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.
