History, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

The First Day Of The War

68 Comments

The Mullahs (I’m not going to call them “Iran”) are impotent, and just made enemies of everyone in the region.

[Monday-morning update]

Still trying to get my computer straightened out (having issues with X and the new graphics card) but here’s a good recap of the war so far, from Roger Kimball.

[Afternoon update]

Thoughts on Trumps strategy:

[Wednesday-morning update]

When the can finally stops getting kicked down the road.

It’s been far too long.

68 thoughts on “The First Day Of The War”

  1. If Iran didn’t want to go to war, why did they put their country in the middle of so many of our bases?

  2. My absolute favorite post on X today about all of this:

    “Just think, we could have built two miles of high speed rail for what this is going to cost us.”

    LOL

  3. As The Thing would say, “It’s clobberin’ time!”

    Turn the IRGC into low-grade jerky, put boots on the ground long enough to confiscate all of the enriched uranium and complete the destruction of any remaining nuclear assets, drop bunker busters on any of the mullahs who haven’t already beat feet for Moscow and leave.

    Let Israel, the Gulf kingdoms and Jordan assist the anti-regime forces in doing any other necessary mopping up. The locals will be able to finger any remaining bad guys for liquidation.

    After that, it’s up to the Iranians what comes next. I would recommend that whatever that turns out to be, it do whatever is necessary to get sanctions lifted and frozen assets returned. Some bonfires fueled by hijabs would not be out of line either.

  4. As I sat in a C5a participating in Jimmy Carter’s distraction, as our helicopters were crashing in the desert I thought this will not be over until we give the regime the boot. I had no idea I would have to wait this long. I have no faith in the Iranian people standing up to fanatics with rifles. I hope in the next few days we get in the business of handing out arms and ammo.

      1. It wasn’t exactly tea and skittles for the Army or the Marines either. Fortunately, we at least learned some things, even if the lessons came hard.

          1. Yes, but beforehand. The US military discovered it had lost the knack for joint service operations during the Vietnam era and started working hard to get that skill set back after the Charlie Foxtrot of Desert One. We did better, though not great, in Grenada. But the idiot USAF brass were still resisting GPS in the early ’80s. By the time of Desert Storm we had the jointness mojo pretty much back.

            There was certainly throw-away on the government’s part after Desert Storm too, but that was at the strategic and policy level. Prior to Trump, the last US Presidents with proper grasps of such matters were Eisenhower and Reagan. 20-year dry spell between them. Even longer post-Reagan. We’re still working on that, but Trump and Hegseth have made some real strides forward in those areas.

    2. Thousands of starlinks were smuggled in over the last month and little came out of Iraq, which leave the possibility that some online courses were being offered.

  5. The US just has to get over their distaste for colonialism and learn from their own history. The only really successful US colonial action was post WWII Japan, where a somewhat dubious Emperor was propped up to be the figure head of a constitutional monarchy. I suspect that the CIA thought they did that in the 1950s with the Shah, but the US government never had the smarts to operate as efficiently as the Brits during their Empire days. Get it right this time, hopefully with the help of Israel and the Gulf States. Build Iran (might be a good idea to rename as Persia) on nationalism and get it out of the Islam proselytizing biz.

    1. It wasn’t just Japan. We had to do something comparable in Germany too. We got a lot of help in that regard from Uncle Joe Stalin and his attempt to take all of Berlin. After the Berlin Airlift the Germans on our side of the Iron Curtain were solidly in our corner.

      In both cases, we ran these places under governments of military occupation. The occupations were as much or more to keep the Soviets from getting grabby as for pacifying the defeated enemies. Just feeding the Japanese instead of torturing and killing them after the surrender surprised them so much it made the job much easier.

      But these were not colonial administrations in the classic British sense. They had endpoints that were reasonably well-defined from the get-go. We returned sovereignty to the locals once we were reasonably sure they could handle it based on several years of observation.

      To our considerable cost, we never tried to replicate that approach anywhere else we fought wars subsequently. We returned sovereignty to the South Koreans far too soon and got three decades of authoritarianism before the Koreans democratized themselves by force.

      In Vietnam we felt like we had to back a government composed entirely of a tiny Catholic minority against a population that was mostly of other faiths. We would have been better off to have invited the Diems and the rest to a conference somewhere and then arranged for the plane to go down on the way. The Catholic JFK finally tried to do something of the sort, but it went about as well as the Bay of Pigs and simply subbed in a new set of Catholic aristrocrats for the previous bunch. It didn’t help that William Westmoreland was a complete waste of space.

