Matt Kroenig has wanted the U.S. to attack Iran for more than a decade. Now that he got the war he wanted and it failed, he is reduced to arguing this:
To be sure, the United States did not register a knockout punch against the Islamic Republic, but to continue the boxing metaphor, it did win on points.
War isn’t a sport, and there is no winning on “points.” The ghouls that cheered this war on treat war as if it were a video game where you get more “points” with every person you kill or maim. How many “points” did the U.S. get from massacring the innocent schoolgirls in Minab with missiles?
If the U.S. won, as Kroenig insists, what did we win? What does the U.S. have now that it didn’t have before? The Iranian government is not willing to concede anything that it wasn’t already offering before the war, and it now has more leverage than it did four months ago. There is a growing consensus that the U.S. and Israel are in a weaker position than they were before they attacked. Kroenig has no answer for that.
The U.S. suffered strategic defeat. It doesn’t matter how many tactical wins it racked up. Kroenig’s “points” don’t count for anything. The U.S. has frequently inflicted many more losses on its adversaries in its many unnecessary wars, but it has rarely won.
It may be true that Iran is relatively weaker in some respects than it has been in a long time. That doesn’t mean that the U.S. won. It means that the U.S. lost to an unusually weakened Iran.
Iran will likely rebuild most or all of what the U.S. and Israel destroyed. It is lunacy to believe, as Kroenig does, that the U.S. will simply come back and destroy these things a second time. If the war has done anything, it has demonstrated the futility of military action here.
The U.S. and Israel caused significant damage to Iran and Lebanon and needlessly killed thousands of people, but they won nothing. A war that does not achieve any of its political goals is by definition an unsuccessful war. It doesn’t matter how much devastation the aggressors caused. They still came away empty-handed. We should be glad that they gained nothing from this crime. It may discourage them from attacking other countries.
