On February 28 , videos emerged online showing the aftermath of the war’s opening strikes on the Supreme Leader’s compound in Tehran. In one video taken on Pastor Street, a few alleys away from the compound, a column of smoke rises into the sky. A young woman, disoriented and distressed, crosses the frame, screaming into her phone, “Mom, get out of the house.” Someone asks, “What did they hit?” The woman behind the camera replies, with a flicker of excitement beneath her concern, “the Bayt,” the leader’s compound. Just a moment earlier, referring to a residential building near the compound, the same woman murmurs to herself, wavering between worry and awe, “Why did they hit the house?”
These videos also captured, in fragments, the collapse of a war of narratives. One after another, bomb after bomb, imperial fictions have burst into powder and dust. Precision strike , human shield , necessary casualties . On March 7, one of the most horrifying nights in Tehran so far, a resident wrote that “two suns rose in Tehran . . . and the night became day and the day became night.” Vast plumes of fire and ash filled the sky as Israel and the United States hit four oil depots, each in a different corner of the capital. That night, oil spilled from depots at the city’s foothills, running in flames through the gutters. Ten million residents woke at dawn to an obsidian sky and the smell of brimstone and poisonous gas in the air. Then, as if the theater of war wasn’t complete, black rain began to fall. It drenched the long queues of cars stuck in Tehran’s infamous traffic, as people who have not abandoned their city—or could not afford to abandon it—headed to work.
Bomb after bomb, the promises of Reza Pahlavi, the false king who begged the US and Israel to attack Iran, who acted as a Tel Aviv agent provocateur, who gave glad tidings of messianic regime change, freedom, prosperity, and recognition by the West, fell apart. It was as if the would-be king himself were burning in those incessant explosions, in the pillars of smoke.
And the day was night. * * * Since the start of the illegal war by the US and Israel against Iran, according to the Iranian human rights organization HRANA, more than 1,407 civilians have lost their lives, including 214 children, and at least 18,551 have been injured. The Iranian Red Crescent Society reports that 81,000 civilian units—apartments, shops, houses, schools—have been damaged, of which 19,000 were commercial and 61,000 were residential. In addition, 275 pharmaceutical, medical, health, and emergency centers across the country have sustained serious damage, and 490 schools have been subjected to direct or indirect attacks. Seventeen of the Red Crescent’s own facilities have been severely damaged, and twenty-one emergency vehicles, including nineteen ambulances, have been taken out of service. One after another, bomb after bomb, imperial fictions have burst into powder and dust. As the tragedy of murder and destruction unfolds in Iran—and Lebanon, and Palestine—an unbearable farce is simultaneously being staged in the imperial center, in three intense acts.
The first, much discussed in the press and across social media, is that of the Pahlavist and pro-war Iranian diaspora. In the months before the war, Shirin Ebadi, the human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, penned a letter to Trump asking him to attack Iran. Now, Ebadi says she only wanted Ali Khamenei dead, and did not want the (inevitable) wider war that has ensued—yet this has not stopped her from joining as a legal advisor to Pahlavi, who still advocates for more bombing.
As for the rest of this camp: It was clear from the outset that no one in the highest echelons of Western power, those who will actually decide the course of this war, had any real regard for the son of the deposed Shah. Even the Pahlavi PR team’s best efforts, including meetings with Volodymyr Zelensky, could not persuade American and European audiences that he was one of them. After all, it was Pahlavi’s father, the King of Kings, who, in a bid for increased financial aid from the US, told a joint session of Congress in 1962 that Iran was part of Western civilization:
No country, still less a country in our geographical position, can afford to remain neutral. We therefore decided to throw in our lot with the countries whose system of government, whose civilization and culture, whose way of life and manner of thinking resemble our own. [Applause.] We decided henceforth to associate ourselves with the free world whether it be for good or for ill. [Applause.]
For the son, the alliance has turned out to be very much “for ill.” After the start of the war, the New Yorker reported, “ Trump and his aides began referring to Pahlavi as the ‘loser prince.’”
