If you’re reading this post this afternoon and you happen to be Iranian, congratulations. Your civilization didn’t die last night. I know it got a little bit dicey there for a minute, what with President Donald Trump promising that full-scale Armageddon would arrive at the stroke of 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday night. But Donald Trump’s arbitrary deadline came and went last evening and you and I are still here. The nation of Iran is also, thankfully, still here.

And it has kicked Trump’s sorry ass up and down the block.

The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire last night. This tenuous détente came after our president committed a glaring war crime by declaring that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil supply flows.

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Why did Iran close the Strait to begin with? Well, because Trump declared war against Iran just over a month ago, assassinating that country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, for an opening salvo. Why did Trump start bombing Iran without provocation? Well, because according to the New York Times, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump that winning a war against Iran would be a cakewalk. Why did Trump believe Netanyahu’s pitch when even Secretary of State and human footstool Marco Rubio — Marco Rubio! — called the plan “bulls—t”? Because Donald Trump is the stupidest asshole to ever live, a fact that Iran has now exploited to cow America just as swiftly as Trump thought he might cow them.

Every war is, at its core, a self-inflicted wound. This wound just happens to be so wide, the Artemis II astronauts could still see it from the dark side of the moon. It’s a decisive loss for the United States and one that, hopefully, portends many great electoral losses to come for the people who orchestrated it.

Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini at his residence in the leafy Paris suburb of........

© SFGate