There’s Going to Be a Ground Invasion of Iran

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On April Fools’ Day, Donald Trump addressed the nation about the Iran War. It would have been too painful to listen to his adenoidal droning and borscht-belt insult comedian shtick, so I just read the transcript. He said nothing new. It was just a live version of his social media tweets: rambling, mendacious, self-contradictory, delusional, emotionally labile, and laced with insults and threats. I wish he were joking, but he probably wasn’t.

When it was all over, however, I was certain of one thing: Trump has learned nothing so far. So he’s going to send in ground troops.

Trump thinks he’s already won several times over because he doesn’t understand asymmetric warfare and consistently underestimates his enemies. He’s been fed a steady stream of videos of American and Israeli airstrikes on Iran, including strikes on civilian infrastructure, which constitute war crimes that he thinks he and his goons will never answer for.

He doesn’t understand that Iran’s leaders knew that they could not fight America by matching its military spending, equipment, and tactics: vast numbers of jets, tanks, naval vessels, missile interceptors, etc. Saddam Hussein tried that, and the US steamrolled him twice, because there’s no way to outspend the United States on military gadgets.

Iran didn’t just learn from Saddam’s defeat in Iraq. They also learned from America’s defeat by Iraq’s low-tech, asymmetric, open-source insurgency, which found low-cost ways of destroying American personnel and exhausting expensive military supplies while living on to fight. Imagine what they could have done with drones.

In the run up to the current Iran War, I compared four sets of numbers.

Racist that I am, I confess I was a bit surprised by the upper end of Iran’s IQ ranking. But the rest of the numbers did not bode well for Iran. Of course, when one does these sorts of comparisons, there’s always a proviso: “Other things being equal, Iran doesn’t have a chance against America in terms of military spending, military size, and population.”

Yet Iran is still fighting—and, I would argue, winning—five weeks later because they didn’t let other things remain equal.

The ancient Socratic philosopher Aeschines of Sphettus reported that when Themistocles of Athens contemplated the invading army of Darius of Persia, he knew that the Greeks were vastly outnumbered. But he did not despair, because he recognized that no matter how vast and well-equipped, an army is only as good as the wisdom of its commander. By the same token, a smaller and weaker army can still win if its forces are deployed wisely. Themistocles proved wiser and beat Darius in the end.

As Socrates taught, wisdom is the great equalizer. Folly can bring down the mightiest empires, whereas wisdom can make a great state from a small city. America is run by fools. Iran, apparently, is run by philosophers.

It is folly to attack an enemy’s strengths from a position of weakness. It is wise to attack an enemy’s weaknesses from a position of strength. That’s the essence of asymmetric warfare.

Thus Iran did not invest in a navy to match America’s navy. It did not invest in an air force to match America’s air force. The Iranians even accepted the fact that the United States would basically control its skies, so they didn’t invest in air defense systems to take down American jets. They probably also accepted that they could not counter the enemy’s electronic and human intelligence gathering.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Against Imperialism here.

Thus the Iranians came up with ways of hardening themselves to these disadvantages. First, they created a decentralized command structure to make Iran less vulnerable to electronic spying and assassinations of leaders. Second, they focused on two technologies: drones and ballistic missiles. These can be countered by missile interceptors. But interceptors are expensive and thus in short supply. So Iran concentrated on making their drones and missiles cheap and plentiful. Interceptors also depend on expensive radar systems for targeting. To protect their drones and missiles from American and Israeli air power, Iran has built “missile cities” of hardened concrete deep underground, out of the reach of America’s most powerful bombs. The entrances to these missile cities have been attacked again and again. But each city has the personnel and equipment necessary to dig them out quickly.

Iran has used its missiles and drones very effectively: to destroy expensive American radar equipment, to soak up large numbers of expensive interceptors, and to destroy American military bases around the Gulf. Their strategy is to use cheap drones and missiles to exhaust American and Israeli countermeasures, then use their more expensive and deadly weapons. ZOG’s counter-strategy seems to be to attempt to destroy the missiles and drones underground. It hasn’t worked so far. So ZOG is going to try something else.

At this point, “something else” basically means two things: declare victory and go home—or send in ground troops and hope for the best.

If Trump declares victory and goes home, the Strait of Hormuz will be in the hands of the Iranians, who are allowing cargoes to pass if they are not priced in dollars. For more than 50 years, the Gulf monarchies have priced their exports in US dollars, which they then invest in US assets, including low-yield treasury bonds, which allow the US to service enormous debts. Without the petrodollar, the US government will be insolvent.

The petrodollar system was based on a quid pro quo: use American dollars in exchange for American protection. Iran has demonstrated that America cannot and will not protect the Gulf states. Given a choice between protecting the Gulf states and Israel, Israel will always come first. Iran is fully capable of destroying the Gulf states’ exports, rendering the area uninhabitable, and sending the global economy to the Fourth World. That’s clearly their “Sampson Option” if, for example, the US and Israel actually do topple Iran’s leaders or use nuclear weapons.

The doom of the petrodollar was sealed recently when Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to help secure them from Iranian drone attacks. Jordan and Kuwait will probably sign agreements as well. Ukraine has spent the last four years perfecting drone warfare technology and tactics in their war with Russia, which is using Iranian drone technology.

Why should we expect the Gulf states to continue using dollars when America has brought them to the brink of destruction and they have been forced to turn to Ukraine for help?

The Trump administration has, naturally, protested this deal, because they want the Gulf states to remain dependent, and they want Ukraine to lose. Given that Trump has insulted both Zelenskyy and Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (who is effectively the king because his father, King Salman, is senile), I am sure the agreement was personally satisfying as well.

There’s a memorable scene in David Lynch’s Dune where the Emperor of the Known Universe, Shaddam IV squirms in impotent rage as he is ordered by the Spacing Guild to invade Arrakis and get the spice flowing again—or spend the rest of his life in a “pain amplifier.”

Trump is being bombarded with calls to stop the war for economic, political, and humanitarian reasons. But America’s equivalent of the Spacing Guild is telling him that if the petrodollar tanks, there will be no more dewy, sunlit putting greens in his future.

Thus Trump will choose the slimmest hope of victory (and personal survival) to the inevitability of defeat. So he will gamble away the lives of American troops on a ground invasion of Iran.

There’s not a single competent person in the Pentagon who would tell Trump that he can successfully invade a country three times the size of Iraq with a tiny fraction of the troops deployed in the Iraq War of 2003.

But Trump is a consummate narcissist who does not like being contradicted, thus he will fire people who say “no” to him. He will also scapegoat underlings rather than take responsibility for his failures. Thus, just last Friday, I said that the people surrounding Trump will soon face a choice: “Trump or us.”

So it comes as no surprise that just yesterday, we learned that Pete Hegseth has fired three generals: U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, Army Gen. David Hodne, and Army Maj. Gen. William Green. We also learned that Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, and there are rumors that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is next. I am betting that Gabbard and the three generals were advising against a ground invasion.

This is how empires end: fools are put in charge, sycophants enable them, and those who know better are too cowardly to speak out.

Source: https://counter-currents.com/2026/04/theres-going-to-be-a-ground-invasion-of-iran/