The Coup, the Nakba, and the Black Rain
Tehran’s rain turned black the other day, a fitting weather report for a civilization still drunk on the very fossil fuels it’s now setting on fire. After the first week of US–Israeli strikes on refineries and oil depots, the Iranian Red Crescent warned residents that the downpour sluicing off balconies and satellite dishes was “highly acidic,” laced with burned hydrocarbons, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides from the great fire rings encircling the capital. People were told not to go outside, not to run their air conditioners, not to breathe too deeply beneath a sky their enemies had decided to weaponize. The footage that did leak past censors—streets running with flaming fuel, smoke columns punching into low clouds, umbrellas useless under the toxic drizzle—looked less like a modern air war than the planet trying to cough its lungs out.
America did not arrive at this moment by accident, nor did Israel. A country whose secret government learned in the 1950s how to topple elected leaders over oil now targets the petroleum infrastructure of the same nation it “saved” from democracy three generations ago. And a state built on the ethnic cleansing of one people under the banner of “security” now exports that operating logic into another country’s airspace, treating a foreign capital the way it once treated the villages of the Galilee. The black rain over Tehran is more than a war crime in progress; it is blowback vaporized and condensed, falling on the city we remade and then declared irredeemable.
And this new war does not start on a blank slate. It comes directly after Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, where the official ministry tallies of tens of thousands killed—many of them children and women—are now understood as only a fraction of the dead, and conservative analyses drawing on Lancet studies and UN data point to at least 115,000 people killed directly by bombs, bullets, and collapsing buildings, and more than 400,000 Palestinians dead overall1 once you count those killed by hunger, disease, and the destruction of every system that kept 2.3 million people alive. UN officials described the 2024 siege of northern Gaza as “apocalyptic,” and by August 2025 Israeli siege policies had produced a man‑made famine, with images of starving children becoming commonplace worldwide. Israel has spent an estimated 352 billion shekels (around 112 billion dollars) on the Gaza war, including roughly 243 billion shekels (around 77 billion dollars) in direct defense costs, while the US has poured roughly 31–34 billion dollars into military aid and regional support operations for Israel’s wars since 2023. The UN now estimates that rebuilding Gaza’s blasted cities and infrastructure will cost around 70 billion dollars and take decades, after a campaign that has “significantly undermined every pillar of survival” for its remaining population. The techniques perfected there—prolonged bombardment of dense civilian areas, siege by hunger, deliberate infrastructural annihilation—are the immediate prelude to what is now unfolding over Iran.
The Coup That Wrote the Script
David Talbot’s The Devil‘s Chessboard follows Allen Dulles from his days as a Wall Street lawyer for banks and oil companies to his reign as CIA director, where he engineered coups, backed dictators, and helped build an unaccountable “secret government” that often ran ahead of, or against, elected presidents. Nowhere is that clearer than in Iran in 1953.
In Talbot’s account, Dulles arrives at Rome’s Hotel Excelsior just as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the young shah of Iran, flees there in fear that his dynasty is finished. Back in Tehran, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh has nationalized the Anglo‑Iranian Oil Company, the British state‑backed giant that controlled Iran’s oil for much of the first half of the 20th century (later becoming BP), and taken his case to the Iranian public; his government rides a wave of popular legitimacy and a simple conviction that 20th‑century Persians should not live as sharecroppers to a British oil monopoly. MI6 and the British establishment see the move as an existential threat, but their embassy has been shut and their networks crippled, so they turn to Washington and the newly empowered CIA.
The Dulles brothers barely bother to disguise their motives. Through Sullivan & Cromwell, a powerful New York–based corporate law firm, they have long represented US oil majors; Allen sits on the board of the J. Henry Schroder Bank, financial agent for the Anglo‑Iranian Oil Company. Both brothers had helped quietly kill a US antitrust case that threatened the giant “Seven Sisters” oil cartel. Mossadegh’s offense is not ideological—it is commercial. He has interrupted a flow of rents from Iranian ground to Western balance sheets. To sell the coup to Eisenhower, Allen and John Foster simply launder oil politics through Cold War language: if Iran falls to nationalism, they warn, it will fall to Communism next; if the Tudeh Party gains, Moscow will control 60 percent of the “free world’s” oil.
The plan they present, drawn up by CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, becomes a template for a generation of coups. CIA money hires mobs and muscle, corrupts senior officers, and underwrites a campaign of intimidation and murder against those loyal to Mossadegh. General Mahmoud Afshartous, tasked with purging the military of conspirators, is kidnapped and found dumped on a roadside; other loyalists turn up in the mountains with their throats cut. When CIA‑paid crowds finally surge through Tehran and pro‑shah units move, Mossadegh is undone not only by brute force but by his fatal belief that Washington will accept an independent Iran. Ambassador Loy Henderson threatens to withdraw US recognition and evacuate all Americans if Mossadegh does not clear his own supporters from the streets; when he does, Roosevelt’s mobs take their place and tanks drive on his home.
