The American Imperial Pattern

Operation Epic Fury · Brief 005 · Fictional Analytical Scenario

The system has four steps. It has run with remarkable consistency across 130 years, multiple administrations and every region of the world. The faces change. The operating system does not.

Step 1 — Identify the asset. Oil. Sugar. Minerals. Strategic position. The specific asset varies. The logic is consistent: there is something of value in another country and the existing power structure is either preventing access or threatening to prevent it.

Step 2 — Construct the narrative. The asset interest cannot be the stated reason. Liberation, democracy, security, weapons of mass destruction, denuclearisation. The narrative varies by era. Its function is consistent: convert a commercial or strategic interest into a moral imperative that justifies the cost.

Step 3 — Remove the power structure. Through coup, through invasion, through the support of internal opposition, through targeted assassination.

Step 4 — Extract. Contracts are awarded. Concessions are restored. Infrastructure is rebuilt by the removing power’s companies on terms set by the removing power.

The operating system is not hidden. It is documented in the historical record of every case. It is visible in the corporate beneficiaries of every post-intervention contract. The reason it continues is not that it is hidden. It is that the people who pay for it are never the people who run it.

Hawaii 1893. Sugar interests. Queen Liliuokalani overthrown. US naval vessel in harbour. Annexation follows. Clinton apologised in 1993. The land was not returned.

Iran 1953. Anglo-Iranian Oil Company concession threatened by Mossadegh’s nationalisation. CIA Operation Ajax. Mossadegh deposed. The Shah restored. Oil concessions restored. The 1979 revolution is the direct consequence. The 2026 operation is the second act.

Iraq 2003. Weapons of mass destruction — none found. Saddam removed. KBR awarded $2.7 billion in reconstruction contracts before the invasion began. The Iraqi army disbanded, producing the insurgency. The museum looted. The conditions for ISIS created.

Iran 2026. Operation Epic Fury. The narrative: nuclear threat, existential security. The asset: Iranian oil concessions lost in 1979. The pattern: running on schedule.

Iraq is the most documented version of the operating system and the most directly relevant to Iran 2026. The specific mechanism by which post-invasion Iraq became the catastrophe it became is the mechanism that is about to replay:

The diaspora provided the intelligence. The diaspora had no base inside the country. The power vacuum was filled not by the diaspora’s preferred candidates but by the most organised actors available. The most organised actors were not the ones Washington wanted. The civilian population paid for the gap between the pre-war intelligence and the post-war reality.

The Iranian Chalabi problem is structurally identical to the Iraqi Chalabi problem. Reza Pahlavi has no more base inside contemporary Iran than Ahmed Chalabi had inside contemporary Iraq. The operating system is running the same step four it always runs.

Hawaii is the case that removes all ambiguity. It is not a foreign intervention. It is domestic. The US annexed the territory of a sovereign nation, extinguished its indigenous sovereignty, built a naval base that made the Pacific war possible, and in 1993 formally apologised for the illegality of the annexation. The land was not returned. The apology changed nothing structural.

Hawaii is America looking at itself without the narrative construction machine running. The machine ran in 1893. The apology came a century later. The structure remains.

The people who pay for the operating system are never the people who run it. In Hawaii it was Native Hawaiians. In the Philippines it was 200,000-600,000 civilians. In Iran 1953 it was the population that lived under the Shah’s SAVAK and eventually produced the 1979 revolution. In Iraq it was the population that lived through the insurgency and ISIS.

In Iran 2026 it is the schoolgirls, the families near IRGC-adjacent buildings, the young Iranians whose pro-Western orientation is being permanently alienated. The operating system is running. The extraction contracts are being drafted. The people paying are not the people planning.

This is a synthesis of Brief 005 of the Operation Epic Fury series.

Read the full brief at substack.joelmorin.com/brief-005.html

The complete series at substack.joelmorin.com