      In Iraq, Bush Jr. was initially set to institute a government of military occupation under a retired US Army general but his Veep convinced him, instead, to put a complete moron of a civilian in charge and then restore sovereignty to a bunch of opportunists and kleptocrats after a year or so of abject blundering.

      Same story in Afghanistan. We quickly stood up a “government” of tribal warlords and ne’er-do-wells and reaped the consequences for another two decades.

      Oh well, Kellogg, Brown & Root got a lot of lucrative contracts so I guess it was worth it to the late Lord of Darkness.

      There was a modest case, at the time, for sticking it out in Iraq to forestall an Iranian takeover. There was really no excuse for sticking it out in Afghanistan, especially once Bin Laden had been found and killed. If Iran or Pakistan had taken the place over after a US withdrawal, it would have constituted a net step forward for the region.

      Given Pakistan’s recent formal declaration of war on Afghanistan, perhaps we will yet see the wholesale slaughter of its human cockroach population that the place so richly deserves. I would caper like a drunken troll were the Pakis to nuke Kabul and Kandahar.

      The Pakis we can deal with later – especially once the PRC is in the rearview mirror.

      Iran is different than Korea or Vietnam in that there is no superpower rival now in the picture. Iran is different from Iraq and Afghanistan in that Persia has been civilized for three millennia while those other two places are the demesnes of fractious tribal barbarians who, in the case of Iraq, killed all of the previous civilized inhabitants and, in the case of Afghanistan, have never been civilized at all. The Iranians can find a reasonable way forward on their own now that they have been thoroughly inoculated against Islamic fundamentalism.

      We should continue, along with the Israelis, to kill Iranian scumbags until we hit some point of diminishing returns, then bow out completely while Israel completes the job of exterminating all of the regional ‘H’ pests – Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Absent the mullahs and the IRGC, the Iranians can tidy up and get on just fine without us.

      About the only advantage to any Amrican boots on the ground in Iran would be to get some practice in confiscation of fissionables and associated goods. Recent practice of this sort will stand us in good stead when the Russian Federation finally goes to pieces under steadily increasing Ukrainian assault and we have to send in military “dental” teams to pull whatever remains of Russia’s nuclear “teeth.”

      1. “To our considerable cost, we never tried to replicate that approach anywhere else we fought wars subsequently.”

        Democracy-building worked in West Germany and Japan partially because the American public of the mid-20th century broadly understood the exceptional circumstances dictated that it was in the US national interest to do so, and therefore it got sustained public support; but I think the even larger reason it worked in both places is because these were homogeneous, high trust, high education, high IQ societies with the pre-existing social capital and (barely) sufficient experience with constitutional government to make liberal democracy work.

        But that just wasn’t true anywhere else we tried to nation-build. South Korea was the closest to having these prerequisites, but even there it took decades of painful adjustment to get there, which they eventually did, to their credit. Ironically, just as they did so, South Koreans (0.80 TFR in 2025) decided that they were no longer interested in procreating more South Koreans, so I fear this might be a time limited project, alas.

        What will happen in Iran? It’s really hard to say; I will only observe that they seem to have more of the prerequisites for sustainable constitutional democracy than Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, or South Vietnam, though just how much more is open to debate … It will ultimately be up to the Iranians themselves, as you say, and we can only hope for the best.

        1. Democracy-building in Germany and Japan largely worked because most of those inclined to resist were dead, the survivors were starving and they were staring down the barrel of a Soviet Army in case we left.

          1. Oh, certainly. I recall a similar observation being made by a Union officer at the height of the Civil War — I can’t recall who, so I do not have the cite handy — who made the observation that the only way reunion was going to happen was if a certain sizable number of Southern men got killed.

            Still, even so, the Germans and the Japanese needed to have the raw social capital necessary for liberal democracy to work, and they did. That was never the case in Afghanistan.

        2. I do not broadly disagree. But even Japan and Germany took a decade each to shape up properly. If we had spent even two or three decades nation-building while remaining in charge at a high level in the other places, we could have saved ourselves a lot of pointless bloodshed and local “government” cretinism and likely have achieved much better results – both for ourselves and the locals. But, of course, we have been in all of those places for decades, just operating with one or both hands self-tied behind our backs as a result of premature return of control to locals who had no idea how to run anything larger than a tribe. If we had stayed in charge in Afghanistan after taking the place over in about two weeks, we would still be there, Afghanistan would be well on the way to becoming a real country and the Taliban would be a distant memory.

          1. “If we had stayed in charge in Afghanistan after taking the place over in about two weeks, we would still be there, Afghanistan would be well on the way to becoming a real country and the Taliban would be a distant memory.”

