According to Greek mythology, around 480 BCE, the 'King of kings' - Xerxes of Persia – marched to conquer Greece with one and a half million soldiers. What he encountered along the way was a narrow, round 2 km-wide point and a stretch of over 60 km connecting the Aegean Sea with the Marmara Sea on the Mediterranean. The geography was impossible, but with his huge but fatigued army, he crossed the narrow strip over a pontoon bridge only to face a severe reality.
The Greeks had predicted the time of the conquest. What they did was unimaginable. They left the villages, leaving no food or shelter for the Persian expedition, only to be worn out and return to Persia.
Despite a small army adept at what one would call in modern times ‘guerrilla warfare’, Greece’s scorched earth policy left Xerxes's army in hunger and despair.
The disastrous military strategy is now emulated by US President Donald Trump and his ally Israel, which went ballistic on Iran for professedly 'godly' reasons and unclear intentions.
Europe’s Folly of 1956
There is another, more recent parallel. In 1956, nine years after the end of World War II, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser began championing Arab nationalism. Nasser had seized power through a coup d'état in 1952, overthrowing the corrupt King Farouk. His vision was broadly pan-Arab, extending beyond Muslims to include Christians, Jews, and other sub-tribes.
This was immediately perceived as a threat by both the Wahhabis and the Zionists, and tensions quickly escalated, culminating in Egypt's nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the swift military retaliation by Britain, France, and Israel. ‘Operation Musketeer’ was launched in November 1956 by this trio.
Their alliance was triggered when Nasser halted Suez Canal operations - a move the West condemned as outright blackmail. The Anglo-French assault force, Task Force 345, was assembled with considerable naval power, including HMS Eagle, HMS Bulwark, and HMS Albion, supported by helicopter gunships.
A fierce two-sided bombardment followed, with Egypt backed by the Soviet Union and its Sukhoi and MiG aircraft. Despite heavy losses, the British navy managed to take Port Said, only to be met with urban snipers and sustained ground resistance.
International condemnation swiftly followed, with ‘Operation Musketeer’ widely declared illegal. A ceasefire was called, UN forces were deployed, and British salvage companies were permitted, despite Egyptian objections, to clear wreckage from the surrounding waters. It was a decisive strategic defeat for both Britain and France.
The Suez remained under Egyptian control and became a critical international chokepoint. Diplomacy replaced force, and for good reason — by the 1950s, roughly 60% of Europe's oil trade passed through the Suez Canal. Egypt knew its leverage, and the world had little choice but to negotiate.
USA’s Myopic Wisdom on West Asia
Seventy years on, West Asia remains much the same, though governments and governance structures have changed, and trade and diplomacy have carved their own course. Israel has grown considerably stronger, yet it continues to lean on the narrative of divine victimhood, kept alive largely by the surrounding Islamic nations.
Meanwhile, post-revolution Iran, a Shia minority state, turned inward after 1979, quietly developing itself. This unsettled the West, and particularly the United States and Israel, who began constructing their own self-serving existential crisis around the idea of an Iranian threat. Hollywood, predictably, played its part with films like ‘Argo’, packaging convenient propaganda as history, bearing little resemblance to what actually happened.
Iran, to the Westphalian order, is a 'Mullah' based Islamic fundamentalist country, thus a red rag. That’s odd. For years, the US overlooked the threats from Osama bin Laden and other 9/11 masterminds, many of whom hailed from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan. The Salafi and Wahhabi Islam has done more damage to the West than the Shia clerics confined in Qom or Mashhad. Still, the USA sees Riyadh as a better partner.
In his book World Order, Henry Kissinger openly states his unease with Iran's theocratic regime, which he believes has been ideologically shaped by Sunni cleric Sayyid Qutb — the foundational figure behind the Muslim Brotherhood and, by extension, Al-Qaeda. Kissinger's preference is unmistakable: a non-theocratic Iran would suit American interests far better.
