The Persian Gulf World War

“Sing in me goddess, of the rage of Achilleus, which brought great suffering to the Achaeans and sent many great souls down to Hades, their bodies left to become the food of frogs and dogs…”

So begins the opening of the Iliad, perhaps the world’s first great anti-war work, a work which contrasts sharply with the endless hagiographic accounts of kings and princes’ greatness which litters the soil of Africa and the Middle East. In their unparalleled wisdom, our leaders have called the current war on Iran “Operation Epic Fury.” Besides the crude manosphere language (“epic” is one of the favorites of these men who have never read a piece of epic poetry) it rhymes with the ancient insight of Homer: enraged men who imagine themselves gods dig their own graves.

 

Tehran is burning.

Enter the American President and Israeli Prime Minster. One of them a blundering oaf who imagines himself king but cannot for the life of him use the powers at his disposal with enough care and forethought to accomplish this eminently reachable goal. The other, a calculating génocidaire whose plots have finally come to fruition. One seeks only his own glory, the other imagines glory in the the mass production of gravesites. One is intoxicated by his unique success in kidnapping the leader of Venezuela, the other is intoxicated by his unique success in committing the most heinous crimes imaginable and getting away with it. And so they have unleashed war for…confusing and inconsistent reasons, but war they have unleashed.

 

Secretary of State and would be dictator of Cuba Marco Rubio announced that this war was a preemptive war because, you see, Israel was going to strike, and then Iran would strike back on US targets, and so the US had to join the strike. Or perhaps, according to Secretary of Defense Hegseth, this is about dominance and taking out missiles. Maybe the war is because the Iranian people yearn for freedom. Maybe the war is not a war at all, but a “major combat operation.” Or maybe it is about the US losing the Iraq War and somehow that being Iran’s fault. Perhaps it is about the Hostage Crisis that we thought Reagan had resolved. Or even the Marine barracks bombing. Maybe it is about terrorism. Or women’s rights. It is about regime change—but not really, just the annihilation of the regime. Maybe the people should rise up, like the President said on day one, or maybe they should wait, as he says now it is too dangerous.

 

The Administration has been rightly lampooned—mostly by its own MAGA influencer base—for the shifting sands of its justifications. The fact of the matter is this is the most consequential foreign policy decision that has been made since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This is the big one. Anti-war leftists have marched against a hypothetical war for two decades now. Armchair military nerds and sophisticated Pentagon war planners have long concluded that it cannot end well and too often ends in an impossible ground invasion…or the use of nuclear weapons to compel Iran’s surrender.

 

While the warlords talked a big game about justice for the thousands of protesters slaughtered in the streets by the Iranian government, they opened the war by slaughtering almost 200 little children at a girls’ elementary school. Investigations by multiple journalistic outlets have confirmed that this was a deliberate administrative massacre. One might call it an act of terror. Prime Minister Netanyahu proudly announces the “Dahiya Doctrine” is now in play for Tehran: that is, they plan on flattening entire neighborhoods rather than concentrating on military or political targets. The beautiful ancient city of Tehran is being made to resemble Gaza.

 

Mass graves for the Elementary School massacre in Minab.

The war has spread across over a dozen countries. The US Navy sank an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka. Iranian strikes have hit as far away as Cyprus and targeted British and French military installations in multiple locations. The Gulf Arab monarchies have been hit the hardest and are panicking as their supply of anti-missile weapons is dwindling and Washington is hoarding what it has to defend itself and shield Israel from the consequences of its actions. Washington is also running out of munitions generally, having supplied them to Ukraine and Israel for 4 years in a row without shifting to wartime production and so they are shifting their strategy to the usage of “gravity bombs” or, as they were once called, “dumb bombs” that are far more indiscriminate. Protesters storming embassies and consulates in Karachi and Baghdad have been shot. Bahraini protesters have been throwing Molotov cocktails at police.

