In July 2006, following the the US’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, Condoleezza Rice stated: “What we’re seeing here in a sense is the birth pangs of a new Middle East and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one.”

Now, with Trump’s disastrous attack on Iran, the Middle East is poised to be transformed again. But I’m pretty sure Condi didn’t have Trump’s Iran cluster-fuck in mind when she made the declaration.

What’s ironic is that prominent advocates of the attack on Iran claimed that it would drastically alter the political map of the Middle East. And Trump assumed that he would be the US president to “remake the Middle East”, a mad scheme all of his predecessors had resisted since George W Bush’s dismal failure to achieve the same goal, alongside Israel, more than 20 years earlier.

With Iran having apparently now gained the upper hand, there are growing indications that this prediction might indeed come true, though not the way Condi, Trump or all the other neocons envisioned. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran had generally been seen as the dominant power in the region. The results of Trump’s war might easily return Iran to that powerful position, while degrading or even eliminating some of the Gulf Arab monarchies that were allowing the US to attack Iran from bases in their country.

Iran has instead made lofty demands of its own to end the war. The closure of all US bases in the Gulf States, Israel ending its hostilities in Lebanon, and returning the occupied territory, relief of all sanctions, acknowledging Iranian sovereignty over the Straits of Hormuz, and war reparations for the atrocities inflicted upon them.

These conditions, if agreed upon, would be tantamount to the complete military and political defeat of the United States in the Middle East and its expulsion from the region. Such humiliation by a regional power such as Iran would not only mark the end of American influence in the Middle East, but it could very likely end America’s tenure as a global superpower.

The Zionist-American war on Iran was intended to be a quick beatdown, starting with the decapitation of Iran’s leadership and ending, hopefully, with a spontaneous regime-change which would culminate with the Islamic Republic’s collapse, or at least total capitulation. There was seemingly no sense in Washington or Tel Aviv that Tehran could fight back at all, let alone cripple the US’s Middle East military archipelago.

Barring a quick turnaround in favor of the US-Israeli war effort, the hosts of these bases may want to begin planning for life without them. If the current status quo persists, with Iran maintaining its missile capacity, its deterrence capacity, control of Hormuz, and with US bases dysfunctional, we are entering a ‘New Middle East’ very different from what bloodthirsty Neocons have been fantasizing for decades.

Along with neocon hubris has been the rank incompetence of US military planning. It’s like they learned nothing from observing Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine with its emphasis on drones and precision strike missiles. Then there’s the grifting of the US military-industrial complex, whose only recent technological innovation has been to increase costs by reducing reliability with their cost-plus pricing. Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has thrown the American empire’s already shattered defense industrial base into total disarray. Commodities and components, like rare-earths and computer chips, central to constructing and maintaining digital and electronic systems, and precision-guided munitions, which before transited the Strait daily are now hard to come by and way, way more expensive.

I’m going to quote big, steaming chunks from: America’s Military Is Never Coming Back From This, because it lays out the calamitous effect the war is having on the US military.

“People talk about how Iran is a ‘second-tier military’ but they ain’t Iraq and this ain’t Desert Storm. This is Desert Shitstorm and Iran is not just a peer military to ‘America’s’, they are demonstrably superior. Just look at the scoreboard, which isn’t school massacres but military targets. Behold, then, ‘American’ airframes burning in the sun while Iran’s rockets are safe underground. The White Empire stood astride the Middle East like Colossus, but now they lie there in a wreck, colossal morons.

It’s not like any of this was a mystery. As the US itself said in a 2024 report called, somewhat hilariously, The Tyranny of Geography,

Moreover, the thousands of short-range missiles that Iran possesses are a factor here. There is no strategic depth. An F-35 is very hard to hit in the air. On the ground it is nothing more than a very expensive and vulnerable chunk of metal sitting in the sun. The refueling and rearming facilities on these bases are also vulnerable, and they cannot be moved. These bases are all defended by Patriot and other defensive systems. Unfortunately, at such close range to Iran, the ability of the attacker to mass fires and overwhelm the defense is very real.

They should have made this report a 15-second ad and run it on Fox because it’s obviously news to Donald Trump. 

It’s not just that the American military is crashing under its own weight, they’re going the wrong way. They brought a fighter jet to a rocket fight and are getting eviscerated. Observe that Iran has no fighter jets to speak of, just as Apple never made phones with keyboards. It’s a completely different business model. This is the age of Tunnel and Rocket Wars, and ‘America’s’ still geared to fight World War II against enemies that don’t exist anymore.

Now ‘America’, in retreat, is parking its 60-year-old airframes out in the open while Iran has modern missiles in tunnel cities.”

Trump once said that to lose dollar hegemony would be worse for America than losing a major war. Yet this is precisely what is in play in this ‘game of chicken’ which Trump started with Iran, but where he is now at a loss for how to exit, without damaging humiliation.

Like the US/Israeli attack on Iran, Condoleezza Rice’s notion of birth pangs and of a new Middle East follow in the intellectual footsteps of A Clean-Break and the Yinon Plan, both designed to remake the region into Israel’s playground. Some intrepid journalist should ask Condi what she thinks about the new and improved birth pangs as a result of Iran’s surprising success against the American empire and their genocidal sidekick.

Update: As the attack on Iran goes pear-shaped and the Straight of Hormuz remains closed, Trump, in a pique of rage, is resorting to the US’s imperial blueprint; attacking hospitals, university’s and factories, while escalating US-Israeli bombings of Iran’s civilian infrastructure. “Over the next two to three weeks,” Trump said, “we are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”