The World Health Organization has verified 13 attacks on healthcare facilities in Iran since February 28. Four healthcare workers dead. Twenty-five injured. Four ambulances hit. The Iranian Red Crescent reports 13 medical facilities and nine Red Crescent centres damaged or destroyed. The Valiasr Burn Hospital — a facility that treats people with the injuries this war is producing — has been rendered inoperable.

U.S. Central Command’s official statement:

We have never — and will never — target civilians.

Both statements are true simultaneously.

And that’s the point, for Hegseth.

The Mechanism

The hospitals aren’t hit by accident. They’re hit by architecture. Gandhi Hospital in Tehran was damaged when Israeli strikes hit the state television buildings and communications antenna next door. The actual target was infrastructure. Gaza observers will note the pattern of Israel saying children aren’t being targeted, and there certainly isn’t an extermination plan, while also rapid increases in dead are from drones that chase children until they are hit in the head.

Former Dutch army commander Mart de Kruif said the sheer number of children shot in the head or chest made the claim of “accidents” implausible. “This is not collateral damage. It is intentional,” he said.

The Tehran hospital was in the blast radius. Khatam al-Anbiya, Motahari, and Valiasr are all in the same neighborhood as the Iranian police headquarters, which was the stated target.

So CENTCOM can say it doesn’t target hospitals. It targets the buildings next to hospitals, with weapons whose blast radius includes hospitals, in a campaign whose rules of engagement are in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own words:

…designed to unleash American power, not shackle it.

The shackles he’s describing are the Geneva Conventions.

• Distinction
• Proportionality
• Precaution

That’s the legal architecture the United States built, championed, and taught the world to depend on it for stability and predictability. Hegseth now calls stability a “tepid legality” while he commits random and obvious war crimes. He frames the laws of armed conflict as purely political.

A girls’ school in Minab is bombed by America, scared children killed while waiting together to be picked up and taken home to be safe. 175 dead. The U.S. keeps bombing, and says its 24/7 pinpoint precision experts are “investigating.” Israel, the most advanced surveillance apparatus in the world, says it’s not aware of any strikes in that area.

The school is still rubble.

Your Doctor, Your Bodyguard, Your Chef

The United States drafted the Geneva Conventions and created the United Nations Charter. It wrote the War Powers Act. It built NATO on the premise that collective security replaces unilateral aggression. It designed the rules-based international order and marketed it as civilization’s greatest achievement because it is the thing that separated the postwar world of diplomacy from the ruthless war mongering empires that came before.

Every one of these instruments is now being violated by America, operated by the people entrusted to maintain them. Imagine the mob-busting NYC Mayor LaGuardia leaving office and the mob taking control of Gotham’s police to enact revenge.

The Senate voted down its own War Powers authority. The House failed 212-219. The UN Security Council convenes in emergency session and the country with the veto is the country doing the bombing. The ICRC visits the damage sites and issues statements. The WHO verifies and counts. None of it changes the operational tempo, because every accountability mechanism was designed on the assumption that the architect of the system would not be the aggressor. The antibodies recognize the attacker as self.

This is the doctor who kills his own patients. The parent who starves her own child. The bodyguard who punches his own client. The protective relationship is the attack vector.

The patient doesn’t suspect the doctor — not because the patient is naive, but because suspicion would make the relationship impossible. You cannot receive medical care while simultaneously defending yourself against the physician. The dependency is the vulnerability. The care relationship requires surrender, and the surrender is what makes the killing possible.

That’s what distinguishes this from ordinary imperial aggression. When a foreign power attacks you, you know you’re under attack. You can resist, flee, organize, appeal to allies. The relationship is legible. Enemy is enemy. But when the protector attacks, the victim’s first instinct is to seek more protection — from the same source.

