It's been a long "excursion" and the U.S. and the world are worse off for it:
It’s been six months since the United States and Israel attacked Iran with the perennial goal of transforming the Middle East through military force. The region has changed, but not in the way they had hoped.
The Islamic Republic survived the assassination of its top leaders and weeks of heavy bombing, and found a potent form of leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. Gulf Arab nations saw worrying gaps open up in the American security umbrella they have relied on for decades — and some are looking at alternatives.
Israel has once again thrashed its enemies without defeating them, and after nearly three years of war in Gaza and new land seizures, is at risk of a generational rupture with the U.S., its closest ally. Hopes of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia — another enduring U.S. and Israeli aspiration — have dimmed even further.
When they attacked Iran on Feb. 28, the U.S. and Israel hoped to topple its clerical leadership and replace it with a pro-Western government. Instead, they’ve ended up with a “hardened and very radical regime,” said Barbara Leaf, a former ambassador who served as assistant secretary of state for the Middle East in the Biden administration.
“That is going to be exceptionally difficult to deal with, to say the least,” she said. Iran’s “confidence has grown over the months that it cannot only survive, but it can prevail, it can reset the regional landscape.”
Not only has Iran been strengthened by the foolish "excursion" that the MF was talked into by Israel's (smarter) Trump, Bibi Netanyahu, but our regional allies now have little faith left in our military and security guarantees:
Iran retaliated against Israel, but it also trained its missiles and drones on Gulf nations that had hoped to stay out of the war. It struck U.S. bases and critical energy infrastructure, stretching air defenses and drawing down American supplies of sophisticated interceptors.
Iran responded to attacks on its civilian infrastructure by striking its neighbors’ desalination plants. That raised fears that a war begun without consultation with Gulf nations could lead to catastrophic attacks on their water and electricity.
“The fact that the war began without a clear political objective and against the advice of key regional partners, and that there has not been clear evidence of a Plan B once the initial attacks failed to dislodge the Iranian regime, is likely to undermine confidence in the U.S. across the region and may take some time to repair,” said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Gulf expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Netanyahu's goading of Trump into war has been catastrophic for Israel's international isolation and for American public support for Israel, as well:
Its many tactical victories have come at a mounting cost in international isolation. Israel has been widely accused of genocide in Gaza, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, all of which Israel adamantly denies.
Of greater concern for Israel is its unprecedented erosion of support in the United States. That accelerated as some critics came to see it as having led the U.S. into another Mideast war, something to which the Trump administration has at times lent credence.
As the war settled into a stalemate over the summer, outspoken critics of Israel won some key Democratic primaries across the United States and more than half of House Democrats voted to cut aid to Israel. Israel has also come in for growing criticism from the right.
Six months in, and an end nowhere in sight. The Malignant Fascist's erratic and self-defeating moves have only strengthened Iran's view that America's word can't be trusted, and that they can wait out the weakened MF's regime and end up as the dominant force in the Persian Gulf. Eighteen American servicemembers dead (that we know of), many more injured, billions of dollars in damage to American intelligence sites and bases (why U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln couldn't resupply), a high-tech munitions crisis that weakens our deterrence capabilities, etc. All in six months' work for the deeply ignorant, easily manipulated moron that 77 million Americans gave the nuclear codes to and made Commander in Chief for a second time.
(Image: moron says what / via Kurdistan24)
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