Oh, But That's How ...

 ... Pentagon and a bunch of amateurs with political pseudoscience degrees think. 

Matt Kroenig has wanted the U.S. to attack Iran for more than a decade. Now that he got the war he wanted and it failed, he is reduced to arguing this: 

To be sure, the United States did not register a knockout punch against the Islamic Republic, but to continue the boxing metaphor, it did win on points. 

War isn’t a sport, and there is no winning on “points.” The ghouls that cheered this war on treat war as if it were a video game where you get more “points” with every person you kill or maim. How many “points” did the U.S. get from massacring the innocent schoolgirls in Minab with missiles? If the U.S. won, as Kroenig insists, what did we win? What does the U.S. have now that it didn’t have before?

If anyone has any doubts about this approach (a euphemism for covering up humiliating losses), allow me to remind you this: 

During the Paris Peace talks to end the war in Vietnam, Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. told a North Vietnamese colonel, "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield." After pondering the remark, the colonel replied: "That may be so. But it is also irrelevant."

This is exactly how the US views WAR. That is why it loses. One-liners such as "victory in war is determined by achieving political objectives of said war" are not enough for making conclusions on matters of strategy and especially so--operations. So, if some uneducated neocon moron who built his career in deep recesses of Pentagon's political fairy tales office, talks like this--know then, he is coping. But then again, US Ivy League humanities degree mills are an insult to real education in history, international relations and ... well, credentialed idiot Kroenig will not understand basic things about war, a real one.