Gulf states are getting hit by Iranian retaliation from a war launched from their territory. Their response is to request more American interceptors. Countries whose security depends on U.S. alliance commitments are watching the U.S. shred international law. Their response is to reaffirm the alliance. Congress gets bypassed on war powers. The institutional response is to hold a vote they know will fail, then proceed to other business.

The patient being harmed by the doctor asks the doctor for more medicine.

The Monroe Inversion

The Monroe Doctrine, as articulated in 1823, was defense of less powerful states against more powerful ones. The newly independent republics of the Western Hemisphere asserting that the era of European colonial reconquest was over. Monroe’s message to Congress was a warning to aggressive war mongering imperial powers: stay out. The United States was positioning itself alongside those states against colonial aggressors, to end the bully threats.

Now look at the current map.

• Venezuela — a huge military raid wiping out infrastructure for millions, costing billions, just to arrest one man, a sitting head of state.
• Iran — a massive air campaign to repeatedly assassinate leadership into a complete vacuum and destroy infrastructure, with a Trump puppet appointment as the stated objective.
• And Trump told an Inter Miami crowd at the White House on Thursday that Cuba is next, “just a question of time.” So, Cuba — an economic blockade explicitly designed to starve a population into regime change, what the New York Times called “the United States’ first effective blockade since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

A distant American military dictatorship using overwhelming force to take over and set the internal governance of sovereign states.

That is structurally identical to what Monroe had aimed to prevent. The Spanish crown was sending armadas to recapture its colonies, France was installing Maximilian in Mexico, the Holy Alliance was asserting the right to reimpose order on states that had chosen self-governance.

The United States now has been taken over by the very thing that it had defined itself against. And it’s using the institutions it built for defense, as the instruments of attack. To be fair, it’s been said in America forever that a standing military, as opposed to a volunteer one, would have this exact danger.

Munchausen

Munchausen by proxy: the caretaker creates the illness, manages the treatment, receives praise for the caregiving, and the patient never gets better because getting better was never the point. A simpler explanation is the mob on Long Island tells the restaurant owner to pay a protection fee or there will be big problems tomorrow. The point is the Trump relationship of harmful dependency — because dependency is where the abuse of control lives.

The United States built an international order that required countries to disarm their independent foreign policies, reduce their defense spending, structure their economies around American-guaranteed trade routes, and embed themselves in American-designed institutions.

It was a premise of protection, like the concept of a police department for a city, which created the vulnerability now being exploited by overtly corrupt and cruel cops.

When someone from outside — China, the UN special rapporteur, the ICRC — points at the bruises, the institutional response is the pathological family system: close ranks, deny, reframe. “We have never — and will never — target civilians.” “The protection of civilians is of utmost importance.” The language of care delivered in the act of harm. The doctor’s bedside manner while adjusting the dosage upward.

Hegseth said this week:

This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.

The Valiasr Burn Hospital is inoperable.

The school in Minab is rubble.

Hundreds of children dead.

The WHO is counting. The world is watching patients killed by their own doctor after asking for more medicine.

CNN reported this week that the CIA is arming Iranian Kurdish forces to destabilize Iran further. The White House called it “completely false” while confirming that Trump had spoken to Kurdish leaders — an intentional contradiction.

A former military intelligence specialist told AFP the goal is for Kurdish forces to trigger a “cascading effect” of ethnic violence that overwhelms the Iranian state and multiplies civilian suffering. At the same time, Trump is backing Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah toppled in 1979, as the presumptive ruler — dependent on American aid to suppress the very ethnic divisions Washington is stoking. Pahlavi commands no army and holds no domestic base or democratic mandate. He is a vessel, useful for signing whatever contracts keep him nominally in power.

It’s already starting. When five Iranian Kurdish groups announced a coalition for self-determination, Pahlavi attacked the idea outright, calling territorial integrity “the ultimate red line.”

So Trump arms the very people his chosen ruler calls an existential threat. The contradiction isn’t a blunder — it is the method. Colonial administrators perfected it: arm your subjects against one another, set them to degrading work, and carry off everything beneath their feet while they fight.

