Coyote Blog

I am not going to say I told you so on Iran (in the first days of the conflict here and here} because there is not much reason anyone would trust me on foreign policy.  Nobody should necessarily listen to me but everyone should listen to history.  History is a laboratory where we can test our social-political theories and plans and see if they make sense.  And the judgement of the last 100 years is pretty unequivocal:

• Countries don't surrender under the onslaught of air power alone.  Ever.  If anything relentless bombing tends to heal fractures in the population as people band together against the common threat.  As I wrote here

All this of course is to reiterate my skepticism that bombing the sh*t out of Iran is going to lead to any sort of surrender or favorable regime change. I see of late that Trump supporters have adopted the defense that their purpose in Iran is to degrade Iran's military ability and ability to support terrorism and conflicts in the region. But that sure as hell was not the Administration's public line at the beginning of the war. My recollection was that Trump's reasoning was we were going to decapitate the leadership and the people would rise up in revolution

• The US has a terrible record of regime change through leadership decapitation and we almost always end up with something worse, at least without the application of a lot of ground troops.  Iraq is perhaps better off post-Hussein and Panama is almost certainly better off post-Noriega, but those changes involved a lot of boots on the ground.  Venezuela may turn out to be an exception as well but way too early to tell.

Certainly Iran's military has been degraded (though so has ours) but I wonder if the loss of $100 million fighter planes isn't the equivalent of losing the  battleships at Pearl Harbor, ie the loss of a very-soon-to-be obsolete military equipment.  In the world of drones on what increasingly looks like the nature of the modern battlefield, the loss of the old stuff may just accelerate their switch to the new war technologies (a switch I am not at all sure our military in the US is on top of).

Seeing little hope of victory, I have been hoping that Trump would declare victory and Iran and go home, which he has sort of done.  Kudos at least for this, if only the US had done the same in Vietnam in 1965.  However, the peace agreement (MOU?  Docusign?) appears incredibly cynical.  As I understand it, there is an armistice of sorts that lasts until 2 days after the US elections in November.  It is clear that whatever JD Vance is spinning, the US got about zero (and maybe less than zero) from this agreement EXCEPT for the Administration's ability to maybe get the war and gas prices out of the paper until after the election.