The US military cannot win the war in Iran for the Iranian people. The victory must come from the Iranian people themselves, especially the same young and middle-aged anti-government protesters, who courageously risked their lives and survived after January 8 and 9, 2026.
Foremost, there must be a massive population uprising nationwide with the help of Starlink to coordinate their communications and resistance.
The January protests were initially caused by a severe economic crisis and the collapse of the Iranian currency on December 28, 2025, which occurred throughout the country. In plain words, the Iranian Treasury was broke, the currency was worthless, and tens of millions of people lost their life savings.
As of March 8, one Iranian rial is worth $0.00 dollars. That does not make for an optimistic economic outlook during an economic depression.
According to the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, she underestimated that “at least 5,000 people had been killed, noting that according to information she received from medical sources, the death toll might [have been] as high as 20,000.”
However, the death toll might be much higher, at a staggering 30,000 or more.
The death toll among the protesters was huge, and reflected the cold-blooded cruelty of the deceased eighty-six-year-old Shia despot, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The bloodletting lasted for weeks, with the protesters opposing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Basij battalions (IRGC’s auxiliary force and morality police), the police force (FARAJA), and plain-clothes agents.
The Iranian security forces frequently and deliberately positioned themselves on the streets and rooftops of houses, mosques, and police stations, and “repeatedly fired rifles and shotguns loaded with metal pellets at protesters, frequently targeting their heads and torsos.” These same radical militants later forcibly and unmercifully entered local hospitals and executed hundreds of wounded protesters in their beds.
Right now, the Iranian Air Force, Space Command, and Navy are almost or totally destroyed. That also includes the enemy’s drone ships, 50% of their ballistic missiles, missile launchers, and the destruction of the drone-carrier ship IRIS Shahid Bagheri on March 6, which was the size of a World War II aircraft carrier.
The US and Israel can easily destroy Iran’s infrastructure, such as bridges, tunnels, refineries, airports, electrical grids, bunkers, water resources, and defense manufacturing centers. However, the Iranian people themselves and not US or Israeli ground forces must finish the job in defeating the fanatical Shiite dictatorship and IRGC.
The US will hopefully soon do everything in its power to air-drop the expected insurgency with rifles, ammunition, helmets, RPGs, binoculars, machine guns, grenades, land mines, and anything else needed to defeat the radical clerics and their Nazi-like henchmen, which have metastasized throughout Iran since 1979.
The U.S. cannot allow Iran to become another “forever war” like Iraq or Afghanistan, costing the US Treasury trillions of dollars. The people of Iran must liberate their own country.
Otherwise, Operation Epic Fury will ultimately fail.
Robert L. Maronic
