Misguided fury: America’s war on Iran could boomerang in a way it doesn’t seem to realize
Beneath the stated justifications of any war in history—righteous causes, nuclear threats, regime changes—the bedrock truth is the same. Conflict is and has always been a quest for resources. The Iran war is merely the latest chapter.
What distinguishes it is not the violence itself, but what has been abandoned to prosecute this war.The blitzkrieg delusion: Heady after the one-sided bombardments of Gaza and Tehran and kidnapping of a sitting head of state, US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have convinced themselves that similar tactics would crush Iran within hours. Three weeks into an ever-enlarging conflict, that figment has been brutally dispelled. Consider what Iran represents as a theatre.
At over 90 million people, its population exceeds the combined populations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan at the time of their respective US wars. Over 4 million of its citizens live across the West—a politically engaged diaspora now watching their homeland burn. Iran’s landmass is larger than all three of those killing grounds combined.
A nation of that size, with thousands of years of civilizational memory, cannot be pummelled into submission.The American war machine has been weakening through a decade of West Asian entanglements and a grinding proxy war in Ukraine. Structurally, it has an Achilles heel that weapons cannot compensate for: a decaying democracy’s intolerance for body bags and economic pain. Every increase in war casualties or inflation erodes Trump’s domestic support even within his base.
Pandora’s Box: Killing Ali Khamenei has not decapitated the Iranian state. It has decentralized it, creating something more dangerous than a unified enemy. A headless movement cannot be
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