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The wars carried out by the United States against Iraq and Afghanistan are not perfectly analogous to Trump’s war on Iran, but they are close enough. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military went in and quickly overwhelmed the opposing forces – Saddam’s army and the Taliban. The attack on Iraq was such as success, that President George W. Bush took a victory lap on a U.S. aircraft carrier wearing a navy flight suit and standing beneath a gigantic banner that read “Mission Accomplished.”
Then came the hard part.
Insurgents in both countries nibbled away at American forces and resolve with IED attacks, ambushes, shelling American bases using mortars and light artillery. The opposition took a toll, one that the U.S. could not endure in the field with its military or economically at home. The wars cost American taxpayers $6 trillion in direct costs with trillions more that will come due over the next several decades in veterans’ medical and disability and retirement benefits.
That’s just the dollars. A total of more than seven thousand American service members were killed over 20 years in the two wars. Each of those soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen and airwomen was someone’s son or daughter, spouse, mother or father, brother or sister.
The cost of sustaining those wars in both blood and treasure became too much. The U.S. has largely pulled out of Iraq and is completely gone from Afghanistan. Another way of putting it is, we lost.
Trump’s war on Iran is only in its second week and its costs are soaring. In a closed-door briefing with lawmakers on Tuesday, Pentagon officials estimated that the first six days of the war cost $11.3 billion. The war has already hit its 12th day, and it’s reasonable to assume the same amount has been spent in the second six-day period, so by Sunday thereabouts, we’ll be in a twenty five billion dollar war. Already, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson admits that he’s going to have to put up a spending package for the war that one of his Republican colleagues told The Hill “will be very expensive.” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has not said whether he and House Democrats will back additional spending for the war. Any spending package for the war will be “supplemental,” which means that it will not be covered by taxes but instead will be added to the national debt that currently stands at $39 trillion and counting.
But those are the dry dollar totals. The real costs of this war are being paid not only by American citizens, but by people all over the world. Trump and his drum-pounder Secretary of Flexo-Macho Pete Hegseth and their Israeli counterparts have fired missiles and dropped bombs on Iran for almost 14 days, and what do we have to show for it? A new Iranian leader who is worse than the last one and a government and military establishment committed to outlasting the assault by the U.S. and Israel on their country. It was always going to cost Iran dearly in blood and treasure if the U.S. and Israel attacked, and it has. But they live there. Iran is their country, not ours. When Trump is gone and Netanyahu is no longer Israel’s leader, Iran as a country and as an Islamic republic will still be there.
Iran is showing us every day how they will survive. All they have to do is keep the Strait of Hormuz closed, and not only the U.S. and Israel but the entire world will have to absorb costs that no countries appear ready to endure.
The New York Times published two stories today on how badly the war is hurting the world’s economy. “This really is the big one,” David Goldwyn, a former U.S. diplomat and U.S. Energy Department official told the Times, describing the effect of shutting down oil trade out of the Gulf. The Saudi chief of the world’s largest oil and gas company, Aramco, said consequences of this war will be “catastrophic.”
The Times story lists many of the countries whose economies depend on Gulf oil and gas. Taiwan gets more than 60 percent of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz. A quarter of its natural gas comes from Qatar, which had to shut down its gas production after Iran struck two of its gas facilities last week, according to the Times. The Philippines, which gets more than 90 percent of its oil from the Middle East – meaning the Gulf – has gone to a four-day work week to conserve energy. Bangladesh, which has converted near all its energy production to gas-burning power plants, is shutting down universities and is trying to cut its transportation costs. Bangladesh produces containerships full of stuff that is sold in Target and Walmart stores. Those costs will go up.
Europe is getting hurt. Great Britain imports Middle East oil and is affected. Over there on the east side of Europe, Putin is rubbing his hands together celebrating every bomb the U.S. and Israel are dropping on Iran. Trump has already “eased” – don’t you love that word? – sanctions on Russian oil to keep oil markets from crashing even deeper. That means more money for Putin to prosecute his war in Ukraine. CNN is reporting that Russia is helping Iran with “drone tactics,” using what they have learned fighting Ukraine to help Iran fight for its survival. Russia has for years bought Shaheed drones from Iran and used Iranian technology and expertise to set up its own drone production facilities. It’s only a matter of time before Russia begins supplying Iran with drones they once imported from that country.
The new and very angry leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, recently ordered the mining of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has struck more than a dozen oil tankers in the Gulf since the war began, and two are currently on fire in waters off Iraq. A third, a containership, was struck near the port of Dubai by an Iranian drone and is disabled.
The price of oil hit $100 a barrel again today, and Iran warned the world that prices could go up to $200 a barrel.
That could be a gigantic bluff, but maybe not. Iran doesn’t have to do much more than it has been doing to continue costing the world hundreds of billions of dollars in increased energy costs and reduced industrial production and trade. The oil tankers that are on fire in the Gulf were said to have been hit by small Iranian boats loaded with explosives. Iran can keep doing that for days, weeks, months if necessary. All they have to do is sit there overlooking the Strait of Hormuz and lob an occasional Shaheed drone at an oil tanker sitting off its coast. More than 150 oil tankers have dropped anchor in the Persian Gulf region since February 28, with as many as 200 more tankers and containerships stalled in the Arabian sea waiting for the Strait of Hormuz to reopen.
Iran had already inflicted a lot of damage on U.S. forces stationed on bases in the Middle East. The Pentagon was finally forced to admit that in addition to seven dead soldiers, 140 have been wounded, eight of them seriously. Iran has rocketed and sent drones into airports, hotels, apartment buildings and other commercial structures in a dozen countries around the Middle East, turning our attack on Iran into a regional war. Even though the Pentagon has announced that the pace of Iran’s missile launches has dropped, Iran can keep doing damage to U.S. bases and other Middle Eastern nations for a long, long time.
It is not costing Iran $2 billion a day. The missiles we’ve been firing at Iran cost in the millions, as do the defensive missiles we’ve had to shoot at missiles fired by Iran at U.S. facilities. Iran’s missiles are comparatively cheap, and its Shaheed drones cost somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 to build, and they have built tens of thousands – so many, in fact, that they were selling them to Russia until Iran helped Russia build its own Shaheed factories.
This war is a matter of simple math, and no matter how you add things up, it’s not favorable to the United States and the rest of the world. Iran has the geography of its control of the Strait of Hormuz that costs it exactly nothing, and what we have is a diminishing stock of very, very expensive weapons that take a long time to manufacture and a president who keeps calling his war an “excursion,” as if the war he launched against Iran is a trip to a golf course or a picnic on a Florida beach.
The president of the United States has no fucking idea what he’s doing. He started a war during an election year that was already looking bad for his party and is now looking terrible. He doesn’t know why he started his war on Iran. He doesn’t know how he’s going to end it, or what ending the war will even look like. The new leader of Iran knows that all he has to do is sit back and keep the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the pressure of oil prices on the world’s economy will cause Donald Trump to make one of his “deals” to end a war that he should have never started and will be seen in the eyes of the world as having lost.
Iran is in the driver’s seat in this war. Bad for U.S. Bad for Trump. Bad for Republicans in midterm elections. Terrible for families in U.S. and Iran and around the Gulf that have lost sons and daughters and husbands and wives and mothers and fathers. A stupid war started by a stupid man for stupid reasons not even he can figure out.
This war will go down in history. So will the man who started it, as the biggest loser of this century.
