War Isn't Won on 'Points'

The ghouls that cheered this war on treat war as if it were a video game where you get more “points” with every person you kill or maim.

Matt Kroenig has wanted the U.S. to attack Iran for more than a decade. Now that he got the war he wanted and it failed, he is reduced to arguing this:

To be sure, the United States did not register a knockout punch against the Islamic Republic, but to continue the boxing metaphor, it did win on points.

War isn’t a sport, and there is no winning on “points.” The ghouls that cheered this war on treat war as if it were a video game where you get more “points” with every person you kill or maim. How many “points” did the U.S. get from massacring the innocent schoolgirls in Minab with missiles?

If the U.S. won, as Kroenig insists, what did we win? What does the U.S. have now that it didn’t have before? The Iranian government is not willing to concede anything that it wasn’t already offering before the war, and it now has more leverage than it did four months ago. There is a growing consensus that the U.S. and Israel are in a weaker position than they were before they attacked. Kroenig has no answer for that.

The U.S. suffered strategic defeat. It doesn’t matter how many tactical wins it racked up. Kroenig’s “points” don’t count for anything. The U.S. has frequently inflicted many more losses on its adversaries in its many unnecessary wars, but it has rarely won.

It may be true that Iran is relatively weaker in some respects than it has been in a long time. That doesn’t mean that the U.S. won. It means that the U.S. lost to an unusually weakened Iran.

Iran will likely rebuild most or all of what the U.S. and Israel destroyed. It is lunacy to believe, as Kroenig does, that the U.S. will simply come back and destroy these things a second time. If the war has done anything, it has demonstrated the futility of military action here.

The U.S. and Israel caused significant damage to Iran and Lebanon and needlessly killed thousands of people, but they won nothing. A war that does not achieve any of its political goals is by definition an unsuccessful war. It doesn’t matter how much devastation the aggressors caused. They still came away empty-handed. We should be glad that they gained nothing from this crime. It may discourage them from attacking other countries.

Major powers can inflict tremendous damage on much weaker adversaries, but especially over the last century they have lost again and again because they could not translate that military superiority into a durable political victory. Foreign attackers can unleash hell on their targets, but the local population typically outlasts them in a fight. The strange thing is not that the U.S. and Israel lost this war. The strange thing is that they were foolish enough to think that it was winnable.

One of Kroenig’s more absurd claims is that “Trump also followed through on his promise to the Iranian people that “help is on the way.”” Thousands of Iranian civilians were killed by U.S. and Israeli attacks, millions were driven from their homes and displaced, and the entire population was terrorized. Trump then imposed a blockade for the purpose of starving the country into submission. The war was an assault on the Iranian people. They could do without such lethal and destructive “help.”

The war has tightened the Iranian government’s grip and empowered even more hardline elements. U.S.-Israeli aggression has given their system a new lease on life. In that respect, the war was a double calamity for the Iranian people.

It’s a good thing that the U.S. and Israel lost. They waged a criminal war of aggression simply because they could, and they are responsible for all of the resulting evils of the war. Aggressors should be defeated. We want to live in a world where criminal aggression doesn’t pay.