The idiom “fog of war” to describe the uncer­tain­ty and con­fu­sion gen­er­at­ed by the chaos of bat­tle was spawned by 19^th cen­tu­ry can­non and cav­al­ry clash­es. Venge­ful­ness and his­tor­i­cal igno­rance are turn­ing the fog of the high tech Iran war opaque.

A week into the con­flict, Trump said he would be hap­py if Iran end­ed up with an auto­crat­ic, reli­gious leader after the war, as long as the new lead­er­ship treat­ed the Unit­ed States and Israel “fair­ly.”
As per usu­al, there was no clear enun­ci­a­tion of what that might mean, but on evi­dence, it seems rea­son­able to pre­sume it would entail acqui­esc­ing to his whims of the moment and a gold award of some sort.
His equal­ly vague assess­ment that the U.S.-Israel war against Iran “is very com­plete, pret­ty much”, shows a fright­en­ing mis­read­ing of the chasm between how the Amer­i­can pub­lic and mil­i­tary, with its mantra of “force pro­tec­tion”, and the theocrats of Iran,view car­nage and bloodshed.
In one of sev­er­al ver­sions of an address to his troops, the great World War II Amer­i­can Gen­er­al George Pat­ton said: “The object of war is not to die for your coun­try but to make the oth­er bas­tard die for his.”
Accord­ing to Islam, (and most pro­found­ly in the Shia ver­sion prac­tised in Iran), mar­tyr­dom, “„, to be killed for the high caus­es of Islam with the aim of defend­ing true human val­ues” marks “one of the most high posi­tions which a man can pos­si­bly attain in his ascent towards perfection.”
Nei­ther fire­pow­er nor the glow­er­ing snarls of strut­ting, macho pos­tur­ing Sec­re­tary of War Pete ‘No-Unflat­ter­ing-Pho­tos-Allowed’ Hegseth, are show­ing any signs of spark­ing so much as trep­i­da­tion, nev­er mind thoughts of look­ing for a way out of the mess among the aya­tol­lahs and their faith­ful fol­low­ers. Nor,  again unlike Amer­i­cans (and the rest of us), does the prospect of a dis­as­ter in the world oil mar­ket seem to trou­ble them.
One won­ders how long the same will hold true for Repub­li­cans run­ning in the mid-terms when MAGA loy­al­ists start assess­ing the war through the prism of “pay­ing at the pumps”.
And if short-term band aids like releas­ing stocks from strate­gic oil reserves work, the Trump administration’s tac­tics (if that’s not an over-lib­er­al char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion) of deflect, mud­dle and delay when answer­ing  ques­tions as to what exact­ly con­sti­tutes vic­to­ry, and how long it will take to achieve, will be assessed through the mag­ni­fy­ing glass of history.
In Feb­ru­ary 2003, then Sec­re­tary of Defence Don­ald Rums­feld said of the inva­sion of Iraq to over­throw Sad­dam Hus­sein: “It is not know­able how long that con­flict would last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
It turned into a nine year occu­pa­tion and strug­gle against insur­gents that  claimed near­ly 4,500 Amer­i­can lives, and accord­ing to some esti­mates, cost more than $2 trillion.
Afghanistan was a ver­sion of that.
Accord­ing to a study on the costs of the war in Afghanistan: “Mil­i­tary oper­a­tions alone account­ed for approx­i­mate­ly $800 bil­lion, includ­ing per­son­nel, equip­ment, and sup­port costs.”
That’s quite a price tag for a regime change that end­ed up back at square one 20 years later. 

                         NOT WHAT THEY APPEAR

Their per­pet­u­al­ly dour expres­sions, medieval mores and relent­less war cries of “Death to Amer­i­ca”,  “Death to Israel”  may make the Iran­ian lead­er­ship look hope­less­ly out of sync with the real­i­ties of the mod­ern world, but they’ve weath­ered sanc­tions, iso­la­tion and being in Israel’s crosshairs  for almost half a century.
Equal­ly use­ful to them is that it will (hope­ful­ly) sink into the pub­lic con­scious­ness that Trump’s boast of hav­ing  “total­ly oblit­er­at­ed”  their nuclear pro­gramme last June, and then jus­ti­fy­ing the lat­est “excursion/war” by pro­claim­ing the regime was “weeks away” from build­ing a nuclear bomb and on the point of hav­ing bal­lis­tic mis­siles that could strike the U,S, are lies with precedent.
The dou­ble-speak echoes then U.S  Vice-pres­i­dent Dick Cheney at the start of Gulf War II: “Sim­ply stat­ed, there is no doubt that Sad­dam Hus­sein now has weapons of mass destruc­tion. There is no doubt he is amass­ing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”
Even when that was proven to be a lie, Cheney said the war had “last­ed longer than I would have antic­i­pat­ed” but  it had been “well worth the effort.”
In four decades of cov­er­ing wars, I do not recall ever hear­ing any leader who start­ed or per­pet­u­at­ed one offer a cogent, cred­i­ble rea­son why it is nec­es­sary to reduce the oth­er side to rub­ble in order to “win” one.
Noth­ing that has been said or done so far makes me think this one will be the first.
A warn­ing by the 19^th cen­tu­ry Ger­man philoso­pher Friedrich Niet­zche applies in equal mea­sure to the lead­er­ship of all the  play­ers in the Iran debacle:
“Beware of all those in whom the urge to pun­ish is strong.” 

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