The Partial Observer: Iran Again: Bibi’s Last War is an American Disaster

The Partial Observer by Wriley Nelson

Iran Again: Bibi’s Last War is an American Disaster

Readers Write: “The Partial Observer” is a column title used frequently in our publications to clearly identify an opinion piece, and/or that the author has some sort of personal or professional interest in the topic about which they are writing. These commentaries reflect on myriad current political, economic, and social situations in this county, this country, and abroad. The content of such submissions should not be construed to be representative of the views of “The Freeman’s Journal,” “Hometown Oneonta,” or AllOtsego.com. In the interests of our readers and with the right and privilege of free speech in mind, we continue to print “partial observer” pieces as we deem relevant.

Author’s Note: This column was originally submitted on March 2, less than 72 hours into the new round of aggression. I have elected to leave any predictions—whether they have since become hindsight or utter nonsense—as they were, to stand or fall on their own merit.

Donald Trump has done it. He has launched the United States into yet another imperial war of choice at the behest of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. For the second time in a year, he sullied American diplomacy for all time by using fake negotiations to lull a military target to sleep before a surprise attack. He did it by secret in the middle of the night, in the face of every promise he made on the campaign trail, without Congressional or public approval and against the desperate pleading of every regional and global friend and foe. He did it despite his own military telling him they don’t have the air defense stockpiles to avoid disaster, under the pretense of striking a nuclear program that his own intelligence community said doesn’t exist and that he claimed to have obliterated last summer. Among the first acts of the new war was the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, whose single-handed opposition is the only reason Iran didn’t obtain nuclear arms 20 years ago. By all accounts, not even Trump really wanted this war. He surely must know that tens of thousands of American service members, the lion’s share of our military hardware, and a fifth of global oil production are under Iran’s missiles and drones.

Trump has started a process that will kill tens of thousands, wipe Israel from the map, and drive the American empire from its dozens of bases across the Greater Middle East. Iran poses no threat to the continental U.S.; Trump did this to protect a loathsome, theocratic military dictatorship and apartheid state that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian children in a demographic war to preserve Jewish minority rule over an Arab majority between the river and the sea. This war is not even in the rational interests of the so-called state of Israel, which will suffer more damage in the coming weeks than it has cumulatively in its 80-year history. The only person who could possibly benefit is Bibi Netanyahu, who must keep the region at full boil to maintain his political coalition, keep his wartime powers, and stay out of jail. In an America bought by AIPAC and CUFI and ruled by the Epstein class, what Bibi wants, Bibi gets.

We are deep in the fog of war. Anything could happen in the coming weeks and it seems foolhardy to venture any prediction. It is entirely possible that, before this article reaches print, Iran will fold under the first shock and Trump will go down as the heroic visionary who did what seven U.S. presidents could not do. The hundreds of civilians caught in the crossfire will not matter to the Western Zionist Empire or its Epstein-class managers and cheerleaders. Neither will Iran’s inevitable descent into a multi-decade forever war, a bleeding ulcer of instability for the entire region, and a howling wasteland of terror groups, slave traders, desperate refugees and narcotics smugglers, just as happened with U.S.-Israeli regime change efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and more. If Iran survives the next few days, however, then we have likely entered a region-wide war of attrition that will lay waste to Israel, devastate American installations and clients across the Middle East, and wipe out the global economy.

Before this week, the greatest geopolitical disaster in American history was the Iraq War. At the all-time peak of U.S. military, diplomatic, and financial power, Bush/Cheney neocons used cooked-to-order intelligence to lie the American public into a war that cost thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and wounds to our constitutional order, financial base and soft power that will never heal. The “anti-Americans,” “communists,” “terror sympathizers” and “bleeding hearts” who opposed that war from the beginning were entirely right. The Zionist-Imperial clowns and cheerleaders across the political spectrum in Congress and the media were entirely wrong. They have spent the last 20 years trying to disown the war they fathered and promising time and again that the next American regime change operation in the Middle East will finally work and bring freedom and democracy to all. Will their promises come true this time?

Iran is not Iraq and 2026 is not 2003. We are in a much worse starting position, face a far stronger foe, and have put even less thought into what might happen if our initial plan succeeds, let alone if it fails. The U.S. is far more fragile economically, politically, diplomatically and even militarily than it was 20 years ago, especially in relative terms. The Trump administration barely made an effort at a plausible pretext to bring Congress or the public along. Armed with a flimsy rehash of the 2002 Iraqi WMD lie, Trump is charging into a global conflict with around 20 percent of the American population behind him, compared to nearly triple that for Bush in ‘03. Our military is a globally overstretched rotten hulk of low morale, subcontracted mercenaries, understaffing, and over-engineered equipment designed more to make defense contractors rich than to win wars. With this quiver full of broken arrows, Trump faces an enemy the size of Western Europe with triple the population of Saddam’s Iraq, close diplomatic ties with many regional and global players, and world-class military capabilities that it has been preparing for precisely this scenario for at least 20 years. Iran has hypersonic missiles that we cannot stop, a constellation of regional militia allies that we could not find or defeat in decades of effort, Chinese and Russian air defense systems that might offer at least a fighting chance against U.S.-Israeli air power, and two decades of prep time to bury all of that too deep for our bombs.

