Matein Khalid
The law of unintended consequences is a recurrent theme in the tragic wars of the modern Middle East. The cruellest outcome of Trump’s failed gamble to dethrone the Mullah regime in Iran has been to empower a new generation of hardline IRGC generals, who did not hesitate to machine gun thousands of young Iranian protesters in the streets of Tehran, Sheraz, Esfahan and other major urban hubs on the eve of Trump’s Epic Fury blitzkrieg.
In January 2026, anti-regime protests erupted in the streets of Iran’s major cities, the worst anti-mullah uprising since the Shah lost his Peacock Throne in February 1979.
Trump failed in his grand ambition to topple the regime, even though the US-Israeli bombing raid on the Supreme Leader’s leadership compound in Tehran killed Ali Khameini and 135 top power brokers in one of the most repressive regimes on earth that had now lost the last shred of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people. Sadly the onset of Trump’s war also snuffed out the embryonic Tehran Spring that could have well presaged the final collapse of the Islamic Republic, which had brought so much human misery to its own people and its Arab neighbours in the Middle East during its 47th year reign of terror at home and state subversion in the Gulf, Levant and Yemen.
Despite tactical successes, Epic Fury has been a strategic failure in the past 6 months. Air strikes have not obliterated Iran’s vast ballistic missile arsenal or clandestine nuclear sites. A Naval blockade of Iranian ports on the Gulf has not reopened the Strait of Hormuz to safe tanker transit. Targeted assassinations have not prevented the ascension of a cabal of IRGC generals to the pinnacles of absolute power in Tehran. The US has been unable to protect its own military bases, its Arab allies and even Israel from periodic missiles/drone attacks launched by the IRGC’s high command.
Above all, a $1.5 trillion pentagon budget has been insufficient to prevent the worst energy supply shock since 1979 and a 35% rise in oil prices since February 28. If Von Clausewitz’s dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”, is true Epic Fury has been an epic political failure and Trump must now pay the price of his colossal failure at the mid-term elections in November.
Trump now intends to impose the most draconian economic sanctions in history on an embattled Iran. I doubt if sanctions and asset freezes alone will dislodge the Pretorian Junta that has seized control of Iran since Aytollah Khameini’s killing six months ago. Clinton’s sanctions in the 1990s did not overthrow the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussain in Iraq. Gaddafi’s 42-year psychopathic tyranny encompassed the terms of every American President from Nixon to Obama despite Uncle Sam’s sanctions on Libya since 1986.
North Korea’s Baby Kim is the third generation autocrat-ruler of the planet’s only Marxist-Leninist dynastic dictatorship that has enslaved its people since Grandpa Kim entered Pyongyang on a Soviet tank in 1945. Baby Kim now has an arsenal of nuclear missiles and earned $30 billion from Putin as a thank you gift for sending his armies and drones to the killing fields of Ukraine despite decades of impotent American sanctions. 60 years of sanctions on Cuba ended with El Commandante Fidel Castro’s peaceful death at the ripe old age of 90 (RIP), Oh Hairy one of Havana.
Trump’s tired huff and puff sanctions bluff will not scare the ruthless generals of the IRGC for one minute. The Trumpster can bet his Taco Bell chelo kabab and Diet Coke dinner on my call on this.
The IRGC controls the smuggling networks and offshore money laundromats that have made its top generals the only multi billionaire to rule the Persian empire ever since the last Shah piloted his imperial Boeing 707 jet high above the skies of Mehrabad in order to allow an Air France Jumbo jet with Khomeini on board from his French exile back home to plunge Iran into a 47 years nightmare of mass murder, political repression and gross economic failure. “We did not make the revolution to reduce the price of watermelons”, the Imam once boasted. Yet there will be no watermelon or any other fruit in the Tehran bazaar when a Weimar scale hyperinflation grips Iran next year.
The IRGC, not Trump, needs a forever war in the Gulf to guarantee regime survival. This is why it will never surrender its uranium hoard, its ballistic missiles stock piles, its proxy militias/proxy death squads and its absolute control of the Hormuz and the Red Sea choke point.
The global oil markets have grasped this existential fact even if the Trumpster’s political circus clowns in DC have not. Planet Forex has understood the IRGC’s strategy, the reason Mr. Buckeroo will fall 20% in 2027 while Dr. Auric, Dr. Copper and Dr. Black Gold make my cash register coo. “Lubbu Matti”, at the stroke of midnight when the NYSE closes and the angels of death roam the night skies above the ancient Persian plateau where it all began and almost ended for my Ismaili ancestors. What a pity! What a world! (IPA Service)
Iran’s generals and oil souq brace for a forever war
