Why has no journalist asked the Trump administration this simple question?

Bear with me, I know we're all sick of this topic, but it's genuinely puzzling

We’re all thoroughly sick of this stupid war and the even more stupid “peace talks”, but something puzzles me about journalists - both American and international. I searched and searched to see if anyone had asked Trump (or one of his buffoons or lackeys), what to me, is the most obvious question.

That question is: “If Iran has been completely militarily defeated, as you have repeatedly and emphatically claimed, why do the armed forces of the United States not simply occupy the territory bordering the Strait of Hormuz and thus immediately open the strait to traffic?”

Now, I’m not so naive as to imagine that anyone in that clown car cavalcade of an administration would actually answer the question - truthfully or even at all - but the question is still worth asking, and worth asking repeatedly.

Of course anyone sentient and not in the MAGA cult already knows the answer: because Iran has not, in fact, been entirely defeated. Its manufacturing capabilities and infrastructure have been very badly damaged and its conventional military assets have been largely destroyed (although even that is a gross overstatement in some vitally important instances), but it is still fighting.

Iran has fallen back to what military experts call “asymmetric warfare”. Instead of directly opposing the US military with conventional weapons, they are using smaller and faster vessels, more mobile weapons systems, even old-school Soviet-era shoulder-launched SAMs to disrupt and damage America’s fleet and airforces without directly confronting them. This is known, in the lingo, as asymmetric area denial, and it is extremely effective.

The USA’s armed forces are conventional - they are designed to fight other armies and navies that stay on the battlefield and fight back. They are simply not designed or suited to fighting this kind of foe. A case in point is the fact that the US is shooting down cheap Iranian drones (costing less than $50,000) with THAAD and Patriot missiles that cost $12 million and $4 million each, respectively. (Yes, those are the actual costs per shot)

This should not be a surprise to the USA. It has just fought two wars, both more than 20 years long, in which asymmetric warfare was predominant. This is doubly true in Afghanistan, where the Americans themselves armed the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War (1979 - 1989) in order to help them to defeat the invading USSR. The Afghans, who have been masters of asymmetric warfare for literal centuries, used these weapons to defeat a superpower.

A large portion of these same mujahideen - now known as the Taliban - then took the entire country over and imposed Shariah law by force. And so, in 2001, when the USA itself invaded Afghanistan after the attack on the World Trade Center (sic) in New York, they were fighting against a force they themselves had armed. And, after 20 years, what was the final outcome?

The simple reality is that, during the post-war era (now spanning more than 80 years), the USA has never managed to achieve true regime change by bombing alone. They tried it in the Korean War, they tried it in Vietnam (dropping nearly 8 million tons of bombs), and they even tried a variation of it in the Iraq War (“Shock and Awe”), where invading troops were meant to finish off the effectively toppled regime within days.

“But what about Venezuela” I hear you cry. Poor battered and starving Venezuela is just the exception that proves the rule - Trump did not topple that regime, he simply replaced its leader with a more pliable goon. Calling that regime change is fake news, as Trump himself would say.

The only way to achieve regime change is to invade with large numbers of ground troops. This is not a theory or a guess - this is a fact bourne out by a century of modern wars. Even the Allies in World War 2 did not defeat Germany through bombing - if anything it made the Germans fight harder.

Military experts estimate that forcing regime change in Iran would require around 1 million troops and the better part of a decade. That would result in tens of thousands of US casualties (if they’re lucky) and several trillion more dollars wasted. This is why the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

So, why aren’t journalists asking Trump some variation of this simple question: “If we’ve won the war and destroyed their military, why isn’t the strait already open?” It is a bit of a “gotcha” question, I know, so perhaps this is about access but I think too many journalists assume that the public understands the context of the war, and its subtle mechanics. They need to clarify this reality, not play along with the administration by asking questions predicated on a fact that they have not forced the administration to acknowledge.

Look, nothing will break through to the MAGA crowd, even if a journalist were to get a halfway honest answer to that question from the likes of Marco Rubio. But ordinary Americans with no particular affiliation are confused and frustrated by this war. They want to know how the USA has “won” this war and yet cannot call the shots. It’s the responsibility of the press to spell this out to them by forcing the administration to explain this glaring contradiction in simple terms. At the very least they must repeatedly attempt to force an answer out of them.

Then again, maybe someone has asked and I just couldn’t find it. I don’t think so, but please do correct me if I’m wrong. Even if that is the case, I would respectfully submit that this question needs to be asked over and over until we actually get the obvious answer, or at least some grudging facsimile. It really does matter in this case.

EDIT: An earlier version referenced the first Gulf War as an example of attempting regime change by bombing, but that’s broadly inaccurate even if the war itself had some similar characteristics (i.e. they expected to win mostly by bombing but boots on the ground did the real work).