War Isn’t Won on “Points”

Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison

“Matt Kroenig has wanted the U.S. to attack Iran for more than a decade. Now that he got the war he wanted and it failed, he is reduced to arguing this: ‘To be sure, the United States did not register a knockout punch against the Islamic Republic, but to continue the boxing metaphor, it did win on points.’ War isn’t a sport, and there is no winning on ‘points.’ The ghouls that cheered this war on treat war as if it were a video game where you get more ‘points’ with every person you kill or maim. How many ‘points’ did the U.S. get from massacring the innocent schoolgirls in Minab with missiles? If the U.S. won, as Kroenig insists, what did we win? What does the U.S. have now that it didn’t have before?” (06/23/26)

https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/war-isnt-won-on-points