The more they hit it, the stronger it gets: the Iranian paradox that escapes imperial stupidity

Tahar Lamri, 16/3/2026

There is a category missing from the debate on the ongoing war against Iran, and its absence explains why those waging it continue to get everything wrong.

Iran is not a partisan movement like the Algerian FLN, which was a front without a unifying dogma - a coalition of nationalists, socialists, communists, conservatives - held together by a single goal: to drive out the colonizer. It is not North Vietnam, which was a State on part of the territory with an exportable doctrine - communism - but dependent on Moscow and Beijing and geographically limited. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis are militias, subnational entities that use guerrilla tactics because they have no alternative: their asymmetry is forced, not chosen.

Iran is something different and historically new: it represents the first historical case of a State structurally adopting the doctrine of partisan warfare as a sovereign strategic choice, combining the legitimacy and resources of a State with the operational logic of a resistance movement. It has a regular army, ballistic missiles, a navy, recognized institutions; it is a Westphalian state in every respect. And yet it has deliberately chosen the doctrine of partisan warfare as its sovereign strategy: saturation with cheap weapons, attrition, conscious acceptance of territorial losses to make the cost unbearable for the adversary. Not because it couldn’t do otherwise, but because it judged this to be the optimal strategy against overwhelming conventional superiority.

This choice has a devastating economic consequence for those who fight it. A Shahed drone costs twenty thousand dollars. A THAAD interceptor costs $12.7 million. In the first week of the war, Iran launched five hundred ballistic missiles and nearly two thousand drones. The math is merciless: poor warfare makes rich warfare pay an unbearable cost: not on the battlefield, but in supply chains, in budgets, in stocks of interceptors that are depleted faster than they can be produced.

But the deepest novelty is not military: it is structural. Iran has institutionalized a contradiction that all liberation movements have had to choose: being a State or being a revolution. Algeria after 1962 chose to be a State and ceased to be a revolution. Cuba tried both and failed. Iran did not: it deliberately built a permanent duality. The regular army is the Westphalian State. The Pasdaran - the Revolutionary Guards - are the permanent revolution, with their regional networks, their ramifications in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, all united not by a secular ideology but by a faith: Shia Islam as identity, memory, foundational trauma. One does not choose to be Shia as one chooses to be communist. It is family, mourning, body. Karbala is not a historical event: it is a cosmological paradigm that repeats itself.

The result is a religious internationalism that is not an alliance between States, not a Leninist International, but a transnational network held together by a common existential grammar that needs no explicit command center to coordinate.

And then the United States and Israel made the greatest gift: they created the pantheon. Soleimani, Nasrallah, Khamenei: every targeted killing they thought would solve a strategic problem produced a martyr who multiplies the network’s cohesion. In Shia theology, the death of the righteous leader at the hands of the oppressor is not a defeat: it is the confirmation of his righteousness. It is the narrative structure of Karbala. A living general can make mistakes, can disappoint, can grow old. A martyr is eternal and perfect. With their missiles, they rewrote the script the other side was waiting for.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has human felicity as its ideal throughout human society, and considers the attainment of independence, freedom, and rule of justice and truth to be the right of all people of the world. Accordingly, while scrupulously refraining from all forms of interference in the internal affairs of other nations, it supports the just struggles of the mustadhafoun (oppressed) against the mustakbirun (oppressors/arrogant ones) in every corner of the globe.

Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Chapter 10, Article 154

But there is one last mistake, perhaps the most serious. Israel struck Hezbollah’s banks (the Al Qardh al-Hassan Institute) and the largest Iranian bank (Bank Sepah). In the Khomeinist Shia world, the bank is not a financial institution: it is the material infrastructure of theology. It is the mechanism through which zakat is distributed, charitable works are financed, the pact with the mustadhafin is maintained—the weakest, the oppressed, Fanon’s wretched of the earth. Khomeini built the revolution’s consensus on this capillary network of material solidarity. Striking it does not weaken the narrative of resistance: it confirms it. It demonstrates, in the daily life of millions of poor people, who the enemies of the weak are. It is the best possible propaganda, carried out by Israeli bombs themselves.

Putting it all together: they are fighting with the logic of conventional warfare - decapitate the structure, cut off funding, destroy infrastructure - a political form that is not a conventional structure. It is a symbolic, social, military, and religious network deliberately built to be indestructible precisely through destruction. Every bomb that falls strengthens the narrative. Every martyr consolidates the pantheon. Every bank struck shows the poor which side the oppressor is on.

And if the Iranian state were to be dismembered or defeated, the Pasdaran without a State - trained, armed, schooled in a culture of martyrdom that depends on no institution to survive - would spread across a region stretching from Lebanon to Pakistan, from Azerbaijan to Bahrain, with ramifications on three continents. No longer contained by any State structure, with nothing to lose, with powerful martyrs and a narrative of resistance stronger than before. A hostile Iranian State can be deterred. A swarm of stateless Pasdaran cannot.

And while all this happens, three signals show how profoundly this war is escaping the narrative control of those who unleashed it.

Turkey expected millions of Iranian refugees fleeing the bombs. Instead, it saw thousands of Iranians crossing the border in the opposite direction, to return and defend the homeland. Not necessarily the regime: Iran. The four-thousand-year-old Persian civilization that cannot be reduced to the equation “regime equals people.” Wounded nationalism produces what years of political opposition cannot build.

And then there is Gaza. Iran is attacked after the world watched for months the Palestinian genocide broadcast live, documented, denied by Western chanceries. For the poor of the earth, for the global South, for anyone who feels on the side of the humiliated, the sequence is readable and brutal: those who defended the Palestinians are now bombed by the same ones who armed those who massacred them. In the global imagination of the damned, Iran has become something that goes far beyond regional politics or Shia theology: it is the promise that one can resist, it is the symbolic revenge of those who never had justice. That solidarity has no confessional or geographical borders.

Finally, there is China. Its strategists are not watching the war: they are conducting the most detailed possible assessment of actual USAmerican capabilities in high-intensity conflict conditions. Every THAAD interceptor fired, every Tomahawk launched, every day of war is data on the logistical and industrial endurance of the adversary they will have to face, one day, in the Pacific. They see stocks running out, production times failing to keep up with consumption, the supply chain under pressure. They are taking notes. And they don’t need to fight to win this war: they just need to wait for USAmerica to run out of ammunition.

This war cannot be won. It can only be widened. And the world knows it.