            This is one of those very rare occasions where I think I take a different view from yourself, especially after talking to Afghan War vets. It’s intractably tribal, but it’s more than that . . . No one has ever managed to civilize the place!

            Perhaps if you really made the effort, really had the right people there (and for the most part, we never really did), you could make some progress over the course of, I don’t know, a century. But would it be worth the price? Not to my mind. Trump may have the right idea of going back to punitive expeditions. What’s happening right now feels like a highly kinetic sequel to the Barbary Wars.

          2. Perhaps you are right and a real attempt – including summary executions of dead-enders – would not have resulted in an Afghanistan of peaceful cities and cul de sac-ed suburbs of ranch-style abodes. We’re not likely to find out during the remaining lifespans of either of us.

            But, prior to the Soviet invasion and the subsequent rise of the Taliban there was a Westernized urban culture in parts of Afghanistan. The real problems with the place are the immemorial tribalism and Islam – now resurgent and regnant. A government of military occupation could have rendered Afghanistan safe enough for Christian missionaries to operate – especially Mormons. I daresay, had that happened, the place would look a lot different at this point than it does now.

            The extinction of tribalism as a core organizing principle of human societies is still very much on Humanity’s to-do list as tribalism is fundamentally incompatible with modernity and progress. Perhaps that particular can will simply continue to be kicked down the road until some confluence of future circumstances combine to make the extinction of tribalism finally rise to the top of the priority list.

            I will continue to maintain that we lost a golden opportunity to conduct controlled experiments toward that end by being short-sighted and stupid in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

          3. “there was a Westernized urban culture in parts of Afghanistan.”

            There kinda was — the photos and videos are out there — but from what I know, it was mostly confined to a certain westernized elite strata in parts of Kabul.

          4. However limited, those times still constituted an existence proof that modernity and Afghanistan are not inherently an oil-and-water pairing.

      2. I left out W Germany because of the complex combination of US, UK and French administration.

        1. Yeah, that complicated things modestly. But both France and the UK pretty much followed the US lead in Germany. The French were seriously distracted in Indochina and Algeria during the interval of external control of Germany and had very limited bandwidth to devote to a place that wasn’t a bleeding sore. The Brits, for their part, were also distracted by insurgencies, both of local and of Soviet origin, in their own colonial demesnes even if not to quite the same extent as the French.

      3. Yeah. I was pretty jazzed when we took out Saddam, and pretty jazzed when we cooperated with the Northern Alliance to force out the Taliban.

        But as a nation I’m afraid we don’t have the consensus or the staying power to follow up on such victories. Both parties stuck with our presence in Germany and Japan, so our clockwork transition from one Administration to the next did not cause our foreign policy to flop around like a dead fish.

        1. Yes. Our fear of “entanglements” led us to do patently stupid things that simply extended the entangling and removed most of our ability to decisively influence matters. Worst of both worlds.

        1. No, but that wasn’t the point of the original incursion. The point was to demonstrate that Russia enjoyed no patent of immunity from having done to it exactly what it had been doing to Ukraine. Now that Ukraine has a lot more capability – much of it self-developed – to strike Russia much deeper than in just one or two border regions and to do so via unmanned ordnance without risking significant troop casualties in the process, the Ukrainians have allowed Russia to take back most of its prior territorial losses. Keeping those gains would have required building and manning defense lines and Ukraine has its hands full doing that on its own territory. The point, in any case, has been made.

    2. We need to keep out of Iran, and given historical emnities, I don’t think the Arab League is a good idea either.

      We need to ask Malaysia to step up, for failing that, call upon Bangladesh.

      1. We need to be there just long enough to confiscate the fissionables.

        What role, if any, the Gulf Cooperation Council may take once the last resistance is crushed is for them to work out with the new Iranian government.

        Notional Malaysian and Bangladeshi forces of occupation would be both superfluous and impractical. The Iranians are perfectly capable of getting their house back in order on their own – especially once still-frozen assets are restored and sanctions lifted. Neither Malaysia nor Bangladesh has expeditionary military capability and there would be a formidable language barrier.

  6. “The only really successful US colonial action was post WWII Japan, where a somewhat dubious Emperor was propped up to be the figure head of a constitutional monarchy. I suspect that the CIA thought they did that in the 1950s with the Shah, ..”

    Time for Shah 2.0; figurehead of state over a parliamentary constitutional democracy.

    “Reza Pahlavi appeals to Iranians after US-Israel strike: ‘Moments of destiny lie ahead of us’

    “My dear compatriots, Moments of destiny lie ahead of us,” he began.