It works. Mossadegh is overthrown, the shah returns on a KLM flight Dulles himself may have helped arrange, and CIA cash ensures there are staged, ecstatic crowds waiting at the airport. The “man of destiny” is restored to his throne; in reality he is now a client monarch, his security apparatus rebuilt and trained by Americans, his country’s oil opened to a new cartel that includes US firms. For Allen Dulles, this is one of his two “greatest triumphs,” alongside Guatemala the next year; for Iranians, it is the moment when a fragile parliamentary experiment is replaced with a police state whose tools—torture, disappearances, one‑party rule—will define their lives for a quarter century.
The blowback is not a mystery. A US‑installed shah rules through SAVAK, jails and kills his opponents, and deepens the perception that sovereignty itself has been outsourced. When the revolution comes in 1979, it is not a polite turnover of elites; it is a volcanic rejection of the 1953 settlement and of the Western powers behind it. The Islamic Republic, with its Revolutionary Guards and anti‑imperialist theology, is the regime that grows in the crater left by Allen Dulles’s “victory.” Every drone flight, every missile launch, every entrenched IRGC network that Washington now condemns is a branch on the tree Dulles planted.
The Ethnic Cleansing Operating System
Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine uses Israeli archival material to show that the 1948 expulsions of Palestinians were not chaotic wartime accidents but the implementation of a coordinated plan—what he and others link to Plan Dalet—to permanently remove most of the Arab population from the new Jewish state. He traces how a small inner circle around David Ben‑Gurion, known as the Consultancy, shifted from retaliatory actions to a doctrine of initiative and intimidation aimed at making Palestinian life untenable.
The Consultancy listens in December 1947 as intelligence officer Ezra Danin explains that Palestinian rural life is still largely normal; villages greet him as a customer, not an occupier, and there is no general mobilization or offensive intent. If left alone, these people will simply go on living where they are, within the borders of the future Jewish state. This is the problem. The solution, Danin argues, is violent action designed not to answer aggression but to change the mood entirely: destroy lorries carrying produce, sink fishing boats from Jaffa, shut shops, starve factories of raw materials, “terrify” the population so that outside help is meaningless. Ben‑Gurion likes the idea. In a letter to Moshe Sharett, he writes that the goal is to put the Palestinian community entirely “at our mercy,” able to do with them “anything the Jews wanted,” including starving them to death.
What follows is not an accidental fog of war but a campaign of calibrated brutality. Night “violent reconnaissance” raids on undefended villages—Deir Ayyub, Beit Affa—where troops enter after dark, fire on houses, distribute threats, and leave corpses behind. The assault on Khisas, where Palmach units blow up homes at night, killing fifteen people, and Ben‑Gurion later classifies the “unauthorized” operation as a success. In Haifa, Jewish forces use their high ground above Arab neighborhoods to roll down oil‑soaked, burning rivers, ignite streets, and machine‑gun residents as they run out to extinguish the flames. Haganah intelligence officers compile detailed “village files” and, once communities are captured, select men for execution or long detention while others are expelled or packed into camps.
This is not restrained reprisal; it is ethnic cleansing, backed by legal and bureaucratic follow‑through. When refugees try to return in 1949 to harvest fields or retrieve possessions, they are labeled “infiltrators” and frequently shot; homes are demolished to prevent repatriation; a “Minority Unit” of Druze, Circassian, and Bedouin soldiers is tasked explicitly with blocking Palestinian return. In some cases, such as the Christian villages of Iqrit and Kfar Birim, courts briefly side with displaced residents, only for the army to respond by leveling the villages under cover of “military exercises” and fabricating retroactive expulsion orders. The pattern is clear: terrorize, expel, destroy the physical basis of return, then legislate the new demographic reality into permanence.
If the CIA in Talbot’s book is the hand that topples governments for oil and empire, Pappé’s Consultancy is the hand that learns to erase communities and call it security. Both are schools in which today’s war planners were implicitly educated, even if they have never read a page of either book.
Gaza, Then Iran: A Single Arc
The Gaza genocide is the recent culmination of that Nakba logic. As Al Jazeera’s accounting shows, Israel has used an immense share of its national wealth to “level” Gaza and destroy its institutions, killing tens of thousands outright and, on conservative estimates, ultimately hundreds of thousands of Palestinians through direct violence and siege‑induced deprivation, and pushing the survivors into engineered starvation. The Bank of Israel puts the war’s economic toll at around 352 billion shekels (around 112 billion dollars), with roughly 243 billion shekels (around 77 billion dollars) in direct defense costs, while daily spending estimates in early 2025 imply a mechanized routine where, on average, around 100 Palestinians were killed each day for months. The UN’s projection of 70 billion dollars and decades to rebuild only scratches at what it means to strip an entire population of housing, water, sanitation, and schools.
