Then why insist on now-or-never?

When did I do that?

The thing you overstate is the iron law that any agreement at all is incompatible with disarmament of the empire.

Something I never stated at all, actually.

It honestly feels like you’re having a disagreement with someone else, not me. Please quote me in the future if you’re going to say what my position is.

Even if you are correct that the US will regroup and continue, it will be years at least before it is able.

The entity has plenty of jets and bombs, they can continue today with minimal logistical overhead. The US can continue by doing exactly what it already has been doing: long distance bombing runs, particularly at high altitudes.

Years that will only strengthen Iran’s position and weaken that of the US.

There is certainly no guarantee of that.

Iran is already on a winning path.

Iran is quite poor and relatively destabilized, just not as poor and destabilized as the imperialists’ usual targets. Iran are well-educated and well-organized. They are still encircled by comprador regimes and the US’ main projection of power is economic and social. Whether Iran is on a “winning path” is entirely uncertain and comes down to navigating exactly issues like these, weighing their strength and timing versus their enemies’, something that is uncertain for anyone on this website. Given the unreliability of their enemies to stick to agreements, their only guarantee is that they have sufficiently beaten them back and made continuation too costly for a long enough period that it’s better to stop now and regroup than to continue their current successful trajectory.

I admit that I believe that things have fundamentally changed and that Iran will continue to build up its defenses, develop nuclear weapons, increase diplomatic efforts with regional and major powers, etc. All things that make future US aggression less and less fruitful than it was before March.

I think those would be good things to happen. I think it is also relying on them to change course, which could also easily not happen. Their major neighbors that aren’t already diplomatically friendly remain comprador regimes tied closely to imperialist interests. The most likely outcome is that their ruling classes continue to know who butters their bread.

These things matter unless you dismiss ideology, propaganda generally as immaterial.

Generally speaking, moral wins mean nothing at all and even listing it in this discussion is unserious. The morally superior frequently lose, the innocent die, the children starve, and the propaganda normalizes and erases all of it. The immoral are bolstered, taught that they are correct and moral, etc etc. It is like discussing whether yellow or green colored propaganda posters are better. Thank goodness Iran can use the green color! Imagine if they used yellow!

It matters whether other the US or its allies can rhetorically justify the things that they want to do; though obviously this is not rigidly deterministic.

Neither have much problem with this, particularly when it comes to mass murdering brown people. People in the imperial core do not care about Iran or Iranians. The media complaints they see and resonate with are about Trump doing a bad job of destroying them and going mask off with his rhetoric. They don’t like the increased cost of gas. They want the Kabuki and personal feelings of security and superiority, it’s what would make it acceptable.

You’re underestimating the depths of imperial core psychology and the importance of focusing on the material, both in base and in military gains.