Let me bury the lede just a bit:

In December of 1862, Union troops under the command of Ambrose Burnside crossed the Rappahannock river by pontoon bridge and occupied the town of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in an attempt to come to grips with Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee.

That first skirmish of the battle named for the town went rather easily for the Union Forces … who couldn’t help but wonder why.

“Some guessed it was because they had no ammunition to spare,” Shelby Foote relates in his excellent three-volume history of the war, “others that they were afraid of retaliation by ‘our siege guns.'”

“Still another,” Foote continues, “a veteran private, had a different idea. ‘Sh*t,’ he said. ‘They WANT us to get in. Getting out won’t be quite so smart and easy. You’ll see.”

And see they did:  Four days later, the Union troops finally skedaddled back to the other side of the river, minus nearly 1,300 killed in action, nearly 10,000 wounded, and nearly 2,000 captured or missing. Lee’s army suffered about half as many casualties and remained in control of the field.

OK, lede buried. Now let’s talk about the wholly optional, clearly idiotic, and unquestionably illegal (at least per US law on the subject) war on Iran, now well into its third week.

I doubt the Iranian regime WANTED the US and Israeli regimes to escalate the region’s long-standing tension, constant low-intensity fighting, and occasional flare-ups to full-on war for the second time in less than a year …

… but now that it’s happened, the Iranians seem intent on extracting a real price for the blunder instead of negotiating another lull or, as some keep putting it, giving Donald Trump an excuse to “declare victory” and take an “off-ramp” back to the status quo ante.

Can you blame them?

The US and Israel have effectively been at war with Iran since 1979, when the Iranian people gave US puppet dictator “Shah” Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the boot (after which hard-line Islamists, like the Bolsheviks in Russia before them, took advantage of the chaos to seize power).

Adding insult to injury,  Trump and Company are promoting Pahlavi’s son as the face of their “regime change” aspirations.

Getting out won’t be quite so smart and easy. We’re seeing.

Oil prices are up by 25-35% (depending on type of the crude). Ditto gasoline prices.

And fertilizer prices.

And, soon, the price of everything that has to be delivered using gasoline, grown using fertilizer, etc.

Which is pretty much, well, everything.

Even when — if — tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz can get back to normal, we’ll be feeling the economic after-effects for a long time. The effects of the war stretch beyond that transport choke point. The Iranians are also striking production facilities, and just this morning hit a major natural gas field in the United Arab Emirates. The damaged and destroyed infrastructure across the region isn’t going to rebuild itself.

The longer this war continues, the worse off Americans will be, above and beyond having to foot the bill — in both blood and treasure — for a war the US regime has yet to present anything resembling a rational explanation for.

Even if the Iranian people rise up and overthrow the current regime, as American pro-war flacks keep predicting, the likelihood that its replacement will be any more friendly to the US and Israel falls somewhere between “infinitesimal” and “non-existent.”

Can the Iranian regime lose this war? Yes.

Can the American people win it? No. And we never could. It was always going to make us worse off.

Our enemies aren’t in Tehran, they’re in Washington, DC.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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