For Washington, the Gaza operation has been an investment as well as a crime: Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that the US has spent over 21.7 billion dollars in military aid to Israel since October 2023 and another roughly 10–12 billion on its own regional military operations in support of Israel, including in Yemen and Iran. That is the same US polity now underwriting “Epic Fury” in Iran, with the same industrial base profiting from the munitions and the same political class insisting that this is how “civilization” defends itself.
The step from Gaza’s pulverized neighborhoods to Tehran’s black rain is not conceptual; it is logistical. Israel’s army has already normalized the total destruction of dense urban environments, the use of siege to induce famine, and the long‑term crippling of a society’s “pillars of survival.” Extending that logic to the refineries, depots, and industrial plants of a sovereign state—and to the atmospheric consequences that follow—is an escalation of scale, not kind. The Nakba, Gaza, and now Iran form a continuous line of experimentation in how far a settler‑colonial and imperial alliance can go in making other people’s territories uninhabitable.
Two Traditions Converge Over Iran
Fast‑forward to 2026, and those two operating systems—the Dulles coup logic and the Nakba/genocide logic—have fused into a single project.
On the US side, the pattern is recognizably Dullesian: a national security elite steeped in the idea that certain countries are too important to be left to their own politics, especially when hydrocarbons are involved. The immediate pretext today is Iran’s drones, missiles, and nuclear program; the structural fact is that the Strait of Hormuz carries a fifth of global oil and a large share of gas and refined products, and that the region hosts irreplaceable LNG capacity. When war disrupts shipping, Qatar declares force majeure on gas exports after Iranian drone attacks, and Saudi’s Ras Tanura complex goes dark under missile fire, global prices spike and storage tanks back up; the same logic that made Dulles panic about Mossadegh now drives planners to treat Iranian military capacity as an intolerable threat to world commerce.
On the Israeli side, the 1948 template has been portable for decades. Gaza’s repeated pulverizations, the destruction of Lebanese infrastructure in 2006 and again in this war, and the casual talk among ministers about “voluntary migration” for Palestinians all follow the line Pappé traces from Haifa and Safsaf to the Galilee “mopping up” operations. What is new is the geographic ambition. With Tehran’s depots, refineries, and oil docks now deliberately targeted, the tools once used to empty villages and pressure a stateless people are aimed at a regional state of nearly ninety million. Acid rain over a capital is ethnic‑cleansing logic upgraded to atmospheric scale.
The succession in Tehran underscores the perversity of the project. US–Israeli strikes kill Ali Khamenei and much of the senior leadership; Donald Trump and his allies sell the decapitation as an opening for moderation or even regime change. Instead, Iran’s Assembly of Experts elevates Mojtaba Khamenei, the dead leader’s son, a man long entwined with the IRGC’s networks and hardline clerical currents. A revolution that once swore it had ended dynastic rule now becomes a family inheritance precisely because an external shock tips the balance in favor of the security organs and the war party. The pattern is familiar: relentless external pressure cements the most intransigent forces inside a system, in Tehran as surely as in Gaza or Moscow. It is also a specific echo of 1953: American and allied forces once again snuff out a constrained but real space for political contestation and midwife an even more openly authoritarian successor.
Meanwhile, US domestic politics repeats another old script. An interagency bulletin warning of elevated homeland terror risk linked to the Iran war is drafted by the FBI, DHS, and the National Counterterrorism Center, only to be blocked or chilled by the White House, which insists that anything “concerning Iran” be cleared before dissemination. Local law enforcement is kept in the dark so that the administration can avoid admitting that its distant war is raising the threat level at home. The intelligence community is told to mute the connection between an aggressive foreign operation and domestic vulnerability—just as earlier generations were told to ignore or downplay the role of US policy in triggering anti‑American militancy elsewhere. Blowback, once again, is not a lesson to be learned but a reality to be managed through censorship.
War as a Symptom of Civilizational Breakdown
All of this would be grim enough if it were “only” about Iran and the Middle East. But this war sits atop, and accelerates, a broader unraveling of modern industrial civilization.
First, the energy system that underwrites everything else is being weaponized against itself. The same tankers and pipelines that built the post‑war boom are now targets; the Iran war has already suspended around a fifth of global crude and gas supply, as ships avoid Hormuz and producers shut in fields while storage fills. Oil and gas prices jump; power futures for cities like Tokyo spike; import‑dependent economies across Asia and Europe scramble for alternatives in markets already distorted by earlier crises.