The farce’s second act is the reenactment of colonial knowledge production. Seeing images of bombed buildings, white observers express amazement that Tehran, with its orderly streets and highways, appears so “modern,” or that Isfahan possesses such “beautiful” architecture from the past. As always, colonial knowledge proceeds through destruction: Where missiles fall, epistemic curiosity belatedly follows.
Another “discovery” was that assassinating Ali Khamenei would not automatically bring about “regime collapse.” One reason for the government’s endurance lies in the difference between the supreme leadership of Ruhollah Khomeini and that of Khamenei père. Khomeini was a charismatic leader who rose to power in the heat of the revolution, and whose relationship with both officials and citizens was grounded in this almost libidinal bond. Khomeini’s Bayt, the traditional seat of the religious leader, did not expand significantly as an institution. Khamenei followed a different trajectory. Lacking his predecessor’s charisma, he operated as an institutionalist. After assuming office in 1989, Khamenei expanded the Bayt into a vast apparatus and, through it, shaped or initiated further institution-building within the system, solidifying a network of government-backed yet semi-autonomous military, religious, and economic organizations.
As a result, the Iranian state developed into a multilayered formation: a modern state that does not depend on a single central figure, so long as the authority of its institutions is sustained. Mainstream analysis has largely failed to grasp this institutional character, instead circulating the fantasy of regime change through decapitation. Indeed, the insistence across Western media on labeling the Iranian state a “regime”—imagined as a thin layer of despotic rulers, rather than a complex system with manifold centers of power—reflects the same sanctioned ignorance.
The third act of the farce is that of the emperor himself. Delusional yet powerful, naked yet enraged, Donald Trump revels in the sheer force of his killing machine across West Asia, threatening annihilation and promising peace in a single breath. Easily bored, the emperor always has his eye on the next prize. Trump recently proclaimed, with chilling candor, that he believes he “will have the honor of taking Cuba.” “I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I could do anything I want with it.” Easily bored, the emperor always has his eye on the next prize. The truth is that he could take it. He possesses the power of destruction. Trump boasts of being the emperor who can make die, who can bomb infrastructure and inflict on the Iranian nation what the postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe calls a “permanent condition of ‘living in pain.’” But the imperialist’s fallacy has always been to think that simply by imposing suffering, he can impose his will. Yet this pure negation cannot produce any durable dominance; the Strait of Hormuz bears witness to this. “Maybe me and the Ayatollah” will “jointly control” the Strait, Trump recently mused to reporters.
Nonetheless, the destruction is real. Israel and the US are deindustrializing Iran. Alongside the the South Pars gas field, industrial zones across the country have been targeted—including Jay in Isfahan, Toula in Qeshm, Abbasabad in Pakdasht, Shenzar in Sharifabad, Lia in Qazvin, Hasanabad in Fashafuyeh, Shokouhieh in Qom, and Kheirabad in Arak—killing and injuring workers and leaving many others unemployed. Bombings in the rural periphery and smaller cities are under-documented, as internet access, already uneven outside Tehran, has become more expensive; but reports show repeated bombings in border areas in the West, coastal areas in the South and Southeast, and provincial capitals in Kurdistan, Western Azarbaijan, and Eastern Azarbaijan. More than 3.2 million people are now internally displaced in Iran, and another million in Lebanon, where entire villages in the South have been razed to the ground, and even bridges over which refugees might escape have been systematically destroyed by the Israeli army. If the US and Israel carry out their threats to further target civilian infrastructure such as power plants, and Iran follows through on its own threats of retaliation, decades of development in West Asia will be wiped out. The peoples of the region will be pushed into ever deeper suffering, and the war will enter a terrifying and unpredictable new phase.