Iraq, once known as Mesopotamia, is a flat, open desert riverbed perfectly suited to the air-and-armor American style of war. It was riven by sectarian and ethnic conflict. The U.S. had already destroyed its military once in 1991 and subjected it to a decade of crippling sanctions that, as Madeleine Albright gleefully admitted, starved half a million Iraqi children to death. Iran is a vast country of mountains and deserts. Whatever else may be said of the Islamic Republic, it is a far more popular, legitimate and competent regime than Saddam ever was. Even the many Iranians happy to see the Ayatollah buried are not likely to rally to any political settlement imposed by hostile foreign powers. Killing the world’s worst dictator will not win you any hearts and minds if you destroy his country in the process, let alone—in true Israeli style—kill 170 schoolgirls in the first minutes of the war. Is there a single historical example of war by assassination and decapitation that actually worked? What would Americans do if an enemy killed a handful of our civilian and military leaders and asked us to surrender? I like to think that we would swap in their pre-designated successors, rally around the flag and fight to the last. Why would we expect Iranians to react differently?

By far the most widely felt effects of this war will be economic. About a fifth of global oil and gas production passes down the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, along more than a thousand miles of rugged, fortified Iranian coastline. The new and largely unanswered military technologies of attack drone and hypersonic missile allowed Yemen to establish a halfway-plausible land-based naval blockade of the Red Sea two years ago, and to chase American carrier strike groups clear out of the region both times we tried to stop them. With all respect to Yemen, that was Yemen; Iran is an entirely different weight class. Beyond the blockade of oil transport, escalating tit-for-tat strikes on production and refining facilities could blow a hole in world energy markets for five or 10 years to come. The world has never faced an oil shock like this, where productive capacity is actually destroyed instead of temporarily shut down for political reasons. The 1973 shock—also partially triggered by an American president’s baffling subservience to Israeli nuclear blackmail—broke the back of American manufacturing, ushered in the malaise of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and became one of the major global political-economic turning points of the 20th century. At the very least, we can expect a surge in energy prices, the added inflation that comes with them, and a major economic slowdown in oil-poor Europe and East Asia. Oil and gas may only be the beginning. A third of global synthetic fertilizer also comes out of the Gulf. If diesel prices continue to rise faster than gas, it is likely that a good proportion of the world’s farmers will go under in the coming months. This is just in time for the northern hemisphere planting season, where nearly three-quarters of all food is grown. It would be hard to design a more perfect storm of global energy-shock stagflation, food scarcity and famine, and political instability.

Unless it stops in the next few days, Trump’s war for Israel will be an American disaster. It may already be too late. The network of military bases and corrupt client regimes we have used to control the Islamic world for six decades will shatter. More Americans will die or be maimed for life in another pointless war for Israel’s regional supremacy. An oil shock to dwarf 1973 will administer the coup de grace to the tottering American economy and dollar empire. Players across the region and world will learn not to trust in our diplomacy or stake their survival on our promises of military protection. New generations of Iranians who do not remember the 1953 Anglo-American overthrow of their first democratic government, the brutal 25-year American-backed military dictatorship of the Shah, or the half-million Iranians slaughtered and gassed by Saddam’s American-armed and -funded army in the 1980s are already learning to trust their parents’ tales of American perfidy and evil. Trump has bet his presidency and millions of lives on a hail-Mary war for Bibi’s political survival. Without even a dream of an upside, we stand on the verge of catastrophe.

If you have a loved one in the military who does not wish to kill or die for Israel and who may want to assert their legal right to discharge or reassignment as a conscientious objector, contact the Center on Conscience and War at (800) 379-2679 or the GI Rights Network at (877) 447-4487 for information or assistance.

Wriley Nelson is a student of international relations with a focus on Eastern Europe and the Middle East. See below for a list of suggested reading.

3 Comments Leave a Reply

Chip Northrup says:

April 2, 2026 at 10:18 am

Trump, like most of Congress, has been bought and paid for by AIPAC for some time. The exceptions – Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont – prove the rule. This unprovoked war is simply another example of toxic Zionism run amuck on the world stage. Per Marco Rubio, US forces followed Israel into this mess, so we “broke it” – for AIPAC. Cue higher energy prices, more deficit spending, and day-trading on Trump’s incompetence

Finlay Adamson says:

April 3, 2026 at 6:29 pm

Exceptional as always. I always enjoy to read All Otsego, when so many other publications are scared to speak truth to power.

Keir says:

April 4, 2026 at 11:20 pm

Wriley Nelson is correct- this war is a disaster and Trump has seemingly no ability to end it