HOW IT'S GOING.

The B-52s were on their way to Iran when Our President announced something along the lines of a cease-fire over Iran and pending negotiations in Pakistan.  According to Juan Cole, Iran won the war.

It did not win as in, scoring a knockout. It won in the sense that if I went 12 rounds with Deontay Wilder and was still standing up at the end of it, it would count as a win.

The Israeli-US attempt to decapitate the government failed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated along with family members, but the 88-member clerical Assembly of Experts simply elected his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to succeed him. The civilian minister of defense was killed, which is probably a war crime. President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed IRGC General Majid Ebnelreza as acting minister of defense. The pragmatic civilian Secretary of the National Security Council, Ali Larijani was assassinated, likely another war crime. He was succeeded by hard liner Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former IRGC general. In essence, Trump and Netanyahu made an internal coup against Iran’s centrist pragmatists in government, ensuring that they were replaced by far right hard liners.

Going into the war, the Iranian government had just committed a massacre of thousands of protesters and was without a friend in the world. Trump and Netanyahu committed breathtaking war crimes on Iran and acted and spoke so monstrously that many countries ended up at least rhetorically supporting Iran, or at least opposing the war on it. Israel comes out of the war a pariah. The US is too rich, big and powerful to be a pariah but its standing has certainly plummeted and it can expect much less cooperation going forward.

Iran likely inflicted billion dollars worth of damage on the 13 US military bases in the Middle East, most of which are largely destroyed. It used cheap little drones to take out radar installations in Kuwait and elsewhere worth hundreds of millions of dollars, blinding the US to its missile barrages and allowing some deadly strikes, as on Dimona in Israel. Iran demonstrated that having a US military base does not protect the host country but rather exposes it to greater danger. Most US military personnel appear to have had to flee the bases, relocating to local hotels. Iranian intelligence in the Gulf is good enough so that some of those hotels were attacked by drones. Some personnel arrived back in Washington D.C. with only the clothes on their back and Pete Hegseth doesn’t seem to have helped them much.

That might elicit earnest nods in an Ann Arbor common room, but it might be that eliminating as many Iranian government officials as the allies have has fractured the unity among what's left of the government's leaders, and that might have led to Pakistan suggesting private peace feelers that are distinct from what the mullahs are offering for their subjects' edification.  Read on , and discover that even Mr Cole might see the Iranian victory as pyrrhic.

Iran has seen important research institutes, university programs, steel mills, petrochemical complexes, and other economic and infrastructural sites destroyed. It is likely, however, that these can be rebuilt if Iran has convinced Israel that it has the means of deterrence. It is likely that Russia and China will help with the rebuilding, behind the scenes, because a strong Iran able to stand up to the US and its Israeli proxy is in their interests.

Predictable stuff from a long-time suck-up to the jihad.

One might expect more sensible reasoning from a onetime faculty member at the War College, but James Joyner appears to have accepted the Iranian spin as truth.

Absent major concessions in the next two weeks that Iran has zero incentive to make, the security situation in the region is markedly worse. An Iranian regime still reeling from the humiliation of multiple Israeli and U.S. strikes against itself and its proxies has stood up to the best the United States and Israel could deal out and survived. Instead of being led by a feeble 86-year-old with no succession plan, his 56-year-old son is now in place.

Certainly, the regime’s military apparatus is considerably weakened. Its navy and air force have been heavily targeted. But the IRGC has shown itself to be markedly resilient. And, of course, they now control the Strait of Hormuz.

In exchange, thousands of innocents across the region, including Israel, and a baker’s dozen of American servicemen are dead. Our flagship aircraft carrier is offline. Several planes have been shot down or otherwise destroyed. We’ve expended much of the magazine depth of some of our most exquisite weapons. We’ve spent untold tens of billions of dollars.

Oh, and world oil prices are up, to the detriment of American consumers and the benefit of Russia and Iran.

The negotiations have not even begun, and a crippled 56-year-old son that nobody has seen since the first bombs fell might not be the best succession plan.  Yes, the public posture of the mullahs is defiant, but the United States diplomats are noting there are private messages at variance with the public posture, and perhaps those were convincing enough to call back the B-52s.  As far as the Strait of Hormuz: Iran has always had the ability to close it.  For years, environmentalist types and transit advocates have insisted that we count as the costs of car culture the expense of the Navy keeping the sea lanes open. How do we add to that accounting the expense of letting the mullahs' tyranny over Iranians and their funding of proxies so that they look the other way while infidel oil transits the strait?

Furthermore, as Rich Lowry notes, Iran has other enemies.

The so-called Gulf Cooperation Council states — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — have the misfortune of being located just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, putting them on the front line of the war.

A key element of Iran’s strategy has been to impose economic pain on these states to force them to press the United States into staying its hand.

For all that the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz is indirectly harming the United States by driving up the global price of crude and other materials, it is a direct blow to the Gulf states, since the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Emiratis send the majority of their oil through the waterway.

The Iranians have struck the Gulf states with missiles and drones by the thousands. The ongoing blitz is damaging energy infrastructure and destroying the reputation of the Gulf states as an oasis of calm and economic development in an otherwise turbulent region.

There’s no insurance policy against having a fanatic millenarian state as a neighbor, while nothing quite concentrates the mind like an unprovoked drone attack on one of your luxury hotels — or your airports, oil fields, and data centers.

Those states have interests that align with, although they're not congruent with those of Israel or the States, and their diplomats are undoubtedly exchanging messages with other diplomats.

