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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

No, it's like saying "I can easily afford a ferrari but I won't be able to afford groceries for a year after that because I've emptied my savings account.

The military might be capable of a ground invasion and succeeding. It would be Pyrrhic. Even if Iran was a genuine nuclear threat (I am not convinced at this point that Iran would launch a nuke at anyone if they had it), is it worth 500k dead Americans?

There was never a path to victory that didn't involve ground troops. We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence. Previous administrations did not do this because the cost was well understood.

There has never existed a military who could win this conflict without ground invasion. This was understood when this administration started it.

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>We aren't losing in Iran because of military incompetence, but policy incompetence.

My point is these two things are inseparable, and to conflate them is simply Call of Duty-esque military fantasy. It's a feel good war story that doesn't actually reflect the reality of actually winning a war.

If the US military does not have the ability to hold, occupy, and install allied regime change, then the US military cannot win a war with Iran. You cannot separate the short term wins from the long term objectives. No one looks at Imperial Japan and says "they easily bombed pearl harbor, but due to policy failures they couldn't keep control of the South West Pacific theatre.

The US winning WW2 wasn't just dropping the nukes and high fives. There was rebuilding the Japanese nation, aligned to the US, becoming a long term ally.

This is no different than Afghanistan. Future humans aren't going to look back and say "the US easily controlled Afghanistan for 12 years, and then just returned to the Taliban". The lessons learned will be the US failed to hold Afghanistan and the Taliban returned to power and it was a military failure.

No matter how you dress it up, I can't afford the ferrari.

This is very different from Afghanistan.

The USA and its allies could sustain the Afghanistan occupation indefinitely, but chose not to(prematurely, in my opinion).

In Afghanistan, the west chose to lose, but victory was possible. We were(we, I was there in 2010) winning hearts and minds of the younger generation but abandoned them. Another Donald victory.

Iran is an impossible situation.

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