An interesting story, from a book about what stopped blackface, includes a footnote about the librarians who hid the books so that they may be found.
Barnes says the librarian admitted that, in 1987, she had personally hidden some of these books because she feared the material would be used by the Ku Klux Klan. […] When we didn’t adequately understand how long blackface was a mainstay in American culture. Because many historians believe that it had died out by 1900, when in fact it only accelerates and increases up through the 1970s. And so if you just say, “Oh, it just died out. It was no longer in fashion,” then what you’re losing is the incredible, dangerous, and brave work of thousands of Black and white mothers across the United States in the 1950s and the 1960s, of students who stood up during Jim Crow America and said, “This is not OK. We are humans. We deserve dignity. And we want you to understand our history.”
The British understood in 1942 that the way to win a war against a propaganda state was radical transparency about your own costs. Openly admitting defeats told the enemy’s population that you were confident enough in the outcome to tell the truth.
While the Nazi regime used puppet broadcasters such as William Joyce — nicknamed Lord Haw-Haw — to spin messages of German invincibility, the BBC was choosing to broadcast detailed news of Britain’s military setbacks.
The logic was structural. If the Allies could openly admit defeats, German listeners concluded they must be extremely confident of eventual victory. The BBC called itself “The Fourth Arm” of warfare. Tales of invincibility project weakness. Confidence comes through when talking openly about losses.
The Trump administration is running the opposite play, dismissive of history. The evidence is piling up that it’s for exactly the reason the BBC understood.
Source: Indian Annual Register, Volume 1, 1945, page 253
Propaganda Podium
On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon podium and told reporters that when casualties are reported, “the press only wants to make the president look bad.” He said it out loud. The man running a war told the country’s journalists to stop documenting dead soldiers.
This was not a slip. Hegseth replaced the Pentagon’s independent press corps last fall with a right-wing roster that CNN described as giving him “kid-glove treatment” from front-row seats. Six military beat reporters, granted anonymity, told CNN the information environment is unprecedented. One summarized: “Lots of chest-thumping, less concrete data.” Another said that in ordinary wartime, the press gets detailed operational briefings once or twice a day. Now:
These days, they put a random tweet or video out with details, with no way for journalists to follow up.
CENTCOM’s casualty accounting tells the same story. On day one, the official line was “no casualties.” That was revised to three dead, then six, as bodies were recovered and wounded died. CENTCOM repeatedly withheld the specific bases, units, and circumstances — citing “operational security” — while omitting locations for recovered remains from its public posts. The Washington Post revealed the six killed were in a tactical operations center in Kuwait that “offered little protection from overhead strikes.” A force protection failure the Pentagon had no interest in publicizing.
Trump told reporters Iran has “no navy, air force, air detection, or radar.” Hegseth declared the US and Israel would achieve “complete control of Iranian skies” within days. This is the Lord Haw-Haw play, not the Fourth Arm play. It projects the thing it’s trying to hide.
Censorship as Coverage
The conflict is widening into its second week across at least twelve countries. Iran has launched strikes against 27 bases where US troops are deployed. The damage is confused, while real and documented:
The US embassy in Kuwait was struck and closed indefinitely. Two Iranian Su-24 bombers nearly reached Al Udeid — the largest US base in the Middle East — before Qatari F-15s shot them down. Kuwait’s military accidentally downed three American F-15Es in a friendly fire incident. Amazon’s cloud data centers in Bahrain and the UAE were hit and remain offline. A Shahed drone struck the runway at Britain’s RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus — EU territory — prompting the evacuation of the surrounding village and protests in Limassol with chants of “British bases out.” Cyprus refused to rule out renegotiating the status of UK bases on the island.
An IRGC general declared that since the UK allowed American aircraft to use Akrotiri, Iran would “launch missiles at Cyprus with such intensity that the Americans will be forced to leave the island.” By March 5, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain were sending warships to defend Cyprus. Europe is being dragged into the conflict whether it wants to be or not.
Iranian drones struck Nakhchivan International Airport in Azerbaijan on March 5, hitting the terminal building. A second drone landed near a school. President Aliyev called it “a terrorist act,” summoned the Iranian ambassador, ordered the army to full combat readiness, and withdrew Azerbaijan’s diplomats from Iran. Nakhchivan sits on the US-brokered “Trump Route” corridor that Iran has long opposed. Turkey condemned the strike. Iran denied responsibility and suggested an Israeli false flag even while an IRGC-linked Telegram channel claimed responsibility.
