As I write this, for those that, in the future, won’t be able to place the date, we are still in the middle of Israel and Iran bombing and launching missiles at each other. Last night, there was a declared ceasefire brokered, or imposed (depending on your perspective) by Donald Trump, after airstrikes on the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in Iran. For context, we are in such a bizarre blending of the information space, I decided to write to give some context for people hearing absurd things about the state of Iran.

I write this as someone with a profound personal connection to Iran. My father was a Tudegh member back in the early ’50s — the Iranian Communist party — that supported Mohammed Mossadegh, the moderate and truly progressive leader that was overthrown by the CIA in 1953. Led by Kermit Roosevelt, the coup installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the king/dictator as the leader of Iran. The secret police in Iran, called Savak, and allied with our own CIA, killed my uncle during this time period, though I’m unsure exactly of the timeline. My father, a revolutionary himself, tells the story of how he came to leave Iran thusly. He was standing before a checkpoint with a briefcase full of pamphlets, and realized that if he crossed that checkpoint and got discovered, Savak would shoot him on sight.

So he threw his satchel in the ditch, turned around, and started the process to take him to America – the very country that was working so diligently to kill him. My father was a doctor, and at the same time all this chaos was occurring, East Coast hospitals were sweeping major metropolitan areas in Iran to recruit physicians who would be brought to these same medical facilities. They would occupy a role as kind of “super-nurses” — indentured, but not given staff positions at the hospitals, so their immigration status would remain in limbo. It would only be by marrying my mother, a poor girl from Dickinson, Texas, and then moving to rural Ohio that he would become a citizen of the United States. In spite of all the carnage, my father was profoundly an assimilative immigrant. During his career, he estimated he delivered over 4000 babies, and more than paid back his debt to the U.S.

The situation in Iran that led him to leaving, though, is accurately described in the book All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. Why my father made the choice that he did, at that checkpoint, is given context by Kinzer’s book, and I highly recommend, if you want to understand the current situation, that you read it. In 1953, there was a wave of anti-colonial sentiment moving through this part of the world, and the short version is that populist wave led Mossadegh to get elected. And once elected, he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) which then started the intrigues led by our own CIA.

Here is the key point. My father, and his entire country, had just passed through the Depression, as well as WWII. People were literally starving, and my father was righteous. The colonial powers were still controlling key elements of most of the world. Winston Churchill, as former Vice Lord of the Admiralty in Great Britain had over 20 years prior made the monumental decision to move the Royal Navy to being oil-powered instead of coal-powered. And that oil was to come from Iran.

The problem was that then, as now, Iran was split into three primary demographic categories. My father, as a doctor, was one of the urban elites. There was the clerisy and mullahs. And lastly, there were the rural poor, alternately insular, and easily swayed by the mullahs. The difference between the elites my father circulated with (our last name itself means ‘Doctor’ in Farsi) and the current progressive elites running our own country into the ground, was that they circulated with the poor, primarily with military service. My father KNEW the problems of the peasantry in Iran. And while much of his history is extremely fuzzy, one point he made emphatically during my childhood was that while he believed that the poor could be helped, they could not be SAVED. When he made that decision at that checkpoint on that fateful day, he had witnessed the Iranian poor lining up behind the Shah.

And he said “screw it.”

There are all sorts of descriptive holes in my father’s story, that I’ll never know. That he showed up at Ellis Island, supposedly never having seen a flush toilet (likely an apocryphal, funny family myth) is indisputable. His manifest from the S.S. France is below.

But we’ll never know about his larger journey, across Turkey, eastern Europe, and finally France, leading to the port of Le Havre, in France, where he purchased his ticket and sailed to America. Like many people with traumatic pasts, he refused to speak of it, save in those few stories.

Modern Iran has structurally not changed much from the Iran my father lived in, as far as social demographic castes go. There are still the urban elites, who are highly educated. The plight of the peasantry has somewhat improved, though they are still backward and prone to believing in whatever the mullahs tell them. Treatment of women, which used to be abominable in my father’s time (my father’s family had a functional slave girl they had purchased out of humane considerations,) remains terrible, aside from the respite the urban class felt during the Shah’s reign. The old Shah, and his father, were tyrants only barely modified by Western influence. And here’s an interesting catch — the reason that the mullahs hated the Shah so much was for one of the few good things the Shah did — land reform in the countryside, which took away holdings from the faith.

The urban elites currently in Iran are living as Iranians for literal thousands of years have lived — in the context of a hidden, if not exactly secret society. Even after the sanctions, and the turmoil present from 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, the middle class has found ways to get by. Iranians are hooked on education — and unlike most of their Arab cousins, they are serious about it. Requests to study in the U.S. come regularly into my email account at the university. Educated Iranians are not particularly nationalistic at all, and so the various speculations that if the Iranian nuclear sites have been destroyed, the literati will rally to rebuild Iran’s nuclear capacity is highly unlikely. The nuclear program in Iran is a paranoid fantasy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the mullahs, who like all disordered religious leaders, dream of the apocalypse. The various scientists participate, I believe, somewhat reluctantly. And as with all hostage situations, implicit or explicit, their mania is tempered. And especially so — regardless of whether sites like Fordow have been completely destroyed, you might imagine being a nuclear scientist and walking into that venue and seeing what had to be massive destruction. It’s not going to fire you up to repeat the B-2 scenario on your head. This time, you just got lucky. And for those true believers, there are Mossad agents circulating, anxious to put a bullet in your brain.

