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By Laala Bechetoula

“The conqueror need not be stronger than the conquered. He need only be more willing to endure.”

— Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, 14th century

“No people has ever been liberated by a war it could not endure.”

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

“All human beings are members of one frame, since all, at first, from the same essence came. When time afflicts a limb with pain, the other limbs cannot at rest remain. If thou feel not for other’s misery, a human being is no name for thee.”

— Sa’adi Shirazi, Bani Adam, 13th century — inscribed on a rug offered by Iran to the United Nations, New York, 2005

Prologue: The Clock That Never Started for Washington

On the morning of February 28, 2026, the United States of America and the State of Israel launched one of the most concentrated aerial campaigns in the history of modern warfare. In twelve hours, nearly 900 strikes rained down on the Islamic Republic of Iran — on its missile sites, its air defenses, its nuclear facilities, its military command centers, and on the compound where its Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was assassinated along with members of his family.

Donald Trump predicted it would be over in “two or three days.”

Twenty-four days later, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Oil is above one hundred dollars a barrel. The global economy stands at the edge of recession. The International Energy Agency has declared the situation worse than the two oil crises of the 1970s combined. The Islamic Republic of Iran — battered, wounded, its navy decimated, its leaders assassinated, its nuclear installations struck three times — is still governing, still fighting, and still dictating the terms of every international conversation.

On March 22, Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum in capital letters on Truth Social: reopen the Strait or face the obliteration of Iran’s power plants. Iran responded by threatening to mine the entire Persian Gulf and strike every energy installation in the region. Twelve hours before his own deadline expired, Trump announced that the United States and Iran had held “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” and that strikes were postponed for five days.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, responded the same hour: “No negotiations have been held with the US. Fake news is being used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry was equally unequivocal: “There is no dialogue between Tehran and Washington. We are not the party that started this war.”

The empire launched its missiles. The civilization endured. And when the empire blinked, the civilization named it for what it was.

This is the story of why.

Part One: The Deepest Asymmetry — Seven Thousand Years Against Two Hundred and Fifty

Before America Was Born, Persia Had Already Given the World Its Rights

To understand why Iran will not collapse under American and Israeli bombardment, one must first understand what Iran is — not in the geopolitical sense measured in GDP and missile inventories, but in the civilizational sense measured in millennia.

The Iranian plateau has been continuously inhabited for approximately 7,000 years. The Elamite civilization arose there around 3200 BCE, contemporaneous with the earliest Mesopotamian city-states. By the 6th century BCE, the Achaemenid Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great had become the largest empire the world had ever seen, stretching from the Aegean Sea to the Indus Valley — encompassing modern Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — governed not by terror but, remarkably for antiquity, by a philosophy of tolerance and pluralism without parallel in the ancient world.

In 539 BCE, after conquering Babylon without a battle — the population reportedly opened the gates willingly — Cyrus issued a decree inscribed on a baked clay cylinder in Akkadian cuneiform. That cylinder, now housed in the British Museum in London — preserved in the very civilization that today bombs Tehran — was recognized by the United Nations in 1971 as the world’s first charter of human rights. A replica stands in the lobby of the United Nations headquarters in New York. Its provisions parallel the first four articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 — more than two and a half millennia after Cyrus had already enacted them.

The Cyrus Cylinder records that the King freed all slaves, declared that all people had the right to choose their own religion, established racial equality, and allowed exiled peoples to return to their homelands — including the 50,000 Jews held in Babylonian captivity, whom he freed at Persian state expense and helped fund the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Hebrew Bible to be called Mashiach — the Anointed One.

This is the civilization that the United States of America — founded in 1776, 2,315 years after Cyrus issued his human rights charter — is trying to destroy from the air. This is the civilization that the State of Israel — established in 1948, when the Cyrus Cylinder was already 2,487 years old — claims the right to bomb into submission in the name of its own security.

A civilization with 7,000 years of memory does not experience a 24-day aerial campaign the way a 250-year-old nation experiences it. For Iran, this is not existential rupture. It is a chapter. A painful one, but a chapter. For the United States, which has never in its history been bombed on its own soil by a foreign power, which has never had its capital struck, its president killed, its cities reduced to rubble — this kind of war is unimaginable. For Iran, in the darkest sense, it is familiar.

Alexander the Great burned Persepolis in 330 BCE. The Mongols sacked Iran’s cities in the 13th century CE with an annihilating thoroughness estimated to have killed up to three-quarters of the population of some regions. The British engineered a coup in 1953, overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh because he had dared to nationalize Iranian oil — a coup documented in detail by the CIA itself and acknowledged formally by the United States government in 2013. Iraq, armed and intelligence-supplied by the United States, invaded Iran in 1980 and fought an eight-year war that killed an estimated half-million Iranians, including through chemical weapons supplied with Western intelligence cooperation.

Iran is still here. Persia has always been still here.

The Intellectual Inheritance That No Bomb Can Touch

The civilization being bombed is the civilization of Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037 CE), whose Canon of Medicine was the primary medical textbook in European universities for six centuries. It is the civilization of Al-Biruni (973–1048 CE), whose calculation of the Earth’s circumference was accurate to within one percent. Of Khayyam, who produced algebraic solutions to cubic equations while Europe was burning books. Of Hafez and Rumi, whose poetry remains among the most widely read in the world — in Persian, Arabic, English, German, Hindi and dozens of other languages. Rumi’s Masnavi has been translated into more languages than almost any literary work in history outside of religious scripture.

When the bombs fall on Tehran, they fall on the city built by the inheritors of this tradition. That tradition does not die in an airstrike. It is, if anything, summoned by it.

Malek Bennabi — the Algerian philosopher whose thought has most profoundly shaped my own intellectual formation — argued in his concept of colonisabilité that civilizations are not conquered by superior weapons alone. They are conquered when they lose the internal will to remain themselves. No such collapse is visible in Iran. The regime may be contested internally. But the civilization it governs is not.

Part Two: The Human Cost — Voices from Under the Bombs

Before the geopolitics, before the cost-exchange ratios and the strategic analysis, there are the people.

According to the NGO Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), by March 17, 2026 — the 17th day of the war — 3,114 people had been killed in Iran by US-Israeli airstrikes, including 1,354 civilians and 1,138 military personnel. UNICEF reported that by March 12, more than 200 children had been killed in Iran alone, with hundreds of thousands displaced and millions unable to attend school. The Iranian Red Crescent reported over 6,668 civilian residential units targeted. A US strike on a girls’ school adjacent to a naval base in Minab killed approximately 170 people on the first day.

A Tehran journalist in her late twenties, keeping a diary shared with NPR under conditions of anonymity, wrote on the first day of the war, when Khamenei was killed: “People came to the roofs and watched and clapped when they hit a target we know. We chanted a lot last night.” She had been arrested twice at the IRGC base that was now bombed. She celebrated the strike.

But as the war entered its second week, her diary changed register. The bombs were no longer selective. The dead were no longer only those she had reason to hate.

A Xinhua correspondent based in Tehran wrote on March 3: “Missiles fell like falling stars, slicing through the darkness before detonating with a force that made the night flinch. The blasts were so violent that they seemed to split the sky at its seams.” In a taxi afterward, the driver shook his head: “Tehran used to be a peaceful city. Some thought the Americans would bring opportunity. Look at what they’ve brought — nothing but bombs.”

From the Iran-Turkey border, NPR’s Emily Feng reported on refugees crossing on foot. An Iranian man showed journalists oil stains on his jacket — residue from burning oil droplets that fell on Tehran’s neighborhoods when Israel struck fuel depots in early March. His 26-year-old cousin, who had risked his life protesting against the government in January, was among the civilians killed. “When he said that to me,” Feng reported, “he paused, like he almost couldn’t believe what he was saying out loud.”

A Tehran resident told Al Jazeera on March 21: “If the main power plants are bombed, it’s not going to be just a brief disruption; it could stop the flow of everything from water to gas. It would be foolish to just punish the population like that.”

These testimonies refuse simplification. They contain simultaneously opposition to the Islamic Republic and rejection of the bombardment. Grief and defiance and dark humor and the stubborn insistence on continuing to live. They are not the testimonies of a broken people. They are the testimonies of a people absorbing an enormous blow and remaining, defiantly, themselves. That is what 7,000 years of civilizational memory looks like from the inside.

Part Three: Fifty Years Under Siege — The Sanctions That Forged the Weapon

The Most Sanctioned Nation in Modern History

Before a single Tomahawk missile was fired on February 28, 2026, Iran had already been fighting the United States for nearly half a century — not with drones and missiles, but with its sheer capacity to survive.

The first American sanctions were imposed in November 1979. Executive Order 12170, signed by President Carter, froze approximately $8.1 billion in Iranian assets held abroad. That was forty-six years ago. Through eight consecutive American administrations — through Republican and Democratic presidencies alike, through periods of Iranian nuclear compliance and non-compliance — the sanctions regime has never fundamentally lifted. It has only expanded.

1979 — First sanctions. $8.1 billion in assets frozen. Trade embargo.

1987 — Reagan bans all Iranian goods and services from the US market.

1995 — Clinton prohibits all US trade with and investment in Iran.

1996 — Congress penalizes foreign firms investing more than $20 million per year in Iranian energy.

2006–2010 — Four rounds of UN Security Council sanctions targeting Iran’s nuclear program.

2012 — EU bans Iranian oil exports entirely. SWIFT disconnects all Iranian banks. The rial loses 80% of its value in months.

