What's the Farsi Word for "Quagmire"?

Rumble link Bitchute link False Flag Weekly News link

E. Michael Jones discusses his new article “Lust Darkens the Mind”, and breaks down the week’s news, in the above-linked episode of False Flag Weekly News. -KB

More and more Americans are asking: What, exactly, are we doing in Iran? Apologists for the war say: “We need to open the Strait of Hormuz! It’s a critical geostrategic choke point! The dastardly Iranians have closed it!”

But before the US and Israel launched a cowardly sneak attack that murdered more than 150 schoolgirls, an 86-year-old Supreme Leader with terminal cancer, his daughter, son-in-law, little grandaughter, and many other innocent people, the Strait of Hormuz was wide open, and nobody was planning to close it. So if “opening the Strait” is the goal, the warmongers are trying to solve a problem that they themselves needlessly created.

The war apologists then shift gears: “We need to protect the Gulf states and our military bases. The Iranians are pounding them!” But once again, that’s circular logic. Had the US not attacked Iran, US military bases occupying America’s Persian Gulf colonies would not be under attack. Nor would there be any imminent threat to the infrastructure, including the crucial energy infrastructure, of those colonies.

“But if we stop escalating and retreat, Iran will emerge as a regional hegemon!” Again, that never would have happened if you had not attacked them in the first place.

The apologists retreat to the fallback argument: “Iran was threatening to develop nuclear weapons!” But that is not true. Once again, by attacking Iran, the US and Israel created the problem they claim they’re trying to solve.

Iran’s late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Syed Ali Khamenei, had issued a fatwa forbidding all forms of WMD including nuclear weapons. But that fatwa was only valid during his lifetime. By killing him, the US and Israel removed the most serious obstacle to any prospective Iranian nuclear weapons program.

The warmongers claim that by enriching uranium to 60%, far above what is necessary for nuclear energy or medicine, Iran showed it was pursuing nuclear weapons. They forget that the only reason Iran was doing that was because Trump had needlessly and stupidly shredded the JCPOA nuclear agreement. Under that agreement, Iran was strictly limited to enriching to no more than 3.67%, and the most intrusive inspections regime in history ensured full compliance.

But if it wasn’t interested in nukes, why would Iran react to Trump’s betrayal of the JCPOA agreement by enriching to 60%? First, Iran wanted leverage to get sanctions relief. Neither Obama not Trump had honored the JCPOA’s provisions obliging the US to drop its economic sanctions. Iran felt the need to convey a clear message to the Americans: “We gave up something up by restricting our nuclear program, but you have to honor your promise to give something up too, by ending sanctions.”

Secondly, Iran’s nuclear program presents a vague but meaningful deterrent to any prospective Israeli nuclear attack on Iran or its allies. With its robust nuclear program featuring plenty of know-how and equipment, Iran has put Israel in a position where it knows that if it uses nuclear weapons against Iran, Iran might rescind its WMD prohibition, engage in a crash program to quickly develop nukes, and retaliate. Thanks to Trump’s shredding the JCPOA, Iran now has plenty of 60%-enriched-uranium and could produce a dozen nuclear bombs fairly quickly in order to retaliate if it were itself attacked with nuclear weapons. (For details, listen to nuclear weapons expert Ted Postol.)

So the nuclear issue, too, represents a case of US aggression creating the problem it pretends to be trying to solve. The self-proclaimed “very stable genius” Trump has taken a few minor non-problems and turned them into the mother of all quagmires.

“We’ve taken away their incentive not to have a nuclear weapon. So we will start to worry as each week goes by, not because we have great intel, not because we’re human. It’s because of the opposite. We don’t have the exquisite intelligence we had with the Obama deal to know we had frozen the program. Now that we have Swiss cheese at best, And what we will see in the holes of the Swiss cheese are indications of nuclear development.” -Robert Pape

Since all of the above-listed rationales for war on Iran are absurdly circular and transparently preposterous, it seems unlikely that any serious people in the American National Security State believe them. They must know that Trump’s war on Iran is inflicting catastrophic damage on US interests. And though they are not allowed to say it out loud unless they resign, as Joe Kent did, they undoubtedly know that the real Commander-in-Chief of this war is Benjamin Netanyahu, who is rolling the dice in what amounts to a long-shot gamble aimed at paving the way to a Biblically-inspired Greater Israel aspiring to regional if not global hegemony while expanding to occupy all of the land between the Nile and Euphrates rivers. In other words, this is a war for a global Pax Judaica, which would replace the Pax Americana that has prevailed since World War II, and in unilateral form since the collapse of the USSR in 1989.

