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.

“Why isn’t Iran giving up?” – Trump’s question reveals the Iran debacle

@luxaitor_fitabogado_23

„Warum gibt Iran nicht auf?“ – Trumps Frage zeigt das Iran-Desaster

♬ original sound - Luxaitor fitabogado

Day 17 of the war with Iran. Wait, let me say that again: day 17.

And do you know what is happening right now in the corridors of the White House? Donald Trump is sitting in his office asking his advisors a question that changes everything: Why aren’t the Persians giving up?

The Wall Street Journal leaked it. The most powerful man in the world is surprised. I repeat: surprised. The man who said this war would end very soon. The man who claimed Iran no longer had a navy or an air force.

This man does not understand why Tehran keeps fighting. And here comes the part that kept me awake all night: his advisors are privately urging him to find an exit. Privately. That means publicly they talk about victory, but behind closed doors there is total panic. That is an admission of weakness.

Trump expected a quick victory. A repeat of his 12-day war last June. But reality looks completely different.

After 17 days, Iran is still firing missiles, has mined the Strait of Hormuz and — here’s the kicker — is exporting more oil than before the war. Plus 30%. Let that sink in.

The United States has been bombing Iran for over two weeks, allegedly hitting 6,000 targets, destroying the Iranian navy and disabling the air force. And yet Iranian oil exports are rising. How is that possible? China.

The Chinese take every barrel Tehran offers. No sanctions, no rules, just business. While Trump thought he would bring Iran to its knees, the mullahs rerouted their ships, activated new trade routes, and are making more money than before.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump keeps asking the same question in meetings: why aren’t they capitulating? His advisors have no answer. Or rather, they do have an answer, but Trump does not want to hear it.

The answer is: because the plan has failed. Because the American military can hit targets, but cannot bomb political solutions out of the sky. Because Iran is a very different opponent from Afghanistan or Iraq.

Wait, it gets worse. Trump’s public statements change daily. First unconditional surrender, then “very soon over,” then “almost nothing left to bomb.”

And now this desperate question: why aren’t they giving up? This is not strategy. This is improvisation. This is a president realizing that his biggest foreign policy gamble is spiraling out of control.

Republicans are getting nervous. Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose this war. Oil prices have surged above $100 per barrel, briefly reaching $119.

At gas stations across the United States, people are paying record prices. The midterm elections are coming, and Trump’s advisors know: if the war continues for weeks, we lose Congress.

That’s why the leak to the Wall Street Journal. That’s why the private push for an exit plan. They are trying to gently steer the president toward the exit without him losing face.

But Trump is Trump. He cannot just stop. He has to declare victory, even if there isn’t one.

So he tells the press: “We are far ahead of schedule.” That is Orwellian language. “Ahead of schedule” means, in Trump’s world: we no longer have a schedule because the original plan has collapsed.

And here is the thing: Iran knows it. The Revolutionary Guards issued a statement.

Iran will decide when the war ends.

That is a direct response to Trump’s claims. Tehran is telling the most powerful man in the world to his face: you do not control this war. We do.

And the facts prove them right.

“Stupid Fury”: Trump’s neocolonialism explained by German theologian Bonhoeffer

Milena Rampoldi, March 15, 2026

Since the outbreak of the Usraeli aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran I feel like the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer when he was in the Nazi jail even if my home office in Istanbul is much more comfortable. In his cell, Bonhoeffer started to reflect on the reasons and roots of the brutal Hitlerian regime by understanding that the cause of it was not the maliciousness/the evil but simply the pure and blank stupidity.

The same paradigm can be applied to the presidency of Donald Trump and his epically furious war against the Satanic regime of Iran while in reality it is nothing else than the brutal and headless aggression against a sovereign State in the Mashreq.

“We sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it again. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it.”

In his letters written from jail, the theologian Bonhoeffer affirmed that stupidity was a more dangerous enemy of the good than maliciousness and/or the evil itself. For me personally, this conclusion he made has a strong impact on how to struggle against human rights violations like the US wars against sovereign Muslim states. We experience an important paradigm shift if we abandon the point of view according to which we should struggle against the US-evil and if we instead say that US-stupidity is the enemy of the sovereign Muslim countries of the Mashreq like stupidity is the enemy of political self-determination and anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism.

