\n<\/p>\n
F<\/span>ive weeks. We are now five weeks in and entering the sixth week of the war on Iran. What was supposed to be<\/a> a \u201cprecise, overwhelming military campaign\u201d to eliminate \u201can imminent nuclear threat\u201d and urge the Iranian people to \u201ctake over<\/a>\u201d their government is now anything but precise or overwhelming. Gulf countries are seized up with retaliatory Iranian attacks, the strait of Hormuz is shut, and there is no sign of regime collapse either through military degradation or popular takeover. The recovery of two downed US aircrew<\/a> is celebrated beyond the facts of the matter because nothing else is going to plan. The mistake, as ever, is a combination of hubris and ignorance, flaws made even more serious by the particularities of the Iranian regime.<\/p>\n There is a mental lag at the start of wars. A cognitive delay that means you can\u2019t quite adjust to the fact that dangerous conflict cannot be swiftly contained. That mental lag is even longer when the United States is involved. Because it remains inconceivable to some that a superior military power would not swiftly achieve its objectives. That an inferior power would not immediately succumb. That allies would not fall into line and rally behind the US. Inconceivable that the fallout of a military campaign would not be limited to the territories and peoples targeted.<\/p>\n None of the predicted scenarios have come about. The conflict is rattling energy markets. There are already forecasts<\/a> of a \u201crare global economic recession\u201d in the case of prolonged war. Donald Trump has failed to recruit European<\/a> and Gulf<\/a> allies to take part in the offensive or in the effort to reopen the strait of Hormuz. And the Iranian regime remains unvanquished, inflicting rising costs in US military equipment and personnel.<\/p>\n These are all misreadings based on over-confidence in the power of the American will. When the attack on Iran was launched, cheerleaders became gripped with the intoxicating thrill of an American-made world, again. The war was a \u201cgenerational move<\/a>\u201d, said the New York Post\u2019s editorial board. The Wall Street Journal declared<\/a> that the war \u201ccarries risks as all wars do, but it also has the potential to reshape the Middle East for the better and lead to a safer world\u201d. Those who did display reservations that these beliefs were misplaced were told to get their act together. \u201cI\u2019m flabbergasted by the relentless pessimism I\u2019m seeing in much of the commentariat,\u201d said<\/a> New York Times columnist Bret Stephens. \u201cWe are less than two weeks into a war that will almost surely be over by the end of the month.\u201d Reader, it was not. Flabbergasting.<\/p>\n And so now that the mental lag is over and we are all caught up, the talk is of quagmire<\/a>, of possible off-ramps and face-saving measures that Trump can take to extract himself without humiliation. The question now isn\u2019t how quickly this will be over; it is the one that Gen David Petraeus posed in 2003 about the Iraq war: \u201cTell me how this ends?\u201d What is heaving into view is the fact that Iran has subjective complex dynamics that cannot be flattened into the simplistic story that the war was launched on \u2013 a bad regime will become weakened through systemic degradation and its people will bring it down once its foundations begin to creak.<\/p>\n