    “The aid that the President of the United States promised to the brave people of Iran has now arrived. This is a humanitarian intervention; and its target is the Islamic Republic, its repressive apparatus, and its machinery of slaughter—not the country and great nation of Iran,” Pahlavi continued. “But, even with the arrival of this aid, the final victory will still be forged by our hands. It is we, the people of Iran, who will finish the job in this final battle. The time to return to the streets is near.””

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/world/4475370/reza-pahlavi-appeal-iran-moments-of-destiny/

    https://x.com/PahlaviReza/status/2027666258393444399?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2027666258393444399%7Ctwgr%5Ecfbb2054d30c7a4d6f7f4f4c153ba69ac41939c8%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonexaminer.com%2Fnews%2Fworld%2F4475370%2Freza-pahlavi-appeal-iran-moments-of-destiny%2F

    1. The Iranians have now had nearly five decades to discover that there are worse things in the world than the Pahlavi dynasty. And the current would-be Shah has had the same amount of time to consider the various serious errors of his late father when it came to governance. Given that he is now six years older than his late father was at the time of his overthrow, one can only hope the perhaps-about-to-be Shah will be more humble in office – should he succeed to it – than his famously arrogant sire.

      I wonder if the Peacock Throne still exists as an artifact or whether the mullahs burned it somewhere along the line. A new one can certainly be ginned up to suit in any case.

      1. No, afraid not, Dick. After Nadir Shah hauled the throne back to Tehran, it seems to have got dismantled later in the 18th C, and its bits and pieces enriched various important pockets. Eventually a new throne was fabricated, the so-called Sun Throne (also known as the Takht-e Khorshid), and as I understand it, that throne is sitting right now in the Central Bank of Iran, of all places. Whether it’s still sturdy enough for anyone to sit on, I have no idea.

        1. Sir, I stand in slack-jawed awe at your near-instantaneous in-depth research abilities.

      2. Dick Eagleson writes:

        “one can only hope the perhaps-about-to-be Shah will be more humble in office – should he succeed to it – than his famously arrogant sire.”

        True but at the same time he has to be hard nosed when it comes to the inevitable attempts of the mullahs to toss him and the new government.

        Something along the lines of velvet fist.

        1. More like a mailed fist – with spikes at the knuckle joints. Should Reza Pahlavi re-take the throne, he must be absolutely merciless to the remnants of the former regime – no mercy, no quarter, no prisoners. The tomb of the late Ayatollah Khomenei should be festooned with spikes upon which their bodies should be publicly impaled and remain until carrion birds have reduced them to bones. Then the bones should be crushed along with the stones of the tomb – and the bones of the late Ayatollah, and used as aggregate in rebuilding Teheran. After that, he should get rough.

          2. Actually, Trump promised “immunity” if they surrendered. That implies immunity from prosecution. There would be no immunity from social cancellation, and Trump is fully aware from his experience in 21st Century America that social cancellation is as bad as or worse than any judicial sanction.

      3. Sorry, what again are the qualifications of this would-be Shah? That he speaks the language?

        1. Reza Pahlavi seems to have quite a following among ordinary Iranians. And, given the parade of nincompoops and grifters the US electorate has seen fit to saddle itself with between Reagan and Trump – plus Joe Biden – I don’t think we’re in any position to be getting all pecksniffian about “qualifications.”

          1. Reza Pahlavi seems to have quite a following among ordinary Iranians. And, given the parade of nincompoops and grifters the US electorate has seen fit to saddle itself with between Reagan and Trump – plus Joe Biden – I don’t think we’re in any position to be getting all pecksniffian about “qualifications.”

            Sure he does. If I had decent marketing, I could seem to have quite a following too. But I fired all my staff, and alas, they’re still not doing their jobs.

          2. Call me back when you can produce video of ecstatic crowds numbering in the tens of thousands deliriously chanting your name. Good luck finding a PR firm capable of pulling that off.

      4. I don’t know if Prince Reza Pahlavi has any desire to rule Iran.

        He could be useful uniting the country and then becoming a ceremonial figurehead like in other constitutional monarchies.

        1. That seems to be exactly his intent – at least his stated intent. If he is returned to the throne, and he sticks to that declared intention, Iran could prosper greatly without re-attempting the construction of a new imperium and he could be remembered as an Iranian royal on a par with the great Persian heads of state of antiquity. And make everyone forget his quite problematical father.

        2. My view is that we wouldn’t be talking about Reza Pahlavi, if he didn’t have an intense, well-funded desire to return to Iran as some sort of ruler.

          I continue to fail to see his value. As I see it, the Iranian Revolution explicitly showed the desire of a lot of people to reject any sort of monarchy. That attitude doesn’t vanish just because the replacement government was terrible too.

