Once again I’ll say: the purpose is clear, you just don’t want to admit it. The point is to destroy the US.

They’ve also said it was to stop their nuclear weapons program, the same program they said they destroyed at the beginning of the year.

They additionally said it was to free the Iranian people from the oppressive regime, and later said we would end their civilization if they don’t agree to a cease fire.

I’m sure obtaining their oil is a goal, but it’s not their primary goal.

No - it indicates gross incompetence of the people in charge of the war and its communication.

Any media worth its salt spend a brief time explaining why invading Kharg would mean mass US casualties, while having no critical objectives only achievable by seizing Kharg.

If one of your media sources only echoed "reports of the US looking to seize Kharg island" without that context it was wasting your time for attention.

The oil is a secondary objective to keep markets stable so there’s less dissent domestically, the primary objective is to weaken Iran so that Israel can continue their expansion in the Middle East with less resistance. Their goal for decades now has been to become a world power like the US, Russia, and China and they manipulate US foreign policy to achieve these aims. This isn’t even a secret, you could read the Clean Break memo or read Israeli news where they talk about this somewhat openly.

The war will continue at least up to elections, maybe longer since Zionism has bipartisan support in the US, but they’ll at least have to change the messaging or approach somehow. These ceasefire negotiations are a farce and will invariably fall through. The US will get no benefits and the spin will be how incompetent the Trump administration is for creating another quagmire but there was never anything for the US to gain from this and the real objective of exhausting the US military resources to undermine Iran will have been achieved. They ideally would still like to install the descendant of the last Shah as the new prime minister, but if that can’t be accomplished they’ll just reset the Iranian civilization back 20 years by destroying infrastructure, oil fields, and killing influential and popular leaders.

The only redeeming factor of the Trump admin is that they are genuinely incompetent so this hidden hand influencing our foreign policy is more apparent but they’re not so incompetent to have started a war they have nothing to gain from.

Trump meeting with China this week, China maybe part of the calculus