Rawanin Buzu II

Through an honest meditation on good and evil, it is observable that while small-scale goodness often triumphs—neighbours helping neighbours, communities pulling together—large-scale entities like governments and empires seem almost constitutionally inclined toward evil. The bigger the beast, the more monstrous its appetite. And nowhere is this truth more nakedly on display than in the ongoing […]

Through an honest meditation on good and evil, it is observable that while small-scale goodness often triumphs—neighbours helping neighbours, communities pulling together—large-scale entities like governments and empires seem almost constitutionally inclined toward evil. The bigger the beast, the more monstrous its appetite. And nowhere is this truth more nakedly on display than in the ongoing cold war flare-up between the United States and Israel on one corner, and Iran with its proxies on the other. The Tuareg’s turban—that rawanin buzu—is once again on the ground. The question is whether anyone saw it fall.

Let us begin with a fundamental observation about the nature of power and delusion. Apparently, the American president genuinely believed that the Iranian regime would collapse following a decapitation delivered with precision plus shock and awe. This is the same kind of thinking that led a man to believe he could wipe out Persian Civilization in a tweet. It is the kind of thinking that emerges when you have spent so long bullying smaller nations that you mistake your own propaganda for reality. Iran did not collapse. It did not even wobble. It absorbed the blow, looked up, and said, “Is that all you’ve got?”

Now we have moved to the next phase: the US blockading Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Read that sentence again. The United States is blockading a blockade. It is like setting up a checkpoint to stop someone else’s checkpoint. The absurdity is so thick you could cut it with a machete. After failing to subdue Iran with more than a month of intense kinetic pressure—assassinations, bombings, cyberattacks, the whole symphony of modern warfare—Washington has resorted to a strategy that seems deliberately illogical. Two sanctioned ships have already broken through the US blockade without incident. No explosions. No dramatic boardings. Just ships sailing past like the world’s most expensive game of TACO (Trump always chickens out) and chicken.

The peace talks brokered by Pakistan were declared a failure by immediate headlines. But if you read past the headlines—something Americans are famously allergic to—both sides are speaking with cautious optimism. This was only the initial encounter, they say. More rounds will follow. That is diplomatic code for “nobody wants to admit they blinked first.” The US has been desperately scrambling to build a coalition to open the strait and clear mines—mines that Iran claims not even to know the locations of. Whether this is genuine confusion or strategic gaslighting is anyone’s guess. But it is delicious either way.

Now, the propaganda war. Always the most entertaining theatre. The US Secretary of State and other officials have been accusing Iran of investing too much money in its military instead of spending it on its people. I beg your pardon? This is peak comedy. This is like a man who has spent fifty years breaking someone’s bones, then pointing and laughing at them for limping. Let us not forget that US Treasury Secretary Bessent did not even mince words some months back. He said, proudly, that his department caused the riots in Iran in January. He even detailed how they did it. They have been strangulating the Iranian economy for half a century now. They froze more than $100 billion of Iranian money. They curbed Iran’s access to forex and blocked its own assets. They also threatened to sanction any country or entity that dares do business with Iran. Had any other country even been suspected of doing this to a Western nation, they would be accused of economic terrorism, of inhuman oppression, of crimes against humanity. But when America does it? Crickets. Or worse, applause.

Now hear this: Iran was condemned by a UN resolution for targeting US assets in Gulf countries. But the US and Israel received no reprimand for starting the war that precipitated those attacks, or for killing 160 little Iranian schoolgirls. Let that sink in. One hundred and sixty children. Blown to kingdom come. . But because the victims were Iranian, because their names were hard to pronounce and their parents wore headscarves, the world shrugged.

Meanwhile, America spends nearly a trillion dollars on its military every year. A trillion. With a T. Its purpose? To dominate and oppress the whole world. And yet millions of Americans live on the streets. Millions more go to bed hungry. Veterans, who fought in those same wars, are begging for change at traffic lights. But sure, lecture Iran about spending on defence when you have been trying to invade or destabilise them since 1979. You cannot make this dramedy up.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding. Americans plead freedom of expression whenever they offend someone. They will draw the Prophet Muhammad in the most demeaning ways imaginable, and their government will defend them. But if an Iranian chants “Death to America,” that is not free speech. That is a threat. That is justification for bombing little girls. America is sacred. Your Quran, your prophet, your ancestors, your entire civilization—those are fair game. The double standard is so glaring it could guide ships through the very strait they are fighting over.

But here is the thing about empires. You can never be free while enslaving someone else. You are bound to them as much as they are bound to you. America has become enslaved by its obsession to keep the whole world under its boots. It is trillions in debt. It spends money it does not really have on weapons while its own people languish. The dollar is slowly losing its grip. The global South is rising. China is becoming the preferred partner even for Western nations because America has become so unpredictable, so unreliable, so utterly unhinged. Some scholars argue that what America is going through now is the death throes of empires. The textbook condition. The final spasm before the long sleep. But the question is: how long does the work has to endure these throes.

So where does the rawanin buzu come in? The Tuareg’s turban, remember, only falls when the head is on the ground. You do not want to be around when that happens. But here we are. The headdress of American exceptionalism, of moral superiority, of “shining city on a hill”—it is on the ground. It has been on the ground for a while, but the flare-up with Iran has made it impossible to ignore. The US president thought Iran would collapse. It did not. He thought a blockade would work. It is failing. He thought the world would cheer. Instead, the global South is watching with a mixture of amusement and horror.

The coin toss in 2023 promised to determine whether Nigeria would have lift-off or meltdown. It did not. So the same might be true for 2026, but on a global scale. The cold war between the US-Israel axis and Iran is not cooling down. It is just changing shape. Whether the ceasefire holds, whether the talks succeed, whether the Houthis and Hezbollah and the PMF hold their fire—these are the questions that will determine if the turban stays on the ground or gets picked up and dusted off.

But one thing is clear. The empire is imploding. And when empires implode, they take everyone nearby with them.

The only sensible thing to do is to step back, watch carefully, and pray that when the dust settles, something better emerges from the rubble. Or at the very least, that the Tuareg still has his head, even if his headdress is gone.