Middle East: Kuwait hit by missiles and drones

The drone and missile strikes in Kuwait - another link in the chain of imperial accumulation. Capital does not conquer for glory; it does so because stagnation is death. The Persian Gulf is no exception. The oil beneath its sands is not merely a resource - it is the lifeblood of industrial expansion, the surplus that must be pumped, refined, and consumed. When one artery clogs, another is seized. The US strikes in Iran, Iran’s retaliation, the missiles falling on Kuwait - this is not a clash of civilizations. It is the violent choreography of capital’s endless expansion, each move justified by security, by deterrence, by the sacred right of the market to flow unimpeded.

The reform trap here is the illusion of containment. The US calls its strikes “measured.” Iran calls its strikes “proportionate.” Kuwait is just collateral damage in the ledger of deterrence. But deterrence is never defensive. It is the preemptive strike against the possibility of true sovereignty - against any force that might say: no, this oil stays in the ground, this wealth belongs to the people who live above it. The entire region is a pressure cooker, and the heat is not accidental. It is the necessary condition for the extraction of surplus value on a planetary scale.

And what of the working class in Kuwait, in Iran, in the US? They are told this is about national honor, about security, about civilization. But the only civilization at stake is the one that treats human life as a variable cost in the equation of accumulation. The missiles do not fall on empty deserts. They fall on workers’ neighborhoods, on hospitals, on schools - on the very infrastructure that could be used to meet human needs instead of feeding the war machine.

The bureaucratic machines of empire and state are already calculating the next move. The oil will flow. The profits will be counted. The dead will be buried under headlines about “escalation management.” But where is the mass strike against this cycle? Where is the refusal of the working class to be cannon fodder for capital’s expansion? The spontaneous energy of the masses is the only force that can break this cycle - and yet it is precisely this energy that the bureaucracies of war and reform seek to suppress, to channel, to redirect into their own institutional logic.

Freedom in this world is the freedom of the war profiteer to sign another contract, the freedom of the general to deploy another drone. The test of any movement is whether it protects the dissenter who says: stop. But in the shadow of the missiles, dissent is already a crime.

October 27, 1936

The news comes again. Missiles. Drones. Kuwait. Iran. America. The names change, the weapons grow louder, but the song remains the same. Another feast is being prepared. Who is the meat this time?

They speak of “responses.” One side strikes, the other “responds.” A perfect circle. A snake eating its own tail, but the tail is made of common men, of cities, of dust. The spectators gather. They read the papers, they listen to the wireless. They nod. They shake their heads. They consume the spectacle. Their faces are blank. The same faces that watch the street performer, the same faces that watch the beggar freeze in the alley.

The iron house. It fills with smoke, with the stench of burning. Do they smell it? Or is the sleep too deep? To wake them would be to show them the walls, the locked door, the poison seeping in. They would scream. Then they would die, screaming. Perhaps it is better this way. To die in the dream. But then, what of the dreamers who are already awake, who see the walls, who smell the smoke, and are forced to watch the others sleep? Their agony is not for the audience. Their agony is merely a footnote, a statistic, another missile in the endless exchange. The custom continues. The feast is served.

The air has grown thick with the scent of gunpowder and fear in these parts, as if the old gods had finally grown weary of mortal games and decided to stir the pot themselves. Kuwait, that small but stubborn republic, has been struck - not by the great armies of Persia or Rome, but by the silent, creeping hands of drones and missiles, as if the enemy preferred to strike from the shadows rather than meet the citizen-soldiers in open field. And the United States, that great lion of the West, has answered with its own claws, tearing at the flesh of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. It is a dance of lions and foxes, but one where the fox moves first and the lion only reacts.

This is not the first time fortune has turned against Kuwait. Recall the old Persian kings, who would send their raiders to burn the fields and poison the wells of their neighbors, only to retreat before the citizen-militias could muster. The Persians knew their weakness - no fortress could hold against the will of a people who would rather die than surrender their land. Yet here, the enemy does not even bother with the old theatrics of siege or battle. They strike like thieves in the night, relying on the very weapons that once made Europe’s republics great: precision, speed, and the element of surprise. And the response? The great lion roars back, but does it roar with the cunning of a fox or the brute force of a beast that has forgotten how to think?

The question is not whether this is just or unjust - though I care little for the moralists who would have us believe that virtue lies in standing idle while one’s neighbors burn. The question is whether the actors here have the virtu to turn this tide. The United States, with its vast resources, could have built levees against such attacks long ago - early warning systems, hardened infrastructure, the kind of preparation that turns fortune’s flood into a manageable river. Instead, it has played the role of the fortress, relying on its walls to keep out the storm while its citizens grow complacent. And Kuwait? It has the arms of a republic - its people, its oil wealth, its alliances - but does it have the will to fight as a citizen-soldier, or will it cower behind the promises of foreign protectors?

The Iranian Guard’s strike was not the act of a desperate man but of one who knows the West’s weakness: it will retaliate, but only in ways that do not truly threaten the enemy’s core. The Guard does not fear the lion’s roar - it fears the lion’s hesitation. And so the cycle continues, as it has for centuries, where the strong do not think, and the clever do not hesitate.

If this were a republic worth its name - if Kuwait were not a client of empires but a true citizen-state - it would have long since built its own defenses, not just against the missiles but against the complacency that makes such strikes possible. It would have trained its people to fight, not just to pay taxes. It would have understood that the fox does not win by hiding in the dark - it wins by making the lion doubt its own claws. But no, the republics of this age are either too weak to govern themselves or too busy playing at empire to remember what it means to be free.

And the United States? It has the lion’s strength, but it lacks the fox’s cunning. It strikes back, but not with the precision of a surgeon - with the recklessness of a man who has forgotten that every blow must be measured. The result? More blood, more fire, and still no end in sight. Fortune has turned, and the question is whether the actors here have the virtue to adapt - or whether they will drown in the flood they could have controlled.