Second, the food system that lets eight billion humans stay fed is chained to the same machinery. Modern agriculture runs on nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers made from natural gas and sulfur, much of it sourced, processed, or shipped through the Gulf. Iran is the world’s third‑largest producer of ammonia, and the wider region supplies a large share of global urea and sulfur exports. When war knocks out LNG terminals, disrupts gas flows, and chokes off Hormuz, it does more than raise input prices for a season; it quietly shrinks the amount of food the world can grow months and years down the line. Today’s “global fertilizer supply shock” is tomorrow’s unrest in import‑dependent states from North Africa to South Asia, another round of blowback seeded in fields far from the front. The pattern is familiar from 2008 and the Arab Spring: when global food prices spike, brittle regimes do not just face higher subsidy bills, they face angrier streets. Today’s disruption of Gulf‑linked fertilizer flows is thus not only an agronomic problem but the seeding of future political crises far from the Strait of Hormuz.
This is what collapse looks like from the inside: key subsystems—energy, food, finance—becoming so tightly coupled and so brittle that a single regional war threatens to “bring down the economies of the world,” as Qatar’s energy minister bluntly put it. The war does not create fragility from nothing; it reveals and amplifies fragility that decades of just‑in‑time efficiency, deregulation, and geopolitical gambling have baked in.
Third, the political and informational organs meant to detect and correct danger are themselves compromised. In the US, intelligence about rising domestic terror risk linked to the war is suppressed for political convenience. In Iran, external attack helps install a dynastic hardliner with deep ties to the security apparatus. At the global level, institutions that might once have mediated or constrained this kind of conflict are sidelined. States that solemnly pledge to phase down fossil fuels at climate summits are, within months, using those same fuels and their transit routes as instruments of coercion and siege.
Finally, the ecological base that sustains any complex society is being treated as just another theater of operations. Acid rain over Tehran is not just an environmental accident; it is the direct result of deliberate strikes on oil depots and industrial plants whose combustion products seed toxic precipitation. Historical analogues—from Kuwaiti oil fires to Ukrainian chemical depot explosions—show that such “war weather” leaves long‑lived scars in soils, water, and human bodies. Launching a campaign that knowingly produces black, acidic rain over a megacity is a choice to trade long‑term habitability for short‑term military signaling.
In earlier work I argued that an empire staring down climate chaos and financial exhaustion chose not to slow but to gamble—on carbon capture schemes, militarized borders, and ever more extractive finance. This war is simply that same wager placed in real time. It assumes that the system can absorb: a prolonged interruption of energy flows through its most vital maritime artery; a fertilizer shock that ripples through global harvests; a new hardening of regimes in Tehran and Jerusalem; a further erosion of political trust and institutional competence in Washington and beyond.
The histories Talbot and Pappé excavate show how we got here: by normalizing coups and ethnic cleansing as tools of order, by treating other people’s sovereignty as a tweakable setting in a larger game, by externalizing the costs of “civilization” onto peripheries we assumed would never speak back. Gaza’s genocide and Iran’s black rain mark the point where those peripheries vanish. The atmosphere is shared; the choke points are global; the feedbacks—whether in the form of soot‑laden storms, spiking food prices, or panicked energy markets—arrive everywhere at once.
The black rain over Tehran, in other words, is not just the weather over someone else’s catastrophe. It is civilizational weather, written in the language of blowback. It marks the moment when an order built on fossil extraction, covert empire, and demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing discovers that there is no outside left to dump its consequences into.
The men who ordered this war will tell you it was an emergency, a deviation, a tragic necessity. They will not say that it is the logical expression of the world they built: a world where energy is extracted, markets are sacralized, people are sorted and sacrificed, and any tremor in the periphery is met with airstrikes. They will not say that the missiles over Shiraz and the oil slick in the Strait are the same policy as the eviction notice in Phoenix or the closed clinic in Ohio, just written in a different dialect.
We live, still, as though there were somewhere else to send the costs. For two centuries, the rich world pushed its carbon into the sky, its waste into the sea, its coups and debt and demographic projects into other people’s homelands. The promise at home was that the check would always be mailed to someone else. But the sky is a single system. The food chain is a single system. The weapons supply chain is a single system. There is no longer any “over there” sturdy enough to carry what this order needs to throw away.
The black rain over Tehran is one expression of that closure. The flooded subdivision, the burned town, the empty grocery aisle are others. They are not aberrations. They are how a system this large, this brittle, and this unaccountable keeps its books. The only real decision left is whether we continue to let the same people roll the dice with larger and hotter stakes, or whether we treat this as a final credit‑limit notice from physics and from history.
When power finds itself cornered, it does not reform; it digs in. It narrows the circle of those who decide, expands the list of those who can be sacrificed, and treats each new disaster as proof that harsher measures are required. The question that remains is not just what everyone else is prepared to do, but how much they are prepared to lose, and how late, before they decide that doing nothing costs more.
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