2018 — Trump withdraws from the JCPOA — which Iran had been complying with, as certified by the IAEA. Standard Chartered fined $1.5 billion for violating Iran sanctions. JP Morgan Chase pays $5.3 million for 87 violations.

The crowning irony came just days before the war. In February 2026, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent testified before the Senate Banking Committee: “What we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country. It came to a swift and grand culmination in December, when one of the largest banks in Iran went under. The central bank had to print money. The Iranian currency went into free fall. Inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

He said this as justification for the coming war. Three days later, his government began bombing the country whose suffering he had just catalogued.

The sanctions did not destroy Iran. They forged it.

The Weapon Born of Embargo

Because Iran could not import spare parts, it learned to manufacture them. Because it could not access Western technology, it reverse-engineered it. Because it could not purchase advanced weapons, it developed cheap, mass-producible asymmetric ones. The Shahed-136 suicide drone was born directly from the crucible of American sanctions. It is a product of necessity, of engineering ingenuity applied under conditions of enforced isolation.

The United States spent fifty years trying to economically strangle Iran into military inferiority. It instead forged the weapon that is now draining its own interceptor stockpiles at a rate no factory on earth can replenish in time.

Part Four: The Arithmetic of Empire — Dollars Against Drones

Strip away the presidential declarations and the satellite images of burning Tehran, and what this war ultimately comes down to is an equation — the most consequential military-economic equation of the 21st century.

On one side: the American Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptor missile. Unit cost: approximately $4 million per missile. On the other: the Iranian Shahed-136 loitering munition. Unit cost: approximately $20,000 to $50,000. The cost ratio is between 80:1 and 200:1.

Other systems compound the asymmetry: the THAAD interceptor costs $12 to $15 million per shot; the ship-based SM-3 costs $10 to $28 million. Kelly Grieco of the Stimson Center has calculated that for every dollar Iran spends manufacturing a Shahed drone, the UAE spends between $80 and $200 to intercept it.

Lockheed Martin produces approximately 600 Patriot interceptors per year. Iran launched more than 2,000 drones in the first week of this conflict alone. In the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury, the United States fired approximately 170 Tomahawk cruise missiles — nearly three times the number the Pentagon had ordered from Raytheon for the entire fiscal year 2026. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the value of interceptors expended in those first 100 hours at approximately $1.7 billion.

“The US, Israel, and Gulf countries are largely relying on US-made systems, which means they are all drawing from the same production lines.”

— Kelly Grieco, Stimson Center

The June 2025 twelve-day war had already consumed an estimated 150 THAAD interceptors and 80 SM-3s — roughly a quarter of the entire US THAAD stockpile — in under two weeks. By July 2025, Patriot stockpiles had fallen to 25 percent of the volume the Pentagon deemed necessary. The Heritage Foundation warned in January 2026 that high-end interceptor stockpiles could be exhausted within days of sustained combat. Operation Epic Fury is drawing on a reserve that was already critically depleted before the first bomb fell.

Iran’s entire 2025 defense budget was approximately $23 billion — roughly 2.5 percent of the American defense budget of $900 billion. The Shahed drone was designed specifically to exploit the fatal flaw at the heart of Western high-technology defense: the catastrophic cost ratio between precision interceptors and cheap, mass-producible swarm weapons. This is not improvisation. It is strategy.

Part Five: The Two Chokepoints — Oil and Water

The Strait of Hormuz: Where Geography Becomes a Weapon

At its narrowest, the Strait of Hormuz is 33 kilometers wide. Through this channel passes approximately 20 percent of the world’s total petroleum supply — roughly 21 million barrels of oil and liquefied natural gas per day. More than 25 percent of global LNG trade transits here.

Iran has closed it. Not with the naval fleet that American and Israeli strikes have largely destroyed — over fifty Iranian naval vessels now rest on the sea floor. But with mines, drone swarms, ballistic missile threats, and the invisible weapon of risk: no insurance underwriter will currently cover a vessel transiting a strait where Iranian weapons continue to operate.

IEA Director Fatih Birol has been explicit: the situation is “very severe — worse than the two oil crises of the 1970s and the fallout from the Ukraine war put together.” His agency counts that at least 40 energy facilities across nine countries have been severely damaged since February 28. Global oil prices surged from under $60 per barrel in January to $113 on March 22.

A third of the world’s fertilizer trade also passes through the Strait. Shipping lines have rerouted. Aviation across the Middle East has collapsed. The war sold to the world as a campaign for the “rules-based international order” is systematically destroying the supply chains that order was built to protect.

Water: The Existential Lever Not Yet Fully Pulled

The Gulf states account for roughly 60 percent of global desalination capacity. The dependency figures tell the story of existential vulnerability:

• Kuwait: 90 percent of drinking water from desalination
• Bahrain: 90 percent
• Oman: 86 percent
• Saudi Arabia: 70 percent
• UAE: 42 percent

Critically, more than 90 percent of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 mega-complexes. On March 7, a drone caused material damage to a desalination plant in Bahrain — the first confirmed strike on Gulf water infrastructure. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stated publicly: “Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The US set this precedent, not Iran.”

“If attacks on desalination plants are the beginning of a military policy and not just mistakes or collateral damage, this is both illegal — a war crime — and a very concerning development, as Gulf countries have only a few weeks of water storage.”

— Laurent Lambert, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

A few weeks of water storage. That is the margin between the current situation and a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented scale — 100 million people without regular access to drinking water. And this margin is held not by American air defenses, not by Gulf state diplomacy, but by an Iranian decision not yet taken.

Part Six: The Matrix That Does Not Fall

Washington went to war with a theory. Kill the leadership, paralyze the command structure, trigger popular uprising, produce regime change in days. Trump predicted “two or three days.” His military launched 900 strikes in 12 hours. Khamenei was killed on day one. Ali Larijani was assassinated on March 17. Dozens of IRGC commanders have been eliminated.

Twenty-four days later, the Islamic Republic is governing.

“It’s not like we finally found the one leader who, once we kill that leader, the whole house of cards comes apart, because it’s not a house of cards. This is more of a matrix — a flexible matrix.”

— Robert Pape, University of Chicago

Kill the apex of a matrix, and you eliminate the layer requiring the most real-time communication between senior leadership and mid-levels. The mid-level commanders do not pause. They reorganize laterally, often with greater aggression and less political restraint than before. Pape’s structural diagnosis is damning: “The new politics triggered by the bombing work to the disadvantage of regime change. What you’re getting instead is negative regime change: leaders from the second generation who are more anti-American, more dangerous, more willing to take costs in order to punish America.”

The historical record is not ambiguous. It is overwhelming.

• Vietnam (1965–1973): The most bombed country in the history of aerial warfare did not capitulate. The government the US sought to destroy united the country in 1975. It is still there.
• Iraq (2003): The regime fell in 21 days. The state destruction produced fifteen years of insurgency, sectarian civil war, the rise of ISIS.
• Libya (2011): Seven months of NATO air campaign. Gaddafi killed. The state dissolved into permanent civil war, still ongoing fifteen years later.
• Afghanistan: Twenty years. Over $2 trillion. The Taliban returned to power within two weeks of American withdrawal.

In each case: tactical destruction, strategic failure. The assumption that the targeted society was brittle was catastrophically wrong. Every time. Without exception.

Part Seven: Faith as a Strategic Variable

Western strategic analysis has a structural blind spot. It can model military capability, economic leverage, and political will in the terms familiar to liberal democratic systems. What it cannot model — because it has no conceptual vocabulary for it — is the role of faith as a strategic variable.

Shia Islam’s foundational narrative is the Battle of Karbala, fought on October 10, 680 CE. Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, chose death rather than submission to illegitimate power. That day — Ashura — is the most important day in the Shia calendar. Not as a day of defeat. As a day of witness: the theology of the victory of principle over power, of the testimony of the righteous over the triumph of the unjust.

In the Shia eschatological framework, every Iranian soldier who dies in this war is not a casualty of a losing military campaign. He is a shahid — a martyr and witness, whose death carries divine meaning. Every bombed city block is not evidence that God has abandoned Iran. It is evidence, within this framework, that Iran stands on the side of righteousness.

No Patriot battery can intercept that. No THAAD system can neutralize it. No Tomahawk missile can destroy it.

Robert Pape identifies “strategic culture” — a population’s cohesion and tolerance for suffering — as the decisive variable when military force is sufficient to destroy but insufficient to conquer. Iran’s strategic culture of endurance is theologically produced, historically reinforced across seven thousand years, and politically mobilized by every bomb that falls on Tehran. The Shahed drone carries a $35,000 warhead. It also carries, in the consciousness of the millions who watch it launched, the weight of Karbala, the memory of fifty years of embargo, the dignity of civilizational continuity. That is not a weapon the United States knows how to defeat.

Part Eight: Sun Tzu and the Strategic Bankruptcy of Trump and Netanyahu

There is a text that every military academy in the world assigns. It was written approximately 2,500 years ago in China. Its author was a general named Sun Tzu, and its title is The Art of War. It is the most influential strategic treatise in human history. And every principle it establishes, Trump and Netanyahu have systematically violated.

First Principle: “Know your enemy and know yourself”

Sun Tzu places the knowledge of the adversary at the summit of all strategic thought. What did Trump and Netanyahu know about Iran before launching 900 strikes in 12 hours? That its economy was fragile. That its population had been in the streets protesting. What they did not understand: that a civilization of 7,000 years does not measure its will to resist in GDP per capita or inflation rates. That the ‘asabiyya of which Ibn Khaldun wrote is activated, not destroyed, by foreign bombardment. That the Iranian woman who had been arrested twice for not wearing a hijab, who celebrated the first strikes, would end her March 16 diary entry: “In the final battle I will burn every single one of these psychopathic murderers” — meaning the regime. But she was writing from a city under foreign attack. The distinction, under bombs, dissolves.

