What bombs cannot kill
Sat 6:42 am +00:00, 18 Apr 2026The War of the World
It is spring 2026. Since February 28, Iran has faced what Washington calls Operation Epic Fury and Tel Aviv Operation Roaring Lion. An American-Israeli military coalition of an amplitude unprecedented since the Second World War. Strikes on the nuclear installations at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. Massive cyberattacks on infrastructure. An economic war added to four decades of sanctions. And, in the background, the question that no one in Washington or Tel Aviv wants to formulate aloud: What if Iran resisted—truly?
Iran is winning the strategic war.[1] Not because its missiles are more precise than the adversary’s. But because Iran possesses what we call civilizational endurance: the capacity of an ancient civilization, forged over 5,000 years of history, to absorb blows without dissolving.
Trump and the Self-fulfilling Prophecy
The Trump administration has developed what we have called geopolitical-theological framing, that is, reading Middle Eastern conflicts as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies[4], as a cosmic combat between Good and Evil, in which Israel plays the role of divine instrument and Iran that of the Antichrist. Shariati had precisely analyzed this mechanism—but from the Islamic side. What he denounced in Safavid Shiism, the mobilization of the sacred in service of power and passivity, we see at work today in the so-called Judeo-Christian evangelical discourse that provides the moral and spiritual legitimacy for the bombings. The prophecy, used as a political weapon, transcends religions. It is universally lethal. But beneath the prophecy lies the oldest motive of all: as Michel Chossudovsky formulated it, the true engine of this war is the hegemonic battle for energy, namely the acquisition of oil and natural gas reserves worldwide.[3] Also, during the 2018 Kuala Lumpur Conference, he said, “The ultimate objective is world conquest under the cloak of human rights and Western democracy.”[4] This is not a war against terrorism. It is a war for the control of resources—the same war that colonial powers have always waged, under different names throughout the centuries. Shariati would have recognized the formula without hesitation. It is al-istikbar—the arrogance of the powerful, the pride of the pharaoh—dressed in UN clothing.
Israel and the Yazid of Our Time
Since October 7, 2023, more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The International Court of Justice described, in its provisional orders of January and May 2024, what it called plausible violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Every day that passes without justice is another day in which Karbala repeats itself—with American-made drones in place of lances. Shariati used the figure of Yazid—the Umayyad caliph who massacred Hussein at Karbala—as a historical type of the oppressor: the power that believes itself above the law, that crushes the weak in the name of a legitimacy it awarded itself. Who mourns Hussein today, and who understands why he died?
The Strategy of Endurance
Sun Tzu wrote,
“Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
Iran in 2026 practices something more complex still: fighting without submitting. Absorbing the strikes without collapsing. Maintaining pressure on the Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly 20,000,000 barrels of crude flowed daily before February 28—without fully blocking it, keeping that decisive weapon in reserve. The International Energy Agency has called this the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Brent crude has surged past $110, approaching $120. Goldman Sachs warns that a sustained closure could push oil past $150. In the first week of the war, U.S. gasoline prices rose by 48 cents per gallon. Every barrel that does not transit Hormuz is a tax levied on the global economy—and felt most acutely in the country that launched the war.
Unsurprisingly though, while millions of people are struggling to pay their energy bills, oil and gas companies are widening their profit margins compared to their pre-war profits. Indeed, as revealed by a recent report[5] commissioned by Greenpeace Germany, oil companies in the European Union have been raking in €81.4 million in excess profits per day in the European Union since the beginning of the conflict in Iran. The study shows that roughly 30 percent of all EU-wide excess profits in the petrol station market were borne by Germany, and in France said companies raised an average of 11.6 million more euros per day.
This being the case in Europe, 45 years of sanctions have not dissolved Iranian resistance. They have hardened it. This is exactly what Bennabi had foreseen: a civilization that has resolved its colonizability cannot be colonized, even by force. It can be wounded. It cannot be subdued.