“The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties, that often happens in war. We're doing this, not for now, we're doing this for the future, and it is a noble mission.”

 However, Bonhoeffer even goes a step further in his reflections by showing that violence is not even capable of opposing to stupidity while it is an effective means when we have to oppose to evil. If we start from the assumption that Trump represents stupidity and not evil, we will understand that we have to change our strategy to oppose to his neo-imperialist children-killing phantasies in Muslim and other (Venezuela, Cuba and more) countries.

Why is stupidity so dangerous in politics? Bonhoeffer has the answer: Stupidity is put into brackets by the majority of people because many think that it is not worth of being considered. And this is a mistake because we then do not understand the essence of stupidity which – if we put it into the words of Bonhoeffer himself – is not an intellectual but a “human” defect.

If we analyse the phenomenon of stupidity from a psychological and then sociological point of view, we understand a fundamental characteristic of it: stupidity appears in groups more than in isolated persons. Trump and his stupidity are part of a system, of an American way of life where taxpayers finance stupidity-driven attacks of girl schools,  museums and hospitals in Iran.

“But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”

If we listen to what Bonhoeffer suggests we need to move from the isolated puppet Donald to the “Epstein” system he is part of. This means that stupidity is not a psychological but becomes a sociological issue. This is why we should establish the so-called “sociology of stupidity” to analyse Trump neo-imperialism to overcome the US occupation of Muslim and other countries.

In a neo-colonialist regime like the United States, the power of the ruling class of the power-hungry AIPAC neo-Zionists of needs the stupidity of the blind US taxpayers to survive because stupidity and neo-imperialist megalomania is the exact opposite of moral courage and struggle against injustice. Stupid people believe in the narrative of the ruling class. And this results in the persistence of a U.S. neo-colonialism shaped by the Zionist 2.0 regime driven by Eretz Israel phantasies. Here in the following, I would like to translate the section taken from Bonhoeffers letters written from jail entitled “Stupidity”[1] into English to let readers think about it, to re-shape their own moral courage as we need a war against stupidity and not against evil:

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of good than evil. Evil can be protested against, it can be exposed, it can be prevented by force, if necessary, evil always carries the seed of self-destruction in that it leaves at least a feeling of unease in people. However, we are defenceless when it comes to stupidity. Neither protests nor violence can achieve anything here; using reasoning to oppose stupidity is useless; facts that contradict one's own prejudices need simply not be believed - in such cases the stupid person even becomes critical - and if these facts are unavoidable, they can simply be brushed aside as meaningless and isolated cases. In contrast to the wicked person, the stupid person is completely satisfied with himself; indeed, he even becomes dangerous by becoming easily irritated and going on the attack. We will never again try to convince the stupid person by reasoning since it is pointless and dangerous.

In order to know how we can deal with stupidity, we must try to understand its nature. This much is certain, that stupidity is not essentially an intellectual, but a human defect. There are intellectually extraordinarily agile people who are stupid, and intellectually very slow-witted people who are anything but stupid. We make this discovery to our surprise in certain situations. We get the impression not so much that stupidity is an innate defect, but that under certain circumstances people are made stupid, or allow themselves to be made stupid. We also observe that people who live in isolation and solitude show this defect less often than people and groups of people who tend to socialise or are condemned. So perhaps stupidity seems to be less of a psychological problem than a sociological one.

Stupidity is a special form of the influence of historical circumstances on people, a psychological side effect of certain external conditions. A closer look reveals that every strong external development of power, be it political or religious, strikes a large proportion of people with stupidity. Indeed, it seems as if this is a sociological-psychological law. The power of some needs the stupidity of others. The process here is not that certain - for example, intellectual - human dispositions suddenly atrophy or fail, but that under the overwhelming impression of the development of power, man is robbed of his inner independence and that he now - more or less unconsciously - refrains from finding his own behaviour to the resulting life situations. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn should not obscure the fact that the person is not independent. When talking to this person, you can almost feel that you are not dealing with the person itself, but with slogans, mottoes etc. that have become powerful over it. The person is under a spell, blinded, has been abused and mistreated in its own being. Having thus become a will-less instrument, the stupid person will also be capable of all evil and at the same time incapable of recognising this as evil. Here lies the danger of diabolical abuse. This will enable people to be ruined forever.