 

Energy infrastructure, water desalination plants, swanky hotels, and critical airports have been stricken by Iran’s missiles, rockets, and drones. Thousands of wealthy influencers, missionaries, tourists, and others are stranded as flights have been grounded across the Middle East. Christian Zionists are planning to repeat Jesus’ journey to Egypt in order to escape the rockets striking Israel. Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem seem to be continually paralyzed by the attacks. Iran is overwhelming the interceptor capacity of Israel and the US with $20K drones being shot down by $4M missiles—missiles that are not easily replaceable. Eventually, the shields will fail. Already the Americans are pulling their defense systems out of Korea leaving them vulnerable to a potential conflict. Their facilities in Bahrain have been hit hard as have multiple airbases. In Kuwait the chaos led to Kuwaiti air defenses shooting down multiple F-15Es at the cost of $300M to the American taxpayer. Meanwhile, Iran has all the time in the world and can make dozens of drones a day.

 

The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Lloyd’s of London has spoken, so insurance is canceled for shipping. The US has promised to step in to insure the ships now and offered to escort them, which would make large slow targets. The damage is already done, however, as the flow of energy has halted—as has the flow of food into the Gulf monarchies. Iraq, lacking excess storage capacity, has begun to cease pumping oil from many of its sites. Already one Saudi oil facility has been struck. Multiple ships in the Gulf have been hit. Energy prices are already soaring. Asian stock markets are rumbling.

 

For his part, the furious would-be-king in the White House did not understand that any of this was possible. Reporting suggests he was shocked and incredulous at the strikes on the Gulf Arab monarchies, not comprehending the role they play in the regional hierarchy and thus the rationale behind making them pay for Washington and Tel Aviv’s war of aggression. Now the White House is broadcasting its intent to arm Kurdish rebels and briefing Senators on the possible use of ground troops. To be clear, the United States does not have the manpower, not with all the Reserves and all the Guard, to invade and occupy Iran. Iran is too big, too mountainous, and the potential resistance too large. With 80% backing from the Iraqi population, a much more capable US military was unable to subdue Iraq. Even if support for an Iranian insurgency is only that 20%, that is 20% of 93 million people instead of 20% of 25 million. There is no scenario that permits the United States to invade and occupy Iran without a draft and a mobilization on the scale of the Second World War.

 

And that seems to be what we are in today, the Persian Gulf World War. It might not shape up to be all that—a coup might happen, some kind of negotiated off-ramp might be accepted, but for now it is trending towards Trojan War timetables. Havoc has been spoken and the dogs of war are loose. If the United States and Israel truly want to negotiate with new leaders, they will have to stop killing them. For now, they have announced no intention to do so. Iranians have learned that every diplomatic engagement with the United States was simply a ploy for war. This is now existential. The Iranians who dreamed of a quick end of the regime have been dealt a cruel blow: they, who bravely faced the bullets of their own government, now face annihilation at the hands of their would-be liberators.

 

The United States has only recently overseen the betrayal—for the upteenth time—of its Kurdish allies in Syria. Now it plans to deploy more Kurdish fighters, but this will, as it did in Iraq and Syria, trigger the ire of Istanbul. Any attempt to deploy US forces through Iraq will be met with hostility from the pro-Iranian Shi’ia government that US colonialism installed in Baghdad. There is no scenario that makes this logical—but the Americans are going ahead with it. Israel, for its part, has taken this opportunity to invade Lebanon once again. With conflict in Southeast Asia, the Pakistan-Afghan War, and the blockade of Cuba, a line of war now stretches over much of the planet.

 

Whether this ends with a bang or a whimper is largely up to the the vicissitudes of fate and chance now. The tragic horror of the Iliad shows how war driven by men intoxicated with delusions of their greatness and motivated by grievance and atrocity can only lead to ruin. Troy burned, its women and children were massacred or enslaved, and the “victorious” Achaeans largely went home to their own series of betrayal, death, and sorrow. Perhaps we are experiencing a new “epic” after all.