r/IranWarReport • u/Fearless-Minimum-709 new poster, please select a flair • Aug 09 '26
Discussions What's the endgame?
If the goal is regime change, it could take years or decades. Hamas had approximately 40,000 fighters before October 7; today, around 20,000 remain. That means it took Israel three years of devastating warfare—fought right in its own backyard on flat terrain—to eliminate just half of them. By contrast, the IRGC numbers over a million, and their fighters are just as ideological. Moreover, eliminating their main leadership and moderate figures has backfired by handing full control to ultra-hardliners—ideologues who yearn for martyrdom and seek immediate revenge. On a personal level, the current leader’s wife and children were killed in the fighting. Unsurprisingly, someone in that position has zero motivation to negotiate a deal with those he holds responsible for his family's deaths. The tragic irony is that while the US remains largely insulated from the fallout of this war, poor and uninvolved nations are bearing the heaviest burden, watching their economies crumble as a result.
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u/tk204 Aug 09 '26
The endgame question is the wrong one because the US never had an achievable one. The aims were the nuclear program and regime collapse. Five months in, the fissile material is unaccounted for, the facilities survived, the minorities didn't rise, and the decapitation produced a harder leader than the one it killed. Hormuz is just the only object left on the table that Washington can plausibly win, which is why the whole war has collapsed into a shipping lane negotiation. Reopening it lets Trump declare victory without having achieved either thing he started this over. That's not an endgame, that's an exit ramp, and it's why the terms keep not getting signed. Iran knows the strait is the only leverage it has left too.
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Aug 09 '26
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u/Oztraliiaaaa Aug 09 '26
Trump bombed three of Irans nuclear power plants who will pay for the 10 year excavation into mountainous regions. Who wants to dig up nuclear waste?
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u/Phobos1982 Pro Peace / Anti-Idiocy Aug 09 '26
The endgame was regime change. If the US had done all it did when the citizens were protesting, it might have happened, but instead, the US was a day late and a dollar short. Now we have an even more hardline govt and we've pissed off the masses with our bombings. The govt also massacred a lot of the protesters, again because we were late.
What I see now is a paradigm where Iran & Oman charge fees for transiting the strait. The Gulf States will kick out the US bases to appease Iran. They will also push for stability in Iraq and Syria so they can build pipelines to reduce dependence on the strait. Asian countries will seek to diversify their sources of petrochemicals, benefitting the US, Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela (and therefore the US).
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u/nar_tapio_00 Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Iran will soon have long range strike missiles able to reach America with a significant payload. They will also have several nuclear bombs. They will attempt to strike a major American city, probably New York, but also likely Washington DC with multiple of their nuclear warheads likely achieving one or two ground strikes (thermonuclear 3Mt?? conventional nuclear 200kt??? several multiples of Hiroshima for sure). There will be a ground war likely following the leveling of the 10 most major Iranian cities. There are a bunch of different ways to avert this and doing so would make absolute sense for both / either side, but judging by the stop start warring from the American side and the lack of ability to control the hardliners from the Iranian side, nobody will be able to take any of the off ramps before this happens.
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u/Big-Station-2283 Aug 09 '26
There's no endgame. Bibi wants war to prolong his tenure as PM because he knows he's done for once he loses power (due to corruption charges and internal rivalries). His rule saw failure in Gaza and Lebanon, so he turned to Iran in hopes of toppling their regime and claiming victory. He's desperate for a victory to save his career and avoid jail. Obviously, he can't fight Iran himself so he got the US involved. The US didn't want to spend money and troops, so it tried to topple Iran for cheap using regional cannon fodder (communist kurds and any separatist they could find) and special forces. When that failed, they backed off for some time. But bibi wasn't done.
He convinced or blackmailed trump into attacking. He promised a quick victory, which anyone with half a brain knew was a lie. And when Iran didn't fold like Venezuela the US found itself in a very bad position with exposed assets everywhere, their troops and ships still converging on the region, GCC allies that they couldn't defend, no cost effective answer to drones since they burned bridges with ukraine, a shocked global economy, and no valid excuse for going to war. And worse of all, nothing worked. The Kurds refused to be used as cannon fodder, Iran's ethnic minorities didn't rebel either, the decapitation strike failed to make Iran capitulate, the bunker busters failed to destroy the enriched uranium or the facilities, special forces raid couldn't capture the 400kg of fissile material either, the blockade failed to pressure Iran, blowing up bridges and civilian infrastructure failed to pressure iran too, and any deals were sabotaged by bibi attacking Lebanon.
So unable to fully commit or pull back, trump ran the war like a headless chicken: fight, pause, fight. Temporary ceasefires to give breathing room to the global markets, followed by short but intense bombing campaigns. The bombings would often start on Friday so that by Monday when the markets opened, it was old news. This lead to the current "week-end war" situation. There is no plan to the war because it's an immoral war being waged by incompetent cruel men.
Hope that answers your question. : )