To build his case, he reaches back to the 1859 Safavid Treaty between Iran and the United States, drawing comparisons with the ancient Achaemenid Empire to frame Iran as a historically ambitious power. He also references certain findings from the 9/11 Commission suggesting Al-Qaeda had an operational presence inside Iran. The claim is conveniently useful to the broader American narrative.
That narrative hardened after 1979, when the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and the subsequent hostage crisis left a deep wound in the American psyche. What followed was a sustained campaign to corner Iran, most prominently through the spectre of nuclear weapons. Yet the IAEA, across multiple inspections, found no evidence of weapons-grade plutonium enrichment. Iran maintained consistently that its heavy water plant was for peaceful purposes like enriching radioactive isotopes for energy, not armaments. The United States chose not to believe it.
The contradiction, however, is glaring. Israel possesses nuclear-grade weapons and an undeclared enrichment facility. These are open secrets, yet Washington finds this entirely acceptable.
Ruinous Math of US Strategy
Great powers have always fallen to their own ego. Napoleon marched into Russia only to find scorched earth and ruin. Trump is walking a similar path.
American forces are now pinned across pockets in the Persian Gulf: taking hits from Iranian drones and spending ten times the cost to retaliate with missiles, aircraft and carrier groups, only to be struck again. The math is ruinous, both tactically and morally.
Amazon data centres in Dubai and Bahrain have been bombed, and American bases targeted. Oil fields in Riyadh, where American interests run deep through Gulf Oil, Shell and broader investments, are under pressure. An F-35, one of the most expensive fighter jets ever built, was struck by a cheap Iranian Shaheed drone, tellingly revealing everything about the gap between American assumptions and Iranian capability.
Iran’s great leverage is Hormuz. Twenty million barrels of crude pass through that narrow strait every day. Iran has held this card for years but never played it so openly. Now Washington is eyeing the surrounding islands: Kharg, Qeshm, and Larak. What it is not seeing clearly enough is the Iranian army waiting patiently on the other side, content to let the attacker exhaust himself.
Trump's 15-point plan and his talk of a five-day ceasefire will not satisfy Iran. A temporary pause solves nothing when the underlying threat remains. For Iran, America can simply wake up tomorrow and bomb again.
Meanwhile, the ceasefire announcements are doing one job well: briefly pulling Brent Crude below $90. But the danger persists. If oil hits $150 a barrel, economies worldwide will seize up. Job losses, collapsing trade, stalled growth and a global recession will become inevitable. Iran knows this arithmetic and is now taking the fight beyond military targets.
The recent strike on Amazon's infrastructure in Bahrain, confirmed in their own press release, signals a shift: corporate America is now in the crosshairs. Boots on the ground would only accelerate the bloodbath.
Trump has one exit. He retreats slowly, declares victory loudly and hopes history is kind. It will not be. His own population already sees this as another pointless war.
Cost for India and Timid Silence
The deeper injustice is who pays the price. Countries like India, with hundreds of millions dependent on LPG, are already fighting a daily battle with black market prices and cylinder shortages. Why should the world's poorest bear the cost of a conflict chosen entirely by two countries: the United States and Israel, settling their own scores?
India finds itself in an uncomfortable position. Prime Minister Modi counts both Washington and Tehran as partners, yet he has exercised little meaningful influence in pulling either back from the edge. He has little or nothing to say at all. This is a failure of leadership at precisely the moment India should be stepping forward.
The stakes for India are not abstract. Fifty percent of India's crude imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. This is not America's problem borrowed from a distance: it is a daily, structural dependency. Every week the conflict drags on, India pays more at the pump, in LPG prices and in the quiet suffering of hundreds of millions who have no say in a war they did not choose.
The Global South bears the cost of decisions made in Washington and Tel Aviv. India, as the Global South's most prominent voice, has both the standing and the responsibility to demand a ceasefire, openly and on the record.