The Shah’ Son
There is a cruel irony—profoundly Shariatian—in what is happening today behind the scenes of the war against Iran. An irony that history seems to write with the sardonic smile of those who know that nothing ever truly changes under the sun of empires.
While American and Israeli bombs fall on Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordow, and while more than 1,400 Iranians have perished since February 28, according to the Iranian Red Crescent’s figures[6], Washington and Tel Aviv already have their man. His name is Reza Pahlavi. He lives in Maryland.
Son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, born in Tehran in 1960, he was formally designated crown prince at age 7. He was in the United States for military pilot training at Reese Air Force Base near Lubbock, Texas, when the 1979 revolution overthrew the monarchy—transforming what was meant to be a temporary stay into a permanent exile of forty-seven years. Two generations of Iranians were born, grew up, suffered, fought, and died without
On March 22, 2026, he published an explicit call on X, asking “Trump and Netanyahu to continue targeting the regime” and welcoming the “support of the United States and Israel” as the condition for Iran’s liberation. In other words, the Shah’s son is calling foreign powers to bomb his own country so that he may take its leadership. Shariati had words for that. Several of them—and none were kind.
History as farce
Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 organized the coup that overthrew Mosaddegh and restored the Shah to his throne. Seventy-three years later, the same geography of power replays with almost comical precision: Washington decides who governs Tehran, Israel provides air cover, and a Pahlavi waits in the wings for the bombs to do the work the people never requested. Trump posted on Truth Social to Iranian protesters:
“KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS! HELP IS ON THE WAY.”
Help. As if strikes on a sovereign country’s civilian infrastructure were humanitarian aid.
Reza Pahlavi himself described the joint strikes as “a humanitarian intervention”—the exact vocabulary used to legitimize the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the intervention in Libya in 2011. Liberation as the packaging of domination.
The Alliance with Israel, or the Original Sin
Reza Pahlavi traveled to Jerusalem, met President Herzog and Prime Minister Netanyahu, and predicted that a post-Islamic Iran would join what he calls the “Cyrus Accord”—an extension of the Abraham Accords named after Cyrus the Great.
The historical metaphor is seductive. It means concretely normalization with the state bombing Gaza and integration of Iran into the American-Israeli bloc that has made Palestine a land of systematic massacre. Even the Atlantic Council acknowledges that this support for normalization constitutes “a defining fault line” within the Iranian opposition itself.[7]
Real Popularity and Its Limits
The most recent polls indicate that roughly one-third of Iranians support Pahlavi—but another third firmly opposes him. One third. In a country of 90 million people, at war, under bombs, with the internet cut off. This is not popular legitimacy. It is a polling preference in a disintegrated political field. Even the Foundation for Defense of Democracies acknowledges there is “no ready-made government-in-waiting” and that Iran is not a monolith but a “mosaic”—Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, communists, dissident Islamists—that does not reduce to a single man in exile.[8]
Shariati had understood what his heirs—in all camps—have stubbornly refused to hear: a revolution cannot be decreed from outside. It is built from within, through long, painful, sometimes invisible work on consciences and identities. That work Reza Pahlavi has not done. He could not have done it from Maryland. The Yazid of our time does not always wear a turban. He can also wear a tie, live in Maryland, and call foreign bombs raining down on his own capital by the name of help.
The War Comes Home
They aimed for regime change in Tehran. They are auditing their own.
On March 29, 2026, the Knesset—Israel’s parliament—held its final vote on the 2026 state budget. The session took place not in the usual plenum but in a fortified auditorium, relocated underground because of the war. Legislators debated behind blast-resistant walls. Above them, Iranian ballistic missiles were striking Beersheba. The budget they were voting on allocated $45.8 billion to defense—including $10.2 billion in additional wartime spending. Simultaneously, that same budget contained over $1.6 billion in discretionary coalition funds for ultra-Orthodox yeshivas and West Bank settlements — the political price Netanyahu pays to keep his coalition alive and himself out of prison. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called it “the most corrupt budget in history.”
