Ummagumma

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] Israel won its war early. The decapitation strike was entirely theirs. It worked. Spectacular. Iran's leadership was devastated. Its military was badly damaged. Its nuclear infrastructure was hit very hard. Netanyahu had spent decades trying to bring about some version of this moment, and Trump gave him the American participation he needed. The opening campaign was spectacularly successful by the standards of war. Then the war kept going. Iran did not win the military contest. It did not come close. It lost too much leadership, too much infrastructure, too much military capacity for that conclusion to make sense. Netanyahu and Trump kicked ass . Nevertheless, Iran found two things it could still use after the initial devastation: the Strait of Hormuz and Lebanon. The official purpose of this whole thing was Iran's nuclear program. That was the strategic reason for the strike. Iran was too close to nuclear latency. Its program was too dangerous. ...

[ See all my Iran stuff. ] (11 a.m. Eastern Time) And then the whole mess started spilling over. Wars like to connect. Maybe they are drawn toward one another. If everyone's not careful this will escalate further in spite of the fact Iran's military is getting hammered. As I have said, whoever actually controls the Strait of Hormuz is winning the war . The Houthis have opened another maritime front in the Red Sea, attacking Saudi tankers and oil facilities while threatening shipping connected to Saudi ports. On July 20 they formalized it into a declared blockade against Saudi-linked vessels in the Red Sea. Tankers have changed course, disabled tracking equipment, and accepted higher insurance costs to move through waters that had already become dangerous. Saudi-backed forces have resumed attacks on Houthi positions in Yemen, threatening to restart a civil war that had been mostly dormant since the 2022 ceasefire.  Iran's regional war now reaches both of the great shipping...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (Posted at noon eastern time.) The US-Iran nuclear talks survived the war longer than I actually thought they would . That is probably the strangest part of the whole thing. Before the Strait became the center of the story, the “interim ceasefire” had settled into tit for tat with minor complaints. Everyone issued statements about restraint while doing the thing the statements were supposedly restraining. It was dangerous, ugly, and absurd, but it still had a rhythm. Like most everyone, I kept waiting for the talks to collapse because the nuclear talks were supposedly the point of the war. That was the final justification. We can’t let a jihadist theocracy have nuclear weapons. It takes a pretty primitive view of the world to disagree with that. Iran's nuclear program had to be set years back if not eliminated. Iran's leadership had to be restrained. Iran's military capacity had to be whacked. As usual, Trump wanted the grand declarative ver...

[ Read all my Iran stuff here. ]  As of 9AM Eastern -  So this may be how it ends. Not with freedom blooming in Tehran, which vanished from the script almost as soon as the bombs stopped being interesting. It ends, maybe, with a memorandum of understanding, the most boring phrase in diplomacy, which is why it is probably how wars actually end. Nobody wants to admit defeat. Nobody wants to admit the thing they said was impossible three weeks ago is now the thing they are signing in Geneva. So they invent a phrase that sounds like a fax machine became secretary of state. Wonderful. If the reporting is right, this understanding more or less takes us back to where we started, only with Iran badly damaged. Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. The Strait of Hormuz must remain open. Nuclear talks are pushed into a follow-on process. Sanctions relief, including oil sanctions and frozen assets, may be staged against compliance. Lebanon may be folded into the deal. The ceasefire gets exten...

[ See all my Iran stuff. ] An Iranian political activist recently described what Donald Trump had done to his country. "He was supposed to save us and help us get rid of this regime. But now he has left us with a wounded, wild, and deranged regime." (Source: War Fronts ) There it is. I have spent much of this war trying to understand what might restrain the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran is not simply the IRGC. There are civilian officials, clerics, business interests, regional governments, rival military organizations, and millions of Iranians who have no particular affection for the regime. I expected a regional powerplay to emerge after the first major round of fighting. Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates had reasons to pressure Iran. Iran's civilian government had reasons to seek a settlement. The clerical state had reasons to preserve itself by putting limits on the IRGC. The Guard had suffered enormous losses. Its naval forces were mauled....

Entering our fourth month in the Iran War, the Strait of Hormuz is moving under seven vessels a day. Before all this started, it was seventy. Just saying, as of today Iran still controls the Strait. Although the Strait will apparently reopen soon, the IRGC seems to be positioning itself to claim that it maintains control of the Strait even though it is open. The official story is that things are trending toward normal. The actual water tells a different story. The United States carried out new strikes near Hormuz against Iranian drone control sites while negotiations were simultaneously underway. That's not a smooth reopening. That's a chokepoint still being contested by everyone with a stake in who controls it. The obvious question, if Trump won the war – “obliterated” Iran was his word, then why isn’t the Strait opening faster? I mean, we obliterated them. So… The answer isn't military. It's trust, and there isn't any. Tanker owners, insurers, crews, and th...