          Sure, if Iran on its own initiative wants a restored monarchy in some form, that’s their business. But if he gets installed by the US even as a pretty figurehead, that will be an albatross around the neck of the Iranian government because it’s ongoing proof of the US’s influence on the government. We can avoid that by simply not doing that.

          1. Most of the people who would be in a position to remember the last time the Pahlavi dynasty was running Iran are dead. The current population of Iran knows only the regime of the Mullahs.

            I also have misgivings about Reza Pahlavi, but I do not make your mistake of assuming those are shared by much of the current Iranian population.

            The US will not have to foist Pahlavi on Iran. Giving him a free ride to Teheran when things have settled down a bit would be about as much as we are likely to do. The Iranians will take things from there.

            If Pahlavi proves too much a retread of his late father, well, the Iranian people have now had a lot of practice in bringing down an unpopular regime.

          2. Maybe.

            They are always going to have an albatross of US influence on their government, no matter what happens now,

          3. The US has at least some influence on every non-US national government on Earth. But said influence is pretty minimal most places. And even when it is considerable – as today in Venezuela for example – US “influence” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Certainly not an “albatross.”

            US “influence” – up to and including the type and extent now being applied to Iran – tends, properly, to rise sharply when a given national government decides to behave really badly in some consequential way. Once Iran has a new government, US “influence” will continue being beneficial, but will also be greatly reduced in extent and very different in nature.

            Despite a lot of loose talk to the contrary by people on both the left and the right who seem remarkably ignorant of history, the US is neither an empire nor a world police force.

  7. It looks like someone offed Santa Claus:
    With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor, and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels
    Tragic. I was just thinking how much he reminded me of my beloved uncle. I hope heads roll over this.

  9. “Iran’s Prince Reza Pahlavi believes regime could finally fall | 60 Minutes”

    “Prince Reza Pahlavi, a leader of the opposition to the Islamic Republic, discusses whether regime change is coming, who leads a transition, and nuclear weapons.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDfvAMK4Q0A

    I used to listen to “60 minutes” faithfully for many years; but it has been many years since I watch it even semi-regularly. Before death of Andy Rooney (RIP).

    1. I stopped at the Audi Death Car episode in the 80’s (memory is a funny thing. I thought I saw that while I was still in college).

  10. Trump Doctrine: Overwhelming use of military force for defined and limited purpose that serves our nation’s interests.

    After watching Trump’s FP moves with other countries in the region and Venezuela, I think he is agnostic to who runs Iran as long as they do not pose a threat to us or our allies and decide to work with us rather than against us.

    We won’t be doing an occupation. We wont be running a government there. Trump does not want to repeat the mistakes of past administrations or get caught up in prolonged conflict.

    Think of this as a punitive expedition. Something intended to change behavior through breaking specific things and killing specific people that we will repeat if needed.

    Trump might prefer the dissidents form a government. He might even provide some help. But ultimately it will be up to Iran to decide their fate and Trump will work with the victor.

    2. Trump demonstrated his method with Venezuela: he removed Maduro. The 2nd in command looked over the situation and said she’d be happy to work with Trump. So long as she actually does that and isn’t feigning cooperation he’s happy.

      What he wants is honest negotiation and deals. As long as he gets those he’ll work with almost anyone.

  11. I think it is precisely when we insunite ourselves is where the trouble begins. Our diplomats are not qualified to play in this sandbox. Simply explain our needs to the incoming and allow them to work with others there to satisfy our needs. In this case the removal of all nuclear materials and production equipment should be our only boots on the ground activity. A B-52 circling overhead with a select smorgasbord as incentive would be a nice touch.

    1. The “Think Different” Apple slogan comes to mind. I don’t think prospective diplomats understand that different cultures really do think different.

      Anyway, yeah. Get the fissionables and any paper trails, turn the sites into gravel pits as a reminder of what would happen should they try it again.

  12. WattsUpWithThat ran a Manhattan Contrarian post “reacting” to a New York Times headline/article about the cutoff of oil to Cuba. This is another consequence of Trumps activities, and another move to neutralize an evil government that acts against out interests. The post is about how, with the help of the Trump administration, Cuba has become the first country to achieve “net zero”, and professes bewilderment when the NYT thinks that is a bad thing. After all, the NYT has been on the forefront of insisting the United States end the use of fossil fuels, but never mentioned that it might “bring [us] to our knees” as they report it has done to Cuba. It’s agreat read.

    1. Some of the great satirical literary works of recent decades have been linguistic shivs slipped between the ribs of the American Left. This sounds like another.

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