Netanyahu is simultaneously prosecuting a multi-front war—against Iran, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and against the ongoing consequences of the Gaza operation—while standing trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. He has appeared before the Tel Aviv District Court 79 times. He has requested a presidential pardon without admitting guilt. His coalition is advancing legislation to abolish the very offense he is charged with. A parliament legislating in a fortified auditorium while missiles strike its cities, financing a war and a patronage network in the same breath. This is not governance. It is controlled demolition of the democratic form, executed from within, under the cover of permanent emergency.
And the mirror image is unfolding in Washington. On March 17, Joe Kent—Trump’s own Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, a former Green Beret with eleven combat deployments, and a Gold Star husband who lost his wife, Shannon, to a suicide bomber in Syria—posted his resignation letter on X. It has been viewed more than 94 million times.
“High-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform,” Kent wrote directly to Trump. “This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq war.”
Kent did what Colin Powell failed to do after Iraq: he spoke while it still mattered, before the body count made the confession redundant.
On March 28, eight million Americans poured into the streets—the third mobilization of the “No Kings” movement, the largest single-day demonstration in United States history. More than 3,300 events, across all 50 states. The first mobilization, in June 2025, drew 5 million. The second, in October, drew 7 million. The trajectory is not plateauing. It is accelerating into a midterm election year.
And then there is the $580 million. On March 23, roughly 6,200 oil futures contracts changed hands in a single minute — 15 minutes before Trump posted on Truth Social that there had been “productive conversations” with Tehran. Oil prices collapsed. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called it treason. Iran’s parliament speaker denied any negotiations had taken place, calling Trump’s claim “fake news used to manipulate oil markets.” The boundary between national security and private enrichment has become indistinguishable.
Shariati knew something about this. He knew that empires do not fall because the barbarians arrive at the gates. They fall because the rot is already inside—because the system that claims to export virtue has become a mechanism for extracting profit from its own wars, because the state that claims absolute security has locked itself into permanent insecurity, because the leaders who promised swift victory are now managing indefinite attrition while eight million of their own citizens assemble in the streets to declare that the emperor has no clothes.
Duration is the weapon. It corrodes approval ratings. It corrodes coalition discipline. It corrodes the narrative that justified the first strike. It corrodes the boundary between defending democracy and destroying it. And the question is no longer whether Iran can withstand the pressure. It is whether the architects of the pressure can survive what they have set in motion.
What Bombs Cannot Kill
What is to be done with Shariati, then? We are not among those who believe a 20th-century thinker can provide ready-made answers to 21st-century problems. History is not an instruction manual. Revolutions cannot be photocopied, and yesterday’s prophets do not govern tomorrow.
But we believe—and it is the conviction of entire lives devoted to the history of oppressed peoples—that great thoughts survive their contexts because they pose universal questions in a particular language. And the questions Shariati posed remain unanswered, urgent, and subversive in their refusal of simplicity:
How does a civilization rise without betraying itself? How does one reconcile faith and freedom of conscience without one suffocating the other? How does one resist the empire—military, economic, cultural, prophetic—without reproducing its methods? And how does one make a revolution without creating a new tyranny that bears the name of the old freedom?
Khomeini did not answer those questions. He evaded them, and post-revolutionary Iran still bears the scars. Trump erases them, reducing all complexity to a tweet while eight million of his own people march in the streets. Netanyahu drowns them in the blood of the innocent while legislating in a bunker and standing trial for the 79th time. Reza Pahlavi sidesteps them elegantly, proposing to replace “theocratic subjugation” with geopolitical subjugation—and calling it freedom.
Shariati posed them. That is all. And that is already enormous—immense. In a world where everyone claims to have prefabricated answers, those who know how to formulate the right questions have become the true revolutionaries.