In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Eli Lake, who also knows a thing or two about diplomacy, suggests the United States has won twice.  (That's contingent on free passage in the strait as an international waterway, and thus pending as I type this.)

Iran’s rulers are presenting their capitulation as a victory. The AP reported that Oman and Iran would begin collecting fees from ships passing through the Strait. As of this writing, Iran was still firing missiles at Israel and its neighbors.

And yet, if this is the deal, Iran didn’t get much. Trump did not accept the terms of their vaunted 10-point proposal, which would have enacted a permanent peace deal, lifted international sanctions, and ended Israel’s war against Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy. Trump merely agreed that the Iranian proposal, along with a 15-point U.S. plan, would be the basis for future negotiations. In other words, Iran is opening the Strait for two weeks in exchange for a maybe.

But it’s worse than that for the Islamic Republic. In five weeks of war, the regime has lost its navy, most of its missile launchers, and a good chunk of its defense industrial base along with the top tier of its political and military leadership. Add to this the damage already done to its nuclear program in last June’s 12-day war. There are more than 900 pounds of uranium buried under the rubble of what used to be underground enrichment facilities. A year ago, Iran was on the brink of obtaining a nuclear weapon and the ballistic missiles to deliver it as far as Europe. Today, the regime’s military has been reduced to a shell of itself.

The war is not yet won. Iran’s regime may still end up collecting a tax on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Whether Israel agrees to end its war on Iran’s regime will depend on whether Iran’s proxies in the region follow their patron’s lead. Pakistan, which burned the U.S. in the war for Afghanistan, is hosting the negotiations.

Nevertheless, there is a new diplomatic alignment taking shape in the Middle East. Iran’s decision to target embassies, hotels, and oil facilities in the Gulf Arab states has hardened the resolve of these monarchies. Notice that Israeli planes are flying over Arabian airspace. Even Qatar has started to turn on Iran. Last month, Doha expelled senior Iranian diplomats after an Iranian missile hit an industrial city that hosts liquefied natural gas facilities. It is an extraordinary turn of events for a country that shares the world’s largest natural gas field with Iran and has historically taken a neutral stance toward the regime’s aggression in the region.

Even Iran’s great power allies—China and Russia—barely helped the mullahs in their hour of need. Russia reportedly shared targeting data with Iran, and China has continued to purchase sanctioned Iranian oil at a steep discount. But neither China nor Russia has resupplied Iran with munitions or exerted much pressure on the U.S. to end the war against its ally.

And I repeat, because repeat I must, we don't know what sort of private messages diplomats are exchanging.  Nor do we understand, at this stage of the conflict, whether Israel and the United States have been focussing on Revolutionary Guard (these Aryans' Schutzstaffel) and Basij (their Gestapo) bases and formations to the exclusion of the army (Wehrmacht) which is made up of conscripts and who knows what sort of interservice rivalries there are.

Nor have the negotiations in Pakistan even begun.  Pierre Rezhov with Gatestone Institute isn't impressed with how we got there.  "Iran's Fantasy of Strength: When Bazaar Tactics Collide with Reality."

US President Donald J. Trump has reportedly laid out a 15-point peace plan to Iran — with conditions that, taken together, amount to Tehran's near-total strategic capitulation.

In response, the Iranian regime has not merely rejected them; it has countered with a series of conditions so detached from reality that they raise a fundamental question: is Tehran negotiating or hallucinating?

What is unfolding is not a classic diplomatic standoff between two adversaries seeking a middle ground. It is a confrontation between a superpower-backed coalition imposing terms from a position of overwhelming superiority, and a regime that behaves as though it were dictating the outcome of a war it is, in fact, losing.

The substance of the American demands is not improvised but instead reflects a coherent objective: the dismantlement of Iran's entire nuclear infrastructure combined with a permanent ban on uranium enrichment on Iranian soil, the transfer of enriched uranium stockpiles to the IAEA, and the imposition of intrusive, unlimited inspections.

Two things might be true.  First, Iranian leadership might be so discombobulated that whoever shows up in Pakistan might not really be in charge, and second, it might be so degraded that somebody might be amenable to concession.  Over the weekend, Danielle Pletka, who has paid attention to things Iranian for years, noted that she had never heard of some of the people being promoted to leadership positions.  Second, and her assessment of the cease-fire and negotiations notes as much, those B-52s might yet be unleashed.  To quote Dana Loesch, "Trump didn't cave" and this thing isn't over.

The United States has a 15-point plan that serves as a launchpad-of-sorts to propel us to the negotiating table. Iran has a 10-point plan to serve as their starting point to enter negotiations. Contrary to the propaganda being widely reported, the U.S. hasn’t agreed to it (more on that later). That’s what this is: the carrot to get the donkeys to the table. It’s not a final deal or even framework for the deal. Apparently a lot of people who’ve never been in a position to negotiate anything, either for themselves or another, have unsurprisingly wrong ideas about what’s happening here.

I'll wrap this post, which has become way too long, with two more observations from The (Not Detroit) Free Press.  Aaron MacLean notes, "For now, though, the sides have kicked the can with the ceasefire, despite its uncertain terms and uncertain enforcement of those terms. It has pushed off the ultimate decision, but possibly for only a period."  Elliott Abrams suggests there may be more kicks of the can.  "My own guess is that at the end of two weeks allotted for negotiations, two more weeks will be allotted, and then two more. There may never be much more than a ceasefire agreed, given the distance between Iranian and American demands."  Or perhaps those B-52s will fly.  What is the over-under on the talks in Pakistan ending quickly or not taking place at all?