Memes

America makes sure its retaliatory responses are overwhelming making a tit for tat deterrence useless against them, this is the advantage of having the largest stick in the world.

Boots on the ground will be needed, you can’t win a war with stand off munitions alone. America was entirely unsuccessful with their previous two attempts at regime change by force this century, why would they do better against a bigger and better armed country?

Not sure what is the point you're trying to argue here. You assume that US escalation is so overwhelming which makes deterrence useless against them; at the same time you correctly point out that US intervention usually fails when they deploy on the ground, let alone how this would go in a country like Iran. So clearly, American escalation reaches a limit when they have have to actually put boots on the ground, if we keep to the realm of conventional action. My point is, if it has to come to this anyway, Iran should have been more assertive with its retaliation and NP to try and prevent the war altogether.

This also assumes Iran is dealing with a rational actor acting logically, there is no evidence Trump is one in this case.

In very few cases is the leader of a state solely responsible for the military actions of said state. A significant portion of his personnel; generals, the MIC, Israeli advisors, economists would have to support or at least assent to this war for it to go ahead. Could they all be crazy? It's possible. But once again, they will have to fight with the options they have, and these options are limited. Iran could have limited them further, but chose not to. And it's unlikely that Trump started this war solely because Israel has "something" on him, because then he'd have to make this case in front of all these people, and it just wouldn't make sense.

The point about the Zulus was to point out the nature of imperialism; the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. Ultimately, the reason wars are launched is that because they believe that they can be won. I speculate that the whole rationale on the American side goes something like this: that they can decapitate the regime, bomb relentlessly, let protesters fill the power vacuum, and finally overthrow the Islamic Republic (the Israelis probably have a more eschatological reason). This is a fantasy. The Nazis tried to do the same with Britain, the British eventually retaliated all the same.

The American war machine is essentially a glorified, very expensive police force (much like their actual police depts). It can do overwhelming force, but it isn't going to win a war of (military or economic) attrition. It can't do much for protecting its allies in the GCC, not even its own bases in the region. The likely ending to all this is that the US, just like with Afghanistan, will announce that it "accomplished all its objectives", pack up, and leave. Iran complains, but eventually does nothing like by the past. This just puts the Iranians back to square one, where they were in 2020. I'll guess we'll see if they actually learnt from their mistakes.