Now that there is open talk of a US ground invasion in the Strait of Hormuz, including the occupation of Kharg or other islands, it is worth recalling that such an operation would hardly be without precedent. The earliest modern episode of colonial intrusion in the Iranian South occurred when the Portuguese, under Afonso de Albuquerque, seized Hormuz and Qeshm Islands, transforming Hormuz into a fortified node of maritime empire and a chokepoint for control of trade. This was not an isolated foothold, but part of a wider imperial encroachment in the Persian Gulf. The British Empire’s naval dominance and intermittent occupations along the Southern coasts embedded the region in the circuits of colonial capitalism. These incursions did not go uncontested: From local uprisings and Safavid campaigns (with England’s help) that expelled the Portuguese in 1622, to a longer sedimentation of anticolonial memory in Southern Iranian oral traditions, folklore, and literary imaginaries, the Gulf is a place where imperial domination and resistance have long been entangled.
As the US and Israel wage a high-tech war over the same strategic waters, it is imperative to recognize the present moment not as a rupture but a repetition under new conditions: the same geography of extraction and control, the same fantasy of white imperialist domination of trade chokepoints, now mobilized through satellites, algorithms, and precision munitions. * * * In the first ninety-six hours of the war, the US dropped more than five thousand munitions on Iran, making it the “most intensive opening air campaign in modern history,” according to analysis by the Foreign Policy Research Institute—far heavier than the first days of the NATO no-fly zone in Libya. Critical to this unprecedented acceleration of military decision-making process—target identification, weapon selection, damage assessment—is the Maven platform, developed by data-mining and surveillance giant Palantir, which is used to coordinate the entire so-called kill chain. Together with Anthropic’s Claude, Maven operates a real-time dashboard for Pentagon analytics and operations in Iran. 1 Where past kill chains required hours or days of manual paperwork for approval, the process has now been condensed to mere seconds and minutes. The same generative AI tools and LLMs used by students and coders are being used by the US and Israeli militaries to rain destruction on an entire country.
Events are unfolding too fast for brash speculation. Yet one consequence of the war is already taking shape: October 7 marked the dawn of an emerging military- AI complex. A recurring headliner in this race remains Palantir, a firm established with CIA funding, which has adapted real-time logistics from the Wendy’s supply chain to the US Army’s kill chain. 2 Palantir has made no secret of its ambition to become the “US government’s central operating system,” effectively bridging civilian bureaucracy and military power through its wide array of data analysis and visualization systems. And in January 2024, Palantir announced a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s defense establishment. Details are murky, but evidence shows its technology has helped select targets in Gaza. 3 We cannot tell with certainty what role AI played in the massacre at the girls’ elementary school in Minab. We do know that the US war machine assembled a target inventory with superhuman speed, which would explain why the list of targets was not updated to differentiate the school from the IRGC base that stood next to it for about a decade. If placing all blame on the digital assassin serves to divert attention from the human assumptions embedded in the system, this is by design: The machine generates intelligence in terms of probability scores, diffusing responsibility and ensuring deniability. Like AI generally, the military AI industry has matured rapidly since 2023. As Avner Gvaryahu wrote recently in the Guardian , “Gaza was the laboratory. Minab is the market.” October 7 marked the dawn of an emerging military-AI complex. For all this, the high-tech methods of US-Israeli warfare do not mark a break with imperialism, but its continuation by other means. In a previous essay , written in the immediate aftermath of the January massacre, we spoke of a political “three-body problem” facing Iran, without an immediate solution. None of the determining factors of the situation—the class character of the uprising, the symbolic domination of the protests by the Pahlavist right, and the threat of imperialist assault—predominated over the others. Now, after the night when “two suns rose in Tehran,” we need to amend our analysis. This is an imperialist war of hubris. It has overtaken the whole situation.
Even the vast majority of US politicians who present themselves as critics of the war are actively working to obscure its true nature. In mainstream media outlets, Democratic senators, congressmembers, and experts condemn Trump’s “recklessness,” the “lack of clarity” about the war’s “objectives.” In fact, the objectives are perfectly clear. Trump’s own stated reasons for initiating the war may change by the hour, but the strategic goal of Israel and its Western allies, as we wrote in January, is “to ignite a permanent civil war that ensures no authority in Iran can rebuild itself for the foreseeable future.” Nor is the timing of the war such a mystery. A troublesome government for US-Israeli hegemony in West Asia—a government that for decades has been cast as the embodiment of “political Islam” and “Islamist terrorism”—appeared to be at its “weakest,” sufficiently discredited among its own population, and ready to be brought to its knees by a swift and violent assault.
