Manufactured War of Aggression
What's going on and how we got here
In late December of 2025, protests began among shopkeepers in Iran in response to the rapid devaluation of the Iranian currency. Over the following two weeks, the protests spread and, over the course of a weekend in early January 2026, exploded into a nationwide movement of generalized anti-Islamic Republic sentiment. Predictably, the government’s security forces cracked down, but this time with unusual force.
Thousands were killed over the course of just two or three days, with conservative estimates placing the number at a minimum of seven thousand. Many in opposition to the Iranian government, both in and outside of Iran, called for military support from the United States or Israel. The Iranian government accused the protesters of being either active terroristic agents of Israel or the United States, or at best dupes of Israel or the United States tragically caught in the middle.
During the height of the protests, Trump posted on Truth Social for Iranian “patriots” to “take over your institutions!!!” and that “help is on its way.” Shortly afterwards, American military assets began to move to the Middle East.
The weekend ended, the protests were suppressed, the bodies piled up in the morgue. Iranian security forces roamed the streets, enforcing curfews and rounding up anyone they saw as a threat.
No help arrived, no institutions were taken over. No 50,000 security service members defected to help bring the disgraced son of the former King (his own father put in power by the British and Americans) back to power. Perhaps the largest protest movement in the Islamic Republic’s five decades ended with the largest killing of protesters in its history.
Let’s back up.
Early in the morning of June 13, 2025, aircraft of the Israeli Air Force and sabotage teams (likely consisting primarily of Iranians trained, funded, and equipped by the Mossad) began a surprise attack on targets across northern and western Iran, primarily targeting Iranian air defense and military command and control headquarters. Over the course of the next twelve days, Iran and Israel engaged in a long-range war that resulted in well over 1,000 Iranians being killed, about half of whom were civilians. In Israel, several dozen were killed, mostly civilians. The war was capped by the American strike on several Iranian nuclear sites, marking the first direct American military attack on Iran since Operation Eagle Claw in 1980. I wrote about that war as it occurred, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
In the Iranian security establishment, the war appeared to come as a surprise. Not so much that Israel was able to launch large-scale airstrikes against targets in Western Iran, or strike targets deeper in Iran with a variety of stand-off munitions, but that they were able to do so quite easily because of the infiltration of Iran by the aforementioned Mossad-trained sabotage teams. Iranian air defense systems that should have alerted of the incoming Israeli aircraft and engaged them early on were instead knocked out by short range drones and missiles fired by these teams. Iranian ballistic missile launchers that should have delivered a devastating counterstrike within minutes or hours of the Israeli attack were struck as well, leaving the Iranian forces on the defensive in a manner they had not anticipated.
Image: An Israeli bomb strikes civilian traffic in central Tehran, killing numerous civilians, during the June 2025 war.
What shook the Iranians was not the technical overmatch by the Israeli Air Force— that they knew already. What shook them was how much their internal security services completely failed to identify and catch Israeli-trained infiltrators, who were instrumental in reducing the strength of Iran’s counterstrikes, especially in the early days of the war.
It is that crucial context in which the protest crackdown of January 2026 should be seen in—not to excuse or justify the state’s violence against mostly peaceful protesters with extremely legitimate grievances, certainly, but to provide additional context as to why the Iranian state would respond as it did. It is analytically insufficient to assume any state or actor does anything out of pure malice or evilness.
Another key takeaway from the June war, which carries through to now, is the complete lack of fracturing or mutiny within the state security services. During the early hours of the war, high-level Iranian generals received calls from the Mossad threatening their families with death if they did not release a video declaring their mutiny against the Islamic Republic. None did.
Similarly, in the January protests, there was a great deal of discourse about whether Iranian police or security forces would refuse orders to crack down on protests, join in the protests, or otherwise defect and help overthrow the government. None did.
What this leaves is a fairly stark picture: a large percentage of the Iranian population, likely a majority, broadly opposes the Islamic Republic. Nonetheless, the security services, regardless of the personal beliefs of individual members, remain loyal to the system and willing to engage in fairly shocking acts of violence against the perceived enemies of the system.
All that is to say that the situation in the aftermath of the violent January 2026 protests is one in which the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic among the general public may be at its lowest ever, but the state institutions themselves, particularly the military and internal security services, remain stable.
It is that context in which the American military buildup in the region began, and the narrative for a new war was started. Early on, when Trump announced he was sending an aircraft carrier to the Gulf of Oman—the first major addition of US military forces to the region—the discussion was about Iranian treatment of protesters.
But, in the weeks following through to now (Friday, February 20, 2026), the discussion about whether to bomb Iran has centered on Iran’s actions in three areas: their nuclear program, their ballistic missile program, and their support for regional actors that threaten Israel (primarily Hezbollah in Lebanon). Indeed, ongoing negotiations between the US and Iran have centered almost exclusively on the nuclear issue, while Israel continues to lobby the US to include the missiles and the proxies in the talks as well.
Some things that are notably absent from the negotiations—a discussion of human rights, democracy, political prisoners, judicial system reform, abolishment of clerical rule, reparations to the families of killed protesters or wrongfully executed prisoners, citizenship law reform to provide legal status to Afghans and their children living in Iran, and so on. No discussion about the wrongful deportations of millions of Afghans over the summer, no discussion of releasing prisoners like Narges Mohammadi, nothing about truth and reconciliation commissions surrounding the January 2026 state violence against protesters or the 2022 state violence against protesters or the 2019 state violence against protesters… You get the idea.
