Excerpts:

Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory.

The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.

It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive.

Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.

This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.

So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.

The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz long ago recognized the delusion of reducing war to a kind of algebra. War, as he understood it, is never merely calculation. It is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose. The algebra has grown more sophisticated. But the delusion is just as dangerous today as it was in the 19th century.

Athens at the height of its golden age sailed for Syracuse and lost an empire. Thucydides spent the rest of his life explaining why. The generals of 1914 were cultivated, well-read men, but those qualities did not save Europe. What has changed is not that culture once prevented blindness and no longer does. It is that culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.

Tolstoy traced the same pattern from the other side. In “War and Peace,” he depicted Napoleon — nourished on Plutarch’s “Lives” and its portraits of greatness — who marched through Borodino to Moscow and still could not fathom a people who would let their city burn rather than submit. His error was not tactical. It was imaginative: He could not credit the Russians with a logic that was not his own. That is the mistake the architects of this campaign are repeating. A leadership that has spent decades framing resistance to American and Israeli power as a religious obligation will experience military pressure not as a reason to capitulate but more probably as a reason to endure.

The more technologically sophisticated war becomes, the more dangerous it is to place it in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature. Such leaders will speak fluently of capabilities, timelines and kill chains. They will have no language for resentment, dishonor, loyalty or grief — and they will discover, too late, that wars are made of these as much as of steel and fire. That is the illiteracy of this war. The algebra of the war makers will have been flawless. But what they cannot read, they will not have reckoned with.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/opinion/israel-us-war-iran-literature.html

He might be the only president able to call this off and just pretend that he accomplished everything he wanted to do. He can just repeat how great it all went, over and over and over.

Let’s hope he does. All other options are worse.


Link: https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-ee950ad4?st=jFMNns

So many apologists for Iraq blamed the intel. Which has never been fair - everyone thought Saddam had CBW, but only the neocons thought that was a reason to invade.

This time, the IC made it perfectly plain to that fat bastard what was likely to happen - and not happen. But he knew better. He ordered the attack anyway.

So, we have jammed our hand once again into a Mideast hornet's nest, and there is no good way out. Brilliant tactical success in the opening stages...and now what.

We are in the beginning stages of a worldwide economic slowdown. Only an immediate end to this madness - and cooperation from Iran, which there is no reason for them to do - can prevent it. And even then, the damage will last.

stock market would react negatively. He did what we needed to have done.Let's wait for the true results.

We don’t want a moron at the helm who launches a war because “He did what we needed to have done.”

“Let’s wait for the true results.” Does that mean the current results are “fake?”

Voters like you are precisely why we are in this predicament.

rest of the arab world being tired of iran are encouraging..

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