They did not know their enemy. According to Sun Tzu, they had already lost.

Second Principle: “The supreme excellence in war is to break the enemy’s resistance without fighting”

On February 27, 2026 — the eve of the attack — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi confirmed that a diplomatic “breakthrough” had been achieved: Iran had agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium, to permit full IAEA verification, and to irreversibly downgrade its existing enriched uranium to the lowest possible level. He declared peace “within reach.” Negotiations were scheduled to resume March 2.

Eighteen hours later, the bombs began to fall.

A negotiated solution — Iran denuclearized by agreement, Strait open, markets stabilized — was sacrificed. Sun Tzu names this error without hesitation: the available victory without combat was strategically superior to the available military one. They chose the inferior option.

Third Principle: The Requirement of a Defined End State

A war without a defined victory condition is a war lost before it is begun. Let us examine the official record of Trump administration war objectives, in chronological order:

• February 28, Hegseth: Ending “47 long years of war by the expansionist and Islamist regime.”
• February 28, Rubio (hours later): The US acted defensively, pre-emptively, to protect its forces.
• March 2, Trump: Regime change in “two or three days.”
• March 9, Trump: “I think the war is very complete, pretty much.”
• March 11, Hegseth: “This is only just the beginning.”
• March 21, Trump: 48-hour ultimatum to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
• March 23, Trump: Five-day delay for “very good and productive” negotiations.
• March 23, Iran: “There is no dialogue between Tehran and Washington.”

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Fourth Principle: Appear Strong When You Are Weak

The art of strategic deception — maintaining ambiguity about one’s capabilities and intentions — is among Sun Tzu’s most elaborated teachings. Observe who practices it.

Iran practices Sun Tzu. It closes the Strait but maintains deliberate ambiguity about its capacity to keep it closed indefinitely. It denies negotiations while allowing regional intermediaries — Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt — to carry messages sufficient for Trump to construct a narrative of “productive conversations” allowing him to retreat from his ultimatum without formal capitulation. It strikes near Dimona without destroying the reactor — demonstrating existential capability while withholding its use.

Trump announces his threats in capital letters on a public social media platform. He sets deadlines in specific hours. He retreats from those deadlines publicly, before his own stated expiration time. Iranian state television broadcast the verdict without ambiguity: “Trump, fearing Iran’s response, backed down from his 48-hour ultimatum.”

Every strategist on earth — in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, Caracas — read that broadcast. Its lesson is precise: American ultimatums can be waited out. This is what deterrence theorists call credibility degradation. Each capitulation makes the next threat easier to ignore.

The Final Verdict of Sun Tzu

“In war, the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Trump and Netanyahu launched their campaign and then looked for what victory might mean. They have been looking for twenty-four days. They have not found a stable answer. Iran, by contrast, had its victory condition defined before the first American missile fell: survival. Remain standing. Keep the Strait closed. Force economic pain on the global system. Demonstrate that the most powerful military alliance in history cannot achieve its stated objectives. And let the world draw its own conclusions.

Sun Tzu would recognize the Iranian strategy immediately. He would struggle to find the American one.

Part Nine: The Third Winner — Beijing’s Silent Harvest

While Washington burns through missile interceptors, carrier group logistics, and political capital in the Persian Gulf, China is quietly consolidating the strategic architecture of the 21st century.

To sustain Operation Epic Fury, the United States has redeployed advanced missile defense systems from the Indo-Pacific to the Middle East — THAAD batteries and naval interceptor platforms whose Pacific positioning most directly threatened Chinese security interests. Melanie Hart of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub states: “It is impossible to overstate the degree to which those movements are a massive win for Beijing. And if the United States ends up stuck in another Middle Eastern quagmire that cedes the Indo-Pacific to China, the wins will keep coming.”

Russia is the clearest immediate beneficiary: oil above $100 a barrel has replenished Moscow’s war chest and reduced Ukrainian leverage in any future peace negotiation. The war the Trump administration was supposed to prevent — Russia’s slow conquest of Ukraine — is being financed, in part, by the economic disruption of the war the Trump administration chose to start.

China alone entered this crisis with genuine strategic depth. It holds the world’s largest strategic petroleum reserves outside the United States. It is purchasing Iranian oil at discount prices throughout the conflict. It will dominate Gulf state reconstruction contracts when the shooting stops. And its military planners are studying, with professional interest, every data point this war generates on drone cost-exchange ratios and interceptor stockpile depletion rates.

The 2026 Iran war may be remembered as the moment the American Pacific Century began its terminal phase — not in a confrontation over Taiwan, but in a miscalculation over a nuclear facility in the Iranian desert.

Part Ten: The Global South Is Watching

This war is not only about Iran. It is about what Iran’s performance means for every non-Western state calculating its strategic options in a world still structured — for now — by American military primacy.

For seventy years, the fundamental premise underwriting that structure has been: no state that directly confronts American military power can survive the confrontation with its government intact. Vietnam cracked that premise. Afghanistan confirmed it required extended occupation to fail. Iran, in 2026, is demonstrating something new: that a non-Western state, under the most intense aerial bombardment since the Second World War, can absorb the assault, maintain its institutional functions, weaponize the global economy through geography and cheap technology, and force the aggressor into public strategic incoherence — all without nuclear weapons.

The Shahed drone that costs $35,000 and forces a $4 million Patriot intercept is not merely a weapon. It is a political statement: the technological and financial gulf between the imperial center and the periphery is no longer sufficient to guarantee compliance.

The Global South is watching from Caracas, Pyongyang, Harare, and Algiers. What it is watching — in real time, measured in the smoking debris of interceptors that cost $4 million to stop a drone that cost $20,000 — is the demonstration that the age of uncontested American military omnipotence is ending.

Malek Bennabi argued that civilizations are not defeated by superior weapons. They are defeated by the internal exhaustion of their own will to be. The civilization that forgets why it exists is already dying, regardless of its arsenal. Seven thousand years of Persian civilization have not forgotten why they exist.

Conclusion: The War That Time Cannot Win

Napoleon invaded Russia in June 1812 with 600,000 soldiers. He reached Moscow in September. The Russians burned their own capital rather than surrender it. The Grande Armée, designed for decisive engagement, had no strategic answer for a people willing to accept unlimited suffering in preference to submission. By December, fewer than 100,000 of those 600,000 men had returned.

The lesson was not about military technology. It was about will, time, and the asymmetry of what each side had to lose.

Twenty-four days of the most sophisticated aerial campaign in the history of warfare. The supreme leader, dead. The secretary of the National Security Council, assassinated. Fifty naval vessels on the ocean floor. Natanz struck three times. At least 1,354 civilians killed, 200 children among them. Billions of dollars of military infrastructure destroyed.

And yet: the Islamic Republic governs. Its drones are flying. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Oil is above $100. The global economy is hostage. Trump invents negotiations that Iran denies in real time. His ultimatums expire un-executed. His war has no articulated end state. And Sun Tzu, reading the record from twenty-five centuries away, would close his treatise and say: this campaign was lost before the first missile was fired.

There is a final fact that history will not overlook. On February 27, 2026 — the day before the bombs began to fall — Oman’s Foreign Minister confirmed that a diplomatic breakthrough was within reach. Iran had agreed to full nuclear transparency. Peace was available. The decision was taken to bomb rather than negotiate.

Sa’adi Shirazi wrote, in 13th-century Persia, the verse that hangs today at the entrance of the United Nations: “All human beings are members of one frame, since all, at first, from the same essence came.” Iran sent that poem to the United Nations. The United States sent it cruise missiles.

The empire has more weapons. Iran has more memory.

Memory, in the long run, wins.

Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian historian, journalist and geopolitical analyst.

24 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Mushtaq Ul Haq Ahmad Sikander, New Age Islam

Kashmir’s Moral Decay: Questions as Deadly Risks

Main Points:

·         Moral decay in Muslim societies replaces God-consciousness with greed and self-interest.

·         Religious trusts evolve from noble causes into family empires controlled by opportunists.

·         Experience reveals aid embezzlement by a failed lawyer during 2014 floods.

·         Questioning corruption invites violence, as in Advocate Babar Qadri’s murder.

·         Fear silences Kashmiris amid blurred lines between militants, mafia, and state allies.

When societies decay, they don’t always collapse with a bang; sometimes, they corrode quietly from within. The Muslim world — once an intellectual and moral lighthouse — today stands at a crossroads of self-inflicted decline. The decay isn’t only political or economic; it is moral, spiritual, and institutional. Nowhere is this collapse more visible than in places like Kashmir, where the noble vocabulary of faith, justice, and service has been hijacked by opportunists — the pious pretenders and clever manipulators who wear the cloak of religiosity to enrich themselves.

What began as reform gradually turned into rot. And questions — simple, honest questions — about accountability and truth have become acts of rebellion so dangerous that they can cost one’s life.

The Moral Decay Beneath the Divine Vocabulary

Across the Muslim world, we have witnessed a degeneration of moral and spiritual values. Where once taqwa (God-consciousness) shaped public life, today greed and self-interest define it. The poor remain poor, and the pious impostors grow rich in the name of the poor.

The disease lies not merely in worldly temptations but also in the loss of fear of God. The rich and powerful engineer shortcuts to prosperity — legal or illegal, halal or haram, moral or immoral — no longer matters. The language of faith has become a business model; dawah is monetized, charity is privatized, and “trusts” have mutated into family enterprises.

