Posted on 03/12/2026 5:07:18 AM PDT by MtnClimber
"If you are feeling dumb today, just remember, there are real people who believe Iran is winning." —Cam Higby on "X".
Terminally Depressed on CNN.
You probably wonder what the end of this war will look like. It won’t look like V-J Day in Times Square, 1945, with sailors kissing girls they met five seconds ago. Our country is way too divided and disturbed with politically-inflected mental illness for love to bloom in the streets like it did then. If you happen to catch the glum crew on CNN you will detect that they really want this operation to fail because, you know, Trump.
The war will be over when Iran loses the ability to spray missiles and drones all over the place — and notice how they are pouring it on the Emirate states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and even Azerbaijan, for Gawdsake, turning would-be bystanders into pissed-off additional enemies they need like a hole in the head.
At some point they will run out of ordnance, or the will to roll them out of the supposed 10,000 bat caves their weapons are stashed in. Our side apparently has an uncanny knack for seeing the launchers creep into daylight and efficiently blowing them up. Creates a disincentive to even think about launching. Of course, Iran might have some spectacular last-ditch thingie they can unleash to horrify the world — perhaps a “dirty” bomb that uses the 460 kilos of 60-percent enriched uranium they bragged about at one of the last negotiation sessions before the war with Witkoff and Kushner. Standing by on that.
But, at some point a week or so hence, a stillness will fall upon the earth and sky above Iran, and that will be all she wrote for sheer havoc. Victory will not look much like anything. Just that stillness. The body politic in Iran is another matter. Expect awful turmoil. Iran’s command structure is shattered. Officials don’t dare pick a room in some building to meet in. The Internet is down and most communication with it. Nobody knows who is really in charge, and nobody may be in charge, not for quite a long time to come.
Let’s hope we have the patience to let the Iranians sort out their own governing structure, and that it will be made up of people who are not insane, not fanatics of the martyrdom cult that has ruled the place for fifty years. It’s probably not part of the US plan to slaughter the Revolutionary Guard, or Sepah, the chief apparatus of despotic control in the country. Or the Basij, (Sâzmân-e Basij-e Mostaz’afin, which means “Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed”), an auxiliary volunteer paramilitary militia that acts as the “morality police” and cracks down on dissent. Hundreds of thousands are employed by these groups.
You might imagine circumstances in which the members of those dastardly outfits decide to peel away from them, sensing a loss of legitimacy and danger in remaining on-board. Surely, a lot of Iranians will have blood in their eyes, looking for scores to settle, just as the people took revenge on members of the Shah’s secret police, the Savak, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Even now with the bombs still falling in Tehran (perhaps even because of them), many ordinary Iranians are dancing in the streets. You must suppose there is massive opposition to the regime. But first, chaos.
Why would we feel any necessity to put “boots on the ground” in there? Why expose American troops to the factional fighting that is apt to break out, as it did in Iraq? Did we not learn the lessons of Fallujah? Wouldn’t it be enough that Iran just loses its ability to fire weapons at anyone? Loses its ability to mess with shipping in the Persian Gulf? And loses its ability to foment mischief in other countries, including any ideological influence it might still have, or any financial mojo for sponsoring terrorism? Can we not just stand by and let the Iranians figure out their own future?
Try imagining a peaceful Iran not bent on exporting Jihad (just like you might imagine a peaceful Ukraine, not making itself a problem for the rest of the world). Forgive the cliché, but Iran (a.k.a. Persia), is an old and durable culture, with a highly educated population, one of the world’s largest oil-and-gas reserves, and plenty of other resources. Iran could be somebody. It doesn’t have to be a bum with a one-way ticket to Palookaville.
As for our own country, too many people here are busy wolfing down the black pills with their Adderall and their Starbucks iced lavender cream chai. It’s actually possible that there is a satisfactory outcome to this Iran operation. Would that disappoint you — as it apparently disappoints the glum crew at CNN? As with Iran, it doesn’t pay to be insane, and something close to half of America is insane. That perturbation is mostly lodged in the American Left these days, the Democratic Party, devoted to a long list of ideas and propositions at odds with reality and locked into a strange willful hysteria that regards any kind of good faith as poison. That is exactly why we can’t have clean elections. How about fixing that?
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James Howard Kunstler ping
“At some point they will run out of ordnance, or the will to roll them out of the supposed 10,000 bat caves their weapons are stashed in.”
