Trump’s Forever War Is Finally Here

Iran is already a quagmire. As the bombing resumes, just how bad will it get?

Over the last two days, the United States has struck nearly 200 sites in Iran and killed 14 people, according to Iranian state authorities. Iran, meanwhile, is back to lobbing missiles at military sites in Jordan, Qatar, and Kuwait. The Strait of Hormuz is all but closed. The Israeli military is “ready and on alert for a resumption of fighting,” said Defense Minister Israel Katz.

“The attacks were four to five times more extensive than other strikes launched since the agreement to end the war was signed last month,” a senior Trump official told The Wall Street Journal. That official also told the Journal that “the U.S. still considers the ceasefire in effect.”

Another official was much blunter to Axios’s Barak Ravid, saying, “We’re going to slap them a bit so they understand we’re not fucking around.”

It’s been roughly a month since the U.S. and Iran reached a memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war, and three months since the two sides first agreed to a ceasefire. And this is hardly the first flareup in hostilities over that time. So what do you call a ceasefire that is punctured by........

© New Republic