My own graduate research on disinformation and the origins of special operations, at the London School of Economics, documented this pattern in the British occupation of Ethiopia.

An intervention sold as “establishing stability” produced revolution and territorial war, then decades of anti-Western blowback the Horn of Africa has never escaped. Iran is being set up to follow.

The Method Has a Name

Mahmood Mamdani at Columbia published Define and Rule in 2012, documenting a system British administrators built after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. They sorted populations into ethnic categories, wrote those categories into law, and then governed through the divisions they had manufactured.

In Sudan, after crushing the Mahdiyya — a revolutionary movement that had united populations across tribal lines — the British carved Darfur into tribal homelands called “dars.” Land and governance rights became exclusive to whoever was classified as native to a given dar. A society of fluid, overlapping identities hardened into a set of legally enforced ethnic containers.

The Mahdiyya was a translocal anti-colonial resistance which “shook the foundations of the Empire to the core.” After it was brutally defeated, Darfurian society was effectively tribalized.

Darfur today is a byword for permanent war, fueled by foreign extraction.

The trick was never simply to divide and rule. Define and rule does the work on its own. You don’t need pre-existing hatreds — you build the administrative categories that make ethnicity the only identity with political weight. After that, ethnic conflict stops being a risk and becomes the architecture, and the architecture is the instrument of control.

Trump’s Iran strategy runs on the same Darfur logic. Arm the Kurds as Kurds, activate Baluchi militants as Baluchis, court Pahlavi as the Persian restorationist. Each faction is handed a role that contradicts the others, so national cooperation becomes impossible and self-destruction becomes the path of least resistance.

Follow the Oil

Philippe Le Billon at UBC has spent two decades mapping how resource geography shapes armed conflict. Point-source resources like oil, concentrated in fixed locations, produce a particular kind of war: control of the production site becomes the whole objective, and the people living on top of it become either recruits or obstacles to be cleared.

Iran’s resource geography is a textbook case.

Khuzestan province generates roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil revenue, and its population is predominantly Arab. The International Crisis Group documented in 2023 that Khuzestan’s Arab minority reads the central government’s chronic underinvestment as systematic discrimination, not mere mismanagement. The New Lines Institute confirmed in February 2026 that local Arabs are shut out of work in the oil and petrochemical industries, with those jobs reserved for ethnic Persians who are paid to resettle on confiscated Arab farmland. As a Khuzestani activist told the ICG:

We live on one of the wealthiest lands on earth.

The same pattern repeats around the map: Baluchis hold the southeast astride the corridor to the Indian Ocean; Kurds the northwest, on the pipeline routes and crossings into Iraq; Azeris the north, against the Azerbaijan frontier.

Fragment Iran along those lines and the result is a cage match — a dozen competing statelets, each parked on resources none of them has the sovereign standing to bargain over collectively.

Chaos is the Extraction Discount Trick

Michael Ross at UCLA worked through data from 170 countries in The Oil Curse and found petroleum-rich states are 50 percent more likely to be run by autocrats and twice as likely to fall into civil war. Oil concentrates power and eliminates the need to tax anyone, which strips away the last incentive for accountability. The petro-state becomes a rentier state, authoritarian by structural necessity.

What is being done to Iran is worse than the oil curse running its natural course. This is the curse engineered from the outside. Pick the autocrat first — Pahlavi — then manufacture the ethnic fragmentation that makes his consolidation look like the only thing standing between Iran and collapse. The trap is the goal.

Paul Collier at Oxford coined the term “conflict trap”: civil war, low income, and dependence on primary commodity exports lock into a self-reinforcing cycle. Once a resource-rich country breaks, it tends to stay broken. The resources keep flowing out at a discount, because armed factions need weapons more than they need fair market value.

That is the business model, and it fits the Trump brand of smash-and-grab exactly.

