The covert Kurdistan play against Iran collapsed for the most predictable reason — nobody running it actually understood the people they were arming.
Marked vehicles rolling out of Camp Victory months ago. Weapons handed to two dozen fractured Kurdish militias who care about their own province, not Tehran. Trump later admitted the gear just got stolen.
And Turkey? They'd rather help Iran crush the Kurds than see an independent Kurdistan form. That's how deep that hatred runs.
The real issue: you can't topple a country of 93 million when your intelligence agencies won't recruit from their own 2 million Iranian diaspora and can't tell a Baluch from an Azeri. Everyone in the camel souk knows each other. Americans keep showing up thinking they can just buy the market.
Contrast that with Israel's 2018 nuclear archive raid — rehearsed for two years on a full-scale mockup, executed in one night, by people who grew up inside those cultures.
You either understand the ground or you're just burning money and hardware.
Marked vehicles rolling out of Camp Victory months ago. Weapons handed to two dozen fractured Kurdish militias who care about their own province, not Tehran. Trump later admitted the gear just got stolen.
And Turkey? They'd rather help Iran crush the Kurds than see an independent Kurdistan form. That's how deep that hatred runs.
The real issue: you can't topple a country of 93 million when your intelligence agencies won't recruit from their own 2 million Iranian diaspora and can't tell a Baluch from an Azeri. Everyone in the camel souk knows each other. Americans keep showing up thinking they can just buy the market.
Contrast that with Israel's 2018 nuclear archive raid — rehearsed for two years on a full-scale mockup, executed in one night, by people who grew up inside those cultures.
You either understand the ground or you're just burning money and hardware.