Iran learned much from our lost wars. It’s strategy is to draw the United States into a long and bloody war of attrition that will impose a prolonged economic shock across the globe.
The disaster will have consequences that American voters and even Trump’s enslaved Republicans should finally realize that Trump is a bigger threat than an advantage to keeping their Congressional seats and join the Democrats in removing him – in other words, regime change at home.
The momentum is building. The war is backed by the lowest number of Americans ever at 41%. Reuters poll has it as low as 27%. Support will continue to deteriorate as Iran increases its retaliation.
Videos showing Iran’s drones bombing a high-rise building in Bahrain, a Dubai hotel, Dubai’s airport, a Bahrain radar facility, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, and Amazon data centers in the Emirates are plentiful and convincing that Iran’s threats are real and lasting.
So is the economic damage to the U.S. and the world at large. Iran bombed critical oil-production facilities and the UAE had to shut down one of the world’s largest oil refineries. Shutting down the Strait of Hormuz reduced oil traffic by 75%, sending oil prices soaring globally and gas prices at the pump in every state.
Clearly, America’s military is far superior to Iran’s. But in this war, the U.S. lost that advantage to Iran’s drones which are much less expensive, more rapidly produced, more scalable at a fraction of the cost, and is capable of precision at short and long ranges. The Pentagon’s addiction to too-slowly producing sophisticated and expensive weaponry is a disadvantage. It’s unclear whether the 1000 Tomahawks ordered will be delivered on time.
The Pentagon’s Switchblade drone was deployed in Ukraine with a range of less than 60 miles and costs around $120,000 each. By contrast, Iran’s drone has a range of 940–1,240 miles and cost around $35,000 each. Ukraine, copying Iran’s drone technology, brought Russia’s offensive to a halt.
The U.S. fired around 400 Tomahawk missiles to intercept Iranian drones –about 10% of U.S. drone inventory – at a cost of around $800 million, which could buy 23,000 Iranian drones.
Sending troops to Iran is not the act of a sane man. Yet Trump’s ill-considered decision to bomb Iran has made a land invasion possible if not likely.
A ground war in Iran will be near-impossible to win. First, the size of the ground force could exceed the scale of Vietnam. Rugged mountains make up half of Iran’s territory, and its urban centers are inland and protected by them and by uninhabitable deserts.
Given Iran’s much larger population than Iraq’s, it would require as many as 1.6 million troops, equaling roughly three-quarters of the U.S. military, including combat forces America doesn’t have.
Deploying ground troops would provide Moscow and Beijing with an opportunity to weaken a rival superpower that is already overextended and domestically fractured.
In the end, Trump’s goal of inspiring an uprising won’t be reached. American bombing has yet to create fissures in the regime. Nor has it inspired Iranians to demonstrate.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard remains firmly in control of Iran’s strategy and battlefield. Demolishing their infrastructure only intensifies national solidarity.
Trump’s ignored the lessons of America’s shameful failures in similar military attempts.
America’s experience in Vietnam bears a striking similarity to what Trump’s doing in Iran. The U.S. dropped three times more tonnage of bombs in Vietnam than in World War II. U.S. air superiority destroyed the country’s crucial military facilities seemingly vital to the Vietnam’s military, and crushed any expectation that North Vietnam could fend off America’s imminent victory. Yet, just a few months later, Vietcong and Vietnamese forces attacked America’s presence in 100 cities and towns across South Vietnam and shattered the perception that an American victory was near. The Defense Department reported that the failed war cost the U.S. military $138.9-billion — over $1 trillion in today’s dollars.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan was also a shameful failure, costing over $2.3 trillion and more than 20,000 American lives. And it set the stage for the Taliban’s rapid return to power.
The cost to the U.S. of the Iraq war totaled more than $3 trillion including direct government expenses and its impact on the U.S. economy. It also cost 4,492American lives.
Yet Trump declared “We won … It was over in the first hour.” Remember when he claimed Covid will disappear “within a couple of days and be near to zero,” it would “disappear like a miracle.” But by the end of his first administration the U.S. accounted for just 4.2% of the world’s population but 30% of COVID cases and 19% of COVID deaths.
The ugliest truth is that Trump’s attack on Iran has nothing to do with his goals of regime change or denuclearization. It’s that he’s sacrificing American lives, its economy, its honor and what’s left of its financial strength in order to distract from the Epstein scandal, for leverage to declare an emergency, as an excuse to deploy American troops on U.S. soil and to try to delay the midterm elections.
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