For the US, and especially for Israel, it matters little whether the existing Iranian state is overthrown and another government installed in its place. Iran is a large and strategically located country, endowed with vast resources and determined to remain stable and independent in the face of imperialism. Any such country, regardless of the conventional or unconventional weapons it may possess, poses a danger to Israel’s establishment of absolute hegemony over the region. The desired aim, then, is to produce conditions which deny all Iranians the right to self-determination for the foreseeable future. Competition with China and the preservation of the petrodollar system—which the current war has thrown into crisis—are driven by the same systemic imperatives.
The war’s objectives are clear, yet its initiators failed to achieve them within the stated timeline of four days, or one to two weeks, or four weeks—the goalposts keep moving. What remains to be seen is what process of sublimation will finally bring this arrogant superpower to accept defeat, and how far Trump will go to project power and claim victory, before finally recoiling at the war’s economic and political cost. For its part, the Iranian side has rejected Trump’s claims of negotiations, even as diplomatic backchannels and third-party mediators, notably Pakistan, may be in play behind the scenes. The war’s motives are obvious, yet nothing is certain. * * * Since before the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, Israeli and US officials have repeatedly assured Iranians that their target is not the Iranian “people,” but the Iranian “regime.” JD Vance insists that “the US is not at war with Iran, but with Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.” Netanyahu and Trump have called on ordinary Iranians to “rise up” against their government. This narrative is by now decades old. In 2007, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert—the liberal sweetheart now celebrated for his supposedly courageous critiques of Netanyahu—told his audience at an Israeli security summit that
We have nothing against the Iranian people, we are not the enemy of the Iranian people and we have no interest in conflict with Iran. In the past, before the takeover by the radical factions of the country with its exceptional tradition and impressive abilities, we had close and friendly relations.
This long-running PR campaign goes beyond politicians and media pundits, to directly involve—or pretend to involve—the social milieux of both Iran and Israel. After the launch of the war, Let’s Do Something, an Israeli charity founded after October 7, posted an online video of Israeli citizens who were asked, “If you sat down with an Iranian, what would you say?” Every answer is a variation on the same talking points . One interviewee points to her surroundings in Tel Aviv and says, “We want you to have all this: freedom, peace, democracy.” Another urges Iranians to carry out a new revolution; a young man says that his parents are Iranian, and the war “is obviously not with you, but with the Iranian regime”; a young woman hopes the two countries can live in peace, “like the old days.”
The rhetorical separation forged between “the Iranian people” and their government—notably popularized by Barack Obama’s annual Nowruz addresses, which bypassed state officials altogether—implies that genuine Iranian society stands in opposition to its contemporary political reality. Netanyahu often addresses Iranians “directly,” in video messages lamenting Iran’s domestic crises, from droughts to oppressive dress codes. Donald Trump, too, boasts of his “good Iranian friends,” praising their illustrious heritage, while threatening their officials with annihilation.
This manufactured disconnect was not merely rhetorical. It penetrated deeper, fracturing the very idea of Iran. The Islamic Republic was increasingly portrayed as a foreign invader, an alien entity holding Iranians hostage, denying their “true” culture, and violently occupying their national identity. Ghazelle Sharmahd, an opposition activist whose father was kidnapped and executed by the regime, crystalized this discourse during the Twelve-Day War:
As war unfolds between Israel and the Islamic Republic, headlines scream “Iran attacks” and “Iran strikes back.” But let me be clear: This is not Iran. The Islamic Republic is not Iran, it’s not a government, and it certainly does not represent the Iranian people. It is a foreign, Islamist regime that hijacked our nation, to erase our identity and steal our future forty-six years ago—and every time you conflate the two, you help bury the truth . . . . It is a violent, ideological occupier that murders Iranians daily.