But it is also quite clear here that it is not an act of instruction but only an act of liberation that could overcome stupidity. We will have to come to terms with the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, genuine inner liberation will only be possible after external liberation has preceded it; until then, we will have to forego all attempts to convince the stupid. Incidentally, this situation will also explain why, under such circumstances, we endeavour in vain to know what "the people" actually think and why this question is so superfluous for those who think and act responsibly - always only under the given circumstances. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom (Psalm 111:10) says that the inner liberation of man to live responsibly before God is the only real overcoming of stupidity.

Incidentally, these thoughts about stupidity are comforting in that they do not allow us to consider the majority of people stupid under all circumstances. It will really depend on whether those in power expect more from stupidity or from people's inner independence and cleverness.”

The simple conclusion is that neo-colonialist Trumpism and neo-imperialist Donaldism are a serious sociological problem interwoven with stupidity appearing as evil. And from stupidity you can just be freed, stupidity cannot be opposed to with violence, and this is exactly the case when we look at the occupation of the Middle East by the Usraeli army. While the Zionist Israel 2.0 needs implosion, self-destruction and deconstruction, Trumpism and Donaldism need an international war against stupidity.

[1] The passage is taken from Bonhoeffer D., Widerstand und Ergebung: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Haft, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, München 2005.

From Gotham City to Tehran via the Silent Holy City: Artificial Intelligence at War

Antônio Dasmortes, 15/3/2026

The USraeli attack launched on February 28 against Iran – named Epic Fury on the US side and Silent Holy City on the Israeli side – can be considered the second major attack in history planned and partly executed by artificial intelligence, the first being the kidnapping of the Venezuelan president and his wife on January 3 in Caracas. In this operation, the Gotham and AIP (Artificial Intelligence Platform) systems from the company Palantir Technologies played a central role, acting as the indispensable nervous system that allowed the AI “Claude” to analyze massive data and contribute to the planning of the strikes.

The table below summarizes the distinct but complementary roles of Gotham and AIP in this operation.

System	Primary Role	Key Function in the Attack
Gotham	Data Integration Platform	Act as an “intelligence hub” to fuse and analyze disparate raw data (satellites, communications, etc.) on a single platform.
AIP	Secure Operating System	Serve as a single, authorized access gateway, allowing the AI “Claude” to operate and securely analyze classified data within a sensitive military environment.

The Architecture of the Attack: The “Brain” and the “Nervous System”

To better understand their interaction, one can compare the entire system to a human body:

• Palantir (Gotham and AIP) constituted the nervous system. It collected and integrated massive and disparate data flows, estimated at 2.3 petabytes (2,300 terabytes, approximately 120 million documents), from satellites, communication intercepts, human sources, and social networks.
• Claude (Anthropic’s AI) acted as the brain. Connected to Palantir’s nervous system via the AIP, Claude analyzed this data, executed tens of thousands of attack scenario simulations, and proposed optimized action plans to human commanders.

The specific contributions of Gotham and AIP

Their roles were decisive in several key phases of Operation “Epic Fury”/”Silent Holy City”:

• Lightning-Fast Intelligence Processing: Gotham enabled the cleaning, modeling, and extraction of crucial information from raw data in just 90 minutes, a task that would have taken a human team 100 days.
• Precision Targeting: By integrating location data, lifestyle habits, and even bodyguard shift schedules, the system was able to identify precise “windows of opportunity,” such as a 3-minute gap caused by an overlap between a radar blind spot and a guard change. This helped reduce the location error margin for high-value targets to less than 500 meters.
• Anomaly Detection: The AI, via the Palantir platform, was able to analyze minute details, like a 1.2-second stop of a vehicle convoy at an intersection – a signal a human analyst might have missed – which was crucial for locating targets.

In summary, Gotham served as the foundation by transforming an ocean of raw data into actionable intelligence, while AIP provided the secure environment and necessary protocols for the AI Claude to analyze this classified information and actively contribute to the strategic planning of the 11-minute and 23-second lightning strike against Iran.

Below are 3 infographics summarizing the characteristics of the new USraeli war machine.