After the Midterms

On Wednesday, before boarding a plane to Dallas, the President of the United States told reporters when the war with Iran will end. "I think the war is going to end immediately after the election," he said, "because they can't hold out any longer." He added that gasoline would take "a little bit longer than the midterm" to come down. It was the first time in seven months that he had attached a date to the thing, and the date he chose was not on the Pentagon's calendar or Tehran's. It was on the Republican National Committee's.

Fairness first, because Iran is not winning this war in any sense a bookkeeper would recognize. On Tuesday the United States Navy sank five Iranian oil tankers. Iran's own count of its dead is past 3,500. The naval blockade of its ports holds. And on the same Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency's board referred Iran to the Security Council for stonewalling its inspectors, the first such referral in twenty years. The President is not losing. He is stuck, which is a different condition, and he is stuck because his own government has told him, in writing and in the Situation Room, that he cannot do either of the things that would get him out.

Consider how the schedule has drifted. On March 1, the second day of the war, the President said he "intended four to five weeks." On March 11: "We won. In the first hour, it was over." On March 17 it was "largely over in two or three days." On April 8, at the ceasefire, the Secretary of War declared "a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield" that had left Iran's military "combat ineffective for years to come," and then, in the same breath, "We're not going anywhere." That ceasefire collapsed. So did the June memorandum, eleven days after the President signed it. So did the sixty-day window that followed, which lapsed in August with Washington declining to extend it. Earlier this month the same Secretary quietly extended the deployments of nineteen warships, fighter squadrons and paratroopers into 2027. Between "four to five weeks" and "into 2027" there is no announcement, no speech, no explanation to the country. There is only a calendar being turned.

The corner is not complicated. There are three doors. Door one is the ground war: fifty thousand American troops are already in the region, and the Secretary has refused for six months to rule out sending them across the border. But on August 14 the Army, Navy and Air Force chiefs, along with the four-star commanders for Europe, the Pacific and Latin America, formally declined to concur with his own orders book, warning that the war had consumed the ships, planes and missiles they would need if anything happened anywhere else. Their summary, as reported, was "too much, for too long." Roughly a quarter of the destroyer fleet is ready to sail. A quarter of the Reaper drones are gone. More than half the cruise missiles and advanced air-defense interceptors have been fired. The Abraham Lincoln has been at sea past three hundred days. That is the door marked invade, and the men holding the keys have said no.

Door two is the deal, and Tehran has priced it. In March, Iran wanted an end to the strikes and its sanctions lifted. It now wants war reparations, a guarantee against future attack, its frozen assets, an end to the blockade, and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, which is to say a toll booth on a fifth of the world's oil. The President's answer, in August, was to demand that Iran pay him instead, "for the damage they've done over a fifty-year period." A man who has publicly invoiced the other side for half a century cannot walk through that door either, and everyone in the room knows it.

So he has chosen door three, which is neither, and which is the worst of the three because it has no end and he has just admitted it. The war goes on at low boil: ten ships attacked near the strait this week, one sailor dead and one missing, American aircraft damaged overnight at a base in Jordan, the Houthis taking a Red Sea port while the Saudis ask for help. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the Vice President and the Secretary of State have both told the President, in private, that Iran can hold out until January 2029. He went out the same day and said it cannot hold out past November. One of those dates is a military assessment. The other is an election.

Then there is the man running the war. Secretary Hegseth's response to six senior officers telling him the force was breaking was not a plan. In April he fired the Army chief of staff, who had objected to his blocking of promotions. In August he removed four officers, two Black men and two women, from a promotions list after the Secretary of the Army refused to do it, and the Secretary of the Army resigned on the last day of the month. Forty-five officers are reported held up in the same way. The Signal chats were a year ago and there was no punishment. The pattern, from the "overwhelming victory" in April to the 2027 orders in September, is a Secretary who announces the result before the war and removes whoever notices the difference.

Congress has a role in this story and it is not the one it will claim. Both chambers voted to end the war. The House did it on June 3, 215 to 208, the Senate on June 23, 50 to 48 with four Republicans, and the House again on July 23. Those were concurrent resolutions, which have no force of law, and Congress knew that when it passed them. It has one power over a war that actually binds, the purse, and it has not touched it. It has instead found $850 million to begin refilling a Strategic Petroleum Reserve that sits at 285 million barrels, the lowest since 1983, and that the Energy Secretary says will take $20 billion. The reserve's damaged caverns can now take in barrels at little more than half their designed rate. Congress voted no, three times, and then paid the bill anyway. That is not oversight. That is a receipt with a complaint written on the back.

The bill itself, since this is the paper that counts. Regular gasoline is $4.31 a gallon this morning, up fifteen cents in a week and $1.12 from a year ago, and climbing back toward May's $4.55 now that the reserve has nothing left to pour on it. The August consumer price report, out Thursday, put inflation at 3.4 percent, with gasoline up 27 percent on the year and responsible for more than a third of the month's entire increase. Food is up a milder 2.7 percent, so the war has not raised the price of everything; it has raised the price of the thing that moves everything. By one accounting, households had paid an extra $471 apiece for fuel by late June. The Pentagon's last official cost figure was $29 billion, delivered to a House committee on May 12. It has not offered another since, four months and one extended deployment later, and a Harvard economist who has audited three American wars puts the real number near $200 billion.

Four in five Americans tell pollsters the war has raised what they pay for gas and food. Sixty-nine percent disapprove of how the President is handling it. He knows both numbers, which is why the only date he has ever given for the end of this war that was not measured in weeks is the one measured in votes. This paper rates absurdity in clowns. A president who told the country it had won in the first hour, and who now needs the country to hold on until the second Tuesday in November, gets five.