The Time Has Come

"I'm less confident now than I would have been a couple of months ago. Something happened to them, but "I am much less confident of a deal being made."

"They seem to be delaying, and I think that's a shame." 

U.S. President Donald Trump

 

"We are constantly assessing the appropriate personnel posture at all our embassies."

"Based on our latest analysis, we decided to reduce the footprint of our mission in Iraq."

Anonymous U.S. State Department official 

 

"Diplomacy -- not militarism -- is the only path forward."

"Iran is not seeking a nuclear weapon, and U.S. militarism only fuels instability."

"CENTCOM's legacy of fuelling regional instability through arming aggressors and enabling Israeli crimes, strips it of any credibility to speak on peace or non-proliferation."

Islamic Republic of Iran

Tehran, Friday, June 13. AP

 

This past week the U.S. State Department ordered all of its embassies within striking distance of Iran, including its proxy locations; missions in the Middle East, eastern Europe and North Africa, to convene emergency action committees, and to urgently forward cables to Washington of measures to mitigate risks. The departure of non-essential personnel from Iraq was also authorized. Bearing in mind that the U.S. is viewed in Tehran as the military and political support of Israel and as such promised consequences should Israel strike Iran.

 

The doomsday stars have aligned for the Islamic Republic. Bleating that it respects not military means but diplomacy reveals that it considers arming and inciting terrorist groups to represent its particular brand of diplomacy. Having connived to destabilize the entire Middle East with its Axis of Resistance the Ayatollahs cannot resist attributing regional instability to the United States and Israel. Because it is a theocratic regime of undisputed 'peace' and 'harmony', Iran deplores aggressors such as Israel insisting it has the universally legitimate human right to exist.

 

A person stands near a damaged residential building after an Iranian ballistic missile strike hits Tel Aviv. Abir Sultan/EPA

"For decades, the tyrants of Tehran have brazenly, openly called for Israel's destruction."

"They backed up their genocidal rhetoric with a program to develop nuclear weapons."

"If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon within a very short time."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 

That determination to defend and protect itself from a regime that has time and again over the decades threatened to destroy 'the Zionist entity', even so far as declaring that intention within the hallowed halls of the United Nations, has finally pushed Israel to the inevitable. A final and total frontal assault on the Islamic Republic, to neutralize that existential threat and prevent it from producing the nuclear weapons it says it has no intention of pursuing; that with its oil for energy notwithstanding, its search for nuclear energy is purely domestic.

 

Reuters

 

Hostile, threatening rhetoric and support for terrorist death cults aimed directly at destroying Israel identifies Iran for what it is. The Hamas October 7, 2023 unspeakable malevolence unleashed by thousands of Palestinian terrorists marauding through southern Israel in a maelstrom of savage intensity, as clear a declaration of war as any that could be imagined. Orchestrated by Iran, championed by Iran, fuelled by Iran, celebrated by Iran as a great victory. 

 

The response was swift with the Israel Defense Forces responding to the bloodshed, rape, torture, destruction and hostage taking. And having to respond as well to Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis is Yemen, as well as Hamas, the PLFP, Islamic Jihad and Fatah in Gaza. The last two decades of Iran's search for nuclear weapons as a deterrent to Israel's existence and its extended goal of conquest of the Middle East for Shia Islam over its Sunni neighbours has been unsettling for the entire region.

 

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran had an organized nuclear weapons program up to 2003, enriching uranium to gradually achieve weapons-grade levels. A nuclear armed Iran would represent the existential threat that Iran celebrates itself as being for Israel. With Hamas battered, Hezbollah in disarray, the Houthis on the back foot, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out of the picture, the Islamic Republic has been deprived of its allies' militant support. 

 

The Islamic Republic was given fair warning to cease and desist or face the consequences. The former never resulted, but the latter is in the process. When the IAEA's board of governors censured Iran for failing to work with its inspectors, Iran responded with the announcement it would establish a third enrichment site and exchange some of its centrifuges for more advanced models.

 

Photos show some Iranians rallying in front of a mock-up of the Dome of the Rock  Atta Kenare / AFP - Getty Images

 

War is never pretty. In the prosecution of war, innocents are caught up while the military on either side pursue their goals, each of outdoing the other to become victorious in combat, leading to surrender of one, dominance of the other. Iran has thus far lost many of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military commanders, its nuclear scientists, all members of the IRGC themselves, airports, arms depots, oil refineries, assault depots. In response swarms of missiles have rained down on Israel.

