They Underestimated Iran — Not Just Militarily, But Also Morally and Spiritually
Will Trump send Marines to their watery graves off Hormuz…“just for fun”? Will he declare victory and withdraw? Will he attack more energy infrastructure and watch Iran do the same to US allies and “Israel”? More ship sinkings and infrastructure annihilation might be “fun” for Trump, but for the region and the world, not so much.
Trump may be having fun, or pretending to. But every five minutes he contradicts himself. The Commander-in-Chief of the Epstein Empire doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea what he’s doing.
Why is Trump so confused? Is it senile dementia? His drooling narcissism is getting more and more blatant. Some health experts argue that the Orange Rapist is in severe decline and may have only two to four months to live.
In any case, it’s long past time to invoke the 25th amendment.
Or maybe it’s his advisors who are demented? Trump claims that Kushner, Witkoff and Hegseth assured him that regime-changing Iran would be a cakewalk. Are those three stooges deranged, or just dumb? One thing we know for sure is that all three have only superficial knowledge of Iran and its region.
Did any non-idiots—people who know something about military affairs, West Asia in general, and Iran in particular—expect Iran to fold? Were any actual experts surprised by Iran’s highly effective campaign of self-defense?
They’re sure starting to sound surprised. The mainstream media and its credentialed specialists have been saying that Iran is on its last legs ever since the war started on February 28. Lipsticking the proverbial pig is their job. But as the reprisals and counter-reprisals drag on with no end in sight, and the global economy starts to implode, the chattering class has been admitting, sometimes tacitly and sometimes directly, that somebody somewhere seems to have underestimated the Islamic Republic of Iran.
How could experts be so wrong? The likely outcome of this war was not exactly rocket science. I am neither an Iran expert (I don’t speak Farsi) nor a military expert, but I’ve been accurately predicting the all-too-predictable course of this kind of war since around 2003, when I learned how Gen. Paul Van Riper led Iran to a stunning victory over the US in the 2002 Millennium Challenge war games exercises. Since then, the more I learned about Iran, the more I realized that actual Iranians would outperform Van Riper if it came to that.
Though I’m no Iran expert, neither am I ignorant. I’ve been interested in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution. As a left-leaning anarchist college kid disgusted with the America that had allowed Kennedy’s killers to take over the country unchallenged, I found Khomeini’s project intriguing. When I converted to Islam (tendance Moroccan Maliki-Sufi) in 1993 I became even more sympathetic to Iran’s attempt to implement Islamic values in the political sphere.
In December 2003 I studied 9/11, concluded that the attack on New York and Washington had been a neocon coup d’etat—and realized that Iran, the biggest obstacle to Zionist regional hegemony, was on the chopping block. I revisited my earlier interest in the Iranian revolution, and grew ever-more-sympathetic to its policies and objectives. After a few years combining teaching with 9/11 info-activism, I was driven out of the academy as “that 9/11 truth professor on Fox News,” which left me with nothing better to do than read, speak, and write about the Zio-American war on the Middle East.
As a notable American dissident, I was invited to a conference in Iran in 2013, then re-invited at least once every year until 2019, when the FBI told me I would be arrested if I attended the next conference. I got to know some of Iran’s leading intellectuals, including the late great Nader Talebzadeh, the scholar of Iranian Shia political theory Blake Archer Williams, and professors including Foad Izadi and Mohammad Marandi. I also conversed with other brilliant English-speaking Iranians based outside the country, including the leftist broadcaster and author Ramin Mazaheri. Thanks to those contacts, I learned what the smartest, best-informed Iranians thought about the ever-looming Israel-driven US war on Iran. I compared those viewpoints to those of the best-qualified American experts, including my podcast guests Flynt and Hillary Leverett and Gary Sick. And of course I looked at what the neocons advocating war with Iran were saying. The upshot: The neocons were blowing smoke. The US would get thrashed if any American president were stupid enough to listen to neocons rather than experts.
Since 2015 I’ve been warning that Trump might be that stupid. Or, more precisely, that Trump is a lifelong Kosher Nostra asset selected as a prospective president due to his hostility to Iran—and his potential willingness to risk World War III by attacking Iran for Israel. When Trump lured Gen. Soleimani to Baghdad under cover of fake peace negotiations, then murdered him, in January 2020, I was one of the few pointing out that Iran held escalation dominance over the US and could have responded far more forcefully. In other words, Trump’s reckless move had risked World War III, and only Iranian restraint had limited the damage.
Then again last June, Trump and his owner Netanyahu risked World War III by bombing Iran. And once again, they launched a dastardly surprise attack under cover of fake peace negotiations. Iran responded more forcefully this time, but still showed remarkable restraint by accepting a ceasefire after twelve days.
Underestimating Iran by Interpreting Morality-Based Restraint as Weakness
Some Western strategists seem to have made the fatal mistake of misinterpreting Iran’s restraint—its willingness to limit damages after the Soleimani murder and the June sneak attack—as weakness. These strategists do not understand the moral and spiritual framework of the Islamic Republic of Iran. They think “Iran must be pursuing nuclear weapons, because (psychopathic) game theory says that’s what a player in their situation has to do.” They think “If Iran could really close the Strait of Hormuz and acquire escalation dominance, they wouldn’t have backed down so easily after we killed Soleimani and bombed them last June.”
From Islamic Iran’s point of view, showing restraint is a sign of strength, not weakness. Insecure bullies, like Israel, are the ones who don’t show restraint.
Iran scrupulously follows the Qur’anic version of just war theory, which is very similar to the Christian and secular versions. Islamic just war theory begins with the Qur’anic precept “Fight those in the way of God who fight you, but do not commit aggression: God does not like aggressors.” This is the famous non-aggression principle that libertarians make the cornerstone of their philosophy. It is also the cornerstone of the Islamic approach to human conflict.
Iran’s leaders are more scrupulously Islamic than those of any other nation, with the possible exception of Yemen. That is why they have gone far out of their way to ensure that nobody could possibly see them as aggressors. Since 1979 the overlapping American and Zionist empires have been committing aggression against Iran. It went into high gear in 1980, with the US essentially ordering the CIA hitman-turned-strongman Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. That war lasted until 1988, when Iran had won back all its stolen territory, at the cost of up to a million lives. After that war, the US continued to arm and train terrorists who have been attacking Iran ever since, murdering scientists, political leaders, and tens of thousands of ordinary civilians.
While refusing to commit aggression, and always only waging defensive war, Iran has always made sure its responses to aggression are proportional. This proportionality is based on Qur’anic guidance: “Whoever attacks you, attack them in like manner as they attacked you.” (2:194, 2:190).
Along with proportionality, Iran has gone to extreme lengths to try to achieve peace whenever the enemy is willing to stop fighting. This, too, is a Qur’anic precept: If they stop fighting, you stop too.
- Surah Al-Baqarah (2:192-193): “But if they cease [fighting], then Allah is Forgiving and Merciful” (2:192). “Fight them until there is no more fitnah [persecution/oppression]… But if they cease, let there be no hostility except against the oppressors” (2:193).
- Surah An-Nisa (4:90): “…if they keep aloof from you and do not fight you and offer you peace, then Allah does not allow you any way against them”.
- Surah Al-Anfal (8:61): “If they incline towards peace, then you also incline towards it and put your trust in Allah”.
Some Israeli-occupied Americans, who know nothing about Islam, have interpreted Iran’s restraint as a sign of weakness. For example, when Trump killed Gen. Soleimani in 2020, Iran could have struck back much harder than it did, but chose not to for moral reasons. Rather than the kind of massive, lethal response that could have triggered the same all-out war we are in now—a war that Iran has always known it will win—the Iranians warned the US and then struck two bases in Iraq, Ain al-Asad and Erbil, causing over 100 traumatic brain injuries to US soldiers but few if any deaths. Iran’s desire to avoid all-out war was moral: It preferred to avoid or minimize the harm to life and property that war inevitably brings. But Americans and their Zionist occupiers have no conception of moral behavior, so they assumed that Iran only wanted to avoid war because it feared it would lose. Nothing could be further from the truth, as we are seeing now.
