After spending the last year killing pretty much everybody else in the Middle East, Israel and their less than silent partners back in Washington finally zeroed in on their 'big bad' in Tehran this June. All of this is hardly surprising nor is the fact that the orange lunatic in the White House has been complicit in pretty much every single move the IDF has made. Regardless of what Donald Trump may try to tell his increasingly suspicious MAGA supporters, his involvement in this bloodbath did not begin and end with the 14 bunker busters he violated the Constitution by dropping on three Iranian nuclear sites. Israel's temporarily aborted attempt at regime change by bombardment was performed completely in tandem with the Trump regime from start to finish.
Trump shipped Israel the 300 Hellfire missiles used in the strikes three days before they began. He deliberately lulled Iran into a false state of security by scheduling the latest round of peace talks regarding Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program for the weekend when the attacks were secretly scheduled to begin. He quite openly aided and abetted the proceeding attacks by providing Israel with the intelligence they needed to hit their targets which included the now badly wounded Ali Shamkhani, who was the Ayatollah's handpicked point man in the ongoing peace talks. He even provided the IDF with cover fire by using the US military to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones.
Trump also engaged in a downright absurdist campaign to convince the more consistently isolationist members of his MAGA base that neocon-style regime-change on behalf of a secular war junkie like Bibi Netanyahu somehow amounts to putting America first. It didn't work. MAGA flipped and Trump chickened out. Don't get me wrong, it isn't over yet, but the Trump regime appears to be attempting to change the narrative to one in which their direct intervention somehow ended a massacre which they clearly engineered from the beginning.
However, perhaps the most astounding thing about this whole bloody charade is actually how restrained big bad Iran has been throughout the ordeal. They have made it perfectly clear through public communiques that they rightly consider this entire adventure to be an American attack on Iranian soil, one that targeted some of the nation's leading military figures, and yet their only response to the men standing behind the Zionist minotaur was a glorified fireworks display over a US base in Qatar followed almost immediately by a peace deal which Israel blatantly violated before the ink had even dried on the treaty.
All of this and more begs the question what exactly is so goddamn scary about this allegedly rogue state? And why is their very existence so offensive as to inspire such treachery and downright reckless animosity on the part of the wealthiest nation on earth?
When you scratch the surface of the Zionist propaganda, Iran actually looks downright boring compared to their head-chopping Salafi neighbors. While Saudi Arabia can directly finance throwing commercial airliners into Manhattan's skyline like tomahawks without so much as a yawn of resignation from America's warmonger class, Iran mostly resigns itself to furnishing regional militias with cheap rockets and drones. Even their support for Hamas pales in comparison to the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Qatar who actually houses much of their leadership, but Israel isn't blowing Doha apart and America is literally protecting them with boots on the ground.
Iran's supposed nuclear weapons program only deepens my argument. All available intelligence suggests that Iran shelved whatever militant nuclear ambitions they once had back in 2003 when the US dispatched their most unpredictable rival in the region, Saddam Hussein. A decision the Ayatollah Khamenei himself even sealed with a public fatwa against even pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, none of this stopped Netanyahu from spending the last twenty years declaring that the Mullahs were just twenty minutes away from an atom bomb and none of that stopped Iran from continuing to jump through their ass to prove otherwise. This endless game of atomic chicken ultimately led the Iranian government to sign on to the JCPOA in 2015. A UN brokered peace deal in which Iran agreed to an unprecedented level of international oversight on their civilian nuclear energy program in exchange for sanctions relief that never actually materialized.
The Mullahs only raised their enrichment levels after Donald Trump unilaterally violated this deal during his first term with more sanctions in spite of Iran being in full compliance and they only continued to do so when the other nations in the P5+1 along with the Biden Administration refused to make any attempt to return to the peace table. Even then, Iran never came close to weapons grade enrichment, and they continue to beg America, a nation clearly committed to their destruction, to return to a treaty regime which even they acknowledge the US is likely just using as an excuse to spy on a totally legal program between bombings.
So, I ask once more with theatric flare, who is afraid of the big bad wolf? What exactly is so goddamn scary about the so-called Islamic Republic? Some will point out their colorful objections to the existence of a Zionist state in Palestine, but these are largely rhetorical at best, after all they haven't lifted a finger in defense of the hundreds of thousands of Gazans still being obliterated as we speak.
Others will point to Iran's strategic location atop a sea of oil at the threshold of the Eurasian Century and I don't doubt that this is a factor. It certainly is prime real estate but the price of buying the Mullahs off is far cheaper than blowing them up and they can just as easily be made customers of Raytheon as they could be made unwilling recipients of their ordinances. No, there is something far more complex at play here, something far bigger than oil or nuclear bombs.