Who actually controls Iran will become clear in the weeks to come. I happen to believe that the IRGC has more in common with paranoid English majors at Microsoft than ISIS. Iran is a western venue, and people like their creature comforts. The IRGC knows that without the help of the educated technical elites, there is no functional economy in Iran, and like those English majors, they cannot reproduce, nor maintain the tech. necessary for making the domestic situation work. Pictures I see of the IRGC also indicate a far greater age spread than in a situation like ISIS, which consisted largely of 20-30-something male transplants from across the Islamic world. Revolution sounds great when you’re a 20-something year old loser from Dagestan. Less appealing when you’re 50, and living in a relatively urbanized country like Iran. Remember that the Islamic Revolution has been going on now since 1979. That means the folks that took over the U.S. Embassy have more in common with our idiot boomers at a No Kings rally, worried about losing their version of Social Security, than any fiery idealistic radicalism they possessed in their youth.

One of the things about the current news cycle that is absolutely infuriating to me is the comparison of Iran, and its potentials, to other Arab states. This isn’t some strange point of personal pride. Iran has literally a 4000 year old sedentary culture. Cities are multiple, and highly regionalized. Tehran has a population of 9 million people; Isfahan, close to 2 million, and Mashhad 3 million, to name only a few. Contrast this to Iraq, whose civilization was centered around Baghdad (8 million) or in Libya, Tripoli (~1.3 million). Urban culture — not tribal culture runs Iran, and it has been that way for thousands of years. And it matters. Even in places like the oil-rich UAE, tribal sheikhs sit on top of their dragon pile of gold and skyscrapers. Iran may be benighted by the destructive rule of the mullahs. But it remains a distributed empire, with a strong intellectual component.

One of the other prevailing myths circulating in the argument about Iran is the notion “if we bomb it, they already know how to build it, so they’ll just build it back.” That is emphatically not true — and I’ll put my engineering professor-working in nuclear nonproliferation hat to address it. The most important thing to understand is that there is no new tech in creating a nuclear weapon. Making them small is another thing entirely. But since 1945, the world has known how to make nuclear fire.

The problem with making one, though, is that it requires a complex manufacturing operation to create enough fissile material to make a bomb. And that requires social cohesion and coordination. One of the wildest things I learned about making nuclear weapons is the delivery system is only a modest part of the problem. If you create a bomb, you can load it on a 747, fly it into any major airport, and detonate it. The real problem is creating enough fissile material. And that requires a complex supply chain — with lots of people talking to each other, in a coordinated fashion. Hardly a trivial problem in such a factionalized country, as I’ve described above. When you add a dollop of Mossad agents into the mix, your odds of success drop precipitously. It’s not that it can’t be done. Pakistan showed that it could. But it is non-trivial.

The images in the press of a monolithic culture immediately recovering and pulling this off are false. There is no overarching enemy that most Iranians view in fact. Only the mullahs chanting “Death to America”. All the rest of the Iranian elite want to move to L.A. 700,000 already live there. One of the most taboo subjects to discuss in the US is the effect of brain drain on underdeveloped parts of the world, to developed nations. Do you really think that the 700,000 Iranians living in L.A. were formally peasants in Iran? How might that affect the current dynamic?

One of the most important things for perspective to read are descriptions of the various Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in other countries like Iraq and Libya. Iraq, before the Gulf Wars, was a nation centered in Baghdad, but mostly tribal, with coherence provided by the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein. Libya was not much different, though I happen to have a more ambivalent view toward Muammar Qaddafi. Don’t believe in the factionalized view? Look what happened when those regimes collapsed. Libya now has open slave markets — and that’s a tribal artifact. It’s simply not conceivable in modern Iran — no matter how much you hate the mullahs.

And the nuclear enrichment sites in those two countries? Portraits of mass disarray. I remember descriptions of bundles of tubes found, scattered like chopsticks. And that was without any major bombing. We don’t understand the role of social order in creating manufactured tech. And it shows. There’s a reason, for example, that Taiwan is the center of silicon manufacturing for the world. It’s an outcome of 50 years of social grooming of an entire population to get to the level of discipline and coordination to pull it off. But that kind of thing isn’t easily transferable. Iran has far more tech and ability than its Arab neighbors. I wouldn’t completely discount it. But rebuilding a series of bombed out facilities is not trivial. If you don’t think there’s mass confusion in Iran right now, you’re off your rocker.

