Published: June 24, 2025, 05:29 PM
Sultan Mohammed Zakaria
Madison, WI, June 20, 2025
For a second uneasy week the guns have kept growling from the Levant to the Zagros. Donald Trump has, true to form, lobbed a few empty threats from the sidelines, but Washington has yet to commit troops. Europe, terrified of another migrant wave after the Syria–Iraq debacle, is pleading for restraint: a fresh exodus of 90 million Iranians would shake the very foundations of the Continent’s welfare states. Whether cooler heads prevail depends less on Brussels than on the deep states of Israel and the United States. So far the trajectory points to a war of attrition. If the conflict does harden into a long slog, three tectonic outcomes—sketched in a previous Bengali essay—are worth pondering.
1. Israel Cannot Win a Protracted War
Israel’s odds of prevailing in a drawn-out fight hover near zero. Two structural handicaps stand out.
No strategic depth. The country is barely the size of New Jersey; sustained bombardment would flatten critical infrastructure and turn the Jewish state into a “mini-Gaza.” Most Israelis hold a second Western passport—around 700,000 are American citizens. Professors I know personally are already booking one-way tickets. As missiles fall, that dual-national cohort is unlikely to return. Iran, by contrast, is eighty times larger. Its military and industrial nodes are scattered across deserts and mountains; many lie deep underground. Even if millions of Iranians flee to Turkey, Pakistan or Afghanistan, most have nowhere else to go and will stay to fight.
Forty years of tunnel-building. Since the Iran–Iraq war Tehran has prepared precisely for an air-power mismatch. Beneath the soil lies a shadow state: scores of underground missile cities, naval pens and air bases. Roughly 80 percent of Iran’s arsenal is buried beyond the reach of conventional munitions. You cannot GPS-track what you cannot detect. The only way to neutralize these bunkers is a ground invasion—and Iran’s topography, ringed by mountain chains and bounded by the Caspian, is a nightmare for aggressors.
2. An American Ground War Would Be Vietnam on Steroids
Only the United States could conceivably mount a land campaign. Even then, failure is the likelier outcome. Imagine Washington drops “bunker-busters” on Fordow; Iran retaliates against nearby U.S. bases; the Pentagon responds with boots on the ground. The result would be a quagmire dwarfing Saigon.
Military lore says a weak defender wins merely by surviving. Hizbullah’s ability to “stand tall” against Israel in 2006 is still hailed in Beirut as victory. Iran, battered but unbowed, could do the same. America would bleed treasure—perhaps $8-10 trillion, a third of its GDP—without securing decisive gains. Iraq cost roughly $2 trillion; this bill would be several times steeper. The empire’s fiscal scaffolding would creak, and with it Washington’s global sway.
3. A Weimar Moment in the Making
Defeat abroad rarely stays abroad. A humiliating campaign could usher in America’s own Weimar Republic. Ordinary citizens would ask: Who dragged us into this ruinous war? The finger would point at Zionist lobbyists who, critics claim, nudge Washington into endless Middle-East entanglements.
Until recently U.S. conservatives were instinctively pro-Israel. No longer. Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Candace Owens are waging an information war against Zionism, aligning—oddly—with progressive detractors on campus quads. Should American body-bags pile up, this red-blue convergence could curdle into a nationalist tide, scapegoating Jews and, inevitably, Muslims and other minorities as collateral targets. History rhymes, and the rhyme is ugly.
Personal Notes:
1. Prediction is very difficult—especially about the future, quipped the physicist Niels Bohr. The Middle East is a labyrinth where linear models fail. Every scenario sketched above rests on two decades of study, some fieldwork and no small amount of informed guesswork. Treat these hypotheses as signposts, not certitudes; each conceals libraries of context that will not fit into an op-ed.
2. War, in the end, is a human impulse: the strong exploit the weak; the weak arm themselves and resist; and the cycle renews. I dearly hope these forecasts prove wrong. But hope is not policy, and denial is not strategy. If Israel, Iran and America sleepwalk into a forever war, the bill—in blood, money and social cohesion—will not be confined to the deserts of the Middle East. It will land, with compound interest, on streets from Tel Aviv to Tehran to Toledo.