Call it a theory but I believe that the grotesque reality is that it isn't even Iran that is dangerous to the west, it's their revolution and the so-called proxies that this unique uprising continues to inspire long after the Mullahs sold out.
In 1979, Iran was one of the wealthiest and most westernized nations in the Middle East. They had been one of the largest recipients of US military aid for decades and their ancient monarchy of over two millennia was the subject of a CIA driven campaign of secular modernization that every American journalist seemed certain would deliver the Muslim world to capitalism with the irresistible allure of Coca-Cola and miniskirts. And then a strange coalition of communist and Islamist student movements smashed it all to bits with zero outside influence from the equally shocked Soviet bloc in favor of something entirely indigenous.
The Islamic Revolution wasn't simply a rejection of American imperialism; it was a rejection of Western Civilization itself along with all the false promises of liberal democracy and the Enlightenment which never really amounted to much more than a smokescreen for cultural subjugation in the Third World. But the Iranians weren't simply rejecting modernity for the sake of contrarian animosity; they were trying to redefine themselves outside of its polluted influence.
Before Khomeini hijacked the nation amidst the unprecedented upheaval, the leading ideologue of the Islamic Revolution was a left-wing Shiite named Ali Shariati who preached what he referred to as "Red Shiism," a kind of Islamic liberation theology that actually rejected idolatrous clerical hierarchies in favor of a populist "salvation of the masses" and preached that the malign influence of western colonialism had actually upended Islam's traditional place at the forefront of human rights and kept the Muslim world from developing their own unique school of women's liberation not defined by materialist sexuality.
Shariati died before the revolution could be betrayed but his influence would continue to define the ideas of the more radical leaders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard like the Fatah-trained Gaddafiite, Mohammad Montazeri, and the Che Guevara inspired Mostafa Chamran, who were inspired by Shariati's notion of the "solidarity of the oppressed" to build an "Islamic International" united against capitalism, Zionism and Wahhabism that would eventually develop into what would become known as the Axis of Resistance, a rag-tag coalition of rogue states and non-state actors that would eventually lead to the rise of the Shia militia.
As much as the west would like to paint these bearded badmen as braindead Iranian proxies, the facts on the ground do not support this narrative. In fact, while Iran has drifted farther and farther into the abyss of a corrupt and moneyed Islamic bureaucracy, movements like the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Iraq's Sadrists seem to have moved in the opposite direction, establishing functioning parallel governments in direct contradiction to Iranian financed nation-states. These stateless societies bare far more resemblance to the pre-western tribal orders that once defined the region than Iran's weird Westphalian theocracy. Muqtada al-Sadr, a populist cleric who actually studied under the Ayatollah, has become one of Iraq's most outspoken critics of Iran's influence over Bagdad and the Houthi rebels overthrew their own government after Iran had directly ordered them to stand down.
This is what the west really fears, and it is way bigger than Iran. The west is terrified of something adjacent to the kind of Islamic anarchism that nearly succeeded in Somalia with the Islamic Courts System, only this time written too large to contain. Iran is just a corrupt nation with just enough revolutionary malcontents amongst its dwindling hardliners to keep the kind of militias who will outlive them armed without carrying the moral or financial authority to govern them. After all, who is the only force that has even dared to hold Israel, and their globalist sponsors responsible for their genocidal sins? While the fat Mullahs cut deals for dinner scraps with the Great Satan, the starving rebels of Ansar Allah expand their blockade on Zionist shipping while Trump refuses to bomb them anymore as long as they leave his loot alone on the high seas.
The ironic thing is that if Trump and Bibi ever do achieve their dream of regime change in Iran, they would likely only succeed in bringing the revolution back home again. Iran still maintains a volunteer militia left over from the Iran-Iraq War known as the Basij. 25 million reserves from Iran's bucolic tribal heartland, many with battle experience in Syria among the Axis of Resistance. Without an Ayatollah to inspire them where do you think these angry young men will turn, to some Pahlavi exile quisling or to a new generation of Red Shiism not beholden to any nation state?
The shit could get wild before it gets interesting so stay tuned to your TV sets while the lion corners the tamer, one drone at a time.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Ex-Lion Tamer by Wire
* War Dance by Killing Joke
* Blank Generation by Richard Hell & the Voidoids
* My War by Black Flag
* Nothing but Flowers by Talking Heads
* Sonic Reducer by Dead Boys
* See No Evil by Television
* Let's Start a War by Fear
* June Guitar by Alex G
* Kill Your Television by Ned's Atomic Dustbin
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