In the first fierce day of war, when coordinated air strikes on Iranian targets destroyed most of the Iranian air force and navy, the US military appeared invincible again. Wrecking a second-rate military power does that for an imperial war machine.

By the second day of the war, however, most American and Iranian citizens wished for peace. Unfortunately, wars are always easier to get into than out of. While the war planners in the Pentagon and Israel had devised a workable plan to force Iran into war, using a fake attack on US warships by Iranian gunboats (as the faked Tonkin Gulf attack initiated the Vietnam War), the US Navy fared far worse than the planners wished. 

In 1987-88, during the First US-Iran Gulf war, the combined US Navy, Navy Seals, Marines and Army copters easily destroyed the navy of Iran in a single day. Yet Iranian gunboats continued to harass US shipping in that undeclared war, culminating in the USS Vincennes shooting down an unarmed Iranian jumbo jet while in Iran water. 

Nearly 20 years later, after being armed with Russian and Chinese weapons, the Iranian defensive forces proved far more capable than the civilian wizards at the Pentagon predicted. Before the war, the chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, General Yahya Rahim Safavi, said the advanced missile system served “to show our deterrent and defensive power to trans-regional enemies, and we hope they will understand the message.” 

By the second day, the message became clearer: Iran was no longer the pushover of years past. The combined effect of Sunburn, Exocet and Yakhonts missiles striking several US Navy ships fleeing the fishbowl of the Persian Gulf was an unforgettable sight. So unforgettable that CNN and Fox chose not to show them. 

According to Mark Gaffney: “At the time of the Falklands war the Argentine air force possessed only five Exocets, yet managed to sink two ships. With enough of them, the Argentineans might have sunk the entire British fleet, and won the war.” 

By contrast, the Iranians, cognizant of their defeat at the hands of the Iraqi and US forces in 1987-88, aware of the twin threat from Israel and the US, had focused heavily on defensive weaponry, supplied to them by Russian and Chinese manufacturers. 

“The Russian SS-N-22.Sunburn (Moskit), which technical journals and experts have termed the most effective and lethal anti-ship weapon extant, is far cheaper to produce than a fighter plane or a missile destroyer, cruiser or aircraft carrier,” wrote Gaffney before the war. To make matters worse for US Navymen, the Russians provided the SS-NX-26 Yakhonts anti-ship missiles to Iran, reported to possess Mach 2.9 speed and a range of 180 miles. 

The width of the Persian Gulf? 100-180 miles. 

The immediate closure of the Persian Gulf to oil tankers from six nations provided a huge boost to peace advocates. By the second day of the war with Iran, with US Navy ships ablaze and sinking, with dire forecasts of worldwide fuel shortages, with gas prices spiking at $10 a gallon in some places, with increasing calls for impeachment appearing in the mainstream media, with environmentalist decrying the spread of radiation from the bomb blasted atomic sites in Iran, suddenly the neocon-sponsored war with Iran no longer seemed like such a good idea. 

Despite the claimed success of the pre-emptive attack on Iran, despite the round-the-clock appearances of neocons on most US news channels, the fallout from the war, both in Iran and America, had become exceedingly toxic. 

By the middle of the second day, with reports of missile strikes on the Green Zone, the media spin became harder to control. The glorious flag-waving patriotism that followed 911 and the approach of the Iraq War never materialized. Along the smalltown streets of America, fewer folks unfurled a flag. Instead, lines of panicked motorists, faces stricken by the new reality of another war, a war they had chosen to ignore for so long, unfurled into every gas station in America as a frightened mob. Most rushed to the pumps with a single thought in mind: I am going to fill my SUV to the top and woe be to anyone who tries to stop me. 

Predictably the price of platinum, gold and silver rose. Gold topped $1000 an ounce while silver, the poor man’s gold, approached $50. Predictably, the US dollar fell, as nations as diverse as China and Kuwait began dumping greenbacks for gold. Predictably, most stocks not related to war industries tumbled. Housing starts dipped and sales dried up. 

And all because of an ill-conceived war designed by a few Israel-centric US leaders with lots to gain and little to lose. 

The retaliatory strikes by US carrier-based fighter planes that struck the Iranian oil platforms along Bandar Abbas and left them ablaze