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This Is The End, Beautiful Friend
As it turns out, two weeks meant two days.
Just 48 hours -- give or take -- after suggesting he'd g
I can hear Jim Morrison’s voice in that headline.
I actually hear it a lot. Situations come up all the time. The stanza I hear the most is, “Five to one, baby, one in five…” The irony runs heavy: Jim was talking about how the Boomers outnumbered the older generations. It was a revolutionary call to rebellion against Vietnam and the draft. Sometimes it’s for the best when an artist doesn’t outlive their time.
I went through a whole Doors phase, which might seem weird because Jim died long before I was born. A college roommate once told a mutual, “If he breaks on through to the other side one more time, I’m going to break something.” His favorite band was Hootie and the Blowfish though, so forget that guy.
I guess it’s fair that I celebrated a Boomer band considering how many Zs are into Nirvana. At least, they’re into the shirts… not sure if they’re familiar with the actual music… “Like a Dead Head sticker on a Cadillac,” to quote another Gen X favorite.
To the original point, I can never quite tell whether it’s actually Jim I’m hearing or if it’s just Val Kilmer.
I’m okay either way.
I do wish Cobain had lived. Out of those two members of the 27 club, he was by far the best.
My oldest friend and I are both from L.A. and are big Doors fans. We actually saw Oliver Stone’s movie “The Doors” together the day it premiered. Recently, I binged on a bunch of old Vietnam flicks: “The Deer Hunter,” “Platoon,” the Ken Burns Vietnam series. I concluded with “Apocalypse Now: Redux” (a foreshadowing perhaps). Of course, The Doors song “The End” is featured prominently in that film. It sent me on a whole Doors rediscovery phase. Then came the story, just a few weeks ago, that French police had finally recovered the bust of Jim Morrison’s head that had been stolen from his grave site 37-years-ago. Nice to hear from another fan, even on this rather solemn occasion.
I have visited his gravesite- once. The site is as disrespectful to the dead, as one could ever imagine. I’ll never go back there.
So is the over/under on number of people who will end up dying as a result of these actions in the hundreds of thousands or millions? Hard to imagine what happens with a power vacuum in a country of 90 million people. What’s the domino effect on all the other counties in the Middle East?
Iran has almost no options other than do something so insanely bad that they draw the US into a land war.
Their only option is to somehow figure out a way to draw the US into a land war. All other options are pretty futile.
Oh god, the IRGC would lose a land war in a week if they lasted that long. The reason for no boots on the ground is we don’t want to wind up fighting an insurgency, not because we might lose to the IRGC. In the state they’re in now, I’m not sure they’d last three days against the US military. The problems start when they surrender and the Marines are standing around in Tehran asking “Ok, what now?”
Well said Mr. H. The nation-building is deadlier than initial shock and awe. At least now he can say: “can’t call me TACO no more”
An insurgency would also be the best way to enact revenge for the diehards in the regime. Trump is dumb enough to fall for the bait of sending troops there so he can get the vainglory of an instant victory. It’s my biggest worry now.
I think the scariest thing about a land war would be putting the US on a war footing. That would give Trump a lot more cover for implementing his authoritarian agenda at home.
H you kinda made my point. We in fact don’t “ we don’t want to wind up fighting an insurgency, not because we might lose to the IRGC.”
So if you’re Iran, that’s your only viable option. Which is what I basically said.
The insurgency wouldn’t be “Iran” in the sense you mean it. The US wasn’t fighting “Iraq” in e.g., Fallujah.
“Get conquered, get deposed, start insurgency” isn’t an option, nor a strategy. Once you’re conquered and deposed, you’re conquered and deposed. The insurgency’s led by somebody else.
The Taliban’s the exception here, not the rule. The IRGC wouldn’t retreat into the mountains and wait it out for 20 years. They’re not a tribal jihadi outfit. They’re a real army. They’d fight it out for 20 days, they’d lose in one of the worst routs in modern military history and then they’d disband entirely, never to be the IRGC again.
