Iran is right: Trump has already lost this war

[marmar]

Iran is right: Trump has already lost this war
Tehran TACO: Trump's bad idea has gone wrong, to literally no one's surprise. Will Putin bail him out?

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published March 29, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) More than 30 years ago, historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that most young people in the late 20th century “grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.” (Apparently an “intelligent American student” had asked him whether the phrase “Second World War” meant that there had been a first one.)

....(snip)....

It might be foreshortening the narrative too much to say that those two observations explain where we find ourselves today, with another American president having ignored the most obvious possible lessons from history and blundered into another disastrous overseas military adventure, for even dumber and less comprehensible reasons than the last several times it happened. But it’s not wrong, either.

Donald Trump’s war with Iran marks his administration’s “looksmaxing” moment: It’s preening before the mirror, repeatedly smashing itself in the face with hammers and launching banger memes, while aggressively pretending not to notice external reality, especially not the mockery, pity and terror it provokes in others. It now seems clear there was internal disagreement about launching this war in the first place, and that there’s now widespread internal bewilderment about how to end it.

Trump and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and whomever else were lured into this war by Benjamin Netanyahu, pushed into it by the billionaire donors of the Israel lobby and, more than anything else, seduced into it by massive institutional incompetence and their thoroughly unfounded belief in their own awesomeness. As one Bluesky poster put it in early March, those guys believed they could wage and win a war easily just by being “based chads” (i.e., white dudes with retrograde attitudes about literally everything) who would avoid all the weak, woke, DEI-informed mistakes made in previous conflicts by such lily-livered libtards as, um, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/29/iran-is-right-trump-has-already-lost-this-war/

[cachukis]

1. Very insightful.