq War. We have triplines in the water that will either provoke a crisis—assuming they're stupid enough to, say, intercept a Chinese tanker—or expose U.S. inability to impose its will. These flattops have all been at sea a whole lot over the past three years. Soon, the Navy's Fleet Forces Command, which oversees the dispensation of the fleet, is going to prepare options for either overcommitting the fleet to the Middle East or reducing the blockade. Hegseth won't take either option well. 

Meanwhile, the head of the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday that the Iran War, atop the Russian aggression against Ukraine, has caused the greatest energy crisis in history. Obviously the longer this goes on, the worse it is going to be. And it sure won't be equally bad for everyone. The Financial Times, writing about the rapidly diminishing gas reserves of Europe, quotes an energy-market analyst who gets to the heart of it: "Rich countries will just pay what’s necessary to secure supply. So the shortages will occur in poorer countries that are literally priced out by Europe and wealthy north-east Asia." Trump and Netanyahu's war will kill people far away from Iran and Lebanon. 

Not every lost war is a forever war. But every forever war is a lost war. The longer you fight, the more ground you have to make up. Many times in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars people in positions of responsibility chose to escalate or otherwise continue the war instead of conceding that it was lost. All they did was kill more people, for less and less. 

That is what we can expect from this zombie phase of the Iran War. A highly combustible new status quo, one that drains resources and wealth from all regions of the world, whose lack of a resolution will itself be a new driver for a humiliated America to continually commit additional resources, since the alternative is to concede defeat. Along the path of recommitment will come temptations to resume the war and force a resolution. Miscalculation is inevitable in a circumstance like this. "We’re a superpower," Stephen Miller said in January, in an instantly-legendary CNN interview that I wrote would lead us right where it led us, "and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower." And a superpower will every time choose a forever war over a defeat, because to concede defeat is to call into question its potency. 

TWO PUBLIC APPEARANCES OF MINE are coming up! On May 14, come to the Brooklyn Institute for a discussion I'll be part of about the Jewish anti-Zionist past and future, hinging on Molly Crabapple's bestselling (!!!) book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of The Jewish Bund. Tickets are available here. Then, on June 30, I'll be speaking with my brother from another mother, Colin Asher, about his hopefully-bestselling book The Midnight Special, the best book about American music and the carceral state you'll ever read. It's going to be the first time Colin and I have been onstage since our teenage punk band 30 years ago. RSVP here. Hope to see you at both!