Congo holds more cobalt than anywhere on earth and has been at war continuously since the 1990s. Jason Stearns, who led the UN investigation into the violence, documented in Dancing in the Glory of Monsters how its politics kept producing leaders without vision, all of them sustained by mineral extraction that financed every side at once. 5.4 million dead. The minerals kept flowing.

Sudan fractured, and the oil fields became the contested border. Libya came apart, and the concessions were carved up among militias. Venezuela got the same treatment from the same administration: destabilize, sanction, prop up an exile figurehead, and build the entire intervention around energy concessions.

Yugoslavia Isn’t Forgotten

Susan Woodward — senior advisor to the top UN official in the former Yugoslavia, special representative of the Secretary-General — wrote in Balkan Tragedy:

To explain the Yugoslav crisis as a result of ethnic hatred is to turn the story upside down and begin at its end.

The real cause was the disintegration of governmental authority. Outside powers recognized breakaway republics, armed chosen factions, and imposed economic conditions that accelerated the collapse — then labeled the resulting violence “ancient ethnic hatreds.”

The hatreds were the output, not the input, produced by political and economic collapse rather than the cause of it. And Western intervention, Woodward showed, made it worse.

Iran maps onto this with uncomfortable precision: a multi-ethnic state with geographically concentrated populations, ground down by sanctions, with outside powers arming particular ethnic factions while professing support for its territorial integrity, fronted by a diaspora figurehead who has foreign backing and nothing at home.

Pahlavi is Tudjman. The Kurdish coalition is the Croatian Defense Council. The “cascading effect” the administration’s own analysts describe is exactly what Woodward spent 556 pages documenting: how a multi-ethnic state dissolves into ethnic war once outside powers start picking favorites.

In Yugoslavia, that cascading effect produced Srebrenica.

Name It

Francesco Caselli and Wilbur John Coleman formalized the economics in their NBER paper “On the Theory of Ethnic Conflict“: the probability of ethnic conflict rises with the share of a country’s wealth that is expropriable. Oil is inherently expropriable. Ethnic boundaries become the enforcement mechanism — they lower the cost of working out who belongs in the winning coalition and who does not.

Ethnicity makes resource expropriation cheaper. That is why resource wars track ethnic lines so reliably.

Berman, Couttenier, and Girard confirmed in The Economic Journal (2023) that mineral extraction sharpens ethnic identity at the expense of national identity. Mining does not build a nation. It manufactures grievance, by making ethnicity the line that decides who benefits and who is left out.

The administration is installing an unelected exile to keep extraction running on favorable terms. To shield him from any real contest for power, it is engineering ethnic conflict across a country of 90 million people sitting on the world’s fourth-largest oil reserves — priming the minorities concentrated on top of those reserves to kill one another.

There are exact words for what this is. Deliberately triggering ethnic violence to deny a people political representation has a legal name. So does engineering a state’s collapse in order to extract its resources at gunpoint prices. The scholarship is not short on vocabulary.

And a broken Iran becomes its own justification — proof, after the fact, that the region was never capable of governing itself. The collapse is engineered precisely so it can later be cited as evidence, the same closed loop that let apartheid manufacture the dysfunction it then pointed to as the reason for control.

Will anyone say the word out loud — genocide — before the next “cascading effect” runs to the conclusion we already know?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth held a Pentagon briefing this morning and complained that media only covers the drones that get through. Six Americans are dead in Kuwait after an Iranian drone penetrated U.S. defenses without triggering a single alert, struck a makeshift operations center at Shuaiba port, and completed its kill chain undetected.

The deaths are the vulnerability assessment. After more than three decades in security, I can tell you: this is very bad news for American defense.

A drone threaded every layer of U.S. defense, found a soft target, and proved the capability gap. That’s not a tragic accident. That’s a successful credibility penetration test, paid for in American lives.

And the results are now public.