Over the past decade, some Iranian media in exile—now indispensable to audiences in Iran under conditions of censorship—has methodically reinforced this framing. In doing so, they have often downplayed the implications of mass violence in Palestine, at times even denying or trivializing the destruction in Gaza, or deflecting responsibility from Israel. These narratives have in effect reinforced the US and Israel’s “head of the snake” thesis, casting the Iranian state as the central source of regional violence, thereby displacing attention from the immediate agents of destruction.
In this context, moral and political clarity is sorely needed. The minimum acceptable position regarding this war is that of, for example, Ben Saul, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counterterrorism, who has condemned the war as a “violation of the most fundamental rule of international law,” led by “two countries who excel in shredding the international order.” The US and Israel launched their attacks entirely unprovoked, in the midst of negotiations, based on bogus claims of an “imminent threat,” or—in more camera-conscious moments—in the name of bringing “freedom” to Iran.
To oppose the war is not to embrace a mythic idea of Iran or the Iranian nation, but to defend an independent Iran as a home for all its peoples. Iran must be saved from imperial capture; the conditions of life must be preserved, in the face of an enemy whose murderous “Gaza doctrine” aims to destroy those conditions. As a Baloch feminist comrade writes from southeastern Iran:
On New Year’s Eve, a motorcycle courier is torn apart by the blast wave of an explosion. A friend, his voice trembling, calls: they “pulverized” Chabahar today. I think of political Nowruzes in the memory of indigenous people. If I could be elsewhere, I would not want anything other than this political Nowruz. In those brief moments when I can connect to the internet, I think every word other than exposing this brazen assault and its savagery on our lives is a waste of our time; but it seems our friends are setting up classrooms to educate us . . . . Do not lecture us on which “anti-imperialism” is worth it or not. These debates mean nothing to us. Do not teach us. Tell the world that Iran and Lebanon have become laboratories for the latest weapons and cutting-edge technologies of collective slaughter in an asymmetrical war. We have learned our lesson in the ashes of Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan—we only want you to stop teaching us. We are living through the collapse of societies, displacement, uprooting, death, and ruin. Everything we built or dreamt of building is being openly erased and handed over to oblivion in this glaring violation. If you cannot raise your voice in disgust at this imperialist war, then at least stop lecturing us. 4 * * * No one knows what awaits Iran after this war. Even in the most optimistic scenario—if the country does not slide into civil war, and the state remains intact—it is not difficult to anticipate a period of violent repression. The mass killing of leftist and MEK prisoners at the end of the Iran-Iraq War stands as a stark historical warning. Forty years later, the country’s social conditions have changed profoundly, and it is difficult to imagine that the state could again execute thousands in silence and secrecy. However, state killing has continued even under the bombings. Last week, three protesters arrested during the January uprising were executed. The situation of prisoners—among them political prisoners—is deeply alarming, and dozens more protesters have been arrested since the start of the war; yet given the severe limits on public information, there is no transparency regarding their condition.
The bombings have left many unemployed, and internet shutdowns have caused further job losses. Food inflation continues. A domestic anti-war movement that could have raised a collective voice against the war did not emerge before it began; instead, the Iranian right-wing opposition beat—and continues to beat—the drums of war. Now, when a state under existential threat has imposed unprecedented restrictions on expression, and a large part of the population faces the direct danger of incoming missiles and bombs, the formation of such a voice within the country has become almost impossible. Many read the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as the next Supreme Leader—at the cost of further delegitimizing the state, as it runs counter to the anti-dynastic origins of the 1979 Revolution—as the realization of a long-anticipated wartime consolidation of power around the Revolutionary Guards, effectively placing the state under their expanded operational control. Ghalibaf’s program could be summed up in a single phrase: deportation and the wall. If the reports are true that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of Parliament, will act as the Iranian interlocutor in upcoming negotiations with the Trump Administration, then this interpretation gains further weight. It carries, moreover, some deep historical ironies. A former senior IRGC commander—as well as deputy commander of the Basij paramilitary forces, commander of Khatam-al Anbiya Construction Headquarters, head of the IRGC Air Force, and later chief of national police—Ghalibaf has long been seen as a prime candidate for the Napoleon III of Iran, a figure who could preside over a Bonapartist reconfiguration of the state under conditions of blocked class struggle. 5 Where Marx described the capitalist state as an “executive committee” coordinating the broader interests of the bourgeoisie, in this scenario the state apparatus becomes, as Mike Davis wrote, “its own executive committee,” exercising power purely in its own kleptocratic interests.
