It seems the President of Peace hasn’t sated his bloodlust yet, after briefly invading Venezuela, attempting a mass decapitation strike at its leadership and kidnapping its President Nicolás Maduro, he dropped the idea of further attacks, attempting to strong arm new President Delcy Rodríguez instead and abandoning Venezuelan opposition leader María Machado.
Although she wasn’t totally defiant, meeting with US officials and agreeing oil privatisation (ironically, the same thing Maduro offered Trump in the first place) Rodríguez retained overall power, with Venezuela not becoming some US colony as Trump proclaimed, a fact the media is slowly starting to acknowledge.
So now in his attempt to flex his muscles, he’s turned to another thorn in US power, Iran.
Iran has been in the crosshairs of the states for a long, long time. After the CIA and MI6 instigated a coup in Iran called “Operation Ajax” in 1953, overthrowing its elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh for having the audacity to nationalise the country’s oil wealth, it fell under the rule of monarch Reza Pahlavi, who established a dictatorship that lasted 2 decades, banning political parties except, in the 1970s, for his own Rastakhiz (Resurrection) Party.
As unrest rose Ruhollah Khomeini, a prominent religious cleric who had been living in exile, spoke out against Pahlavi and rode the wave of discontent to power, returning to Iran as Pahlavi was forced to flee.
Khomeini set up a system he called the “Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist”, forming a constitution where Iran would return to elections and representation, with a voted-for parliament and president, but supervised by a parallel structure which could overrule it, led by the unelected Supreme Leader and his Guardian Council, who could overrule the country’s institutions as they pleased and were the true source of power in the country.
Taking power as the Supreme Leader after his system was approved in a referendum, Khomeini purged revolutionaries who weren’t loyal to Jurism and gained confidence, wanting to export his revolution further in the Muslim world, calling for an uprising in neighbouring Iraq, ruled by the secular dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
Saddam invaded Iran with the backing of neighbouring regional Arab powers and the aid of the US, the Iranians pushed the Iraqis back and began sponsoring the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which aimed to force Israel out of Lebanon.
The Iran-Iraq war continued for nearly 8 years after Iran tried to invade Iraq in return and both sides failed, retreating to their own borders, with new Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei taking over after Khomeini died, but Iran ended up rising in influence in the 2000s as Hezbollah successfully ousted Israel and its proxies from Lebanon and the US invaded Iraq, ousting Saddam and creating a power vacuum that Iran was then able to fill with proxy militias.
In the 2010s Iranian influence rose even further, as Iran moved to prop up Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad as his country became gripped by a civil war, then backed the Yemeni Houthi movement that rose up and took over much of northern Yemen, placing it in a proxy war with the Gulf Arab states, who backed what was left of the Yemeni government and the sprawling network of Syrian rebel groups, plunging the Middle East into a Cold War that left Iran as a major thorn in the side of the Western world.
When Daesh (aka ISIS) emerged in Syria and Iraq, Iran played a major part in crushing them, placing them awkwardly with a common enemy with the West in the War on Terror, as Daesh was obliterated they managed to benefit in the aftermath, with their Iraqi proxies being incorporated into the new Iraqi state as the “Popular Mobilisation Forces”, and their forces in Syria helping Assad successfully purge the Syrian opposition from most of the country, humiliating Western led efforts to oust him.
The 2020s placed the country in a much more hectic place after Hamas attacked Israel, leading to the Israeli invasion of Palestine’s Gaza region, with the Houthis and Hezbollah supporting Hamas through bombing campaigns.
Hezbollah was severely damaged by the conflict, as Israel killed many of its forces and assassinated its leader Hassan Nasrallah, which blocked them from aiding Assad when the Syrian opposition launched a mass uprising against him, overthrowing his government, but Iran reconciled with the Gulf Arab nations, freezing the Yemeni Civil War and ending the Arab Cold War, with the Gulf countries, who had previously slowly begun normalising relations with Israel, supporting Iran instead.
Internally Iran has had just as hectic an era, after gaining widespread support for Jurism and rallying through wartime unity, large groups of Iranians have come to resent their “Guardians”, with the system overruling their election choices and violently imposing their rulings on the country and mass unrest being tackled with a carrot and stick approach, showing sympathy for activists and promising change on one hand while violently cracking down on unrest in the name of stomping out foreign interference with the other.
For decades Iranians chose to compromise, with the majority participating in elections as the country’s politics battled between the more hardline “Principalists” and the moderate “Reformists”, but in the 2020s boycotts reached their height as turnout dropped below half1 and mass movements reached an intense level, with police brutality leading to the death of Iranian woman Mahsa Amini inspiring cultural rejection of government demands on self presentation and economic clashes increasing calls for the Islamic Republic to be dismantled and replaced entirely, but again and again Iran successfully stemmed the tide with its mix of sympathetic, compromising messaging, violent repression and using internet blackouts to block organising, in the latest wave from January to February this year, Trump threatened to intervene, but didn’t follow through.