Trump did call Modi. Nothing came of it. The most concrete outcome reported was a limited negotiation around allowing select ships through the strait, nothing more than a Band-Aid on a rupturing pipeline.
What is also notable is what India has not said. The Indian government has not formally condemned the killing of Khamenei. That silence will not go unnoticed domestically. India's Muslim population stands at roughly 15 percent of 1.4 billion people, and within that, approximately one percent is Shia. With a larger concentration in Kashmir, Kargil, Ladakh, Lucknow and Murshidabad, the community comprises over 14 million people.
The images coming out of Srinagar, Bandipora, Kargil and Leh following Khamenei's death were not incidental. The scale of mourning, and the reported flow of donations from Kashmiri communities toward Iran, reflect a depth of feeling that no government can afford to dismiss, least of all in an already polarised domestic environment.
In this moment, India’s silence reads not as neutrality, but as weakness or deference to Washington.
From Covert Operations to All-Out War
Iran is not Saddam's Iraq. Saddam was, in many ways, a CIA asset. Washington had its people embedded throughout Iraq's security apparatus and knew the regime's inner workings intimately. With Iran, penetration has been far more limited and far more dangerous to execute.
Israel’s Mossad has nonetheless run a sustained covert campaign inside Iran, recruiting local operatives and carrying out targeted killings with calculated precision. Majid Jamali Fashi, an Iranian bronze medalist kickboxer, was convicted of assassinating nuclear scientist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi in January 2010 on orders attributed to Israel. He purportedly used a bomb-rigged motorcycle detonated outside Ali-Mohammadi's home as he left for work.
Fashi had reportedly been approached by Israeli intelligence as early as 2007 during a competition in Istanbul and was subsequently trained and paid for the operation. Fashi was hanged at Tehran's Evin Prison in May 2012 after being convicted of murder.
He was not the only one. Majid Shahriari, a top nuclear physicist at Shahid Beheshti University, was killed in November 2010 when assassins on motorcycles attached a magnetic bomb to his car.
Dariush Rezaei-nejad was shot five times outside his home in July 2011, in front of his wife and young daughter. Ahmad Reza Zolfaghari and Saeed Borji are among others killed in operations widely attributed to Mossad, the latter assassinated during Israeli airstrikes on Tehran in June 2025, part of a widening campaign against Iran's scientific community.
These were targeted, precise and deniable. However, direct assault on Iranian soil by Mossad or the CIA remained limited until now. The shift to open-air strikes marks a fundamental change in strategy: from covert neutralisation to declared military confrontation. Whether that escalation proves wise is another matter entirely.
Shia Connection with Martyrdom
The West also consistently underestimates the Shia relationship with martyrdom. From Imam Ali to Imam Hassan, and through the defining tragedy of Karbala, Shia Islam is built around the acceptance of sacrifice in the face of injustice. Every year during Ashura in the month of Muharram, millions grieve, keeping the memory of the battle of Karbala alive. The wound is deliberately kept open.
Within this framework, the deaths of Khamenei, Qasem Soleimani or any revered figure do not signal defeat. They become fuel. Each martyr is folded into a fourteen-hundred-year continuum of righteous struggle, awaiting the return of the Twelfth Imam: the hidden imam of Shia belief who, alongside Jesus, will emerge to restore justice to the world.
Any power that approaches Iran purely through military and economic calculation, without grasping this, is not reading the battlefield correctly.
Xerxes is not forgotten, nor would be Trump. His 'goal to achieve' was a grand plan only to be crushed before his eyes, and history reads him as a strategist with lesser vision.
Xerxes, in his arrogance, believed he could do something worthwhile, but didn’t rely on strategy and calculation, bringing the lives of his million soldiers under fire. Similarly, Trump, the megalomaniac, believed he was fulfilling “God's will”. But while the world has begun to suffer his actions’ consequences, his own ego lies in tatters.
This war will end up being Trump’s Hellespont moment.
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