What the Troops Say

Three U.S. military officials with direct knowledge told CBS News the operations center was a triple-wide trailer — a shipping container turned into office space at a civilian port, more than ten miles from the main Army base at Camp Arifjan. There was no American counter-rocket, artillery, or mortar system at Shuaiba. No drone defeat capability at all. Requests for additional resources were made.

Support never came.

Two of the sources said they didn’t recall hearing warning sirens before the strike. The sirens had worked all week — but in prior incidents, drones were already inside the base before they sounded.

The dead were from the 103rd Sustainment Command out of Des Moines, Iowa. A reserve logistics unit. Captain Cody Khork, 35. Sergeant First Class Noah Tietjens, 42. Sergeant First Class Nicole Amor, 39. Sergeant Declan Coady, 20 — recommended for promotion, the youngest in his class. They were pushed to a civilian port without organic force protection. Someone signed off on operating from Shuaiba without C-RAM coverage during an active air campaign against an adversary with demonstrated drone capability.

That’s not a defense gap. That’s a command failure.

The OPSEC Disaster

Now listen to what the Secretary of Defense said from the Pentagon podium.

Monday: the drone was “a squirter” that “makes its way through” defenses he called “fortified.”

Wednesday: “This does not mean we can stop everything.”

The troops say there was nothing to stop anything with. The husband of one of the slain soldiers says the building had no defenses. Hegseth is publicly contradicting the people who were there while simultaneously confirming the capability gap to every adversary watching. He’s not managing information. He’s broadcasting failure from the podium and calling it strength then complaining that the press reported what he just said.

This is what telegraphing military weakness looks like. Not the media reporting on the deaths. The Secretary of Defense publicly confirming what American air defense can’t do, where it isn’t deployed, and what gets through, while his own troops are telling reporters the resources they requested never arrived. That’s a huge gap.

Resource constraints are the clearest tell in military history. Quartermaster integrity and strength mean everything in war and Hegseth is openly exposing that he can’t handle the truth.

The Numbers Watching

Approximately 375,000 U.S. military and civilian personnel are assigned to Indo-Pacific Command. About 53,000 in Japan, 24,000 in South Korea, 7,000 on Guam. The Congressional Research Service has noted that much of the INDOPACOM area of responsibility falls within range of PRC conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, and that U.S. bases, personnel, and weapons systems may be at risk.

China’s Rocket Force fields over 1,300 medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles covering the First and Second Island Chains. The DF-26 — the “Guam killer” — can reach every major U.S. installation in the Western Pacific.

A Stimson Center study found that Chinese missile attacks could close runways at forward air bases in Japan and Guam for the first critical days or weeks of a conflict, and that no combination of countermeasures is likely to solve the problem.

Iran just demonstrated that a single drone can thread U.S. air defense architecture undetected. China didn’t need to probe those systems.

They got decisive gap analysis for free.

The drone that did it wasn’t advanced — it was Iranian, likely a Shahed-136. If that technology completes the kill chain, China’s far more sophisticated platforms now have a confirmed baseline. They know the floor of what gets through.

The Drawdown

About 40% of U.S. Navy ships capable of immediate operations are now in the Middle East. The Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was pulled from the South China Sea.

The only U.S. carrier in Asia — the George Washington — is in maintenance at Yokosuka. Japan faces delays in Tomahawk deliveries. Former Defense Secretary Kendall warned that drawing down precision weapons stockpiles “would increase risk in other theaters.”

The U.S. is burning through THAAD rounds and PAC-3 Patriots in the Middle East, which are the interceptors designed to protect the 375,000 troops from competition with China.

China has built over 3,000 hardened aircraft shelters in the past decade. The U.S. has built… wait for it… twenty two.

Chinese analysts are already saying it publicly. As one scholar wrote this week, America’s deep involvement in military conflict in the Middle East:

…inevitably diverts its strategic resources and attention, objectively constraining its capacity to sustain pressure on China in the Indo-Pacific.

