No, You Morons, Iran Has Not ‘Won.’
I know that it’s a sin against my own intelligence not to follow Mark Twain’s guidance in matters such as these.
Twain said many wise things. Some of the wisest things attributed to him are now said not to have come from him at all. But I have my doubts about the doubters.
One was “Don’t wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
The other has been offered in two versions — either “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference,” or “Never argue with an idiot; they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
Mark Twain, or at least the mythical Mark Twain whose brilliance appears to be under attack by these niggling scholars denying him some of his best stuff, would have had one hell of a time with the “anti-war” gang on social media and elsewhere today.
Maybe that’s not quite fair. There are critics of the Iran war who have perfectly rational and valid points to make, and this column does not seek to take them on.
It’s a particular species of “anti-war” keyboard warrior with whom I quibble.
Specifically, this cabal of fools and idiots who pronounce the Iran war over, when we don’t know that to be true, and have judged the victor to be Iran.
Much like the Black Knight of Monty Python and the Holy Grail fame…
At least the Black Knight had the humility to call it a draw.
We’re getting this assault on logic and reality from a handful of places, but it’s time that we put it to bed — even if pigs, fools, and idiots insist on making a mess along the way.
The idea that Iranian victory would be an outcome of this war stems partially from notions put forth by a number of pundits — most notably on the left — that so long as the Iranian regime survived the war, they would have won.
This wasn’t an honest narrative, you understand. Nor was it intended to be. It was set up as an impossible standard for the Trump administration to meet, in an effort to cast Trump as a loser.
We saw this point of view manifested a week ago when President Trump submitted an ultimatum and a threat that Iran either open the Strait of Hormuz or he’d “end” their civilization. This was taken in the most maximalist interpretation possible, but it was much more nuanced than that. I’ve said this elsewhere, but if you talk to Iranian dissidents or expatriates, many or most of them will tell you a couple of interesting things. First, they insist on telling you that they’re Persians, not Iranians, and second, they will tell you that the religious Twelver Shia nuts who took over their country 47 years ago are of an entirely different civilization than the noble Persian civilization they claim, in exile or diaspora such as it is. And that someday the Twelver Shiite mullahs will be gone and Persian civilization will revive.
When Trump talked about ending the civilization of the ayatollahs, a lot of the Iranian expatriates and dissidents interpreted what he said that way, and it’s a very good bet that was Trump’s intent. But these people weren’t going to give him credit for using a bombastic rhetorical flourish in saying “regime change” was coming to Iran; instead they jumped straight to accusations of genocide.
And when Trump’s threats resulted in a ceasefire with the Iranians and peace talks in Islamabad, these very same people who had been grousing about the war immediately pivoted to a stupid meme they’d created last year, which is TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out. Because a threat issued to force an enemy to the negotiating table forced the enemy to the negotiating table and therefore wasn’t necessary to carry out, we therefore will argue that the issuer of that threat is a coward for not executing it.
I wonder if these people would prefer Trump just to say “Don’t.”
And the people uttering these inanities are somehow credited as (1) intelligent and (2) speaking in good faith. The blithering idiocy and whiplash-inducing inconsistency of their rhetoric apparently notwithstanding.
Is there some historical context behind the idea that a war can be won against an enemy without altering that enemy’s form of government? You might be surprised to find out that’s how better than 90 percent of the wars ever fought are ended. In fact, most of the wars Americans have fought ended without changing the enemy’s government, and we haven’t lost very many.
Naturally, if you run up against an adversary so intransigent that you can’t resolve your differences with him at the negotiating table, finding a way to depose him as a means of winning the resulting war is a preferred outcome. It’s why the Germans were happy to facilitate Lenin’s train ride from Switzerland back home to Russia in the middle of World War I, for example.
But even though we nuked the Japanese twice, they still had an emperor at the end of hostilities in 1945. We certainly reshaped their politics and policy, and frankly did a hell of a job of it. In fact, that standard was far too high; it let us think we could meet it in dealing with countries far less civilized or advanced later, Iraq and Afghanistan being the clearest, but not sole, examples.
And now there is zero national desire for long-term occupations, empire-building, or counterinsurgencies. We are not going to reform Iran by force.
In fact, the standard enforced on Trump — that he had to take down the Iranian regime, or Iran would win — was explicitly not agreed to by the president or his people. The military goals of the U.S. in this war were to interrupt, degrade, or destroy Iran’s navy, air force, missile and drone capability, military command and control, nuclear program, and ability to conduct proxy warfare in places like Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. Regime change was always reserved as a happy coincidence or aftereffect of the bombing campaign that was aimed at the aforementioned items.
