In August 1988, with his country bled white by eight years of war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a million dead, the economy in ruins, the revolutionary generation exhausted, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a U.N. ceasefire. He called it “more deadly than taking poison.” He was drinking from the bitter chalice of defeat.And then what happened? The Islamic Republic survived. It did not moderate, liberalize, or reckon with its failures. It nursed its wounds, rebuilt its Revolutionary Guard, and spent the next three and a half decades constructing the very proxy network and missile arsenal that the United States and Israel The post Drinking from the Bitter Chalice in the Middle East, Again appeared first on War on the Rocks.