If they've been wrong about every war since WWII, how are they right now?

Chris Hedges

f they've been wrong about every war since WWII, how are they right now?

The arithmetic of empire has always been a fiction, but rarely has it been exposed with such brutal elegance as in the latest blow to American prestige. According to reports, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has dismantled a $700 million Boeing E3 surveillance aircraft, the jewel of the airborne early warning fleet, using nothing more than a Shahed 136 drone. The cost of the drone is estimated at $20,000. That's a ratio of 35,000 to 1. Nice odds if you can get em!

Observers note that the United States is being ratioed into certain defeat. Bravado aside, what we are witnessing is the same pattern that has repeated itself from the jungles of Vietnam to the mountains of Afghanistan: the ritual underestimation of those who refuse to submit to the empire. The Iranians are outperforming every expectation peddled by Western military “experts” and the chorus of media cheerleaders who have never once predicted anything other than a swift and glorious victory for their own side.

This is the tired script we know by heart. Every time the West sets its sights on a sovereign nation that refuses to roll over and die, the machinery of delusion grinds into action. First comes the economic warfare. Tariffs, sanctions and blockades, we are assured, will crush any resistance. The public is expected to ignore the reality that targeted nations have weathered these assaults for decades without collapsing, often emerging more self-reliant than before.

Then follows the next series of lies. A kinetic war will be over by the end of the week. The leader will be removed, a handful of targets struck, and the regime will beg for mercy. These operations, they assure us, will be quick, cheap and decisive. The enemy is weak.

It is an interesting phenomenon, because it functions as a loyalty test. You must declare the targeted nation pathetically feeble while simultaneously insisting it poses an existential danger to the civilised world. Deviate from this doublethink for even a moment and you are labelled an apologist, a useful idiot, or worse, a traitor who has taken the other side. Underestimation paired with hysterical threat inflation is mandatory. Anything less marks you as malignant in the eyes of the empire.

Anyone who has read The Art of War understands the fatal stupidity of underestimating an opponent. Yet in the West this ritual self-deception is enforced without pause, on auto repeat. The results speak for themselves. Twenty years and seven trillion dollars were poured into Afghanistan only to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. That disaster was itself the poisoned fruit of earlier imperial meddling, when the West shovelled millions at the Mujahideen in the 1980s. The same arrogant blindness produced the catastrophe in Vietnam. The lesson remains unlearned because the imperialists cannot afford to learn it.

When the body count rises and the predictions collapse, the propaganda machine simply accelerates. Billions more are demanded while the weak enemy, major threat fiction is repeated with fresh fervour. The enemy is months from total collapse, they have run out of ammunition, they are wiring washing machine chips into their weapons. Two years later, the war grinds on unchanged, yet no retraction is ever issued, no apology ever offered. The public is expected to swallow each new lie without question. Raise the slightest doubt after years of gaslighting and you are once again branded an enemy within.

I will not participate in this manufactured fantasy. The ritual underestimation, the endless threat inflation and the refusal to acknowledge reality serve only one purpose, to justify ever greater military budgets for Western imperialists who have no intention of learning from their defeats. The targeted nations are not collapsing. They are resisting, and I personally will cheer every time a cheap drone downs another expensive imperial asset.

Yet there is another fantasy that has become endemic in liberal circles, and it is perhaps the most dangerous of all. It is another cover story designed to ensure nothing changes at the imperial core. These liberals harken for the life they had in 2024, when $NVDA was up three per cent every day, Biden slept through market hours, and they didn't have to worry about the US president causing a tariff war or a global energy crisis.

Now, the same liberals are throwing all their weight behind the notion that one man is to blame for every single thing going on in the world. This movement has a tagline: “No Kings”. If they got rid of Trump in the morning, he would be replaced with someone like Gavin Newsom. What was his record on the genocide in Palestine? Atrocious. Because he is another political insider who will do exactly what he is told by AIPAC and the rest of the deep state lobbyists who run Trump.

“No Kings”, as Jill Stein said recently, is a Democratic Party psyop. We need no empire, no genocide, no oligarchy, and no warmongering duopoly. Stop deluding yourself that everything will be fine once Trump is replaced. Trump did not invent US imperialism. He simply does what the imperial swamp instructs him to do, and unless he is replaced by a genuine anti-imperialist, things will carry on the same.

The Boeing E3 is down. The question is whether Western Media outlets will ever be honest with the people who consume their "news". When the 9:00 news tells you how weak the enemy is and how close they are to surrender, use you brain. If they've been wrong about every war in history how are they suddenly going to get this one right?