Blood Sports Department: America’s War Won-Lost-Ties Record In The Past 100 Years. 2-3-2
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/opinion/iran-deal-trump-us.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/opinion/iran-deal-truce-trump.html
Let me start with this. I have avoided doing a whole piece about the Iran War until I could be sure that President Trump wasn’t some kind of genius and had figured out a way to eliminate Iran as a threat to the world. I am now quite sure that he has not done that. I was pretty sure he wasn’t very smart beforehand, but I can be fooled like over half the country. That’s now over. My eyes are clear. It is very unlikely that President Trump will forge a deal better with the current Iranian regime than the one he tore up in his first term that the Obama team negotiated over more than a year with a past Iranian regime.
I set this discussion in the context of America’s wars since WWII. You may remember that we won that one. We also won the Gulf War that President George H. W. Bush waged. Mr. Bush was himself shot down and rescued at sea during WWII. He knew what war was. He would not start one foolishly or prolong one beyond the need to fulfill his clear objectives for military action.
I called the Korean War a tie. What most Americans today remember about that war is that Hawkeye and Trapper John were surgeons in that one. A lot of people died and Communism still sits atop a free South Korea.
I do not know what to make of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They seem to be losses to me, but maybe it’s yet to be determined in Iraq. Afghanistan has to be a loss given our hasty exit and the despicable manner in which we treated those Afghanis who helped us over 20 years, let alone all that death for nothing. The Taliban are still in charge.
Then, of course, there is Vietnam, the war being waged when I came of age. The Pentagon Papers and a huge literature have demonstrated that the leadership of our country knew back when Kennedy was in the White House that we could not win a ground war in southeast Asia. Furthermore, no one was really sure what we were fighting and dying for. Putatively, it was to keep South Vietnam from becoming a Communist puppet of China. Instead, today, a united Vietnam has become a prosperous Communist country on its own. Check out where many of the clothes and athletic shoes you wear come from.
Upon visiting Vietnam a few years ago, I saw why we lost. Interfering in a civil war with ground troops that have no business being there and with no clear objective is a formula for failure. The North Vietnamese were fighting for their country. The Americans were fighting because they were told to do so. That one was a loss.
The current war with Iran I am chalking up as a loss as well. At best, when the dust settles, if it ever does, the theocratic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979 will still be in power. There is no way that Iran will give up its aspirations to be a nuclear-armed nation. Perhaps, Mr. Trump or a third party may be allowed to excavate the bomb-buried radioactive material from June 2025. Then what? If the Iranian apparatus to make more bomb-grade material is not destroyed and there are not external inspections throughout Iran, the mullahs will just start over again. It sounds to me like the deal that Obama negotiated and which Trump tore up was better than anything Trump is likely to get now. Had Trump stuck with the Obama deal, he probably would not have had to start this war.
Then there are the Iranian proxies that surround Israel in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. They are still there. They are still killing and being killed. The Arab populations of those lands are not yet free. Israel is still in a perpetual multi-front war.
The Strait of Hormuz was open to all traffic when this war started. Now the Iranians have learned to use it as a wedge to hold the entire world hostage.
For all of this, and the $30 billion and climbing in direct costs and many billions more that will be needed to repair American military installations in the Middle East damaged by Iranian missiles as well as the immense harm suffered by the Gulf States’ energy production facilities, we can thank one man, Donald Trump.
The two attached articles from The New York Times on May 27 by Tom Friedman and Bret Stephens summarize their takes on the war. This is mine.
So, what differentiates the wars we won from the ones we lost?
The United States resisted joining the fights against totalitarianism in Europe and Asia until Pearl Harbor dragged us in. Once we were in, we knew why. Our goal was to eliminate fascism as a threat to the people of the world, but especially those in Western Europe and Asia near Japan. We had a clear objective. That objective was met.
Similarly, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, President Bush 41 coalesced an alliance that included Arab states to drive Saddam Hussein’s troops back to Iraq and then left. He had met his objectives. He stopped the war. He, like FDR before him after Pearl Harbor, got congressional approval for the Gulf War.
In Afghanistan, we went to fight Al Qaeda in response to 9/11. President Clinton should have acted long before 9/11 to rid the world of Al Qaeda after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. It took ten more years to kill Bin Laden. This was not a success. 9/11 was not an act of war. It was a crime. It required police action as a response, not a war that the Soviet Union had already demonstrated we were likely to lose. Historically, Afghanistan is a quagmire.
I assume that President George W. Bush went after Saddam Hussein to finish what his father had started and to eliminate the “weapons of mass destruction” that never existed. Poor intelligence. Just like 9/11.
So here we are today in another Middle East conflict. This is precisely what Donald Trump ran against doing. What are we there for?
Will we take out the mullahs? No. We killed bunches of them. They just trot out more and the military is probably really in charge.
Will we open the Strait of Hormuz which was open when the war started? Hopefully, but can we ever trust the Iranians not to close it on a whim using cheap drones, not their navy of 1970 vintage ships now at the bottom of the ocean.
Are the Iranian proxies gone from around Israel? Not a chance.
Is the Iranian nuclear program and its ineluctable march toward a weapon deterred in any way? To be determined.
Are the Iranian people free to prosper? They are worse off than ever. They don’t even have the internet often.
Is Iran any less of a danger than it was on New Year’s Day? No. It’s more of a danger now that it has learned to perfect the use of high-tech, low-cost drone warfare to control the flow of 20% of the world’s oil.
Every conceivable objective President Trump listed, and he kept changing them, has not as yet been reached.
The reason America wins wars is that the country has a clear objective, Congress is in favor of the mission, and the American people are at least open to the possibility of the war’s necessity. None of these things is true of Trump’s war.
Let’s call it what it is. It is Trump’s Folly. Did you really expect a game show host to wage war successfully? But America, this is what you voted for. This is what you should have expected.
