War is never something the United States should engage in without very good cause. Too many of our past wars might have involved some bit of national interest, but they weren't really necessary. Kicking the crap out of Afghanistan following the Taliban's refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden? I got that completely. I was less thrilled with us going into Iraq.
My take has always been that we should be slow to anger, but when we hit that point, we should descend upon our enemies like the fiery hand of God.
It's what we did in the Gulf War, and we could have turned Iraq into the 51st state if we wanted to, with how lopsided that war went, and now we're doing it again in Iran. After 47 years of facilitating terrorist attacks against Americans, they had it coming.
In just a few weeks, we've destroyed their Navy and Air Force, gutted their leadership structure, and basically done whatever we wanted to. They've launched some missiles, of course, and managed to anger all of their neighbors in the process, but the American loss of life has been small. Yes, we've lost a few aircraft, including a couple of F-15s that were shot down by friendly fire over Kuwait, and the collision of two KC-130s, but our losses, while tragic, have been small.
We've killed more members of the Iranian leadership than we've lost troops in total.
And yet, if you go on X, it's not difficult to find plenty of people telling us that we're losing. They'll claim that Iran shot down an F-35 or that they hit one of our warships, and it's taken as proof that we're getting our posteriors handed to us by the Iranian military.
Y'all, if this is losing, then what exactly would winning look like in these people's world?
Would it require us to turn Iran into the Persian Glass Sea via nuclear weapons? I mean, that's about the only way the butt-kicking going on right now could be ramped up enough that some of these mental smurfs would acknowledge we won. They'd find something else to complain about, of course, and nothing would ever satisfy them, but the sad truth is that they can't accept something important.
We're really good at war.
Nation-building? Not so much.
But war? War we can handle.
You wouldn't know that if you're just looking at social media or even the mainstream news. Instead, we're just being told how much we suck, both as a nation and a military. The estimated 6,000 Iranian military personnel killed so far might disagree, of course, compared to 13 American lives and 24 Israeli lives lost, 22 of which were civilians.
The only reason Iran isn't begging for a peace deal isn't that they're holding their own. It's that they're too fanatical in their faith to accept the harsh reality that we're simply better at this than anyone else. Their radical Islamic beliefs won't let them accept anything but victory, so they've warped their perceptions to reflect anything but reality.
If this is losing, though, they'd better hope we don't decide to step things up so they accept we're winning.
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