So the fact that this war is completely self-destructive from any conceivable US standpoint is a feature, not a bug. Operation Epstein Fury is really an Israeli war on the United States of America. Israel wants to destroy the Middle East and force the US out, so it can dominate the ruins. Ending US occupation of its Persian Gulf colonies will completely free Israel’s hand, which in the past has been at least mildly restrained from committing extreme actions, like the genocidal slaughter and expulsion of millions of Palestinians and the destruction of the al-Aqsa mosque, by US “alliances” with the Gulf satrapies.

Presumably Israeli leaders think that since their ethnic-supremacist brethren dominate the Western banking system, they’ll be able to rebuild a power base that will be strong enough to expand their borders, dominate the region, and ultimately make Occupied Jerusalem the de facto capital of a Jewish-banker-controlled world. That would pave the way for the coming of an ethnosupremacist Jewish Messiah, who, according to Jewish eschatology, will exterminate most non-Jews, enslave the rest, and create an earthly paradise for Jews, each of whom will own 2800 goyim slaves.

But as Alexander Dugin among others has pointed out, the Jewish messianic-millenarian vision that produced this war (and Israel itself, truth be told) makes no sense without the coming of the Jewish Messiah, a.k.a. the Antichrist. If the Messiah/Antichrist doesn’t show up, the whole plan falls apart. So the petty gangster Netanyahu, and his messianic-millenarian power base, are essentially gambling on the prospect of an Antichrist Messiah appearing and miraculously saving their genocidal kosher rear ends. And if past experience is anything to go by, that prospect seems unlikely. On many dozens if not hundreds of previous occasions, messianic-millenarian movements have gambled everything on the prospect of an imminent coming of their Messiah. And in every single case, they have lost. The last plausible candidate for Messiah-hood was Jesus, the antithesis of Jewish supremacist psychopathy, and even he hasn’t returned nearly as quickly as his followers expected.

If the Antichrist doesn’t show up with miraculous superpowers, Israel too will find itself facing a quagmire. And that quagmire will get worse, not better, as the US inevitably retreats from West Asia. Without the protection of the kosher-nostra-occupied USA, a genuine geopolitical superpower, Israel will quickly collapse—unless of course a deus-ex-machina Antichrist Messiah arrives in the nick of time to save it. Apparently Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and Chabad Lubovitch think that if they murder enough children and sodomize enough people to death with sticks and slaughter a magical pink heifer, their devilish Messiah, gorged on the blood of innocents, will show up to save them.

How Geopolitical Quagmires Work

I hate to say I told you so, but I have seen this quagmire coming for more than two decades. Iran has always been the last and most important country on the list of “seven countries in five years” targeted for destruction by the real perpetrators of 9/11. And it was clear to me, and to the serious decision-makers in Washington, that by attacking Iran, the US would lose far more than it could ever hope to gain. Only the insertion of the non-serious Israeli-owned president Trump, flanked by “experts” like Chabad real estate sharks Kushner and Witkoff, made this doomed war possible.

One of the shrewdest and most insightful American strategic analysts, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, likewise saw the Iran quagmire coming for more than two decades. Pape was one of the voices of relative sanity in the often-phantasmagoric discussions of “terrorism” that raged after 9/11. (Unfortunately he was never sane enough, or courageous enough, to publicly question the official story of 9/11.)

As I wrote in my 2009 book Questioning the War on Terror:

Are anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists who happen to be Muslim more likely to commit suicide terrorism than non-Muslims of the same political orientation? According to the best research the answer is no.Robert Pape is a University of Chicago professor who wrote Dying to Win:The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Pape’s exhaustive study of every suicide attack between 1980 and 2003 concludes: “The data show that thereis little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism or any one of the world’s religions.” Instead people of any or no religion use suicide terrorism as a weapon of last resort when their lands are invaded and occupied…It is a way for occupied peoples to increase the cost of occupation to the point that the occupier finally gives up and goes home. Pape points out that “what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.” Pape’s book suggests that if war is the terrorism of the strong, terrorism is the warfare of the weak.

Pape’s otherwise-solid analysis uses an incorrect definition of terrorism. Following Zionist-owned imperial propaganda media, he considered terrorists to be people attacking imperial or colonial occupiers. But the actual definition of terrorism is “attacking civilians for political reasons.” And 99% of terrorism is committed by governments, mainly imperial and/or colonial ones. So the real terrorists are the occupiers. The heroes who stand up to them are resistance fighters—some of whom may attack civilians, in which case they, like their enemies, would be availing themselves of the military tactic known as terrorism.