Every avenue of righteous service has been converted into a personal fiefdom — where the throne of the Almighty is invoked only to legitimize selfish power. Sincerity has been replaced by theater; spirituality by spectacle; integrity by slogans.

How Noble Causes Turn into Private Empires

It begins innocently enough. A group forms an Islamic trust, declaring noble missions: to educate the poor, aid orphans, or raise religious awareness. They attract support — moral, intellectual, and financial. For a moment, hope breathes again. People believe that the idealism of Islam can still produce social reform. But soon, the group mutates. The original zeal and sincerity give way to hierarchy. Power revolves around one family. Trustees gradually become mere signatories, present only to fulfill legal formalities. The real control lies elsewhere — in one man’s hands, his household, and later his descendants. Where once a collective dream existed, now a family enterprise stands. The mosque becomes an office; the pulpit, a press-conference desk.

The Story of a Failed Lawyer and a Broken Trust

I speak not merely in abstraction. I was, for more than a decade, a volunteer in one such “Islamic trust.” It began when an academic mentor urged me to join a fledgling organization led by a lawyer — a failed one, both professionally and ethically.

This man, married into a family of NGO owners and social workers, decided to own his piece of the moral market. He opened his own trust — a shop thinly covered in religious wrapping. As an idealistic college student, I poured time, intellect, and heart into this venture. For years, I worked without pay, mobilizing youth, connecting donors, helping the trust survive through its early years. During the devastating 2014 floods in Kashmir, I helped channel millions in foreign aid to this organization — aid meant for rebuilding lives, for the destitute, for the homeless.

But soon the numbers stopped adding up. The donor agency sought transparency — a simple audit, a basic moral duty. And then the mask slipped. The audit never came. The “failed lawyer” had siphoned off a large portion of the donations to buy a flat in New Delhi.

When I discovered this, my conscience screamed. I wanted to expose him. But the world of deceit is guarded by unseen daggers. Friends cautioned me: he could fabricate charges, trap me legally, even get me imprisoned. Some whispered that people who raise uncomfortable questions disappear quietly. In that moment, idealism died a quiet death in me. I resigned, disillusioned yet grateful to be alive. For in Kashmir, truth-telling can be a form of suicide.

When the Guardians Become the Gravediggers

The tragedy is broader than one man or one trust. Across Kashmir, Islamic institutions — educational, charitable, missionary have fallen prey to similar fates.

I recall another circle, founded by sincere professionals seeking to combine faith, education, and service. Yet as soon as the venture became successful, one man — an engineer by training seized control. His greed eclipsed every collective aspiration. He turned a social movement into a bloodline business. Those who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him were expelled one by one. Trustees were threatened, silenced, or bought.

When I asked some of the displaced trustees why they didn’t challenge him legally, their answer chilled me: “He has access to guns.” In a place where power and violence blur, where the boundary between militants, mafia, and manipulators is invisible, they chose silence over martyrdom. “Better to stay quiet than become a headline read with suspicion,” they said. Because in Kashmir, when someone dies at the wrong hands, rumors paint the victim darker than the murderer. Death itself becomes a defamation. The fear of “unknown gunmen” has colonized the conscience of Kashmir. Every honest person carries an invisible notice — “Speak carefully, for your grave may be listening.”

When Questions Become Crimes

If you need a living example of how dangerous dissent is, remember Advocate Babar Qadri. A sharp mind, an articulate voice, a believer in dialogue. His only sin was asking the wrong questions — questions about transparency in power structures, about the conduct of the Bar Association, about the silence of those who claim to represent justice. One evening, masked men entered his home and silenced him forever.

His killers walked calmly into the darkness. His questions still echo in it.

In Kashmir, asking questions about the misuse of religion or money, the exploitation by Moulvis and “leaders,” or the hidden alliances between religious entrepreneurs and state machinery — is equivalent to inviting death.

Take the case of a prominent religious figure — Ghulam Rasool Hami. His family enterprises swirl with whispers of fraud and manipulation. Yet who dares investigate? Only those under political protection, like Sandeep Mawa, can speak openly. Anyone else risks a jail cell — or a coffin. Because in every conflict zone, the state keeps loyal “assets” — people whose function is to maintain influence among the populace. These assets are untouchable. They manipulate faith to pacify protest, distribute aid selectively, and control narratives. And the state, in turn, shields them.

This unholy marriage between political power and religious opportunism has made accountability impossible. The masses remain silent, not because they approve, but because they wish to live.

The Anatomy of Fear

There’s a proverb in our land: “When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets crushed.” The ordinary Kashmiri — the teacher, the student, the shopkeeper, the volunteer — is the grass. Between the weight of the gun and the shadow of corruption, between the state and its surrogates, between militants and mafias, the common man learns only one lesson: survival.

We have reached a stage where silence is no longer cowardice — it’s self-preservation. Truth has no reward, only risk. The powerful fabricate charges with ease; the weak find themselves behind bars or beneath soil. To question is to betray. To expose is to invite revenge. And to resign from moral complicity is to live with perpetual suspicion.

Between Faith and Fear

It is ironic that in the land of saints, where Sufis once taught humility and truth, faith has now become a camouflage for kleptocracy. Everyone talks of Shura, consultation, and Caliphate; of justice in Islam; of freedom of expression in Khilafat. But when someone dares to actually apply these ideals — to demand audit, transparency, or explanation — that person is branded as “a troublemaker,” “a foreign agent,” or worse, “an infidel.”

Our tragedy lies in this hypocrisy: we quote verses about justice while burying those who live by them. We brag about Haqq but celebrate Makkari. We speak of Akhirat while enslaving the world. We demand democracy for ourselves but despise accountability for our idols. Thus, the disintegration isn’t only institutional; it is doctrinal. We no longer believe what we preach.

The Irony of Islamic Rhetoric

Nowhere does irony wound more sharply than in the language of faith itself. The very words that once emancipated humanity — adl (justice), amanah (trust), shura (consultation), ikhlaas (sincerity) — have been hollowed out and repainted as tools of control. Across Kashmir and much of the Muslim world, these sacred ideals are now rehearsed in speeches, embossed on trust letterheads, and woven into the rhetoric of Friday sermons, all while their spirit lies buried under layers of greed and fear.

We proclaim our attachment to the Caliphate, yet we cannot run a charity without corruption. We quote the Qur’an about accountability, yet we recoil from a simple audit. We invoke the Prophet’s humility, while competing for power, position, and photo opportunities. This duplicity insults both faith and reason. Islam was never meant to be a slogan for social climbing; it was meant to be a moral discipline. But in our hands, religion has become both a refuge for cowards and a weapon for swindlers.

The irony deepens when these exploiters portray themselves as victims — claiming to “defend Islam” even as they defile it through deceit and intimidation. They preach patience to the poor while their own children study abroad on misused relief funds. They demand accountability from the world but offer none to their own followers. When confronted, they wrap themselves in the sanctity of religion, declaring any questioner an enemy of faith. Thus, Islam — the religion of questioning, of reason, of moral interrogation — is used to silence the very act of inquiry it once commanded.

And that is the heart of the tragedy: the murder of conscience in the name of piety.

In our sermons, Islam reigns supreme; in our systems, it lies imprisoned. We boast of divine justice but live by human cunning. We fear no God but all men. Our words are sacred — our deeds profane.

Until we learn to reclaim the moral integrity of our faith — until truth becomes safer than silence — Kashmir, and indeed the Muslim world, will continue to produce martyrs of honesty and monuments of hypocrisy. For now, in our valleys, questions themselves have become crimes; and those who ask them, casualties of their own courage.

…

M.H.A.Sikander is Writer-Activist based in Srinagar, Kashmir.

13 February 2026

Source: newageislam.com

By Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes

If we can imagine such a world, we can create it.

That the U.S. is awash in hypocrisy and mendacity should come as no surprise to the people of the world who have watched the U.S. launch one war and/or regime change operation after another over the past 80 years. As former president Jimmy Carter acknowledged in 2019, after receiving a phone call from Donald Trump bemoaning the rise of the China century, he (Carter) didn’t fear the Chinese who hadn’t been at war since 1979; it was the U.S. that had constantly been at war. The late president calculated that the U.S. had only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its then 242 year-long existence, making it “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

But that dismal record has not deterred the U.S. from touting its moral superiority and lecturing other countries about the need to adhere to the so-called “rules-based international order” that the U.S. created but refuses to follow when its own “interests” are at stake. Former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson demonstrated this hubris best following the post-WWI settlement conference at Versailles when he said, “at last the world knows the United States as the savior of the world.” That smug refrain—the bloated and blind self-righteousness captured in the notion of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is not only different than all other nations, it is better than all other nations—has been echoed repeatedly by American leaders who believe it entitles them to use whatever means are necessary to maintain global hegemony. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, not long after justifying the killing of a half million Iraqi children via U.S. sanctions, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”

With leaders like Wilson, Truman, the Dulles brothers, Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Reagan, George W. Bush, the Clintons (especially Hillary), Albright, and Biden, the U.S. has long deserved the Nobel Prize for hypocrisy. Now with Trump back in office, U.S. hypocrisy and mendacity have both risen to truly unprecedented levels.