 

Israel is in a battle for survival. Its success in this battle will result not only in removing the source of an unrelenting cult dedicated to the destruction of Israel and by extension, Jews, but by extension, freeing the Iranian people themselves from their burden of Islamist anti-human corrosion of the most basic of human rights. Moreover, the removal of the current Islamist regime's stranglehold on its own population, on the Middle East and its long-range threat to the West and its freedoms represents a benefit to the international community. 

 

The justice of peace and freedom will arrive with the removal of impediments to both. And Israel alone has undertaken that task of benefit to all.

 

A fire at Tehran's Shahran oil depot after an Israeli attack. Photograph: Majid Asgaripour/Reuters

 

Iran's Shattered "Axis of Resistance"

"The Syrian debate is happening at all levels of Society."

"People are asking: Why did we spent so much money there? What did we achieve?"

"What is our justification now that it's all gone?" 

Hassan Shemshadi, Iranian analyst

AP Photo

 

Iranians appear to be awakening from their stupor of victimization by their theocratic regime; influential critics in the country now speaking out publicly of the futility and regional destabilization fomented by the Islamic Republic of Iran, short-changing the great Iranian people living in poverty and repression crushed beneath the fist of the Islamist Khomeinist regime under Ruhollah Khomeini's successor Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, carrying on the vision of his predecessor.

The sudden collapse of the Alawite regime of President Bashar al-Assad, propped up by Tehran, has taken the Iranian Mullahs and their Republican Guard Corps by surprise; no longer can they rely on Syria as a conduit for weapons meant for the terror groups founded and funded by Iran and others dependent on its support; Tehran's infamous 'axis of resistance'. 

The public has always grumbled in fruitless frustration over billions spent by their government to recruit, train and arm their proxy militias, while depriving the people of Iran of basic necessities of life. That, and the Iranian lives sacrificed to help support the Syrian regime in its long-standing civil war against Syria's Sunni population, and its and conflict with foreign Sunni-led Islamist groups like the Islamic State; all to naught. 

 

AP Photo

 

"No one will be able to waste Iran's dollars for maintaining a spider web anymore", stated former lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh in a social media post, urging Iranians to celebrate the fall of Bashar al-Assad. A professor of international relations at Tehran University, Ebrahim Motaghi stated that Iran had been reduced from regional power to merely another country, on a talk show viewed widely.

The Iranian regime's strategy to become a dominant regional force capable of confronting Israel and the United States, its support of militant Islamist groups across the Middle East it named the axis of resistance, is being questioned not only by an incensed public, but also by well-placed authority figures. Mohammad Shariati Dehghan, former Iranian representative to the intergovernmental Organization of Islamic Cooperation wrote in a front-page opinion piece that the Assad defeat exposed Iran's strategy as misguided, "built on weak foundations".

A new approach was required, to prioritize building alliances with other countries rather than propping up militant groups, while redirecting funding and resources back to the people of Iran. This open public debate is a departure from the norm since for many years leaders of Iran placed support for Syria and allied terrorist groups fighting Israel to be a non-negotiable focus of the Islamic revolution, which national security demanded.

These open comments, infuriating to Ayatollah Khamenei, were, he said, "a crime", having the effect of sowing fear and uncertainty in the public mind. Iran's judiciary responded by announcing a criminal investigation into specific prominent figures and news outlets identified as leading the criticism. Among them, former lawmaker Heshmatollah Falahtpisheh who had revealed the Syrian debt to Iran came to $30 billion.

Syria had become Iran's central command base in the region for over 40 years. Military bases, missile factories, tunnels and warehouses were all controlled by Iran. Weapons, cash and logistical support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and terrorists in the West Bank and Iraq were all beneficiaries of Tehran's largess in building its 'axis of resistance'. 

When the Assad regime was deposed, Syrians stormed the Damascus Iranian Embassy, smashing photographs of Iranian leaders, and hauling down the Iranian flag. The Islamist rebel leader, Ahmed al-Shara, who spearheaded the insurgents, warned Iran he would not tolerate continued Iranian interference in Syria's affairs. Gone forever, the Assad regime's complicity with the Republic.

AP Photo

"Why were you spending billions of dollars of oil revenues that belong to the Iranian people on Assad until the very end if he wasn't even listening to you?"

"At least on the topic of Syria, stop lying and be honest with the people."

Alireza Mokarami, Iranian, Syrian civil war veteran