Students of history will understand what's happening as a variant of the Nixon/Henry Kissinger stratagem of getting the North Vietnamese to the Paris peace talks.

An odd comparison, given that the U.S. failed to achieve almost all of our strategic objectives in the Vietnam war, no matter how successful any individual operation(s) was in killing or blowing up the targets.

I'm not sure why you have to be disparaging of the reasoning of folks on this board. None of us think that the Iranians can prevail militarily over the U.S. We have the ability to do a massively large range of things to them without them being able to resist. What folks point out, though, is that the main objectives of the war (to prevent them from ever getting a nuclear weapon, to prevent them from being a regional threat going forward, to prevent them from sponsoring terror groups) are not things that can be achieved with the stuff we can do to them absent a much more serious commitment of ground troops.

Again, we're likely to come out of this with something pretty much like what we could have gotten in late February without the war: a promise not to have nuclear weapons, a promise not to take uranium above a certain enrichment level, and eliminating their existing 60% uranium supplies. What critics of the war question is the massive cost to us in doing it this way since we have been unable to dislodge the existing regime and we've opened up a massively significant strategic weapon for them in controlling the strait.

After all, it's Iran that's executed a very strong strategy of getting the U.S. to the Islamabad peace talks. Seizing the strait forced a ceasefire when it wasn't really in our interests to accept one. Pretty successful move on our part.