A four-time loser of presidential elections—first in 2004, when he was reportedly sidelined at the last moment by allies of none other than Mojtaba Khamenei—Ghalibaf ran what was perhaps the closest thing to a Trumpian campaign in Iran’s 2024 election . He was “the first candidate in the history of the Islamic Republic” to openly incorporate anti-Afghan, anti-migrant rhetoric as a means of mobilizing voters. Ghalibaf’s program could be summed up in a single phrase: deportation and the wall.
At the same time, in recent days, even under ongoing bombardment, state officials have appeared on national television to reaffirm that the government’s policies of neoliberal austerity—or “downsizing the state,” in the official buzz phrase—will continue. This at a time when war conditions demand not retrenchment but rapid expansion in both the quality and quantity of essential services, such as education, social security, and health care. * * * The Iran war is being fought not only with bombs and missiles, but by the regulation of perception. We are dealing, as political commentator Richard Seymour has put it, with a “cognitive dissonance” that operates on two overlapping levels, a spatial one and a psychic one, whose separation and recomposition structures the present war. At the level of space, the fiction is relentlessly circulated that one can strike “targets”—the state, the Bayt, military and energy infrastructures—without striking the lives embedded within them, that social space can be neatly partitioned into legitimate objects of violence, with innocent residues left untouched. First deployed in Gaza and later codified by Israel in Lebanon as the “Dahiya doctrine,” this logic is now being applied again in Lebanon and Iran.
Across Tehran, local police buildings have repeatedly been targeted. Yet as in many American and European cities, these stations are embedded in dense residential neighborhoods, amid ordinary apartment blocks and everyday urban life. At the same time, Iran’s system of mandatory conscription means that a large proportion of those stationed and targeted at border military posts are extremely young, often just 18 years old. The distinction between “military” and “civilian” thus becomes immediately unstable. Even in peripheral regions like Baluchistan or Kurdistan, urban areas have not been spared. Media infrastructure has likewise been targeted: Radio and TV broadcasters, often located in populous urban cores, have come under attack. In older, denser districts, the impact of such strikes is amplified, rendering any remaining distinction between strategic “target” and civilian space untenable.
This instability is further heightened by the density of Iran’s social fabric. Contrary to caricatures in right-wing media, Iranian society is deeply entangled across institutional, economic, and spatial lines. The language of “precision strikes,” as in Gaza and Lebanon, functions as a convenient fiction. Hundreds of health, medical, and cultural facilities are connected—through contracting, administration, or ownership—to state and military structures. The category of “military personnel” thus embraces a heterogeneous workforce of administrative staff, service workers, technicians, and salaried employees, working far from any battlefield. The total war on Iran signals a new break in the logic of these militarized gamifications. This spatial dissonance cannot sustain itself without its psychic counterpart. The use of AI to render Palestinian lives disposable—whether in Gaza or in West Bank surveillance systems—has been widely documented. However, the total war on Iran signals a new break in the logic of these militarized gamifications. The site of cognitive dissonance has shifted from the “player” (settler) and the “enemy” (indigenous Palestinian) to instead embed both functions within the lone player, at once self-destructive and self-alienated. The human user now functions as a node in the decentralized assemblage generating predictive prophecies and imperial fantasies: simultaneously the player and the played, in Palantir’s operating system. Appeals to “human” involvement and accountability—from soldiers watching drone footage to lawyers verifying targets—may soon become passé under conditions in which the human is integrated into the super-cognition of the killing machine.