When are we going to get it through our thick heads that these islamic fanatics DO NOT GIVE UP?
You can not reason with people that their only goal is to kill you.
Only way to deal with that is kill them 1st.
"Try imagining a peaceful Iran not bent on exporting Jihad (just like you might imagine a peaceful Ukraine, not making itself a problem for the rest of the world). Forgive the cliché, but Iran (a.k.a. Persia), is an old and durable culture, with a highly educated population, one of the world's largest oil-and-gas reserves, and plenty of other resources. Iran could be somebody. It doesn't have to be a bum with a one-way ticket to Palookaville."M'Lady and I are fans of much in and from Europe, and push back against those who conclude "Europe is finished." The European Union and the European Leftists are sinking, too slowly for our hopes. But civilizations / cultures are NOT synonymous with governments.
To paraphrase: try and imagine a peaceful everywhere. Not as one world like the globalists imagine, but as with many nodes and redundancies. Individual as well as joined when profitable to all. Used to be called a "win-win."
Girls like uniforms, and strong young guys who win. I can’t imagine what life was like back then, with these guys returning as heroes. Physically fit with their low-interest loans.
And of course it came at a time when immigration hadn’t ruined everything, turning us into a mish mash of third world flotsam. I was too young to g to see that. Unfortunately I’ve only known declining America. Graffiti- tagged drugged-up America where 1% of the people own everything and everybody else has to scrape by. I’ve only known covid masks and the daily onslaught from the enemy media.
I would have liked to have been there back when we were just gong to the moon. A time of hope. Shining city on a hill and all that.
The last time that America’s “press” was on that selfsame country’s side was when Americans fought to save Communism. Some things never change.
Don’t despair...it is still a time of hope. It just takes a while to eliminate one way or another the various misfits surrounding us. Do your part to isolate and eliminate the many anti-humanity, anti-civility nitwits. Be creative. Never give up hope.
Bunch of Bombs in the Air!!
The last time that America’s “press” was on that selfsame country’s side was when Americans fought to save Communism.
Meanwhile, On the Waterfront, “I coulda been somebody”. LOL!
It went into overdrive with Watergate.
Why does this sound familiar? There's that "oppressed" word again that the left makes useful for invigorating it's idiots.
And I've always wondered what the connection between the left and the arguably ultra-conservative muz is. Could it be the kiddy diddling? Unless I'm overlooking something nothin else matches up. Hard ta say. But the lefty in my AO voted Harris/Walz strictly based on insurance concerns. Country be damned. 🤔
How about the reign of the teachers unions? Although there is now a resistance, they're still warming up, the teachers are more radical, and there's no bottom to where they'll go.
it’s funny, last night I was showing my friend a music video from the 1980’s. A time where the banks were giving money away, everyone wanted to be an executive for the big companies like in Robocop, people dressed well and the future was bright. She’s young, and so she smiled and said— “that’s before everything turned to sh&t. “I had to laugh.
>Forgive the cliché, but Iran (a.k.a. Persia), is an old and durable culture, with a highly educated population,
We were told similar about the Iraqis. “They’re the Germans of the Middle East, very organized.”
Yeah, not so much. My expectations for what emerges are very, very low.
.
“I would have liked to have been there back when we were just gong to the moon. A time of hope. Shining city on a hill and all that.“
The moonshot was momentum of the age you describe which by then was otherwise browning and curling at the edges. Talk to anyone who was over sixty in 1969 and unless they were a pervert or an aging downtown hipster they would deeply lament the direction the culture was clearly going. Indeed the press, when reporting the latest Boomer demands and plans for the future, would always interview an old person for reaction and always citing their age when doing so. Those old men were right. What they promised we would someday see, we have and worse.
A friend, years ago, asked me if I remembered the news shows from the late sixties when we were between eight and ten years old and I said I did. Cities burning seemingly constantly. Huge angry protests, dogs, firehoses , B 52s dropping payload, the VietNam death toll every night and endless stories on “the generation gap”.
The moon landing was a happy bubble in an angry and getting angrier boiling cauldron. The culture was degrading and the old men knew it. I, as a ten year old, thought their time was past and that they should put their OTHER foot in the grave, lie down and STFU. Now I am an old man and I am right, like they were in their time and, hopefully, like my son will be in his. (So far so good on that score).
Yep, and Tagline says it with every post.
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