After 13 Days Of Iran War, Trump And Netanyahu Are Learning Bitter Lesson

By T.N. Ashok

NEW YORK: Let’s be blunt about what’s actually happening in the current no holds barred war between Iran and US-Israel combine. The United States and Israel have been bombing Iran for thirteen straight days. Cruise missiles, precision strikes, relentless sorties. The kind of firepower that flattened cities in Iraq within weeks and turned Gaddafi’s Libya into a failed state in months.

And Iran? Iran is still standing. Still fighting. Still squeezing the throat of the global economy with one hand while absorbing punishment with the other.

If you expected a quick, clean victory — if Western planners genuinely believed Tehran would buckle under the weight of American airpower — then someone in that war room badly needed a history lesson. And they are getting one now. The hard way.

Forget the missiles for a moment. Iran’s most devastating weapon isn’t in a silo or an underground bunker. It’s geography.

The Strait of Hormuz — a narrow, almost absurdly strategic chokepoint between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula — carries nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil every single day. Every barrel that heats European homes, fuels Asian factories, and fills American SUVs has to squeeze through that corridor. Iran has all but shut it down.

Tankers are anchored offshore, paralyzed. Shipping insurers are walking away. Oil prices have blown past $100 a barrel and analysts are already muttering about the 1970s oil crisis. The International Energy Agency has unlocked emergency reserves in a scramble to calm markets that are anything but calm.

Tehran didn’t need to win a dogfight in the sky. It just needed to make the world feel the cost of this war in their wallets. Mission accomplished.

Iran is telling the world that you cannot bomb a 5,000 year civilization away, poof, just like that. Here’s the uncomfortable truth that keeps getting buried under military briefings and strike packages.

Iran is not Iraq. It is not Libya. It is not a modern state assembled from colonial lines on a map by bureaucrats who’d never set foot in the region.

It is a civilization five thousand years old. Cyrus the Great built an empire while Rome was still a village. Persia survived Alexander, survived the Mongols, survived imperial Britain playing great games across its territory. The Islamic Republic — whatever its many flaws — sits atop a bedrock of national identity so deep that bombs barely scratch the surface.

And here’s the cruel irony of foreign military pressure: it doesn’t fracture that identity. It forges: it.

Iranians who despise their government — and millions do — do not want Washington making their choices for them. They’ve seen what American liberation looks like in Baghdad and Kabul. They’re not queuing up for a repeat.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have perished in a missile attack with other clerical leaders. But his son Mojtaba Khamenei has taken his place in quick succession. Regime change did not happen. IRGC is still in control and operating under the new Ayatollah. Western planners hoped — and in some cases openly stated — that the strikes might trigger elite defections. That the Revolutionary Guard, under enough pressure, might crack. That has not happened.

Israel has announced it will assassinate Mojtaba if he does not surrender, they may, another Ayatollah will arise.

IRGC is an institution built from the ground up for exactly this scenario. It doesn’t fight like a conventional army because it was never designed to. Missile units, drone swarms, naval guerrilla tactics, proxy networks from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq — it’s a hydra. Cut one head, and the others keep moving.

The Guard survived eight years of grinding war with Iraq in the 1980s, including chemical weapons attacks that the international community largely looked the other way on. It didn’t collapse then. It’s not going to collapse now because American aircraft are in the sky.

Sadly, The War Washington Forgot It Already Fought. Every major Western military intervention of the past quarter century has followed the same arc. Swift opening campaign. Declarations of success. Then years — sometimes decades — of insurgency, instability, and ultimately, withdrawal.

Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Each presented as a necessary intervention. Each became a cautionary tale. ISIS was born in Iraq and it recruited Americans and Europeans as mercenaries in a war that did not belong to them but for the money they joined.

Iran is not a weaker version of those states. It is a far more cohesive, historically rooted, militarily capable nation with regional reach and great-power backing. China is still buying its oil. Russia is still covering its political flank. Neither Beijing nor Moscow is sending troops — but their strategic umbrella is very much open. Iran is not isolated, it is constrained far from cornered.

Europe Is Watching Its Energy Bills. European governments are doing what European governments do in uncomfortable situations: issuing statements carefully calibrated to mean as little as possible while protecting their economic interests.

The reason is nakedly obvious. Europe has spent two years trying to unshackle itself from Russian energy dependency after Ukraine. It cannot absorb another prolonged Middle Eastern oil shock without serious political consequences at home.

Inflation is already a wound. Disrupted energy flows from the Gulf would rip it wide open. So Europe hedges. And in hedging, it quietly signals that the unified Western front has limits.

The Real Casualties are the Grocery Bill, Their Currency War’s collateral damage now travels at the speed of financial markets. Energy prices don’t just affect what you pay at the pump. They are baked into food costs, transport, fertilizers, manufacturing. When oil spikes, the pain fans out across every sector of the global economy within weeks.

For wealthy nations, this is uncomfortable. For developing economies already buried in dollar-denominated debt, already struggling with post-pandemic inflation, already on the edge — a prolonged Gulf energy shock isn’t a geopolitical abstraction. It’s a humanitarian crisis.

That’s the real arithmetic of this war. Every additional day of conflict doesn’t just cost lives in Iran. It costs livelihoods in countries that have nothing to do with this fight.

The Question No One Wants to Answer; Thirteen days in, the fundamental strategic question still hangs unanswered in the air like smoke over a strike zone.

Can the United States and Israel actually win this war? And if so — what does winning even look like? Regime change? History’s track record there is catastrophic. A nuclear deal under duress? Iran’s negotiating posture hardens with every strike. A permanent military occupation of a nation of 90 million people across a territory the size of Western Europe?

No serious strategist is suggesting that. Which means the endgame, if there is one, is deeply unclear. And wars without clear endgames have a habit of grinding on far longer — and costing far more — than anyone anticipated when they started.

Iran will not surrender easily. Not because its military is invincible. Not because its government commands popular love. But because nations with five thousand years of memory do not fold in two weeks. The bombs are falling. The costs are rising. And the hardest battle is yet to begin. (IPA Service)

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