What you’d probably get after that is a collection of splinter groups led by former IRGC commanders and Basij bosses who’d become competing warlords. That’d be your Shiite insurgency, and they wouldn’t be fighting for the restoration of the Islamic Republic, they’d be fighting for Short Round-style fortune and “gworwee.”
Then you’d invariably have Sunni jihadists pouring in from everywhere — Iran would be the new cause célèbre for that crowd.
The Iranian legislature would continue to function, but it’d be hopelessly corrupt. The new military would be impotent and unable to operate without US Marine assistance outside of Tehran because the various warlords would establish fiefdoms in all the other cities and towns. Sparsely populated areas would probably end up controlled by salafists.
In other words: It’d be Iraq. Which is why, crazy as this sounds, the best approach from here is probably “We broke it, you fix it.” Because “We broke it, we’ll fix it” is a guaranteed disaster for everybody.
Totally accurate analysis Mr. H. I suspect that the opportunists will become regional warlords and any central authority will most likely be nominal and utterly corrupt and looting the foreign aid while being guarded by US peacekeeper troops. As U say, this is the playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan.
The regime is mortally wounded. They either go down in a blaze of “glory” or tuck in the tail between their legs. Given their fanatical nature, it’s possible they contemplate the former.
Side note….is there a better way to upgrade the comments format here. The replys on mobile, get narrower and longer making them odd to read.
“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Vladimir Lenin
Thanks again for the late post. What a shocking twenty months.
The military superiority on display by Israel/US should be daunting to many other world players. The arrogance, my opinion, was as scary. Is it a signal to the world, think Canada etc. In my opinion it was an “operation” not a war. I bet it all ends shortly. US jumped in after Israel proved Iran weak, mostly to draft image of power going forward. I worry about the arrogance this success will breed down the road.
an “operation” or a “special operation”?
You are correct.
The regime may be toast, but we’re not going back to the peacock throne. There are enough nationalistic Iranians, especially in a power vacuum, to mount freelance attacks on US interests, and they will be a thorn in our side for years to come. Maybe even in the Homeland.”
We can kiss everything this country stands for goodbye. From this morning:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/democracy-iran-israel-war-trump/683269/?gift=NXi3_pdmbnIFddYEU4kBKQXAX1a3rpm-d8bUWIi1FVk&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Impeach.
Look, Trump hasn’t got the patience or brains for a long negotiation for a treaty that might get him a Nobel. Default to the biggest firecracker he could find was inevitable. If it goes sour, he can always blame Kegseth.
Five-months in and we are bombing Iran already, and that was not even something that he ran on. Whatever happened to “no more forever wars?” Sounds like homie got played, much like George W. did. (Remember how certain he was that it was “mission accomplished” so early on?”) Trump’s address afterwards was clearly strained, and mostly read off the teleprompter. The moment towards the end where he invoked God’s name, while common practice, seemed both hopeful and desperate at the same time. Whatever nastiness gets thrown at Israel now, we are all going to wear that sh** too and for a long time. We may have taken-out Iran’s nuclear capacity (for a time), but at this moment it feels like we have lost something too. Ghosts of “shock and awe” perhaps.
Profound changes going on in the ME and also in the global “world order”. Syria, now Iran. Just wait until solar and nuclear power sources start replacing ME oil.
I look forward to H’s insightful discussion of where our future is headed. Thanks for posting- this was the first source I looked to, after learning what had occurred.
Solar, nuclear, and other renewables won’t replace ME oil. For one thing, ME has the lowest production cost for oil on the planet. Of course, lower prices will hurt their government budgets. That said, there’s a far more powerful force at work. It is the nature of organic systems to expand until they have absorbed all the available energy in a given system. Whether that’s plant leaves and sunlight or humans and electricity, the provision of more energy doesn’t offset energy consumption. Renewables won’t sunset fossil fuel generation, it will just augment it.