Just as Trump had lured Soleimani to Baghdad in 2020 under a false pretext of negotiations, only to strike him dead, the US president and his owner Netanyahu repeated the same ruse last June. Trump instructed negotiators to fool the Iranians into believing that they basically had a deal, causing Iran to let down its guard and facilitating Israel’s murder of top Iranian leaders. This time, Iran’s response was stronger: It pummeled Israel until Netanyahu begged Trump to find a way to end it. Once again, Iran took the off-ramp—not out of weakness, but because the Qur’an demands that “if they stop, you stop.”
On February 28, Trump tried the same trick one time too many. Once again, he used a fake “breakthrough in negotiations” as cover for a dastardly sneak attack aimed at murdering as much of Iran’s leadership as possible…while sacrificing 160 innocent schoolgirls to the Epstein class’s deity, Baal.
Trump-n-Yahoo’s obdurate evil left Iran no choice. “If they commit aggression, fight till they stop.” Unfortunately, the Zionist-occupied Americans seem unable to stop themselves from committing aggression against Iran, and nothing they could possibly say at this point will convince Iran otherwise. So to ensure that the aggression stops once and for all, Iran has committed itself to an existential battle in which the only acceptable outcome is the enemy’s total defeat, meaning the complete removal of his capacity to commit further aggression.
The Axis of Epstein is learning the hard way that Iran is fully capable of achieving that outcome. They chose not to whip America’s tail in 2020 and June 2025 out of restraint, not incapacity.
The Israelis are likewise learning the hard way that Hezbollah’s relative quiet since it accepted the ceasefire of November 2024 was not a sign of weakness. Hezbollah abided by that ceasefire for more than a year, even though “Israel” didn’t, because Islamic ethics, unlike Jewish ones, require that agreements be honored. But ultimately, as “Israel” kept violating the ceasefire and attacking Lebanon every single day, Hezbollah got tired of being “Jewed” by God’s chosen scumbags and has finally responded with tremendous firepower. Again, the Zio-Americans profess shock: Wasn’t Hezbollah kaput since Israel’s terrorist sneak attack using explosive consumer electronics? As always, being immoral psychopaths themselves, the Zionists can’t even imagine the possibility that anyone would take just war theory seriously enough to act with extreme restraint while in a position of strength.
The chosenites’ arrogant contempt for the goyim—their mistaken belief that their enemies’ morality and decency and proportionality and restraint is a sign of weakness—has blown up in their sneering hook-nosed faces. Iran’s, Hezbollah’s, and Yemen’s moral strength has rallied their populations’ morale and energized them to struggle and sacrifice, and endure absolutely any level of suffering, in the path of God, justice, and truth. Meanwhile, the sniveling, cynical, psychopathic Israelis and their fatamerican goyim slaves defecate all over themselves out of fear and subconscious guilt.
No Israeli wants to sacrifice his life for his misbegotten “country.” That’s why they had to blow up the World Trade Center and call in the Americans to do their dirty work for them.
Neither does any fatamerican want to die for Israel…or even for FatAmerica, truth be told. Kill? Sure. But risk death? No way!
If there are any brave American soldiers left, they will join Iran’s war on the cowardly [[[Epstein class]]] that occupies what used to be the United States of America. For as more and more observers, including Nick Fuentes, have been saying, Iran is fighting to free America from a soul-crushing foreign occupation. When the Epstein class is finally defeated by a coalition of Iranians and patriotic non-Zionist-owned Americans, let’s all pray that the new leadership—Christians like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, perhaps joined by a few leftists like Ro Khanna and Jews like Jeffrey Sachs and Max Blumethal—will bring America the kind of confident, restrained, rigorously ethical leadership that Iran has been enjoying since 1979.