He died at 43, three weeks after his arrival in exile, under circumstances no one has ever truly elucidated. He is buried in Damascus, near the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab—where rests the memory of refusal, of dignity preserved in defeat, of a word carried to the end even when nothing justifies continuing except truth itself.
We think of him often when we walk through Laghouat in Algeria and pass the house of martyr Ahmed Chatta, abducted in 1958 by French colonial forces during the war of liberation, whose body was never recovered. Disappeared as men were made to disappear in that era: those who refused. We know he was killed, because that was the time when those who refused were killed. But his death has no place, no date, no grave. Only an absence that still inhabits the walls of that house and that we carry with us everywhere I go.
We think of those men who refused. Who said no. Who paid with their lives for that one-syllable word that the powerful cannot bear to hear — because that word, spoken by enough mouths, is capable of toppling thrones.
Shariati also said no. To the tyranny of the Shah. To the opium of Safavid Shiism. To Islam without thought and thought without roots. To colonization from within. And today, from his tomb in Damascus, he would say no to the Shah’s son returning in the baggage train of the bombers; no to the global war dressed as liberation; and no—above all, no—to all those who believe, through cynicism or naivety, that one can liberate a people with foreign bombs bearing the name of humanitarian aid.
And he would say one final thing to Algeria—to this country he loved, whose revolution formed him, whose diplomats may have saved his life, and whose best son died trying to save the peace: Rise. Speak. The world is waiting.
Bombs can destroy Natanz. They cannot destroy ideas. Sanctions can asphyxiate an economy. They cannot asphyxiate a civilization that has decided to live standing upright.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the great philosopher and major figure in the tradition of German idealism, once argued that “History begins with the Persians.” Indeed, “there were three significant Persian empires before people in Britain had got rid of the Romans and started making up stories about King Arthur. The first Persian Empire, from 559 BC to 330 BC, made famous by Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, was the earliest example of universal, imperial rule,” Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook wrote.[9] Darius the Great, the fifth-century BC ruler, said he was Achaemenid by family, Persian by tribe, and Iranian in terms of his people.
All the above should give the presidents of the newest of empires something to think about whenever they interact with the Iranians.
***
Amir Nour is an Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the books “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (The Orient and the Occident in Time of a New Sykes-Picot) Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014 and “L’Islam et l’ordre du monde” (Islam and the Order of the World), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2021.
Laala Bechetoula is an Algerian journalist and writer, author of “The Book of Gaza Hashem: A Testament Written in Olive Wood and Ash”.
Notes
[1] Laala Bechetoula, “Iran Is Winning the War — Seven Thousand Years of Civilization Against Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Empire”, Countercurrents / Global Research, March 2026. [2] Amir Nour and Laala Bechetoula, “They Believe They Are Fulfilling Prophecy / Armageddon Politics”, Countercurrents / Sri Lanka Guardian, March 11, 2026; and Amir Nour, “From Bush’s Crusade to Trump’s Epic Fury: The Geopolitics of Messianic Wars”, IslamiCity, March 25, 2026. [3] Michel Chossudovsky, “Donald the Terrible: The Consequence of a War with Iran”, Global Research, March 3, 2026. [4] Michel Chossudovsky, “Globalisation of War”, Kuala Lumpur keynote, July 2018. [5] Report by Dr Steffen Bukold, “Excess Oil Profits in Times of War: An EU-wide snapshot of higher margins on the sale of diesel and petrol since the beginning of the Iran war”, Greenpeace Germany, 30 March 2026. [6] Iranian Red Crescent, “Emergency Report on Civilian Infrastructure Damage, March 2026”, cited by Middle East Eye, March 22, 2026. [7] Atlantic Council, “The Hidden Friction with Reza Pahlavi and the Iranian Opposition”, MENA Source, March 2026. [8] Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Regime Change in Iran Is Underway — And It Won’t Be Easy”, February 28, 2026. [9] Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, “What Have the Persians Ever Done for Us”, Good Reading magazine, December 2023.