Give a community 10MW of electricity, and they’ll find a way to use it. Gift them 10MW of free electricity on top of that, and they won’t turn off all their old generation, they’ll just find more ways to use electricity. They’ll crank their thermostats, open energy intensive industry, and add more streetlights.
Assume a relatively fixed demand curve. Now push the supply curve way down and to the right. P goes down, sure, but Q goes up.
Just look at crypto mining. The most damning description I ever read for bitcoin was, (paraphrased) “Bitcoin is a Rube Goldberg machine whereby sudokus are solved via brute force in order to convert electricity into waste heat.”
I hear you, but as solar/nuclear (currently less than 10% of total global energy production) continues to significantly increase the total amount of energy available, then the “math” indicates that Iran will go from being “somewhat” important to being “not very important”.
Iran currently produces about 4% of the global oil (oil is about 35% to 40% of total global energy production).
Far easier for the world to deal with an energy producer that is “poorly behaved” if they are only a relatively insignificant energy producer and trending towards being even less significant over time (as oil/gas becomes less significant to total energy production over time).
https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/INTERACTIVE-The-top-10-oil-producers-JUNE16-2025-copy-2-1750160548.png?resize=770%2C962&quality=80
I disagree with most of Trump’s actions, but in this case, I support the president’s decision. Iran has been our enemy for decades, and we were drug into this. At this point, reality dictated that we do this. The world is in a better place now.
Blowback. Unforseen reactions. Retaliations. Unintended consequences.
These things are not this administrations strong points, nor Trump’s personally.
How are you so sure?
How long before Trump mentions his superiority with BOMBS in the same sentence with Canada, or Greenland, or some nasty country working around his beautiful tariffs?
I find myself in the uncomfortable position of approving of something this administration did. You don’t have to be a Zionist to support the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program. The world is presumably safer today than it was yesterday.
As an aside, I said to my wife last night that Trump might actually be a good wartime president. Smoke screens, head fakes, confusion, and outright dishonesty can be seen as assets when the bombs start flying (not so much when making domestic policy decisions about, say, funding K-12 education). But we all have to admit he caught the world on its heels with this one. Blind squirrel or finally operating in his wheelhouse? TBD, I suppose.
There is something we should not forget as we seek an answer to what’s next? Iran (as we call it) may favor Mohammedanism today, but a large minority still worship Zoroaster and its people are not Arabs. In fact, most Iranians detest the Arabs. Iran is not Iran. It is Persia, an old civilization steeped in antiquity. These people come from Cyrus the Great, Darius, Xerxes and their empires, the largest in the ancient world until they were eventually conquered and ruled for a time by Alexander, a Macedonian. Even then, the Persian empire made a comeback which finally was reduced by the Greeks and Arabs. These are proud people and their role in the Middle East has always been disruptive. All this is to say that Jihadists are unlikely to be filling vacuums in post war Persia. Many times in history have ended with “post-war Persia.” This time may not be very different. I have known and taught many Iranian students and they were all quick to point out that they were not Arabs. They all claimed their birthrights from among the Persians, Ancient Greeks, Phoenicians and other leading societies born in antiquity. After thousands of years of history during which they considered themselves to be the superior force in their region, these folks will never submit to those they consider their enemies. They will be forever difficult adversaries.
I have an underlying fear/suspicion stoked by the notion that the sudden timing of our Iran involvement may be the result of Netanyahu’s leveraging Trump’s hurt feelings over what we all thought was nebulous ridiculing of him as TACO over comparatively unimportant trade matters. But power structures run on intimidation and loyalty, and don’t respect traditional lanes. “You torched our forno, so now we gotta kill your whole family.”
A foreign “war” gives our Nobel Prize candidate the emergency he has already been claiming with no foundation, thus conferring maximum freedom to cause problems and then “resolve” them, whether they are unilateral tariffs or a domestic uprising that extends beyond the current pithy sign-making and mostly-peaceful gatherings. Netanyahu has helped him instantly transform his hated TACO into the pinnacle of fast food fare – the Big Bad Mac – complete with real blood instead of ketchup.
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