But to make matters worse, in west Asia, the U.S. has joined Bibi Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing advisors in a war of choice based, like so many previous U.S. wars, on blatant lies about the imminent threat posed, in this case, by Iran’s nuclear weapons and missile programs—lies that had been thoroughly debunked by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.S. intelligence community. That the U.S., with more than 5000 nuclear weapons and a unique responsibility for the nuclear age and some of its worst crimes, and Israel, with 90 nuclear warheads or more, an arsenal considered to be “undeclared,” feel justified in leveling much of Iran on the fabricated pretext that Iran might have the propensity to develop nuclear weapons takes hypocrisy and impunity to an entirely new level.

The C.I.A. has reported that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. That same year, Ayatollah Khamenei first issued his fatwa against Iran ever developing or attaining a nuclear weapon—a ban that was in place prior to this and last year’s attacks on Iran. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or the Iran nuclear deal, which Obama painfully negotiated in 2015 with the help of Russia and other countries, Iran was to keep its uranium enrichment to 3.67%, far below the levels needed to develop a nuclear weapon, for 15 years. Following the deal, Iran was being subjected to the most intensive inspection regime ever instituted, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). But Trump walked away from the JCPOA in 2018, setting the stage for the violent confrontations that have marked his second administration.

Last June, the U.S. and Israel subjected Iran to a 12-day bombing campaign that Trump claimed had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Now the U.S. and Israel are again bombing Iran even more mercilessly. Gone are the days of targeting mainly the nuclear sites, which had risked a catastrophe of a different proportion. Such “strategic” sites have now been replaced by a girls’ school, at least 13 hospitals, a sports complex, and many other civilian targets.

Israel had done everything it could to stop the U.S. from signing the JCPOA in the first place and encouraged Trump to withdraw from the agreement during his first term. Now Netanyahu finally helped drag the U.S. into a war with Iran—something Netanyahu has been attempting to do for decades—but other U.S. presidents had the good sense to resist. Netanyahu is the one who has been warning that Iran was “weeks” away from a nuclear weapon on a regular basis since the 1990s. Trump and Netanyahu began their bombing campaign despite the fact that the Oman foreign minister declared that the two sides had made “significant progress” and were very close to a deal. According to Minister al-Busaidi, Iran would have agreed to get rid of its highly enriched uranium that could potentially be used for a weapon and roll back all other potentially threatening aspects of its research program. Trump and Netanyahu, thinking a military victory would showcase their ferocity more than a diplomatic one, opted to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and unleashed this immoral, illegal, and absolutely unnecessary war.

No one, and especially those who like us, have advocated for nuclear disarmament and the abolition of nuclear weapons, should want to see Iran develop its own nuclear arsenal. But no one should be surprised if Iranian leaders believe that this would be their only credible means of defense against another invasion. Clearly, after being bombed twice within eight months when they were in the midst of seemingly productive negotiations, the Iranians have little appetite for being sucker-punched a third time. But given the stakes and the global risks from further escalation on top of the damage already being done, a diplomatic solution must be imposed upon all parties.

This should happen immediately. If the U.S. and Israeli regimes learn that the use of force under phony pretenses turns them into universally despised pariah states, so much the better. If the Iranian regime gives up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the world will cheer.

But we must all agree that in the nuclear age, war is not an option. We must reembrace diplomacy and find a path toward peaceful development that will serve the interests of not just those involved, but all of humanity. As wise statesmen have said, human beings created these survival-threatening crises; human beings can also choose to live together and resolve differences peacefully. If we can imagine such a world, we can create it.

Ivana Nikolić Hughes is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry at Columbia University.

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington, D.C.

21 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Tehran (QNN)- The administration of US President Donald Trump moved to ease pressure on global energy markets by temporarily lifting some sanctions on Iranian oil for 30 days. The decision came despite years of failed Iranian efforts to secure sanctions relief through diplomacy.

Iran had long pushed to remove sanctions through negotiations, but those efforts brought little progress. Now, in a shift driven by wartime conditions, Washington allowed limited oil sales without a request from Tehran.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the move, describing Iran as a “central force in global terrorism.” He claimed that Trump’s “Operation Epic Fury” was advancing faster than expected and aimed to counter Iranian influence while stabilizing energy supplies.

The US Department of the Treasury issued a narrowly tailored authorization that permits the sale of Iranian oil currently stranded at sea. Officials stressed that the measure remains temporary and does not allow new production or future purchases.

The policy unlocks an estimated 140 million barrels of oil and injects them into global markets. US officials said the move would increase supply, ease pressure on prices, and reduce the impact of disruptions linked to the US war on Iran.

Bessent said China had been stockpiling sanctioned Iranian oil at discounted prices. By releasing this supply, the United States aims to keeping global prices in check.

Despite the easing, Washington insisted it would maintain its broader “maximum pressure” campaign.

The administration has already worked to add around 440 million barrels of oil to global markets in recent weeks. These efforts seek to offset disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, a key route for global energy shipments.

According to the International Energy Agency, oil flows through the strait dropped sharply from about 20 million barrels per day to minimal levels, marking one of the largest supply disruptions in history. The crisis has driven US gasoline prices up by more than 85 cents per gallon since the start of the Israeli war on Iran.

Inside the White House, officials debated whether to release even more oil. Some advisers supported adding up to 100 million barrels, while others warned that excessive releases could weaken US reserves if regional infrastructure faces further attacks.

The US Department of Energy said it has no immediate plans for additional releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve but continues to monitor the situation closely.

Trump’s administration framed the move as part of a broader pro-energy strategy. Officials claimed that record US oil and gas production has strengthened energy security and helped lower long-term costs, even as short-term disruptions continue to affect global markets.

21 March 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bharat Dogra

The humanitarian crisis situation has become acute in Iran, Lebanon and Cuba very quickly in recent days. In most reviews of the countries that were worst affected by humanitarian crisis at the beginning of the year, prepared by various humanitarian aid organizations, these three countries were not mentioned as the worst affected countries, and most of the nearly 239 million people estimated by the UN to need urgent humanitarian assistance were from other countries (including mainly African countries like Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, the wider Sahel region but also some Asian countries and territories like Afghanistan, Myanmar, Yemen and Gaza). While humanitarian aid needs to be maintained at high levels in all these and other countries identified earlier as leading areas of humanitarian crisis, at the same time there is also a new urgency of taking more humanitarian aid to Lebanon, Iran and Cuba.

It will be even more difficult to take humanitarian aid to these three countries, compared to the difficult conditions prevailing in many countries identified earlier, but nevertheless the challenge has to be taken up to the extent possible, keeping in view the urgency of the task. Some volunteers have already made very courageous efforts to take help to Cuba in difficult conditions and while keeping in view the needs this small help could only be symbolic, it is the spirit of these noble efforts that is really needed today.

While the UN has the main responsibility for this, other organizations like BRICS and the movement of non-aligned countries should also become more active in arranging humanitarian aid for those countries where it is more urgently needed. The cause of humanitarian aid can be a more unifying factor among several nations that are eager to make a constructive contribution.

Lebanon has a total population of six million people and out of this over a million have already been displaced after about a month of recent war and conflict in the region. In Iran, given the overall larger population, the number of people needing humanitarian assistance is much higher, and the situation must be considered keeping in view the fact that after years of severe sanctions the economic capacity of the government here has been greatly reduced.

In the context of Cuba the crisis created by many decades of highly unfair sanctions and other pressures has been aggravated increasingly by the Trump administration in recent times with increasing aggression towards the small neighbor country.

In fact in all these three countries as well as in most other countries facing humanitarian crisis, the problem has been caused to a large extent and is being aggravated greatly by entirely avoidable wars, conflicts and aggression. While the Iran war or the wider middle-east war is the most dangerous just now, there are also serious humanitarian crisis situations associated with the Ukraine war, the Sudan civil war, the Rwanda-DRC conflict and the various conflicts of the wider Sahel region which too can be aggravated during this year and in fact some of these crisis situations are already getting aggravated in serious ways. There is a danger that some of the killer crisis situations may get neglected under the shadow of the Iran crisis.

In fact the risk of a bigger regional war erupting in Africa is something about which we should be very concerned, and should do all to prevent. This can grow out of existing civil war in Sudan (increasingly also South Sudan) or various sectarian and other conflicts in the Sahel region or the tense-situation in eastern DRC along Rwanda-DRC borders. Ethiopia is increasingly desperate to regain its lost access to sea which can potentially ignite new conflicts with Eritrea and Somalia, apart from re-activating Tigray based militias. On the other hand, Ethiopia can have increasing conflict also with Egypt over its Grand Renaissance Dam and the access to Nile river waters. An aggravating problem is that there are possibilities of various African country groups being formed on two or more sides of some of these conflicts, and worse still, of more resourceful countries from West Asia providing more destructive weapons to rival sides in Africa, making the situation much more destructive.

Hence while collecting and rushing more humanitarian aid is very important, it is even more important (if anything can be more important) to strive to end or reduce various conflicts and wars.

It is also important to remember the warnings voiced right at the beginning of the year, or even earlier, by the UN and various humanitarian aid organizations that the funds available for humanitarian aid are now much lesser than in earlier years. In fact the fund shortage for this most important task has never been as acute now as in any recent times.

Keeping in view all these factors, unless immediate remedial actions are taken, the number of people affected by serious humanitarian crisis may quickly rise closer to or even beyond the previous peak of 323 million people. Keeping in view the serious funds crunch and other difficulties, if just 2 per cent of these highly vulnerable people die, then this will mean over 6 million deaths this year. Let there be no doubts about this. The life of millions of people is threatened this year, and the world should heed such timely warnings. This huge and very painful tragedy can still be averted by stopping wars and rushing humanitarian aid to highly vulnerable people before it is too late.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now.

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Helen Benedict

I’m writing this piece well into President Donald Trump’s new war with Iran, which, with the help of Israel, has already killed more than 2,000 civilians, including 175 schoolgirls and staff; displaced some 3.2 million people; and is costing the American taxpayer at least one billion dollars a day. All of which is tragically reminiscent of the last time a Republican president led the U.S. into a war on a river of lies and greed. I’m thinking, of course, about George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Weapons that don’t exist. Threats to this country that aren’t real. Liberation for a people that the U.S. will never win over. Freedom for women about whom nobody in power cares a jot. A war that will bring total victory in only a few days or weeks. All this we heard in 2003, and all this we are hearing again now.

I spent many years writing about the Iraq War, even though it took me some time to figure out how to begin. I was sickened by the Muslim-baiting that had been going on since the 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and disgusted with the Hollywood movies and legacy press articles glorifying our vengeful wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while deifying our soldiers. I wanted to tell a different story. I just didn’t know how.

Then, in 2004, I came across the blog Baghdad Burning by a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who called herself Riverbend. She was the first Iraqi I had ever read on the war, and she taught me that those in an occupied country tell a very different story than do the occupiers.

Back then, if Iraqi men showed up in American books, movies, or journalism at all, it was usually as an enemy or a clown. Meanwhile, Iraqi women were depicted as little more than incomprehensible black-clad figures hovering in the background or wailing over the dead. But Riverbend was none of those. She was a computer technician in a sophisticated city who sounded like an American college student. I was hooked.

Over the next few months, I read her blog religiously. Riverbend’s language and thoughts sounded no different than those of my own daughter, except that she was describing what it was like to live, hour-by-hour, through the overwhelming, heart-freezing violence of a U.S. bombing campaign and the occupation of her country.

Today, we can get the same sense of immediacy by reading or listening to brave civilians and journalists in Gaza, but during our post-9/11 wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, hearing any voice from the “other side” was rare. So, Riverbend’s blog was not only eye-opening, but it made readers like me feel as though we were experiencing the war right beside her. She wove the mundane moments of her days — jokes, lighthearted observations, conversations with her family — in with her terror at the falling bombs and her feelings about the United States as she watched us tear apart her country. Her blog was eventually collected into a book and published by The Feminist Press in 2005.

Soon, I began reading other Iraqi blogs, too, along with every translation I could find of Iraqi poetry and fiction. I also followed videos by Iraqis that were appearing online, telling stories remarkably different from those I was hearing here in the United States. Some of those Iraqi civilians did indeed want democracy, although they didn’t believe it could be forced on anyone by a foreign power or bombs. Some had been satisfied living under Saddam Hussein’s autocratic rule. Many were too focused on their daily struggles to find food and avoid bombs to think about politics at all. But all of them, whatever their thoughts and opinions, were suffering horribly, not only from our bombs, but from wounds, illnesses, malnutrition, starvation, and threats of all kinds, as well as from bullying, kidnappings, rape, and murder at the hands of the gangs and militias our war had unleashed.

One of the most eye-opening of those Iraqi videos was made by an anonymous woman early in the war, who put on a burqa, hid her handheld camera under it, and drove around the countryside interviewing women about their struggles and poverty. As she explained, what she was doing was so dangerous that she had no doubt her video would only remain up on YouTube for a day or so. Sure enough, it quickly disappeared. I only hope that she didn’t disappear with it.

A Bloody Mess

President Bush’s war in Iraq quickly became a bloody mess. As I (and many others) documented, the U.S. might have toppled Saddam Hussein, but in the first five years of our war, we killed at least half as many Iraqis as he had in his 35 years of brutal dictatorship. By 2011, our war had slaughtered some one million Iraqis, orphaned at least a million children, and displaced four million people within or outside Iraq, according to body counts by The Lancet medical journal, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and others. In short, one of every five Iraqis was forced from his or her home: a chilling foreshadowing of what we have since seen in Gaza, and that we are now beginning to see in Iran and Lebanon.

The U.S. not only killed and displaced all those people; it bankrupted Iraq with sanctions, poisoned it with depleted uranium, destroyed its infrastructure and middle class, and dismantled its achievements. Before we invaded, Iraq had the best medical system in the Middle East, and women there had more rights than in any Muslim country other than Turkey, making up 50% of students and 40% of the workforce. By the time we left, all of that, including women’s rights, had been undone.

Today, women’s rights in Iraq have eroded even further and women are now relegated to second-class citizenship. Just this March 2nd, the most prominent women’s rights advocate in Iraq, Yanar Mohammed, was shot to death by men driving by on motorcycles. Nobody has claimed responsibility for her assassination, nor has anybody yet been arrested — and that was just one of many political assassinations there since our war.

While the U.S. war machine was busy destroying Iraq and we were hearing all too little from Iraqis themselves, Americans at home were being bombarded with ever more movies (think Hurt Locker and American Sniper, for instance), books, TV series, and news stories about the heroism of U.S. soldiers at war, as well as their traumas and struggles on returning home.

Harry Potter

Seeking relief from such a myopic view of war, I set out to meet Iraqis who had lived through the war themselves. I wanted to hear the other side, the side we were not telling. So, when I found out that several hundred Iraqis had been resettled in Albany, New York, on the special visas (called SIVs) reserved for those who had worked for two years or more as interpreters for the U.S. military or government officials, I decided to seek them out. That is how I came to meet several women I will never forget, among them a young poet named Nour, and a mother of three named Hala. (I’m withholding their last names for their safety.)

Nour told me she had been imprisoned and tortured in the city of Abu Ghraib at the age of 16 for writing a poem that Saddam Hussein didn’t like. After her release, she taught herself English and later became a translator for a freelance American journalist. In 2005, she and the journalist were kidnapped in the city of Basra and shot. The journalist was killed, but thanks to several surgeries, Nour survived and came to the U.S. with the help of his widow.

Nour and I met in New York City and had lunch a few times. Small and slight, with an angular face and haunted eyes, she was reserved and visibly fragile, but her bravery was unmistakable. She refused to be pitied and, in spite of all she had been through and the dangers she would face there, wanted more than anything in the world to go home.

Hala, the other unforgettable Iraqi woman I met, had fled Baghdad with her husband and children about a year before we met in 2010. The day I arrived at their apartment in a suburb of Albany, New York, he was at his job far away in New Jersey, work he had found only after 10 months of searching. But Hala, who was working as a substitute schoolteacher, was at home with her daughter, Hiba, who was 20, and her son, Mustafa, who had just turned nine. As I speak no Arabic, I was grateful that they were all fluent in English.

“Come in, come in,” Hala said when she opened the door, ushering me in with a smile and showing me to a chair in her immaculate, if somewhat bare, white living room. A round, energetic woman with a kind, if worn, face, she settled onto her sofa and sent her daughter to make the chai (tea). “Mustapha,” she said to her serious-eyed son, “this lady is a writer. She is from England.” (I am British and sound it, although I have lived in the U.S. for many decades.)

His eyes grew big. “You wrote Harry Potter!” he declared. It was not a question. I tried to disabuse him of the idea but he refused to believe me. “I’m a writer, too,” he said. “Want to see?” He ran out to fetch his book — a sheaf of stapled papers he had made in school. “It’s about bad GIs and good GIs.” On each page, he had drawn soldiers and a sky raining with bombs.

After we had settled down comfortably with our tea, Hala told me that she and her husband had both been engineers, a highly respected profession in Iraq, and had hated Saddam Hussein, but had lived a pleasant enough life. Her daughter Hiba had been studying to be a dentist, and their two young sons were in school. “Baghdad was beautiful to us then,” Hala told me wistfully. “Looking back now, it was like that movie Avatar, that world of paradise before the invasion.”

But then the U.S. did invade, their jobs disappeared, and money ran low, so her husband became an interpreter for U.S. officials. Soon afterward, Hala’s brother was killed in retribution. Then, their middle child was kidnapped and murdered (by whom they never knew). He was only 15.

“Every day for a year, Hiba dreamed that she went home and found her brother there,” Hala told me quietly, while Hiba listened without saying a word. “She could not eat or get up or get dressed.” So, in the end, they fled to Jordan to escape the violence and find Hiba therapy, eventually obtaining a visa to the U.S., where Hala and her husband hoped their children would be able to forge better and safer futures.

“And how is that going?” I asked.

“I like school,” Mustafa told me with confidence. But Hiba said she was mostly ostracized by the other students at her Albany college. Feelings against Iraqis ran high in those days — against all Arabs, in fact — and she was spared little of it.

“Some of them don’t like me because they know I’m an Arab and Muslim, and some because they think I’m Hispanic,” she said, her pretty face rueful, and with a shrug, she pushed her long hair over her shoulder. Her only friend, she added, was a young woman who had moved here from India.

The Visas That Are No More

Today, in Donald Trump’s America, neither Nour, Hala, nor any of the other Iraqi women and men I met would even be admitted to this country, no matter how much they sacrificed to help Americans and no matter how much they might be targeted at home for having done so. Indeed, the chances of any refugee finding asylum in the U.S. now are just about zero. The Trump administration has banned refugees, asylum seekers, or any immigrants from 75 countries — including Iraq.

In light of this, I look back with nostalgia on the time I spent with Riverbend, Nour, and Hala, when Barack Obama was still president and Donald Trump had yet to loom all too large in our lives. And I can’t stop thinking about what Hala said when I apologized for what my country had done to hers.

She looked at me and nodded. “Mustafa, come sit on my lap.” She motioned to her son. “Listen to this lady, so you will know that not all Americans wanted that war.”

