This is a three-part series on the 106-day Iran War and what the United States got catastrophically wrong
Part Two: What You Cannot Destroy With Missiles
Before the war, American analysts catalogued Iran's military assets with impressive thoroughness. Underground bunkers, hypersonic missile ranges, drone production capacity, cyber warfare units, the reach of the Quds Force across four countries. Good intelligence work. Necessary. And almost entirely beside the point.
Because the thing that makes Iran Iran — the actual engine of its resilience — is not buried in any facility that can be found on satellite imagery.
Start with Zoroaster. Most Westerners, if they know the name at all, associate it vaguely with Nietzsche.
But Zoroastrianism, born in the Persian highlands sometime around 1000 BC, is arguably the most influential religion most people have never seriously studied. Its core proposition — that the universe is a battleground between Ahura Mazda, the principle of light and truth, and Angra Mainyu, the principle of darkness and destruction — filtered, over centuries, into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Heaven and hell.
The Last Judgment. The cosmic struggle between good and evil. The idea that history is going somewhere, that it has a moral direction, that righteous suffering is not pointless but meaningful — all of this, theologians will confirm, has deep Zoroastrian fingerprints.
Iran converted to Islam in the seventh century. But it never entirely converted away from this older architecture of meaning. The moral seriousness, the insistence that existence is a test, the sense that one's people are engaged in something larger than mere politics — this persists. It runs beneath the surface of Iranian culture the way granite runs beneath topsoil.
Then, in 680 AD, something happened at a place called Karbala that sealed the character of Iranian Islam in a particular direction. Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, led a small band against the vastly superior forces of the Umayyad caliph. He knew he would lose. He went anyway. He was killed, along with most of his companions, on the tenth day of Muharram — Ashura.
To the Western strategic mind, this is a military defeat. To Shia Islam, of which Iran is the gravitational center, it is something far more powerful: the eternal archetype of righteous resistance against illegitimate power.
Every year, tens of millions of Iranians process through the streets to mourn Husayn, to feel his suffering, to recommit to the principle that you do not submit to the unjust merely because the unjust are stronger. The ritual is not nostalgia. It is inoculation. It is a society rehearsing, annually, its own theology of endurance.
A country that has built its national identity around the idea that losing with honor beats winning with compromise is not a country that can be pressured into compliance through economic pain. The sanctions hurt. Of course they hurt — inflation, unemployment, technological stagnation, the slow draining of talent abroad.
But they also, perversely, confirmed the narrative. Every sanction said: the powerful are arrayed against you. Every sanction made Karbala feel contemporary.
And then there is 1979, which Americans remember as the hostage crisis and Iranians remember as something else entirely: liberation. Not from poverty or backwardness, since by Middle Eastern standards the Shah's Iran was prosperous.
Liberation from the particular humiliation of being a client state — of having your intelligence service rebuilt by the CIA, your oil profits managed by British and American corporations, your sovereignty exercised at the pleasure of a foreign power.
Khomeini's revolution was religious, yes, but its deeper grammar was nationalist. "We will not be anyone's satellite" was the message, and it resonated because it spoke to something that predates Islam, predates even Cyrus: the Persian refusal to be absorbed.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which became something of a fixation in American threat assessments, is best understood not as a conventional military but as the institutionalization of that refusal. It is simultaneously army, intelligence service, economic conglomerate, and ideological vanguard.
It controls construction, telecommunications, energy. It is the revolution's self-replicating immune system. You can degrade it. You can kill its generals, blow up its facilities, disrupt its supply chains. What you cannot do, with missiles, is remove the idea it represents — which is that Iran will be governed by Iranians, on Iranian terms, full stop.
The nuclear program sits inside the same framework. The West sees proliferation. Iran sees sovereignty made concrete. Crucially, the nuclear program did not begin with the Islamic Republic. It began under the Shah, with American encouragement.
Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" initiative helped put Iranian physicists in American university laboratories in the 1950s. The program is older than the revolution. It is Persian, not merely Islamist.
Every time Washington demands that Iran dismantle it, Iranians hear something like: you may not have the instruments of self-determination. And every time they hear that, the answer is the same as it has always been.
*The author is a senior columnist for AJP with deep knowledge in religion, geopolitics, and civilizational history.
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