These dynamics have a long history. Don’t forget that Sun Tzu cautioned to “Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across” — meaning that an easy partial victory is usually better than an all-out, apocalyptic fight. Of course, none of Sun Tzu’s opponents had missiles or nukes, but nevertheless, achieving some key objectives before heading to the peace table has never been considered a dishonorable discharge of war.
South Korea’s story is a pretty good success, after all.
The Israelis have a term for military campaigns aimed at degrading the lethality of their enemies, who turn out to all be Iranian proxies. They call it “mowing the lawn.” Periodically they’ll take out enemy leadership, missile stores, weapons caches, terror tunnels, and the like, in the knowledge that these accomplishments represent little victories that move the needle temporarily without a permanent resolution.
Because permanent resolutions to Israel’s security issues are denied them by the “international community.” Which means Israel has been locked in forever wars that cast Israel as the villain.
Thus enabling the Hamases and Hezbollahs of the world to declare victory after victory while getting their asses consistently whipped on the battlefield.
Now that the target of this propaganda offensive is the Great Satan rather than the Little Satan, we find out that nothing has changed.
Or has it?
Let’s think of this in a way the pigs, fools, and idiots won’t like.
Let’s consider that for 40 days or so, the U.S. and Israel pounded the Iranian regime down to the studs and largely eliminated its ability to rain militarily significant hailstorms of missile and drone fire down on Iran’s neighbors. That isn’t to say Iran can’t threaten the region, particularly when it comes to the softer targets, but Iran doesn’t control its airspace, it has no naval assets other than a collection of speedboats that can be easily sunk to the bottom of the ocean whenever they make an appearance in the battle space, and — most spectacularly — the Iranian regime can’t even stop the U.S. military from sending in planeloads of ground troops to set up a temporary air base in the middle of Iranian territory, conduct ground operations to rescue pilots, lose a couple of cargo planes after they got stuck in the sand, fly in three more, fill them up with Americans, and skedaddle all without losing any dead.
That’s what happened after 40 days.
Now there are reports trickling in that Basij commanders are being stabbed to death by masked men on the streets of Iran, which would indicate that the regime is in literal mortal peril even during a ceasefire.
That’s what Iranian victory looks like.
And it actually gets worse, because Iran’s other claim to victory was that the regime declared the Strait of Hormuz was closed, and if Iran had the power to close the Strait of Hormuz that was evidence Iran had won.
Funny thing about that victory, though.
Between last year and next month, U.S. oil production and export sales will have gone up by more than a million barrels a day. You’ve undoubtedly seen the reports of a massive increase in oil tankers headed for oil ports along the U.S. gulf coast. We are literally stealing away the oil trade from the Strait of Hormuz that Iran declared closed.
And when the tankers adjusted their headings for places like Beaumont and Fourchon, Trump and U.S. Central Command completed flipping the script. Trump declared that the Strait would indeed be closed.
To Iran. Not to everybody else.
He sent a couple of destroyers through the strait to demonstrate the Iranians wouldn’t fire on them, and then he blockaded all of Iran’s ports. By Wednesday afternoon it had been a day and a half since any ships to or from Iran had been able to reach port. But tankers from the other Gulf states were moving.
You might check for yourself to see who’s insuring those tankers. I have a hunch a lot of them are insured by carriers in the United States rather than London, which would be a significant change from pre-war — and one quite favorable to the U.S. where the international balance of trade is concerned.
This is more or less a non-kinetic version of something we’ve expected for a while, which is that we’d land Marines on Kharg Island. That might still happen, but it doesn’t actually have to if we can stop the ships from moving.
And actually, if we can ramp up U.S. and Venezuelan exports to replace Iran’s shut-in production, we might just prove that the world can go without Iran’s oil at all. We’re also going to find out if the world can go without Iran’s petrochemical exports, something the Israelis made sure would be the case 10 days ago.
That’s what Trump was talking about on Wednesday…
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 15, 2026
If this isn’t quite registering, the point is for China to be buying oil from the other Gulf states and not Iran, which with the Americas ramping up as a supplier of Europe and Asia suddenly appears doable.
We’ll know more about these outcomes as time goes along, including the most important one — namely, how long this regime can last with its economic jugular vein bleeding, and no means to stop it save capitulation.
That isn’t to say I expect them to capitulate. The Black Knight didn’t, and the Black Knight wasn’t even attempting to start so much trouble that the end times come and the Mahdi climbs out of a well where he’s been residing for the last 1200-odd years in order to perfect the world.
But all that means is the final chapter in this war has yet to be written.
And a whole lot of things would need to happen before anyone but a fool could say Iran has won, or will.
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The Democrats’ Swalwell Follies
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