He nestled into her lap, his sister sat on another chair, and they all gazed at me, waiting.

Disconcerted by such an unexpected responsibility, I took refuge in addressing Mustafa. Looking into his little face, I attempted to apologize on behalf not only of the United States, but of England, too, for destroying his country and killing his brother. And then, like an idiot, I began to cry.

Hiba handed me a Kleenex, but neither she nor her mother and brother cried with me. I was mortified. What did I want from them, weeping like this? It wasn’t my son and brother who’d been killed. It wasn’t my life that had been torn away. It wasn’t my country that had been ruined.

Yet they continued to be kind. After I had recovered and we had spoken for a few hours, I asked Hala, “How can you stand living here with your former enemy? Aren’t you angry at us Americans?”

She shook her head. “No, no, my friend.” She smiled at me kindly. “We lived under Saddam. We understand that there are people. And there are leaders. And that the two are not the same.”

I wonder, as we rain bombs down on the people of Iran today, if they would be able to find it in themselves to be quite so forgiving.

Helen Benedict, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author of the novel The Good Deed, (shortlisted for the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize), Wolf Season, and Sand Queen, has been writing about war and refugees for more than a decade

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ashraf Zainabi

Wars are usually fought with clear declarations of purpose. Nations enter conflicts believing that certain objectives can be achieved through force. These goals may include defeating an enemy army, securing territory, weakening a rival state, or even replacing an unfriendly government. Yet history repeatedly reminds us of a difficult truth, when war objectives exceed political reality, even the strongest powers struggle to achieve them. This dilemma is what strategists often call the classic problem of unachievable war goals.

The current conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran appears to reflect this very problem. The rhetoric coming from Washington has increasingly suggested that the ultimate objective is the unconditional surrender of Iran. Such language carries a profound meaning. It implies not only military defeat but also a complete restructuring of Iran’s political order. In practical terms, it means regime change, a reshaping of the military command structure, and the emergence of a new political leadership aligned with American strategic interests.

At first glance, such an objective may appear decisive and straightforward. Powerful nations often believe that superior military technology and overwhelming force can compel weaker adversaries to comply. But the real question in any war is not what leaders desire, it is what is realistically achievable.

To understand the complexity of this situation, one must recognize that not all countries are the same in terms of internal structure and resilience. In some cases, political outcomes can be influenced without direct war. Venezuela is one example often cited in discussions of American foreign policy. There, Washington relied largely on economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and political pressure rather than large-scale military intervention. Whether successful or not, the strategy depended primarily on economic and political leverage, not battlefield confrontation. Iran represents a very different reality.

Unlike smaller or politically fragile states, Iran is a large and historically rooted nation with nearly ninety million people. Its political system is layered and complex. Power is distributed across several institutions, religious leadership, elected bodies, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular armed forces, and a broad administrative structure that penetrates deep into society. This institutional depth means that the removal of a few leaders does not necessarily collapse the system itself. Instead, the structure is designed to absorb shocks and maintain continuity.

This makes Iran fundamentally different from countries such as Iraq, Libya, or Syria, where regime change occurred through invasion, internal collapse, or prolonged civil war. Iran’s state apparatus is more deeply embedded within its society, supported by a blend of ideology, nationalism, and institutional discipline. In times of external threat, these elements often strengthen rather than weaken. History offers several reminders of how difficult it is to impose political transformation on a determined society through external force. The United States itself has encountered this reality more than once.

In Vietnam, the most powerful military in the world was unable to defeat a nationalist movement determined to resist foreign influence. In Iraq, the regime of Saddam Hussein was removed quickly in 2003, yet the political stability that was expected afterward proved elusive. In Afghanistan, two decades of war ended with the return of the very movement that had originally been overthrown.

Another dimension of the present conflict concerns the origins of the confrontation itself. Many observers argue that the war was initially driven more strongly by Israel’s security concerns about Iran’s regional influence and nuclear ambitions. From this perspective, Israel’s strategic calculations played a major role in pushing the crisis toward escalation. The United States, as Israel’s closest ally, gradually found itself drawn deeper into the conflict.

Once involved directly, however, Washington could not remain a secondary actor. Superpowers rarely enter wars without asserting leadership over their objectives. As a result, the language of unconditional surrender emerged, an objective that effectively places the entire Iranian political system in the crosshairs. But this is precisely where the classic problem begins to appear.

War goals must align with political realities. If the objective is limited and realistic, a conflict may end quickly. If the objective becomes too ambitious, however, the war risks becoming prolonged and unwinnable. Demanding unconditional surrender from a large and resilient nation can easily fall into the latter category.

Moreover, in the present conflict Iran is not entirely isolated. While the country itself possesses significant internal strength, it is also receiving overt and covert support from other major powers, particularly Russia and China. Reports suggest that Russia has provided intelligence assistance and strategic cooperation that may help Iran monitor military movements in the region. China, though more cautious in its approach, has offered political backing and economic engagement that prevents Iran from becoming completely isolated.

This does not necessarily mean that Russia and China are formally entering the war. However, their involvement reflects a broader geopolitical reality, conflicts in the modern world rarely remain purely bilateral. When powerful states quietly support one side, even indirectly, the strategic balance becomes far more complicated. Achieving sweeping military objectives becomes significantly harder.

Another important factor is the psychology of nations under attack. External military pressure often produces the opposite effect from what strategists expect. Instead of weakening internal unity, it frequently strengthens national solidarity. Political factions that might otherwise disagree begin to rally around the idea of defending national sovereignty.

Iran’s political culture contains powerful elements of both nationalism and religious identity. In moments of crisis, these forces can mobilize society in ways that outside observers may underestimate. Even citizens who criticize their government may resist what they perceive as foreign domination or imposed political change.

This dynamic reveals a deeper paradox of modern warfare. The more ambitious the objective becomes, especially when it involves transforming another nation’s political system, the more difficult victory tends to be.

None of this means that military power is irrelevant. Modern armies possess extraordinary capabilities. They can destroy infrastructure, weaken adversaries, and shift the strategic balance of a region. But changing the political character of a nation through external force is a far more complex task. Such transformations usually occur through internal political evolution rather than external imposition.

For this reason, experienced strategists often argue that wars must be guided not only by power but by realism. Military strength must be matched by achievable goals. When objectives exceed what the political landscape allows, even the strongest powers find themselves trapped between ambition and reality.

The current conflict appears to illustrate this very dilemma. Iran is not an isolated or fragile state that can easily be reshaped from outside. It is a complex society with deep historical roots, layered institutions, and a strong sense of national identity. Attempting to force unconditional surrender upon such a nation may prove far more difficult than the language of power suggests.

History has shown time and again that empires and superpowers, despite their immense capabilities, remain constrained by the political realities of the societies they confront. When strategy ignores those realities, the gap between ambition and achievement grows wider. That widening gap is precisely what defines the classic problem of unachievable war goals.

Dr. Ashraf Zainabi is a teacher and researcher based in Gowhar Pora Chadoora J&K

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Stan Cox

Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that

A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.

Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “The administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.”

For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians

At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.”

On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep U.S. troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war.

Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.”

Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote.

Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like? . . . Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.”

As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party.

And so itcame to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts — the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.”

“Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner!

“This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself”

Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices.

Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran-regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to him suggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments:

If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government . . . you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you . . . proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform . . .

Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At the Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.”

By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89 percent.”

Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war,

The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences . . . They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security. . . This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself.

“A Gift to Our Country”

Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington.

More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.”

He wrote, “The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”

Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed.

El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing I.C.E., increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare-for-all. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide — and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.”

In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan . . . None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed . . . Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good health care or good schools.”

Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past fifty years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home.

Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.

• * *

Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves.

After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble.

Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile.

Stan Cox is the author, most recently, of Anthopause: The Beauty of Degrowth.

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Feroze Mithiborwala

​TEHRAN / WASHINGTON — As the tyrannical Trump regime moves from punitive strikes under “Operation Epic Fury”, or rather “Operation Epstein Fury”, toward the actual seizure of Iranian islands, a consensus is emerging among military realists and veteran geopoliticians: the mission is a strategic mirage. While the Pentagon’s destructive firepower is overwhelming, the unique confluence of Iran’s asymmetric warfare, daunting fortress-like geography, “anti-navy” tactics, and the sheer persistence of Iran’s decentralized command structure suggests that any attempt to “capture and hold” Kharg, Abu Musa or the Tunb islands will likely result in a historic American quagmire.[1]

​1. THE GEOGRAPHICAL “KILL ZONE”

​The primary obstacle to a successful U.S. occupation is not just the Iranian military, which has proved to be a formidable force, but the physics of the Strait itself. Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran and former advisor to the Secretary of Defence, has been vocal about the folly of a ground engagement in this theatre. Macgregor warns that U.S. forces are being led into a “catastrophic trap,” noting that the U.S. military is currently “a force designed for a world that no longer exists,” ill-equipped for the high-intensity, localized attrition required to hold Iranian territory.[8]

• ​The “Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier” Myth: Military analysts warn that while islands like Qeshm and Abu Musa are “fixed launch pads,” they are also surrounded by thousands of “hidden teeth.” According to Mike Plunket, a senior analyst at Janes, the proximity to the Iranian mainland means U.S. forces would be “perpetually within the engagement envelope of Iranian mobile artillery.”[3]
• ​The Topographical Fortress: The Iranian coastline is composed of rugged, limestone cliffs and “moon-like” caves. Pravin Sawhney, editor of FORCE Magazine and a veteran defence analyst, argues that the U.S. fails to grasp the integration of Iranian geography with their missile doctrine. Sawhney notes that Iran’s “unmatched missile and drone capability” is purpose-built to negate U.S. carrier groups in the narrow waters of the Gulf, making any landing force a “sitting duck” for land-based saturation.[9]

​2. THE “ANTI-NAVY” AND ASYMMETRIC SATURATION

​The U.S. Navy is designed to fight “blue water” battles. In the Strait, it faces an “Anti-Navy”—a swarm of low-cost assets that can overwhelm sophisticated Aegis defence systems.