Then, suddenly out of nowhere, the US and Israel launched a mass bombing attack on Iran, killing Khamenei and other top figures, with Trump demanding Iranian forces surrender, Iran showed no sign of compromise, launching missile attacks on US bases in the Middle East and striking Israel alongside Hezbollah, setting the stage for an intensely dangerous conflict.
With Trump’s erratic persona, we have no clue what’s going to happen next. Will he get bored after a few days or weeks, stop bombing and leave a new Supreme Leader to take over like his Venezuela climbdown, effectively killing a bunch of people for nothing? Or will he launch a full invasion to topple the Iranian state for good?
Iran is not Venezuela, which had little power and few friends to count on, few reliable ones at least, with Russia tied down in its fumbled colonisation of its neighbour, although its network isn’t as strong as it was, it has a vast array of proxy forces to launch another multi front war and make any invasion a mad bloodbath that would make the Iraq War look like a nursery playground, and as a state born in war, no stranger to death, it’s not one that can likely be easily bombed into compromise either, so neither of Donny’s options look very pretty.
Probably what he’s hoping for is an ideal option C, where the bombings soften the country up for an internal rebellion, collapsing a rival power without the US having to do the dirty work that’s become so unpopular after Iraq and Afghanistan, but it didn’t happen in Venezuela and though there are plenty of expat groups and dissidents who would love to take a shot at it, none of them actually have the means on the ground to launch an insurgency that can conquer a country of 70 million people.
His propaganda explanation for all this is probably even more stupid than the Venezuela one, dragging up a propaganda line recycled over and over again when it comes to Iran, nuclear fearmongering.
Iran has had a nuclear program for decades, focusing on civilian nuclear energy, and of course with that has come the scaremongering idea that one day they’ll turn to making atom bombs that threaten the world, Israel really loves this one.
The problem with it is Iran has been supposedly months or weeks away from developing nuclear missiles for about 30 years, and it’s never actually happened,
as if that wasn’t dumb enough, Khamenei actually passed a religious Fatwa ruling against nuclear weapons development in the early 2000s and in 2015 Iran agreed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the US, EU, Russia and China to limit its nuclear enrichment to calm the nuclear anxiety.
Guess who threw the JCPOA in the bin? Donny J. As a result Iran intensified its nuclear enrichment again, but over a decade later still no evidence of the supposed weapons program emerged, or the weapons themselves. Here’s a wild guess why, they don’t exist.
It’s also worth pointing out that Israel is the one country in the Middle East that actually does have a nuclear weapons program, one that everybody knows about but they keep refusing to acknowledge, given their extensive war crimes and apartheid treatment of the Palestinians, the naked rise of authoritarianism of the US and the fact that its Gulf allies are even more authoritarian with Iran, practicing absolute monarchy with no real elected power structures at all, the narrative from Iran’s supposed “liberators” couldn’t look any more ridiculous.
That of course hasn’t stopped the rest of the West from joining the humiliation ritual, scared of really standing up to the Don of the Washington Mafia, with the UK, France and Germany putting out a statement casually ignoring that the US started the war, repeating the fearmongering bullshit and demanding that the Iranians return to negotiations, and the UK later giving the US permission to use British bases for “defensive” strikes attacking Iranian missile sites “at source”, aka in Iran itself. So, the US bombed Iran, Iran struck back, and striking them is then… Defensive? Yeah, okay then. I hope he wasn’t too exhausted by that mental workout, because I can tell you we’re definitely exhausted by him.
As many have already pointed out, this naked imperialism is yet another blow to the idea of there being a “rules based order” that the West, especially the US, supposedly upholds, with widespread growing recognition that we live in the law of the jungle, or the Wild West if you prefer.
Of course, that was always just an idea, the rules based order never actually existed, only a few weeks after I was born in 2003 the US was doing the exact same shit with the invasion of Iraq, making up obviously fraudulent WMD claims to get rid of a country that it didn’t see as playing ball enough, and now just after I reach 23 years old, here we are again, with Donny not even really bothering to put any effort into this WMD narrative it’s a sequel even more poorly written than the original.
The one success he can claim so far is the war has significantly damaged Iran’s outreach, reconciling with the Gulf nations was a massive success for the country, but as the Iranian military strikes at US bases on Gulf soil they’ve made those countries very very angry, but for a President that long advocated for an end to forever wars, having openly said that leaders like Saddam and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi should’ve been left in power, suddenly constantly sparking up his lighter next to a puddle of petrol doesn’t seem like a health idea, for himself or pretty much anyone really.
I suppose it would be nice if the US didn’t have a ruling class of deranged blatantly evil dementia patients, has anyone tried doing something about that?