Peter Zeihan

And even if you're going to do a ground war, you're doing a ground war in a mountainous area that has almost 90 million people, and the U.S.

Army cannot do that, period.

It appears that all of that was ignored.

And so now we're in a situation where he's making policy by feels.

And while you can certainly bomb the crap out of the country with the American military, if you don't have an end goal, don't have a strategy for dealing with the other side's strengths, you're just in a pointless grind.

And that seems to be where we are right now.

That's absolutely one of the ways that this can go because the terms of success are being changed every day.

A couple problems with that, though, that we will then be dealing with for decades to come.

Let's start with enrichment.

We know that as of eight days ago, there were at least 50 different nuclear sites that we knew about that had been hidden and hardened.

And let's assume that we got all of those.

We certainly didn't get the ones we don't know about.

And if you want to build a plutonium bomb, you don't even need an enrichment program.

You just need a nuclear power plant, which they have.

So unless and until that is gone, they still have the capacity to extract plutonium and go that route.

That's problem number one.

Problem number two, Iran, as the intelligence community has always warned the American president, whoever happens to be,

Iran believed that a nuclear weapon would invite automatic intervention.

And so they went with one step back.

They wanted a credible nuclear program that didn't have a weapon that, but if you flipped a switch within a matter of weeks to months, you could then have a nuke.