What Trump (and Netanyahu) want Iran to give up are the various ways in which Iran can potentially threaten Israel—becoming a nuclear-armed state, possessing a significant arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles, and supporting regional actors like Hezbollah with money, training, and weapons.
To coerce Iran into submitting to Trump’s demands, a dizzying array of military force has been deployed to the Middle East, primarily to Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Over the course of the last month, hundreds of aircraft and dozens of ships have moved to various locations across the region. Dozens of combat aircraft, including stealth F-35s, and key support aircraft like KC-135 and KC-46 aerial refueling aircraft, E-3 airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) aircraft, RC-135 Rivet Joint signal intelligence aircraft, and so on have been deployed to the region. Two carrier strike groups are either already in the region or on the way, carrying dozens more aircraft and ships with air defense and land attack missiles. Hundreds of transport aircraft have delivered Patriot and THAAD air defense systems across the region. In short, one of the largest gatherings of military force since the 2003 invasion of Iraq has been placed around Iran in preparation for a strike.
Image: An estimation of forces deployed as of February 19 created by a reasonably trustworthy Twitter account based in Egypt.
As to what the purpose of this buildup will be—that too remains ambiguous. Trump has said it could be as simple as a “punch to the nose” to bring about a more favorable negotiation result. It could also be some kind of weeks-long attempt at enacting a regime change akin to the air campaign that brought down Gaddafi in Libya, or perhaps a quick and clean leadership decapitation akin to Venezuela. This all begs the question—does Iran get a vote in this?
Image: A Khorramshahr 4 ballistic missile in an underground missile base in Iran in February 2026.
I don’t want to predict the outcome of any conflict, and certainly Iran has had a frankly weak response to US and Israeli aggression over the past two years, but at least part of that was because they felt—not incorrectly—that the threats they faced at those times were not worth going all-in on a regional war. Even in June 2025, with Israeli bombs falling on Tehran, the Iranians judged, correctly, as it turned out, that this particular conflict was not an existential threat to the state.
The tools that Iran has at its disposal to deter a war with the US are, at this point, limited. It does not appear to have weaponized any nuclear weapons, it demonstrated a great deal of vulnerability in the June 2025 war, and many of its regional allies (especially Hezbollah) have been degraded. It doesn’t have anything hidden up its sleeve to prevent an attack.
But what it does have is the ability, once the establishment has decided this is in fact existential, to extract fairly significant costs to pretty much everyone around them, particularly the Gulf Arab countries who rely on Persian Gulf oil infrastructure to power their economies. All of this infrastructure is within range of Iranian missiles or drone attacks, and as the Abqaiq-Khurais attack in 2019 proved, it can be badly damaged by attacks by Iranian drones and cruise missiles.
A not insignificant possibility, also, is that US forces in the region actually sustain reasonably significant losses—either in actual soldiers and airmen being killed or wounded, or in their aircraft or equipment damaged or destroyed at a scale that hasn’t really happened since perhaps the Vietnam War. Nearly all of the combat aircraft that have been deployed to the region are parked basically wingtip-to-wingtip at air bases in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Image: A satellite photo from February 19 showing 18 F-35A fighter jets and 2 EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets, totaling $1.5 billion in aircraft cost, at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in central Jordan.
While I have no doubt that the US would be able to establish some degree of air supremacy over Iran, needless to say Iran is a very large country that is covered in mountains. It would only take one missile with a range of 1,000km or more (of which Iran possesses thousands) escaping notice or getting through missile defenses, striking the tarmac photographed above, to destroy over a dozen extremely expensive aircraft. Alternatively, an errant missile could strike sleeping quarters for the pilots and maintenance personnel at any of these bases, killing dozens. Numerous US Navy ships are within range of Iranian anti-ship missile systems, and all of those are potentially at risk of seeing a lucky missile putting a multi-billion dollar ship with hundreds of crewmembers into a very sticky situation.
I don’t think this is necessarily a highly likely, but it is much more likely this go-around than any of the previous periods of military tension between the US and Iran. The Iranian military has learned from the June war, and was very much caught by surprise in that case. They are much less likely to be completely surprised this time, and are much likelier to “use it” rather than “lose it” when it comes to the variety of weapons they have at their disposal.
And all of this build up to war—for what? The US doesn’t appear to have a clear goal beyond a sort of libidinal desire to bomb Iran (how much of the Beltway power brokers are still mad about the hostage crisis?) for the sake of it, and the US military is able to provide the tools to do so. But without a clear goal, the best case scenario is that Trump just doesn’t want to do anything beyond a showy, one-time strike with overwhelming force that ultimately doesn’t actually do much, like the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025. Anything that goes beyond that risks spiraling out of control and creating the worst conflagration the region has seen since 2003, but in a country more than twice the size of Iraq with four times the population.
And those hoping that somehow Iran gets a free and democratic government out of this, well, I won’t waste many words on arguing against this. I also hope that Iran sees freedom and democracy as soon as possible, but I’m not stupid. Trump doesn’t care about democracy in the US, let alone Iran, and his various scheming viziers advocate for Balkanization, a complete breakup of the Iranian national entity. They have no clear path charted that gets Iran from the stage of “being bombed” to the stage of “prosperous democratic state.” The invasion of Iraq in 2003 had a plan—it was a bad plan, but it was something—and we all know how that turned out. And no, Iran is not somehow “built different.” Completely degrading the state apparatus and removing the Islamic Republic’s monopoly on violence within the borders of Iran with no plan—not simply no good plan, but indeed no plan at all—will not result in freedom, democracy, or prosperity.
Image: US Senator Ted Cruz, who advocates the decapitation of the Iranian government, demonstrates to right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson that he does not know how many people live in Iran.