Reporting is needed more now than ever, as censorship denies the kind of transparency and clarity needed to contain war.
Hormuz is Just Math
The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Kpler, the commodity intelligence firm, puts it plainly:
Insurance withdrawal is doing the work that physical blockade has not — the outcome for cargo flow is largely the same.
Tanker traffic dropped to approximately zero. Over 150 ships anchored outside the strait. Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd suspended transits, rerouting via the Cape of Good Hope at roughly $1 million extra per voyage. Oil past $91 a barrel. Houthi-controlled Yemen resumed attacks on Red Sea shipping, closing the Suez alternative too.
Update: Traffic in the Strait of Hormuz on March 10, 2026. Source: USNI / Vessel Finder
Trump said there are “no time limits” on the war. Hegseth said it “has only just begun.” The stated objective is regime change, which is the same failed objective that produced a decade-long quagmire in Iraq, which ended up being the single greatest strategic gift Iran received in the modern era. Hegseth from the podium:
No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don’t waste time or lives.
Chatham House called this an absence of real strategy:
…wholly predicated on the untested proposition that the Iranian people will quickly rise up — a huge gamble.
As a historian, let me just point out the test would likely reaffirm the colonial-era lessons, that “rise up” doesn’t happen until self-defeating conflicting ethnic divisions are artificially injected. The whole rise-up strategy of WWI was a bust. The Arab Revolt was used as a template and required externally manufactured fractures to ignite, and then it produced Sykes-Picot betrayal rather than liberation.
Reagan ran the same military intelligence play in Afghanistan with the Mujaheddin, promising divine invincibility for religious extremists he fraudulently linked to “our founding fathers.” It created the fanatical and ruthless Taliban who kicked America out.Source: FP. “Above, a giant mujahid with ‘God is great’ written on his jacket is shown defending Islam and God from Soviet assault. The text in the top right says ‘Shield of God’s Religion,’ implying that the faith of the mujahideen will protect him from bullets. “
Promise a population invincibility through belief, use them as instruments of regime change, then abandon them to the consequences. It reads like the explosion of MAGA complaints about Trump in office versus his campaign promises, let alone court cases filed against promises made by Trump University, Trump Vodka, Trump Airline, Trump Casinos, Trump Steak….
The Pentagon’s own sources told Congress there was no intelligence suggesting Iran was planning to attack US forces first. Some senior White House advisers opposed direct action, arguing it would be preferable for Israel to strike first so Iranian retaliation would provide retroactive justification. And now? Even Trump can’t seem to explain why Trump cancelled negotiations to start an unprovoked war.
Iran’s ballistic missile launches and drone attacks are down dramatically. Real capability has been degraded by constant American bombing, just like we saw in the Korean, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. Yet Iran’s outsized threat to the region has never been about a match in direct firepower or speed. It’s an asymmetric minefield that plans to persevere like every place American unilateral force projection failed, keep the Strait closed, keep drones entering Gulf bases, keep widening the conflict into dozens of countries like Cyprus and Azerbaijan and Lebanon, and let the economic math please the Chinese while the Pentagon tells Americans everything is fine.
The Fourth Arm or Haw-Haw
The media blackout we need to understand the most isn’t Iran’s, it’s here at home.
It’s Hegseth standing at a podium built by decades of American press freedom tradition, using it to tell reporters they’re the enemy for recognizing and investigating six dead American soldiers. These soldiers didn’t need to die, and silence about the command failure that caused it only means less respect not more.
It’s CENTCOM releasing chest-thumping meme video montages while withholding where and how Americans died, let alone why America double-tapped nearly two hundred Iranian children — a war-crime death toll that has tripled in three days and is still climbing.
It’s credentialing sycophants and excluding the reporters whose questions the American public is entitled to hear answered.
On the flip side of truth telling are all the spin stories like the giant fiction of Rommel being anything but an impatient selfish hack who took a poison pill to prove he remained loyal to Hitler’s lies. Rommel literally said the coming occupation wouldn’t suit him. These liars went to the grave rather than try to live a truth.
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.
Wouter Basson, known as “Doctor Death”, led the Apartheid government clandestine chemical and biological warfare program designed to kill people who had anti-apartheid thoughts. It was known as Project Coast.
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.
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.
The Emperor of Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) with Brigadier Daniel Arthur Sandford on his left and Colonel Wingate on his right, in Dambacha Fort after it had been captured, 15 April 1941
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?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