Beijing didn’t need to say it. The math says it for them.

The Signal

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine opened his remarks by naming the fallen. He didn’t have two of the names yet because next-of-kin notification was still underway — while Hegseth was complaining about press coverage. Caine acknowledged that troops “remain in harm’s way” and that “the risk is still high.” He’s reading the battlefield. Hegseth is performing for an audience.

Six dead Americans gave a blueprint for exactly how targets now will be painted.

Hegseth’s own words confirmed the capability gap from the Pentagon podium. His pivot to grievance over accountability told every adversary that when U.S. defenses fail, leadership fails too by reaching for a talking point instead of a fix.

And the war consuming the interceptors meant for the Pacific tells China exactly how long this big window stays open.

Epilogue: For Those Who Don’t Recognize the Pattern

Putin did this. He telegraphed Russian military incompetence in Ukraine for years before the 2022 invasion, chest-thumping about modernized forces while his logistics couldn’t sustain operations seventy miles from the border, his commanders lied up the chain, and his air defense gaps were exposed one system at a time. He performed strength from behind a long table as his army bled out in the mud by the tens of thousands. Every intelligence service on earth read the meat grinder signals. It didn’t matter. Putin couldn’t stop performing.

The Greeks had a word for this.

They had two war gods to differentiate them. There was an Ares, who was rushed, aggressive, and a liar, despised even by the other gods, who fought with brute force and bluster. And then Athena, who was measured, strategic, and honest about the battlefield.

Homer has Ares wounded and screaming in the Iliad. Athena barely breaks a sweat. Ares always loses. He just never admits it. As I wrote on this blog in 2006 about Chinese strategic traps to avoid:

Foolish pride will blind men like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gates from realizing that their instinct to call for military action in destabilized regions actually could be a trap set by the Chinese to show the cruel and unusual side of American foreign policy. The military knows this, CIA knows this, a former World Bank chief is saying it, but will a US leader emerge who can understand the pressure to avert self-immolation…?

And now along comes Hegseth:

“Death and destruction from the sky all day.” “We don’t fight fair, we punch down.” “No stupid rules of engagement.” “We’re playing for keeps.” “Four days in, we have only just begun to fight.”

That’s obviously weakness, the Ares of today. With 375,000 Americans in the Western Pacific directly exposed to China doing simple math.

Donald Trump has never hidden his admiration for white supremacist apartheid doctrine. The doctrine has a consistent two-step execution: assassinate the successor first, destroy the resulting state second.

Let’s step back in time for a minute. Patrice Lumumba was killed in January 1961 to prevent a functional post-colonial Congo. When UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld flew to negotiate a ceasefire that would have ended the Katanga secession, his plane was shot down in Northern Rhodesia eight months later by the South African apartheid mercenaries, Belgian colonial officers, and CIA operating as one network. Eduardo Mondlane was killed by a parcel bomb in 1969 because his moderate leadership of FRELIMO made Mozambican independence negotiable, and the Portuguese colonial right and its Western allies feared negotiation more than armed resistance. When Mozambique achieved independence anyway in 1975, South Africa deployed RENAMO to destroy the resulting state. The same sequence played out in Angola with UNITA.

The recurring goal in each case was a failed state by design, because a failed state confirmed the ideology that was manufacturing it.

White House advisers now include Elon Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa and tweets nostalgia for Rhodesia as “a century of civilization,” and Peter Thiel, who spent years under apartheid and has praised that system. Trump’s immigration enforcement architecture was built by Kris Kobach, whose transition vetting documents flagged “white supremacy” as a political vulnerability after he accepted funding from white supremacist groups and employed white nationalists on his campaign. The ambassador to South Africa is a man who spent the 1980s trying to protect apartheid by blocking US contact with the African National Congress.

