All Wars Are PR Wars. Why Iran Is Winning This One.

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Breaking! Iranian mullahs killed Lindsey Graham! Read all about it! We now return to our regular programming. -Ed.

Americans who have heard of Sun Tzu identify him with deception, like they identify Machievelli with immorality. The US leadership class has taken to heart Chinese sage’s dictum “All warfare is based on deception.” They have weaponized their self-granted license to lie against their own people, feeding us outrageous whoppers about Iran being supposedly primitive, fanatical, and full of people who hate their own government and can’t wait to overthrow it and welcome invading Americans and Israelis with proverbial flowers and candy.

Iranians, we are told, are royalists who want the US puppet Shah back on his Peacock Throne. They are also Pol Pot style communists who would love to be governed by the US-backed MEK terror cult. Not only that, but they probably also yearn to be ruled by an army of invading Zionist Kurds. Anything so the girls can go half-naked again like they did before 1979.

At some point American leaders started believing their own propaganda. High on their own supply, they have been making an endless succession of strategic blunders.

Iran, for its part, prioritizes another of Sun Tzu’s observations: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Extending the Socratic imperative to know thyself to the enemy provides a sound basis for truth-based strategic communication. And sometimes the simple truth can defeat an army of lies.

Iranians live there, so they know what is really happening in their country. They are also heavily exposed to Western media, including its massive Farsi language propaganda apparatus, so they’ve heard both sides of the story. They can’t possibly miss the grotesque levels of deception and self-deception that pervade Western discourse about Iran.

Just as the October 7 concentration camp breakout unveiled the truth about the ongoing genocide of Palestine, the current Israeli-American war on Iran has cut through legions of Western/Zionist lies to reveal stark geopolitical realities. First and most obviously, the Islamic Republic commands immense popular support. As with Bush’s war on Iraq only more so, the “flowers and candy” predictions were preposterous.

Actually that comparison is deceptive. Saddam Hussein never enjoyed much popular legitimacy. Most Iraqis tolerated him, and preferred him to a Zionist-orchestrated US invasion, but certainly did not love him. (What was there to love?) By contrast, the late Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was genuinely loved by his people. Even the disaffected, including the small minority of Iranians who would prefer to live under a secular system, for the most part loved the Rehbar. When he was criticized, it was almost always because he was seen as being too kind and gentle and lenient and forgiving…in other words, lovable…but sometimes not harsh enough on corrupt individuals and enemies.

Iranians, including the minority of disaffected ones, always knew that the Khamenei family was squeaky-clean. The late Rehbar insisted on that. Since everyone knew that he and his family were totally free from any whiff of corruption, the propaganda lies to the contrary spread by US-taxpayer-funded Persian language media simply discredited the source. “Know yourself and your enemy” triumphed over “deception.”

Likewise, Western propaganda claims that the Rehbar was a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein were belied by the experience of ordinary Iranians who could see with their own eyes what was going on in their country. For example, during one of my eight visits to Iran I spoke to someone whose friend was involved in a land dispute. Though clearly in the right, and after years of court cases having finally obtained the Supreme Leader’s official decision to that effect, the plaintiff was still unable to take possession of his property, because lower-level officials were in no hurry to enforce the Leader’s edict. Far from enjoying dictatorial powers, the Leader’s authority was mostly moral and motivational, and stemmed more from love than from fear. That approach had drawbacks as well as advantages, but the latter outweighed the former, and the ultimate triumph of the loving approach to governance was eternalized by his martyrdom and the reaction it sparked.

Iranians’ love for their martyred Leader was demonstrated at last week’s funeral commemorations, in which an estimated 43 million Iranians participated. That’s almost half of Iran’s total population, making it the equivalent of 150 million Americans turning out for a leader’s funeral. (That’s about how many Americans would line up at Trump’s grave to piss on it; he’d be lucky to get one-thousandth of that to pay their respects.)

The Leader’s funeral was not just the biggest funeral in human history, but also the most-attended event in history. Ex-CNN host Rick Sanchez, fired from the MSM plantation for noticing who the owners and overseers were, had this to say:

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More than 12 million people turned out for Ali Khamenei’s (Tehran) funeral — one of the largest funeral processions in modern history… and it’s still not over.

That’s more than Lenin’s funeral. More than JFK’s. More than Churchill’s. More than Queen Elizabeth’s. More than any British monarch’s funeral.

So much for the “Iran is on the brink of regime change” narrative.

When you’re high on your own lie supply, trapped inside your self-inflated bubble of masturbatory fantasy, you can be blind to the most blindingly obvious realities…such as the obvious fact that murdering Iran’s Supreme Leader would lead to Iran’s shutting down, and seizing permanent control over, the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of the world’s energy must pass.

Sun Tzu’s claim that deception wins wars was never meant as a recipe for random, outrageous, pointless lying that deceives the liar not the target and blows up in the liar’s face. If Sun Tzu heard people like Karl Rove chortling “we’re an empire now, we create our own reality” as their pathological mendacity triggers ever-bigger explosive chain reactions, he would certainly want to distance himself from such grotesque distortions of his own prescriptions for the modest and judicious use of strategic deceptions.

Iran, a lynchpin of the reality-based community, knows that geographical reality has favored it with mountains for self defense and a dominant position overlooking the world’s most important Strait. Military reality, too, now favors the side that keeps its drones and rockets deep underground. These realities cannot be overcome by any number of lying Trump tweets brandishing fantastic and obscene threats.

Trump’s crazed imagination, which swings wildly between fantasies of nuking Iran one day and equally improbable fantasies of peace the next, may hold temporary power over the stock market, but it can’t determine the outcome of the military conflict. Trump may be able to bend FIFA’s soccer rules, but such demented moves, like his erratic war tweets, just make him look weak, stupid, desperate, and totally out of control. As a war propagandist, Trump is an epic failure: His war on Iran is the most unpopular war ever begun, and it plumbs new depths of unpopularity every time a new poll is taken. When economic crunch time comes, Trump will be lucky to escape the guillotine.

Iranian strategic communicators, like Trump, can be quite imaginative. But they are honest enough to frame their Lego videos as fiction. My literary journalism professor Wilmot Ragsdale was fond of quoting Camus’s “fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” That’s what Iranian LEGO filmmakers excel at.

Iranian communicators enjoy a huge advantage over Trump’s Fox News crew: they are defending the defensible, and the defensive. Nobody likes aggression, least of all God.

And the Iranian advantage goes even deeper: They are metaphysically grounded in Truth a.k.a. Reality (al-Haqq, one of the 99 Most Beautiful Names of God). The late Supreme Leader, like other leading Iranian philosophers, was never undone by Westoxified deviations of hyper-skeptical materialism and nihilism. There is essentially no Western philosophy left, because the West has abandoned God, and with Him, Reality. Trying to fight an information war on groundless ground is a hopeless assignment. Might as well sink into the quicksand and be done with it.

So it’s a war of truth versus lies, reality versus fantasy. Lies may prevail for a time. But, like evil, they are ultimately undone by their lack of metaphysical grounding and ontological heft.

“Know your enemy and yourself”—and the truth—defeats (self-)deception in the end.

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