The history of Western imperialism in the Middle East is written in blood. Yet, completely ignoring the lessons of the past, the world witnessed another horrific gamble on February 28. The massive waves of missile and bomb strikes launched by the United States, with active Israeli participation, against Iran are not just a military operation. They mark the beginning of a terrifying new chapter in the desperate attempt to keep a dying unipolar world order alive.

Washington and its allies are cheering the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian military leaders as a massive victory. But if you look past the smoke and the media spin, a harsh reality becomes visible: this is a war completely empty of strategy. Dropping advanced bombs to shatter buildings and kill leaders might satisfy the ego of the imperialist war machine. But history—whether in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan—screams a clear warning. You cannot bomb a nation into accepting Western liberal democracy. Decapitating a government from the sky does not bring peace; it only breeds chaos, endless civil wars, and a fierce anti-imperialist backlash. Thinking you can win a war by pressing a button from thousands of miles away, without putting troops on the ground, is the ultimate arrogance of the military-industrial complex.

There is a much larger geopolitical game happening here. As even Western military analysts admit, this aggression is not just about Iran. By targeting nations and movements that refuse to bow down—from Venezuela and Cuba in Latin America to Syria and Palestine in the Middle East—the United States is trying to dismantle the entire anti-imperialist bloc led by Russia and China. This is the old neoliberal agenda: destroy anyone who stands in the way of a multipolar world. Capitalist powers always need a crisis to keep their economies running and their weapons selling.

And who pays the price for this endless hunger for dominance? It is never the corporate elites. It is the global working class. If the conflict spreads and shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz are choked, the global oil market will freeze. We are staring at oil prices shooting past $100 a barrel. For a common worker in a developing country like India, this means a daily struggle for survival. Transport costs will skyrocket, and the prices of basic food and daily needs will become unbearable. While Wall Street speculators and arms manufacturers count their massive profits, the working class is pushed deeper into inflation and poverty. The wars of the rich are always fought on the empty stomachs of the poor.

But there is a darker, silent war happening right alongside the falling missiles. How exactly did the US and Israeli intelligence find these highly secretive underground bunkers? How did they track the exact movements of the leadership? The answer lies in the weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data. Platforms like 'Grok' and Western military algorithms are doing the heavy lifting. Modern wars are no longer just planned by generals in the Pentagon; they are driven by algorithms sitting in the data centers of Silicon Valley tech giants. Imperialism today relies more on data than on bullets.

When I think about this deep cultural and technological invasion, my mind often wanders back to my own past. I remember being a young student in a small village in Malappuram, Kerala, looking at computers and the internet with pure wonder. Later, when I sat in the computer science labs affiliated with Calicut University campus, trying to learn programming and IT, a massive political reality completely escaped us. Everything in front of us was built by the West. We learned to type on Microsoft’s Windows. We searched for knowledge on Google. We explored the web through Chrome.

Yes, free alternatives like Linux existed in those labs. But the entire syllabus, the way we were taught to build applications, and the software architecture we studied were entirely designed to serve American and Western tech interests. Why did we fail to build our own basic operating systems? Why didn't our academic institutions or governments make a serious push to take existing open-source code, add our own building blocks, and create something that belonged to us? Because it was easier to just consume. We blindly accepted these Western platforms without a single thought about digital sovereignty. Sitting in those labs, with absolute innocence, we typed away our habits, our locations, and our preferences into their "free" platforms. We weren't just learning technology; we were being trained to become lifelong consumers, feeding the greatest data pipeline in human history.

For years, under the disguise of "open data" and free social media apps, Western tech monopolies have harvested billions of data points from developing nations. Today, AI algorithms analyse this massive ocean of stolen data to turn it into a weapon of war. The layout of our streets, the strength of our communication networks, our daily movements—it is all sitting on Western servers. The imperialists no longer need to send spies to map a country. Our digital footprints guide their missiles. This is the brutal reality of digital colonialism.

This is exactly why the data policies of China and Russia offer a powerful socialist alternative. When China heavily restricted American tech companies and banned their social media platforms, the Western liberal press cried out about "authoritarianism" and a lack of freedom. But by building their own search engines (Baidu) and communication networks (WeChat), and by keeping their citizens' data within their own borders, they showed immense political willpower. Russia took similar strict measures. While capitalist democracies happily hand over their citizens' private data to American tech lords, these nations are fiercely protecting their data sovereignty. They are actively fighting back against digital imperialism.

For a developing country like India, this is a matter of life and death. Blindly importing Western AI platforms and algorithms will bring chaos to our core sectors, especially agriculture. If the data about our farmers' land, weather patterns, and crop yields falls completely under the control of foreign AI monopolies, we will enter an era of "digital feudalism." The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has clearly warned that the world is heading toward a severe food crisis by 2050 due to climate change and population growth. If our agricultural data is controlled by Western corporations, imperialism will weaponise this coming famine. We will find ourselves begging foreign powers not just for seeds and fertilisers, but for the very algorithms that tell our farmers what to plant.

The US strike on Iran was not just a traditional military attack. It was a modern invasion powered by the data stolen from citizens across the world. From the software we used in our university labs to the global navigation systems on our phones today, digital colonialism is tightening its grip. The working class must wake up to this threat. If we do not build our own technological infrastructure, kick out Western monopolies, and reclaim absolute sovereignty over our data, we will be the future victims of these digital missiles. A nation that does not control its own data can never prot0ect its freedom.