In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order prioritizing Afrikaner refugees while freezing aid to the Black-majority South African government — citing a “white genocide” conspiracy theory that South African courts, South African political parties, and the South African Human Rights Commission have all dismissed as fiction.

On January 7, 2021 — the day after the Capitol attack — Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Gary Player, who wrote in 1966 that he was “of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid,” describing the country as “the product of its instinct to maintain civilized values and standards among the alien barbarians.” Player’s Johannesburg estate had been acquired by TGS International, a company set up by former CIA agent Ted Shackley — the same covert apparatus that ran operations in Katanga while Lumumba was being delivered to his executioners.

This history is the how and why of an administration now bombing the Iranian succession process. The strategy it has for Tehran is the same derangement it admires so much from apartheid-era Pretoria.

Bombing Successors to Prolong Chaos

The sequence is precise enough to read as a doctrine. CIA intelligence on Khamenei’s location (an old man in ill health, sitting at home with his family) was shared with Israel, accelerating the timeline of a strike that killed the supreme leader along with his children, senior IRGC commanders and political officials gathered at his home. Within 72 hours, Israel struck the Iranian parliament building to prevent assembly. Then it struck Qom, the seat of the Assembly of Experts, the body constitutionally charged with selecting the next supreme leader.

Richard Helms, who helped engineer the 1953 CIA coup in Iran and later served as US ambassador to Tehran, testified before the Church Committee with the clearest possible warning against exactly this kind of operation (Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, S. Rep. No. 94-465, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. Nov. 20, 1975 — Epilogue, testimony of Richard Helms.):

If you are going to try by this kind of means to remove a foreign leader, then who is going to take his place running that country, and are you essentially better off as a matter of practice when it is over than you were before?

The Trump administration has no answer to either question.

There is no evidence it has even considered them.

They started bombing to prevent the end of negotiations. They destroyed the succession to prevent the end of bombing.

Permanent Improvisation Policy

The Kahanist ministers now holding structural power in Netanyahu’s coalition — Ben-Gvir at Internal Security, Smotrich at Finance with authority over the West Bank — require permanent instability.

Stability forecloses annexation. A coherent Iranian state, even a post-theocratic one, could reconstitute as a regional counterweight. A permanently fractured Iran with the IRGC splintered, Kurdish and Baloch separatist movements armed by the CIA, and the clerical succession process physically destroyed serves the Israeli territorial program.

Netanyahu’s own record is mired in Kahanism. For years he kept Hamas financially viable, allowing Qatari funds to flow into Gaza, precisely because a divided Palestinian leadership made a two-state solution structurally impossible. The chaos was the alternative to a peace strategy. The same logic, applied at regional scale, produces the current operation in Iran.

Kahanism requires both — the land and the proof that no alternative was ever possible. A functional Iranian state falsifies the second requirement as surely as it threatens the first.

Trump Exceptionism

Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty — the sovereign is whoever decides the state of exception — illuminates why forever war is a governing strategy.

Permanent war produces permanent emergency. Permanent emergency suspends legal constraint.

The courts that declined to rule on the war powers question, invoking the political question doctrine and standing limits, are the system functioning exactly as the executive branch spent decades engineering it to function.

Netanyahu faces criminal indictment. Wartime prime ministers stay in office. Trump, facing his own accumulating legal exposure, understands this logic intimately. He said so himself, telling ABC that he killed Khamenei as a grudge match.

I got him before he got me.

The president who claims the unilateral right to assassinate a foreign leader preemptively, citing fear for his own life, spent the same year stripping Secret Service protection from Kamala Harris and revoking security clearances for Biden, Blinken, Cheney, and the prosecutors who pursued him. He removed protection from Americans facing documented threat environments. The immunity from consequences is only for Trump.

A personal grudge framing is the only honest assessment. The legal architecture — Article II authority, the 2024 immunity ruling, the hollowed-out War Powers Resolution — was hastily constructed around it after the fact.

