This is how uneducated (or delusional) Republicans are:
So now they think we won the Vietnam war? With Rolling Thunder, the 3 year long bombing campaign that resulted in absolutely nothing? It didn’t break the North Vietnamese will and ended as a strategic defeat of historic proportions. Just as Trump’s Iran debacle is going to be.
Spencer Ackerman points out the absurdity of this view. He lays out Trump’s and, more recently, Rubio’s fatuous attempts to say that the war has achieved its objectives and writes:
[I]t’s necessary to point out that Rubio has abandoned as unachievable the fantasy of regime change. And while any state would prefer to have an intact navy and its air force, Iran has just proven that its ability to project power resides in its missiles and its drones, rather than its conventional military. And seeking a “significant reduction” in anything is a tell that you know you cannot eliminate the threat from that thing, so you employ a vague term you can define as needed to save face. But most importantly, Rubio is making one gigantic elision: the state of the vital commercial waterway, open when the U.S. and Israel launched this war, now throttled by Iran, which blocks ships flagged to the U.S. coalition.
“One way or another,” after the war, Rubio hand-waved, the strait will be opened. “We’ll achieve those objectives in weeks, not months, and then we’ll be confronted with this issue of the Strait of Hormuz,” he said. “And it’ll be up to Iran to decide. And if they choose to try to block the strait, then they will have to face real consequences. Not just from the United States, but from regional countries, and from the world.”
It’ll be up to Iran to decide is the only accurate thing Rubio said. Here we have the foreign minister of a belligerent power—the regnant superpower, no less—insisting that if the U.S. ceases fighting with the Strait of Hormuz closed, it’s still victory by the original terms the U.S. set out, no matter how thoroughly Iran has obviated those terms. Rubio has no choice but to persist with this absurdity, since otherwise he’ll contradict Trump, the only fireable offense he could commit. Whether or not Rubio believes what he’s saying, what he’s describing is a situation in which the U.S. quits the war, leaving other combatants—the sort that never manifest and would certainly never manifest within range of Iranian missiles— to impose “real consequences” on Iran. That’s not just a lost war. That’s a humiliation.
It’s not the first time we’ve lost a war but it’s certainly the first time we didn’t even have a real reason for starting it — well, other than the president is a delusional megalomaniac who thought it would be a cakewalk and blew up the middle east instead. What a horrific decision and what a predictable outcome.