Under such conditions, imperialist violence need not be denied outright; it is enough that it becomes unrecognizable. National solidarity does not fail because suffering is unseen, but because solidarity itself is rendered inadmissible. These psychic conditions have led some Iranians to embrace foreign intervention and regime change, romanticizing the invader as a savior who will bring “Western” values to the barbarism of the Iranian state. This is visible in the neo-Pahlavist movement’s open endorsement of US military invasion, and even among some members of Iranian liberal groups, who since the January massacres have resigned themselves to foreign intervention as a last resort, allegedly “after all else has failed.” Both positions surrender all popular agency and self-determination to the quixotic promise of freedom bombs. Such attitudes bespeak a psychic possession by forces that render us living military bases, rockets launched on our own bodies.
The toll exacted by this new cognitive order may also contribute to the war’s eschatological tenor. American commanders have reportedly told their units that the war on Iran is “anointed by Jesus” as part of his return, a sign of Armageddon. Pete Hegseth, known as the Pentagon’s “holy warrior,” holds weekly pro-Israel Bible study sessions. Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have likewise long trafficked in apocalyptic discourses of civilizational conflict. And since the January protests, Reza Pahlavi has spoken of a “final battle” with the Islamic Republic.
Stripped of its messianic rhetoric, this trajectory reveals something far more continuous: a long durée of imperial governmentality in which technologies of surveillance, classification, and control are first tested on colonized and occupied populations, only to be later reimported into the metropole. War, in this sense, is not only destructive but also productive: It creates the means by which power reorganizes itself across space. We return to the warning of our Baloch comrade, which the world must hear: “Iran and Lebanon have become laboratories for the latest weapons and cutting-edge technologies of collective slaughter in an asymmetrical war.” However this current war ends, we can trust that the colonial boomerang is already on its way back.
- In late February 2026, the Pentagon terminated its contract with Anthropic, labeling the company a “supply chain risk,” after Anthropic refused to permit unrestricted military use of its AI technology. The day the war began, the Department awarded a new contract to OpenAI, to provide AI capabilities for classified defense applications. ︎
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- After writing these words, we came upon Palantir’s own promotional information sheet titled Connecting the Supply Chain to the Kill Chain ; our analogy was not merely ironic after all. ︎
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- Although Palantir has assumed a newly decisive role in the current war, the company has been enmeshed in US-Israeli strategy toward Iran for more than a decade. In 2018, after Trump withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iranian nuclear enrichment, it was revealed that the International Atomic Energy Agency had relied on Palantir’s predictive policing software since 2015, using its tools to visualize classified information and help inspectors link people, places, and materials involved in nuclear activities. (Ironically, under the terms of the agreement, it was the Iranian government itself that granted access to Palantir’s intrusive verification system.) In June 2025, Israel touted an IAEA report alleging that Iran had developed 60 percent enriched uranium, again based in part on data from Palantir’s monitoring and prediction platforms—ultimately bolstering the narrative that served to justify the current war. For a rich and detailed investigation of Palantir’s long involvement in Israeli aggression against Iran, see Islam Khatib’s 2025 article in Al Akhbar , “Palantir’s Shadow War on Iran.” ︎
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- This position certainly does not oblige one to embrace the official sentimentalization of the IRGC, the masculine jouissance attached to every display of Iranian power, or the romanticization of state figures. In the days after his assassination, the former national security chief Ali Larijani, who authored a handful of academic books, was eulogized in some quarters as a “Kantian philosopher.” This is not only a romanticization, but a helplessly orientalist and exoticizing gesture. The Iranian state is, again, a modern state, institutionalized across multiple layers, not a gang of exotic figures, scholar-warriors, or supernatural heroes. ︎
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- Ghalibaf has even proclaimed himself the “Reza Khan of Hizbollahis,” invoking both the Islamic Republic-backed Lebanese militia and the grandfather of the current claimant to the Peacock Throne. ︎
- The post Laboratory for Slaughter appeared first on Truthdig .