• ​The Swarm Dilemma: Iran’s IRGC Navy utilizes hundreds of fast-attack craft (FAC). George Galloway, the British politician and commentator, has frequently highlighted the disparity in the cost of war. In recent broadcasts, Galloway has pointed out the absurdity of the U.S. “spending millions on interceptor missiles to shoot down drones that cost as much as a lawnmower,” arguing that the Western public has no appetite for the “rivers of blood” that a Strait invasion would entail.[10]
• ​The Mine Menace: Experts at Stratfor estimate Iran possesses up to 8,000 naval mines.[2] Mike Plunket emphasizes that the U.S. lacks the mine countermeasure capability to sweep the Strait while under active fire from the mainland cliffs.[3]

​3. THE “MOSAIC” DEFENSE: DECAPITATED YET DEADLY

​A central tenet of the Trump strategy has been “decapitation.” However, Professor Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran argues this is a profound Western miscalculation. Marandi, a knowledgeable and leading voice for the Iranian perspective, states that the U.S. is “living in a fantasy” if it believes destroying command centres will stop the resistance. He emphasizes that Iran’s defence is “deeply rooted in the population and the geography,” and that the “Axis of Resistance” is now a self-sustaining entity and has the firepower to strike back at U.S. staging grounds.[11]

• ​Decentralized Lethality: The IRGC’s “Mosaic Defence” allows 31 independent commands to operate autonomously. Can Kasapoğlu of the Hudson Institute notes that even with “functional air supremacy,” the U.S. cannot suppress the “kill chains” of these decentralized units.[1]

​4. LOGISTICAL SUICIDE: THE COST OF THE “HOLD”

​Seizing an island is an act of hours; holding it is an ordeal of years. Pravin Sawhney observes that the U.S. military logistics chain is “overstretched and vulnerable,” particularly when facing a peer-level electronic warfare environment that Iran, bolstered by its allies, now provides.[9]

• ​Vulnerability of the “Tail”: Every cargo ship carrying resupply to an occupied island becomes a target for Iran’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBMs). As Douglas Macgregor bluntly stated, any attempt to sustain a landing force in the face of Iranian shore-based missiles would result in the “destruction of the U.S. Navy as we know it” within the confines of the Gulf.[8]

​5. THE ALLY FACTOR: THE “AXIS” BEYOND TEHRAN

​The U.S. is not fighting Iran in a vacuum. Mohammad Marandi warns that the U.S. “cannot protect its bases in the region,” and that countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are “extremely vulnerable” to having their entire economic infrastructure dismantled if they continue to host an invasion force.[11]

• ​Global Backlash: George Galloway frames the conflict as the “final gasp of Western hegemony,” suggesting that the global South and Iran’s allies will ensure that the U.S. is diplomatically and economically isolated for its “aggression” in the Strait.[10]

​CONCLUSION: THE PYRRHIC VICTORY

​The attempt to capture the islands of the Strait of Hormuz is likely to result in what military historians call a Pyrrhic Victory. As Douglas Macgregor and Pravin Sawhney have both cautioned in different contexts, “victory” on paper means nothing if the price is the loss of a carrier strike group and the collapse of regional alliances. The islands of the Strait remain not a prize, but a trap designed to bleed a superpower dry.[5][8][9]

​References:

1. ​[1] Kasapoğlu, Can. “Examining US Military Options for Kharg Island and the Strait of Hormuz.” Hudson Institute, March 30, 2026.
2. ​[2] Stratfor Worldview. “The Obstacles Facing the U.S. Plan for Strait of Hormuz.” Stratfor, March 17, 2026.
3. ​[3] Plunket, Mike. “Iran challenges the powerful US Navy in an asymmetric naval battle.” El País, March 13, 2026.
4. ​[4] Maritime Security Forum. “Iran’s Islands and Strategic Architecture.” March 21, 2026.
5. ​[5] WANA News. “Trump’s Two Scenarios for Ending the Conflict.” West Asia News Agency, March 31, 2026.
6. ​[6] Iran Watch. “Weapon Programs One-Month Update.” Wisconsin Project, March 31, 2026.
7. ​[7] FPRI Experts. “Options in the Strait of Hormuz.” Foreign Policy Research Institute, March 20, 2026.
8. ​[8] Macgregor, Douglas. “The Coming Conflict with Iran: A Strategic Disaster.” Judging Freedom / YouTube, March 25, 2026.
9. ​[9] Sawhney, Pravin. “Why the US cannot win a war against Iran.” FORCE Magazine / YouTube, March 28, 2026.
10. ​[10] Galloway, George. “The Mother of All Talk Shows (MOATS): The Gulf War Part II?” Galloway Media, March 29, 2026.
11. ​[11] Marandi, Mohammad. “US aggression will lead to its total expulsion from West Asia.” Al Jazeera English, March 30, 2026.

Feroze Mithiborwala is an expert on West Asian & International Geostrategic issues.

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Paul Krugman

In normal times, about 20 percent of the world’s oil production passes through the Strait of Hormuz. That flow has been cut off except for Iranian oil and a handful of other vessels the Iranians are allowing through. This disruption has led to a large spike in oil futures prices:

[https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rGH7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0ddcfe6b-b0e2-42be-8f6f-10cd650a70ab_1518x824.png]

Source: Trading Economics

But this price rise has been speculative, driven by the (justified) expectation of future shortages rather than a current lack of oil. In fact, so far deliveries to markets around the world haven’t declined, because shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to major markets takes 4-6 weeks. As a result there was a large quantity of oil already at sea, outside the Strait, when the war began.

However, this grace period is about to end. The oil crisis is about to get physical. The map at the top of this post shows J.P. Morgan’s estimates of when tankers from the Gulf will stop arriving at various destinations. Deliveries to Asian markets will end this week; deliveries to Europe will end next week.

And once the crisis gets physical, there will no longer be room for jawboning the markets. Since the war began there have been several occasions on which Donald Trump has been able to talk prices down by asserting that meaningful negotiations are underway with his invisible friends the Iranian regime, but that won’t work once the oil runs out. So prices will have to rise to whatever level destroys enough demand to match it to the available supply.

PS: The United States buys little oil from the Persian Gulf, but we can expect U.S. oil prices to rise in response to shortages around the world.

So how high will oil prices get? I’ve written about this before, but I thought it might be useful to update the analysis, emphasizing how uncertain the prospects are and the real risk of extremely high prices.

There are two big sources of uncertainty. The first is that we don’t know how much oil will manage to escape the Gulf. Right now oil supply is drastically curtailed, but not by the full 20 million barrels of oil a day that used to flow through the Strait of Hormuz. The Saudis have a pipeline that lets them ship some of their oil to the Red Sea; Oman has a pipeline that takes some oil around the Strait. And Iran has been letting millions of barrels of its own oil pass. Whether all these “leakages” will continue depends on the course of the war.

Second, how high must prices rise to choke off a given amount of demand? We know from previous oil shocks that the price elasticity of demand for crude oil is low — that is, even large price increases only cause small declines in demand. But in the current crisis it matters just how low that elasticity, a number that is impossible to estimate with any precision, really is.

So, what is a reasonable range of possibilities? I’ve considered three scenarios for the disruption to oil supply: a “low disruption” scenario in which supply is reduced “only” 8 percent from normal levels, a medium scenario in which supply falls 12 percent, and a high disruption scenario in which it falls 16 percent. I’ve also considered three alternatives for the price elasticity of oil demand: “high” at 0.2, medium at 0.15, and low at 0.1.

And I assume that in the absence of this war the Brent price would be $65 a barrel. In that case I get the following matrix:

[https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3Occ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7e663eca-5da8-42d1-a02b-dc125b778ac1_1240x488.png]

Readers should know that Robin Brooks has done a conceptually similar analysis. My numbers, however, are more alarming — and I believe that you should be alarmed.

In particular, by presenting the analysis this way, I risk conveying the impression that we should assume a moderate, medium/medium outcome. That is not at all a safe assumption.

After all, what would it take to get to my “high disruption” scenario? That’s what might happen if Iranian oil exports are cut off, say by a U.S. attack on Kharg Island, and if supply via pipelines is hindered by Iranian retaliation against other Gulf oil facilities as well as attacks by the Houthis on Red Sea shipping. That is not an outlandish possibility. It is, in fact, exactly what we should expect if the Trump administration follows through on what appear to be its current war plans.

And if oil really does go to $200 or more, it’s all too easy to envisage a full-blown global economic crisis, with an inflation surge and quite likely a recession.

Ever since this war began I’ve noticed a sharp divide in sentiment among experts. Finance and macroeconomics experts have been relatively sanguine about our ability to ride out this storm. But talk to or read energy experts — people who focus on the physical side of the oil crisis — and their hair is on fire.

I’m mostly a macroeconomist. But my hair is definitely starting to smolder.

MUSICAL CODA

My apologies

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWz9VN40nCA]

Paul Krugman is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

1 April 2026

Source: countercurrents.org