After the martyrdom of Hajj Qassem Soleimani in 2020, an Iranian cleric made a tongue in cheek remark that Iranians would need to kill Spongebob in order to achieve an equal revenge for the brutal murder of one of the main architects of the entire Axis of Resistance’s military capabilities. The comment, now in the light of the assassination of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, rings true beyond its memetic qualities. The leaders in Iran are statesmen, religious leaders, and scholars, the stature of which do not exist in the United States; Ali Larijani, for example, had written four books on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. All of these leaders, who have refused the safety of bunkers and special treatment, suffer the same fate as their people.
The skies over Tehran were black with poisonous fumes from the joint American-Zionist attacks on Iran’s oil facilities, signaling that the imperialists have entered a qualitatively new stage in their brutality. If the bombing murder of more than 150 little girls in Minab was not enough to whet their appetite for destruction, the gassing of an entire city certainly makes sense by their logic. No longer are we hearing refrains of ‘save Iranian women’ or ‘regime change’; the only refrain that remains is ‘exterminate the brutes’. Yet, for anyone with clear vision and a mind which is not colonized and owned by Zionist television media, it is clear that Iran–despite the catastrophic loss of civilian life–have military capabilities which were vastly underestimated by the imperialists, and has carefully selected their targets in order to inflict the most damage to imperialist interests in West Asia. Americans don’t have heroes, all that’s left are brands, the image of toughness and worse yet they wear their strategic interests on their sleeve. Because the Iranians understand this, they know exactly which brands to tarnish and which strategic interests to hit with their advanced missile arsenal. This essay does not seek to be the most updated or real-time analysis, because in such a fast-paced war that would be a Herculean task, but rather this essay seeks to understand how Iran has been able to build deterrence, maintain its structure of alliances, and to provide an antidote for any defeatist thought which lingers.
While the American, Zionist-owned news media tries to tell us that Iran is sending missiles willy-nilly into the Gulf states and Occupied Palestine, the reality is much more clear for those with eyes to see it. Even supposedly left-of-center outlets like Mehdi Hassan’s “Zeteo” news agency entertain analysis which uncritically talks of Iran sending missiles to the Gulf states, without mentioning that they are US military installations which are hit. European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, among others in the West, has expressed ‘solidarity’ with the Gulf monarchies. In a joint European Union – Gulf Cooperation Council (EU-GCC) statement, Iran’s attacks are seen as ‘unjustifiable’:
“The Ministers strongly condemned the unjustifiable Iranian attacks against the GCC countries which threaten regional and global security and called on Iran to cease immediately its attacks…”
As early as 400 BCE, Sun Tzu put what the Iranians are currently doing into words: “…what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy”. The GCC countries are the backbone of petrodollar recycling schemes where US dollars used to buy oil are recycled back into the US economy in the form of government bonds and investment in military and tech companies which then allows the Federal Reserve to continue printing away our purchasing power at home. What’s more, these sclerotic monarchies are also the rear guard for the Zionist colony; in the politico-military realm, they host American military bases and economically the Abraham accords have facilitated large volumes of trade between the GCC and the Zionist colony. Socioculturally, cities like Dubai serve as an ideological mirage which allows the average stone-faced blue light victim in America to view it as a haven of hotels, casinos, complete with lurid orientalist fantasies about the women ‘available’ there. This aura of safety, insulation from the supposed ‘savagery’ of the rest of West Asia, and bubble of Western consumption habits is all but gone due to the Iranian precision missile strikes. Of vital importance to the entire imperialist strategy, as I have mentioned in previous articles, is the tech economy, particularly data centers. So when we see the Iranians hit two Amazon Web Services data centers in the Gulf, it is not an attack on civilian infrastructure, rather it is an attack on a nerve center of the entire imperialist economy and network infrastructure. As for the Iranian missiles hitting the Zionist colony, these too have destroyed the facade of “Israeli” invincibility and the entire Zionist security doctrine. Military bases, radar stations, air and naval bases, command and control centers, as well as economic interests such as the Tel Aviv diamond district have been hit with Qadr, Khoramshahr, and Khaibar Shekan missiles. So when Kallas and other American lackeys declare their ‘solidarity’ with the GCC countries and “Israel”, it is because they know that the Iranian strategy is effective, and is actually hitting targets which form an integral part of the imperialist architecture of control in West Asia.
What of the response in the American government? Contradictions continue to become antagonistic in the MAGA camp, with former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene criticizing the war as ‘Israel’s war’ and even citing the bombing of the Minab school girls. The ‘Israel’s war’ narrative has rhetorical benefits but it totally misses the woods for the trees in the sense that the genocide in Gaza has exposed to the whole world that “Israel” and the USA are one large settler colonial homunculus where the US is clearly the senior partner. In the case of MTG and other conservatives, blaming “Israel” fits into the great replacement and other conspiratorial lines of thought. Per usual, the Democrats are totally flaccid, and represent one wing of a bipartisan policy which calls for more wars, and more de-development of the global south. Their latest protest is that Trump ‘does not have a plan’ for the war. While this is certainly something to consider, the hyperfixation on the subjective character of Donald Trump without a structural critique of how he came to power has achieved nothing for the Democratic Party. The refrain of “orange man bad” is the extent of their politics, and for all their whining, they are leading the global working class like lambs to the slaughter.
By way of a conclusion, the importance of naming the structures which shape this war cannot be overstated. Iran has been under siege for 47 years for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 did not shy away from allying itself with the revolutionaries of the global south, such as those in the DPRK, Burkina Faso, Nicaragua, Cuba, Grenada, and most importantly, Palestine. Relatedly, Iran’s pledge to support Palestinian resistance until liberation has been and continues to be a thorn in the side of imperialist designs for West Asia. To this end, after the western backed Iraqi invasion, Iran has forged a path of self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency has led them to become a major industrial power and a center of accumulation capable of challenging Zionism and imperialism.
Through this independent path, the entire Axis of Resistance has been forged as a force which is capable of liberating the region, as we see through more than 60 waves of attacks on the imperialist infrastructure in 23 days at the time of writing. While “Israel” is pushed further into a corner, and the U.S. is desperate for any shred of legitimacy or signal of success, the Arab-Iranian region is once again plunged into a war where the outcomes are limited. Victory for the U.S. and the Zionists means a totally de-developed Iran, split into rump states incapable of resistance. Victory for Iran is deterrence, and the ability to return to the negotiation table with bigger demands such as the reduction of western military installations in the region. Until then, the fronts in Lebanon, Iran, and Palestine are opened, and working people suffer the greatest costs.
Hanna Eid is a Palestinian American writer, researcher, and a Union electrical worker. His writing concerns mainly imperialism and anti-imperialism in West Asia and West Africa.
source: Black Agenda Report