The fanatic Twelvers will not negotiate and hope the disaster will bring the 12th Imam out of the well. Rational people would cut their losses. They’re not rational.

Juist a possible outcome. I hope I’m wrong.

Thanks, Niketas, for calling out Bauxite. I want & wanted regime change, and an explicit goal. But Trump specifically rejected it, tho implicitly has already achieved it. Whoever is now in charge is not the same as after the July bombing of Iran’s nuke program. Already some regime change, but not (never ending?) nation building with liberal democracy as the imposed goal.

I like transcripts more, but nothing new.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-transcript-address-iran-war-b5970011fe934dde84d95d650bda56a9

There is a tweet of some IRGC guy asking the people to Not tell the Israelis where the IRGC forces are—indicating there are many Iranians doing that. It’s a slow preference cascade buildup, with few now willing to risk their lives to fight with no or few weapons against the armed guard, but many willing to call in info so Israelis can take out forces still supporting the “regime”.

Which Trump is negotiating with, (I’m sure he really is), but the only deal he’ll accept is Iran giving up nukes, and the near-ton of enriched uranium. Which we all know the old regime would never do, but some new survivors might.

In the meantime, Iran is running out of money, and going thru hyperinflation. So the people are becoming desperate. At some point, 20, 30, 60, 90, 220, 444 days they will rise up.
At some point, unlikely before 90 days after the start on Feb 28, Trump might decide to stop so much pressure and just Declare Victory and come home with the forces. Dems already want him to do that, so they can say he’s actually failed, lost, TACO, even tho already the world is safer.

Whatever attacks Trump makes, if any, they will be far more effective and less costly if they are a surprise to the enemy. Which requires them also being a surprise to the voters.

So I’m on board with Trump still. C’mon, surprise us all on the timing.

“Dubai Crackdown Hits Iran’s Economic Lifeline, Squeezes IRGC Networks”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/dubai-crackdown-hits-irans-economic-lifeline-squeezes-irgc-networks
– – – – – – –
And if there was any previous doubt that the
Democratic Party is, essentially, an enemy of the USA…

“Obama Judge Orders Trump Admin To Restore Legal Status Of 985,000 Migrants Who Used CBP One App”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/obama-judge-orders-trump-admin-restore-legal-status-985000-migrants-who-used-cbp-one-app

“Democrats Ask Judge To Block Parts Of Trump’s Election Order”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democrats-ask-judge-block-parts-trumps-election-order

“Iran war has a ‘second front’ — and Tehran has already lost it”—
https://nypost.com/2026/04/02/opinion/iran-war-has-a-second-front-and-tehran-has-already-lost-it/
Key grafs:

…President Trump’s goal in his first term was to resolve the Iran issue through primarily economic means.

After a year of renegotiating the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, he withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and imposed tough economic sanctions on Iran’s key sectors to prevent nuclear development….

Some 1.5 million barrels of oil per day were removed from the market, and Tehran’s revenue losses topped $200 billion.

Headlines screamed that Iran was on the verge of collapse.

Yet in 2021 the Biden administration chose to stop enforcing the sanctions, and even provided the Islamic Republic with some $144 billion in additional revenue.

The oil started flowing again, primarily to communist China….

[Emphasis mine; Barry M.]

NATO has illustrated it’s incapacity in terms of resources and it’s unwillingness in terms of determination even though we have seen strikes at Turkey as well as other bases in Cyprus, the French Spanish even the Italians have proven rather worthless,

the Gordian knot lies in whether striking Kharg Island for instance, would incapacitate a successor regime, also possible expanded retaliation against Gulf Targets, like the Ab Quaiq oil fields, (they have struck some minor facilitities in the early part of the campaign,

Then stop lying and saying no one told us what the objectives were.

So we either finish the job and suffer significant additional human and economic damage, or we leave after allowing our enemy survive and allow the problem to continue to fester.

Nice exercise in goalpost moving. Let’s review where you started:

And, if we weren’t planning to get rid of the Ayatollahs, why did we attack in the first place?

This is more bad faith on your part. First you say no one explained it, which was a lie, because next you conceded they explained it and all you MEANT was that you didn’t agree with it. Well, you lied. Trump is not making you lie, you are doing that on your own.

The Republicans you do approve of had lots of chances to do even this much against Iran and didn’t take them. Sorry you didn’t get Jeb! or DeSantis. But that’s because the voters got tired of GOP talk and inaction. They did it your way for fifty years and we got multigenerational war in Iraq and Afghanistan and tax cuts, but no rollback of what the Left got. It’s not Trump’s Jedi mind tricks. It’s the dogs don’t like the dog food, doesn’t matter how good the marketing was. Sooner you make peace with that, the sooner you can figure out how to actually achieve what you want, instead of just coming here and trying to gaslight people.

The cost side includes US war casualties. The rest comes down to (i) whether Trump gets Hormuz re-opened and how costly it is to do so; and (ii) how severely the Hormuz closure affects the world and US economies.

I think you also have to consider the probability that the US will ever go back to Iran to finish the job if we don’t now. Unless Iran does something much worse than it has done since 1979, I really, really doubt it. So we either finish the job and suffer significant additional human and economic damage, or we leave after allowing our enemy survive and allow the problem to continue to fester.

I think honorably winding up NATO is long overdue, as the primary threat it was intended for (Warsaw Pact) is long gone, and Europe has the capability to be far stronger than Russia, having four times the population and over four times the economy. When NATO was new this was not true. Western Europe was weak and devastated by war, and the Soviet Union and its satellites had millions of men under arms and was exploiting the advanced industry in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Russia today is older than Europe with a population shrinking even faster, with a smaller active military than North Korea (whose soldiers they’ve been renting).

But the key point is “honorably”. We have to honor commitments that we are not yet released from. Lack of credibility is a form of military weakness. Western Europe is exhibiting it right now.

New alliances have to be thought through carefully considering American interests as primary. Can’t just keep packing countries into NATO, the likelihood of true collective action keeps going down. Three or four roughly peer countries can work together really well, but not many Spaniards want to die for Estonia. France bailed from 1966 to 2009.

Too many connected people at home and abroad make too much money from NATO as it is. It’s a skinsuit now, best adapted for sucking up taxpayer money and spending it with government cronies at home and abroad rather than providing credible security. I’m not optimistic anything will materially change.

As Marc Rubio said to George Stephanopolis when he repeated your bogus talking point, maybe you better write them down if you can’t remember what they are.

This operation is about very specific objectives. The President laid them out on the first night of the operation. I’ll repeat them to you now because I hear a lot of talk about we don’t know what the clear objectives are. Here they are…. you should write them down….

Number one, the destruction of their air force. Number two, the destruction of their navy. Number three, the severe diminishing of their missile launching capability. And number four, the destruction of their factories so they can’t make more missiles and more drones to threaten us in the future.

All of this so that they can never hide behind it to acquire a nuclear weapon. That was our objective from the beginning; that remains our objective now. We are on pace and in fact ahead of schedule on some of those things, and we are going to achieve those things in a number of weeks, not in a number of months.

Print that out and then you can refer to it next time you forget.