Confusion in the information space — years of gaslighting regarding Presidential action — has really created many of the problems in the West in even understanding what’s going on now. My estimated date for mass confusion traces back to the ’80s. But it was truly in high gear by the early ’90s, and was profiled in one of my favorite books by William Greider — Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy We’ve existed in a gaslit world where we have been so inundated with disordered myths, we can hardly think of any action that might work unless we cut in the elite class to make money off our ignorance.

One of the most prominent was started by Secretary of State, Colin Powell, with his famous quote regarding countries — “If you take a government and you break it, you own it.” What Powell was really advocating for was the nascent growth of the Blob — the NGO-industrial complex deeply involved with ostensible nation-building. USAID-sponsored organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy have always made bank of creating chaos– and so they have.

And it’s the seething from this contingent that is an enormous part of the problem. Trump is using our military at the time of this writing in a hegemonic, punishment-based, but fundamentally goal-based mode. He doesn’t intend to continue the war. He wants to punish Iran enough, and remove enough strike capacity so he doesn’t have to worry about them any more. Think Rome invading Carthage. And while what Powell said isn’t entirely wrong, the notion that we have to put ground troops into Iran to achieve our own goals as a nation is also wrong. Punishment that scares whatever group of elites running the show is not such a bad notion.

And Iran with a bomb is a frightening prospect. You better believe that the upper-class Iranian elites smoking Gitanes and eating baklava won’t be the ones deciding to nuke Tel Aviv. They may be key in making the bomb. But it will be culled fanatics from the IRGC flying the 747 into the city center. We’ve been fighting an 46 year war with Iran already. Taking out a key military capacity is in everyone’s interest.

The deep memetic problem we are actually having is that we’ve had that 40+ years of our own gaslighting governance, which has alternately funneled enormous amounts of money to our own nation’s elites, who continually dream of being let into the club of global power brokers, and the sycophantic press corps wanting to accompany them on their private jets. Someone like Trump is an ice-cold bucket of water over their head, in that he says he’s going to do something, and then acts on it. And then ends our participation.

But the problem goes deeper. Once a public is gaslit long enough, in a complex world, we lose the cognitive ability to even come up with alternate scenarios about what might actually be happening. I was talking to one of my extended network, who is heavily involved in the nuclear sector. We have a publicly accepted scenario regarding Israel’s attacks on Iran that they have been primarily air-directed, with the aim of that campaign to take out Iran’s air defenses, which seems to have worked. But my friend maintains that most of Iran’s air defenses, though, were not taken out from the air. They were taken out by sleeper commandos on the ground. And that there are a whole range of possibilities had Trump not acted to bomb Fordos and Natanz, including commando raids by the Israeli army to remove those threats. Planefuls of commandos could’ve landed in those remote locations and done the job that the bunker busters did in silence and stealth. It could be that Trump was compelled to act, to profoundly mitigate the broader inflammatory scenario of Jewish troops on the rampage inside a Muslim country.

And another surprise twist — along with Iran’s air defenses, apparently the same commandos focused on removing Iran’s attack helicopter fleet, which was an apparent success. Why does this matter? Attack helicopters are key in suppressing any armed rebellion. Perhaps not lethal enough to take on an advanced military, like the US. But plenty powerful enough to annihilate a homegrown insurgent population. It is highly likely that Israeli, as well as US planners, put a homegrown uprising on their bingo card, and created contingencies to make it potentially successful — if it happened.

None of this is surprising for those of us familiar with the capacity, if not the details of US military (as well as Israeli) planning. But we see more profound failure in our press corps, as well as uninformed members on both sides of the Congressional aisle. Intentionally or not, their lack of complexity in their thinking contributes to the crisis. Why? Simplistic messages travel virally far more quickly throughout the media. And no one’s had the chance to make a blockbuster movie on the actual scenario. So the LARP proceeds at the scale of the aggregate public’s awareness.

As I wrap this piece up, it appears that the cease-fire is holding. This is not surprising, as it is highly likely that Iran’s nuclear sites have been destroyed, and their command capacity for making trouble with their Hamas and Hezbollah proxies has been seriously degraded. Further, it appears China has stepped in from behind the scenes and yanked Iran’s chain. As the mullahs and the IRGC do some delicate dance behind the scenes about who is running the show, there appear to be enough elders in the mix who are not completely bonkers, who realize that further degradation of Iranian defense capacity leaves them vulnerable to other neighbors who are none too fond of the constant turmoil, with no apparent end in sight. Just as the Arab world is tiring of the Palestinian cause, the larger circle around Iran is done with the Ayatollah. I think pure, remorseless projection of force has a lot to do with it.

One also starts understanding how much the American NGO community, by blathering on about future monetary opportunities for nation-building, contributes to the unending nature of all these crises. National collapse of Iran is in none of the interests of the primary three demographics I named above. Urban elites are aware of the results of chaos. The IRGC and the mullahs lose their retirement plan. And the rural poor are still bereft, and powerless. There is no land war even for their sons to be drafted into. And the Iran-Iraq War is not that long ago – only 38 years.

So, stay tuned. The plot will likely be far more complicated than you can dream up.