Why Chaos? Evidence to Justify More

The Afghanistan war lasted twenty years and transferred roughly two trillion dollars from public accounts to private contractors. The stated objectives — stable governance, functional institutions, a self-sustaining security force — were not achieved. The contracts were fulfilled. Revenue was recognized. By the measure that actually governed behavior, it succeeded.

Iran is far larger, far more complex, and more strategically located as it sits astride the Strait of Hormuz. The procurement pipeline implied by permanent conflict there makes Afghanistan look like a pilot program.

The absence of a plan is the plan. An open-ended operation answers to no endpoint, no congressional authorization, no definition of success that could expire.

The mechanism is based in cruel operational logic. The belief system, raw ideology, explains why that mechanism is indispensable.

You can’t go bankrupt if there’s never an accounting. You can’t go to jail if there’s never an enforcement.

Kahanism holds that Arabs have no legitimate national existence, that Palestinians are not a people, that Islamic civilization is structurally incompatible with self-governance. Inside that framework, a functional Iranian state, a coherent Palestinian authority, a stable Arab democracy anywhere in the region is a falsifying data point. Nazi racial doctrine followed the same logic — Jewish participation in European civic life falsified the premise of inherent incompatibility, so participation itself became the target.

The death and chaos are required as evidence.

Apartheid South Africa operated the same logic with the same precision. The white minority regime understood that a thriving Black-governed neighbor would undermine its foundational claim that Africans were incapable of self-rule. When Mozambique and Angola gained independence in 1975, South Africa responded with a formal doctrine of regional destabilization — arming RENAMO to terrorize Mozambican civilians, backing UNITA through decades of Angolan civil war that killed at least half a million people, and at one point using its proxy forces to deliberately exacerbate a drought into a famine that killed over 100,000. The goal was a failed state on the border, because a failed state confirmed the ideology that manufactured it. Self-sealing.

Robert Moses did the same to the inner cities. Urban renewal demolished the organizational infrastructure of functioning communities — the informal economies, the political networks, the institutions of local order — and installed nothing in their place. The crime wave that followed was predictable. Jane Jacobs diagnosed the mechanism in 1961. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote the report that blamed the family structure. The consequences of deliberate policy became legible as evidence of inherent incapacity. The destruction that produced the dysfunction disappeared from the official account.

The through-line from apartheid South Africa to the current operation is the cordon sanitaire. Apartheid South Africa used that exact term to mean a buffer of deliberately failed states that an ethno-supremacist project requires on its borders. The logic today is identical: no neighbor can be permitted genuine sovereignty, because sovereignty eventually produces the mirror that reveals the actual threat.

The American Christian nationalist layer adds the civilizational frame. Trump calling Khamenei “one of the most evil people in history” is doing theological work, not strategic work. Chaos in Iran reads, inside that framework, as confirmation that Islamic governance is inherently ungovernable. The bombing produces the evidence that the crusader narrative already required.

What Helms Already Told Us

The Church Committee’s conclusions on assassination were bipartisan. They quoted Kennedy:

We can’t get into that kind of thing, or we would all be targets.

They documented eight attempts to kill Castro between 1960 and 1965. They produced Helms’s operational objection, grounded in the predictable consequences of decapitating a state without a successor structure.

Three consecutive presidents — Ford, Carter, Reagan — signed executive orders banning US involvement in assassination. Reagan’s order is technically still in effect. It is a dead letter, rendered null by practiced nullification: bin Laden, then Soleimani, then Khamenei, each step justified by the last, the ladder working exactly as ladders do.

The hardest argument against assassination is operational. The moral case makes itself.

The argument that reaches even people who have dispensed with moral reasoning runs through 1975 Helms testimony: decapitate a state without a successor structure and the vacuum compounds the original problem, every time, with no historical exceptions.

Unless, of course, a power vacuum is a structural doctrine of manufactured state failure as an ideological proof. Then it works as intended.