Kidnapping a Thousand American Soldiers!

In a recently surfaced video, Mohsen Rezaei speaks about Iran kidnapping one thousand American soldiers and bargaining over them. While the video is authentic, the statement is old, dating back to 2015. Today, Rezaei serves as the right-hand man to the new Supreme Leader and holds the position of Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Does Iran still view war through this same mindset? The confrontation has been ongoing for a year, yet they have been unable to arrest anyone or destroy a single battleship, and American casualties are the lowest in the history of its wars. Iran's enemy is its inflated sense of power, which makes notions such as continuing an asymmetrical war, closing straits, choking the global economy, and bombing neighbors appear to be great plans. The arrogance of power led Napoleon and Hitler to invade Russia, only to face defeat. While such a sense of superiority might be justified for major powers, it appears peculiar in mid-tier, economically frail countries. This very sentiment causes them to indulge in unrealistic illusions for consecutive decades, only to lose their entire first-tier leadership and most of their military capabilities in the very first confrontation. The Iranian leadership's perceptions that it is capable of defeating a superpower with such ease are peculiar; has the military leadership misled the political authorities in Iran? The developments following the war indicate that their understanding of the world does not differ much from the delusions of a megalomaniac, much like Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and 1990s. Their perceptions of the balance of war do not align with their actual capabilities when confronting two fierce adversaries: the US and Israel. For years, their previous statements consistently converged on two conclusions: first, that "America will not dare to attack us," and second, "if it does, it will be defeated." An associate close to Saddam Hussein recounted that during a poolside barbecue at Saddam's palace following the invasion of Kuwait, he asked him why he had not taken precautions. He stated: "Saddam responded mockingly: 'You know they can see us with their satellites and know that we are here together by the pool grilling meat? They are capable of reaching us, but they do not dare to target me.'" Because successive US administrations refrained from entering a war with Iran, despite the attacks carried out or orchestrated by the Revolutionary Guard against American citizens and interests around the world, an impression emerged among both clerical and military leaders that Iran was immune to any attack due to its growing military capabilities. Tehran's condescending perceptions toward the US may differ from their view of the much smaller Israeli power. They have always been anxious about the prospect of a war with Israel, which largely explains their persistence in executing their military nuclear program - viewing it, in their imagination, as the ultimate weapon that will protect them from it. During the stage prior to acquiring the Iranian nuclear bomb, they established a vast belt in the region to protect them from Israel, spanning Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Yemen, and Iraq. Leaders of Hezbollah frequently echoed this erroneous conviction, asserting that these proxy camps were sufficient to defend Iran should Israel dare to launch an attack and that Israel would be destroyed. Superiority, hegemony, success, and national pride were all embodied in a single project: building a massive military force until it became an Iranian obsession. This power began directing the regime's policies and incentivizing it toward further defiance, proving that "power deludes its possessor into believing they are capable of anything." "Military superiority" led Tehran to harbor the illusion that it was capable of controlling, expanding, imposing political hegemony, and altering or maintaining regimes. The reverberations of Iran's growing power reached across the globe, as it became the primary supplier of lethal drones to a major superpower like Russia in its war in Ukraine. It constructed 30 underground missile cities, produced tens of thousands of drones each month, surpassing American factories, carved mountains for nuclear laboratories, and dug hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels to conceal ballistic missiles. Furthermore, it began boasting of its missile product families: "Fateh,Qiam,Shahab,Qadr," and "Sejjil." Tehran reached a stage of thinking where "if you have a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything around you as nails." A distorted intellectual delusion was exposed during the war, along with the weakness of Iran's defensive capabilities and the failure of its strategies to close the straits and strangle global markets. Iran now recognizes that it is not a match for the US and Israel. Today, Iran's airspace is breached and its defenses are eroded, leaving it incapable of inflicting harm except on its neighbors who are less inclined and equipped for war. Nonetheless, Iran has not yet altered its behavior or narrative; instead, it has humbly begun to label mere endurance as a victory. While it is true that the survival of the regime constitutes a victory for it, the outcomes of two brief rounds of war have been devastating. These results include the elimination of its first-tier political and military leadership, the massive destruction of its offensive capabilities, and an unprecedented, stifling siege. Can Iranian leaders think more realistically after all of this? Precedents indicate that ideological regimes do not follow the survival instincts known to conventional states; rather, they rarely learn from experience, and preserving their image becomes their primary concern, leading them to become more defiant.