The collapse of precision warfare: Iran's role in the struggle for dignity

Ali Ridha Khan

THE fantasy of precision warfare is collapsing. With each Israeli airstrike, each Iranian drone, and each jittery American deployment, the veneer of “surgical retaliation” is being stripped away. 

What remains is raw and elemental: a struggle not merely over territory or proxies, but over dignity, narrative, and the political horizon of the Global South. And it is in this horizon that Iran has positioned itself as the last strategic spine in a region otherwise bent by American fear and Israeli force.

Let us be clear. The West— then led by an ever-confused Biden and now shadowed by Trump’s isolationist pantomime—still believes that violence can be compartmentalised. That one can bomb Gaza, assassinate scientists, and sanction hospitals without consequence. But this belief, like Zionism itself, is a settler delusion.

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has understood something Washington cannot: reputation is a weapon more potent than warheads. The Islamic Republic’s restraint during the escalations of 2023 and 2024 was not a weakness. It was the patience of the hunted turning hunter. Israel’s moral currency has never been lower; its genocidal siege on Gaza has moved even the most cynical into recognition. Iran knew then that the world did not need its rockets—it needed its example: a state that would not be baited into annihilation but would strike when the strike became unavoidable.

And yet, we hope—for the sake of history, for the raped soil of Gaza and the bombed flesh of Beirut—that Iran’s restraint ends soon.

Not because war is noble, but because there are worse violences than war. The violence of waiting. The violence of witnessing. The violence of survival without sovereignty.

This is the violence Frantz Fanon spoke of when he wrote that the colonized “learns that he is nothing in the eyes of the settler.” And so he must rise, not simply to destroy his oppressor, but to resurrect his own worth. 

Iran, in this framework, becomes not just a nation-state—but a vessel of defiance. Fanon never saw 1979, but he would have recognised it immediately: a rupture in the colonial order. Ayatollah Khomeini, like Ali Shariati before him, did not believe in Westoxification—the intoxication with the West that neutralises the revolutionary soul. The Islamic Revolution was never meant to mimic the Westphalian world—it was a call to reimagine it.

Today’s battle lines are no longer Cold War relics. They are metaphysical. On one side, Zionism, bolstered by empire and Silicon Valley surveillance; on the other, a constellation of wounded nations refusing to forget. As Steve Biko reminded us:“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Iran’s war is as much epistemological as it is ballistic—it is about reclaiming truth from CNN, memory from Mossad, and meaning from a UN that counts bodies but never blames the butcher.

Some will call last week’s developments “escalations.” That is incorrect. This is the culmination. The slow agony of colonised people cannot continue in half-measures. The Arab regimes, with their palatial cowardice and U.S. bases, now face a mirror they cannot avoid. To host the empire’s hardware is to be targeted by the rage it generates. Iran’s message is clear: if we burn, you burn with us.

And what of the world’s so-called “moderates”? The liberals who pace between peace and politics, issuing statements and equivocations? Ghassan Kanafani dismissed them best: “If the Palestinian cause is not the cause of every revolutionary, it is not a cause at all.”

This is not about Iran. This is about the entire non-Western world standing at the edge of war and saying: we have waited long enough.

Let the empire finally tremble.

 Khan is a fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape.