Iran–USA : Watches against time
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The survival of Iran and what remains of the Axis of Resistance after years of assassinations, sabotage, sanctions, bombing campaigns, intelligence penetration, coup attempts, and now direct war should force Washington to confront a conclusion it has worked for decades to avoid. The problem is no longer the inadequacy of American strength. It is the repeated application of American power to environments that the United States understands far less than the adversaries it seeks to defeat. Iran has suffered considerable losses. Hezbollah has been tested. Syria was lost with the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Hamas has been pulverized in Gaza. Iran's supreme leader, commanders and scientists were killed. Still, Iran remains standing, Hezbollah remains a factor, the Houthis can still strangle maritime traffic, and Iraqi militias remain relevant enough to be another potential front. The Axis was damaged, but it bounced back.
It is on this distinction that the American strategy repeatedly stumbles. Washington has an extraordinary capacity to destroy but a much weaker capacity to translate destruction into lasting political results. It can eliminate commanders, raze facilities, temporarily shut down financial networks, intercept shipments, and sanction savings. What he cannot do is determine what grows in the political space left behind. This was the lesson of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, decades of war on terror. Yet each failure produces a demand for a better version of the same set: stricter penalties, smarter ban, more selective engagement, more ingenious efforts to divide one faction from another. New tools are being repackaged, but the assumption that Washington can manage political societies it barely understands, and for which it has even less sympathy, remains intact.
Iran is seizing something of power that Washington is forgetting. Efficiency matters more than expense when conflict lasts for decades. America spends three dollars to accomplish what Iran is trying for three cents. This report is not an accounting statement; he describes an asymmetry. America needs to deploy multibillion-dollar aircraft carriers, aircraft, contractors, supply chains, and defensive systems over thousands of miles. Iran operates in its own neighbourhood. He cultivates relationships for decades, transfers cheap technology, exploits geography, and accepts levels of risk and deprivation that would be politically intolerable in Washington. America operates according to budget cycles and presidential terms. Iran operates through generations.
Iraq should have destroyed the illusion that technological superiority produces political mastery. Iran understood the terrain better than the U.S. ever did, operated with a much larger economy, and became the main strategic beneficiary of a war that cost more than 4,000 U.S. military lives and left tens of thousands wounded. The directed explosive charges that pierced the U.S. armor bore the imprint of Iranian assistance, and Tehran-armed and cultured militias helped bleed the occupation. Washington overthrew Saddam Hussein, dismantled the Iraqi state, spent enormous amounts of blood and treasure rebuilding its institutions, and then watched Iran penetrate much of the political and security architecture that emerged from the rubble.
Iran did not have to defeat the United States in a conventional way. It is enough for him to make the occupation prohibitively expensive, to cultivate the forces that would survive him, and to wait. He emerged with far more influence than he had before the first American tank crossed the border. This is not simply a failure of intelligence or the military. It is a failure to grasp the elementary distinction between possessing overwhelming strength and knowing how to use power on the political terrain of others.
Watches against time
The fundamental Iranian advantage was permanence. Qassem Soleimani commanded the Quds Force for about twenty-two years. By the time Donald Trump killed him in January 2020, Soleimani had remained in the same strategic position through eight CIA directors and nine permanent CENTCOM commanders. American officers came and went. The ambassadors were turning. The administrations changed. The budgets were expiring. Strategies were announced, revised and abandoned. Soleimani remained, accumulating connections, institutional memory, and an intimate knowledge of the same political terrain that his American counterparts had to relearn over and over again. Iran remained on the other side of the border.
The same logic ends up destroying the American project in Afghanistan. The aphorism associated with the Taliban summed up the asymmetry perfectly: "You have the watches, we have the time." America fought according to political and bureaucratic calendars; his adversaries fought according to historical time.
That is why Iran cannot be treated as another state whose political system could simply be decapitated by removing a leader or taking a capital. Iran is a country of more than ninety million people, a major arms exporter in its own right, with mountainous terrain, a strong national identity, extensive institutions, a substantial military-industrial base, and deep experience in irregular warfare. Even under enormous pressure, he has demonstrated the quality that Washington repeatedly underestimates: the ability to absorb punishment without translating military damage into political capitulation.
A serious ground invasion would introduce a danger on an entirely different scale, closer to America's great wars of exhaustion than to the short punitive campaign its planners imagine. Vietnam is relevant not because the terrain or ideology are the same, but because of the political mathematics of attrition. A weaker power does not need to destroy a stronger power; it is sufficient for him to lead the Court to conclude that the cost of the prosecution exceeds the objective which justified the war in the first place.
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Despite the fact that the Iran regime allegedly killed 30-40,000 of its own people , Trump seems to have assumed the population would rise up and overthrow the theocracy. Given the seemingly obvious conclusions of the seeded article, Trumps misunderstanding of Iran has created the quagmire.
Shouldn't that motivate the people to overthrow the government?
The one mistake the ayatollahs didn't make is going soft on repression. The Shah, The tsar, The Bourbon monarchy were nowhere near as repressive or tyrannical as the left wing revolutions that replaced them. In the short term brutal repression can work, but it also can fail (the Thermidorian reaction to the reign of terror in France). Trump thought the Iranians would welcome the opportunity to overthrow their oppressors, but perhaps those who would lead are already dead. Might have to wait another generation.
I think there are serious contradictions within Iranian society. As I showed with some You Tube videos many months ago, daily life in Iran, in the cities, is not that different than other countries. The Iranians are , in the urban areas, a generally educated population. They wish to emulate The West in many ways, they have shopping malls, restaurants and cafes, museums, etc. They know their government is repressive.
But, when their country is attacked from without they agree to circle the wagons, and object to their country being bombed by the United States. They want their freedom but they also want to be unconditionally patriotic.
It seems clear now that Trump misjudged the situation and was basking in his "glory" over Venezuela when he decided to join Israel in starting a war with Iran.
Very few are willing to risk their lives to overthrow a government no matter how repressive. In most revolutions the percentage of people who take to the streets is tiny. That tens of thousands were killed shows just how deep the hatred of the regime and probably either removed or scared the majority of those who would risk their lives.
It's not really the "people" who decide if the revolution is possible. It's the willingness of the soldiers to kill their own that does. The success and failure of revolutions depend on fanatics on both sides. When the government has enough fanatics willing to murder civilians to protect the regime, it will survive no matter how hated it is, absent a leadership coup. When it loses the army, a small group of fanatics can overthrow a government(see the Bolsheviks).
Not understanding the fanaticism and loyalty of the Iranian army to the Ayatollahs was the mistake.
If the first strike had taken religious dictators, it would have been a success. If USA would not go after them, we should not have held back allies willing to do what was needed at the time