If Pape got terrorism mostly right, he has proved even more prescient in his analysis of the Iran quagmire. Pape has been simulating the likely progression and outcome of a US war on Iran for more than 20 years. Unlike Cassandra, the famous prophetess of doom, Pape did find some people to listen to him—namely the realist wing of the US strategic establishment. But Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff, egged on by Netanyahu, apparently weren’t listening when Pape explained why Iran would enjoy escalation dominance, ensuring an unhappy outcome for the US.

Pape explains how quagmires happen: The aggressor, in this case the US, engages in wishful thinking by overestimating the chances of a limited military strike bringing about a desired political outcome. When, in January 2020, Trump and Netanyahu lured Iran’s greatest military figure and future president, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, to Baghdad under the false pretext of peace negotiations, then murdered him, they apparently imagined that such a dastardly crime would somehow produce a more pliable Iran. That, of course, didn’t happen. Then on June 13 2025, Israel launched a massive attack, murdering more than 20 senior Iranian leaders, leading to a 12-day war that the US joined at the end as a pretext to end the hostilities. The Israelis and Americans bombed Iranian nuclear sites, and Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely obliterated.” But once again, the aggression backfired: Iran curtailed IAEA inspections, its 60% enriched uranium disappeared from Western radar, and the population rallied behind its government.

On February 28, 2026, Trump, once again egged on by Netanyahu, apparently imagined that by murdering the Supreme Leader of Iran he could somehow magically bring about “regime change”—the fall of the Islamic Republic and its replacement by Baby Shah Pavlavi or the MEK terror cult. Predictably, the Iranian population rallied around their government, and the sacred memory of their martyred Supreme Leader and his family members, and wholeheartedly supported a war that will not end until Iran drives the US and its Israeli occupier out of the region.

Pape wasn’t surprised that Iran has rallied behind the Islamic Republic rather than overthrowing it. Having studied every historical instance of attempts to coerce populations through strategic bombing, and to enforce regime change through air power alone, Pape observes that it has never, ever worked, and presumably never will.

The failure of strategic bombing, Pape writes, sets the stage for the next phase of the quagmire or “escalation trap”: expanded bombing to include both military and economic targets. And when Iran shows it can match each such attack with proportional retaliation, the US will be tempted to move to an even more dangerous phase, by sending in ground troops.

But to have a chance of militarily imposing its will on Iran, the US would have to send something on the order of a million ground troops—a political impossibility absent a colossal false flag orders of magnitude bigger than 9/11. And if Trump chooses to send a few thousand troops to Kharg Island, or on a treasure hunt for enriched uranium in the Zagros Mountains near Isfahan, such a fools’ errand is likely to end in disaster.

If Trump, or more likely his master Netanyahu, were somehow able to overcome the rational elements of their security establishments and use nuclear weapons against Iran, both the US empire and Israel would be committing suicide by permanently imploding their global legitimacy. What’s more, Iran would not only mount a crushing response, ending Mideast oil production, rendering America’s Gulf colonies uninhabitable, and raining down fire and fury on Israeli nuclear sites, it would also probably embark on a crash program to develop nuclear weapons and use them to finish off the Zionist entity.

Pape’s analysis shows that what he calls the “escalation trap” is based on two fallacies. The first and most obvious is the well-known sunk cost fallacy, the tendency to irrationally throw good money after bad. After all, if we’ve expended tremendous effort and expense to solve the Iran problem and everything we’ve done has only made it worse, why not keep doubling down?

The other relevant fallacy is the belief that military power in general, and air power in particular, can magically solve political problems. Despite abundant historical evidence to the contrary, a certain wing of the strategic establishment has never stopped hoping that ever-improving bombing yields and accuracies would eventually amount to a magic wand that decision-makers could wave at political problems to make them go away. That hope, Pape explains, has always been chimerical, never more so than when applied to the current Zio-American war on Iran.

Robert Pape is not the only American strategic thinker who understands these things. Presumably JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Kent, and plenty of others who’ve haunted National Security Council meetings grasp the gist of them.

But getting Trump, a pathological narcissist and megalomaniac, to understand them, when such an understanding would amount to admitting defeat (and perhaps inviting Netanyahu to make good on “golden pager” blackmail threats) is probably just as impossible as regime-changing Iran. That’s why the reality-based, non-messianic-millenarian wing of the American deep state needs to embrace the slogan “regime change begins at home”…and act on it with ruthless alacrity.

Stripe is Substack’s only processor and they debanked me, so you can no longer pay me through Substack. Now I am posting everything on Substack free and asking people to sign up for recurring donations at my Paypal donation page…or better yet, the free speech platform SPdonate. Alternately you can Paypal or Zelle to truthjihad[at]gmail(dot)com. Note that Zelle, unlike other methods, doesn’t charge any fees.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com