Pity of war and peace in Middle East

Matein Khalid

There is no geopolitical risk premium in Brent crude even though history just went fast forward and literally ballistic in the Middle East as the IDF bombed Hamas into the Stone Age, decapitated Hezbollah’s command/communications networks, killed Nasrallah, forced Iran’s most valuable proxy militia to sue for a ceasefire in Lebanon, destroyed Iran’s Russian S300 anti-missile defense systems and escalated its air assault on the Houthis in Yemen.

The late summer and autumn of 2024 will go down in history as Israel’s Umm Maarik (the mother of all battles) that is now changed the balance of power, or tawazun al quwa in the Middle East in the most decisive, even more seismic stroke since the Six-Day War.

The guns have not fallen silent in the battlefields of the Levant, yet the political shock waves will be amplified when Trump restarts his “maximum pressure” policy on a weakened and vulnerable Iranian regime as soon as he moves into the White House next month. Iran has lost Hamas and Hezbollah as its deterrent shield against Israel.

The Assad regime in Syria, Iran’s oldest and faithful ally in the Arab world has crumbled. The successor regime in Syria will never forgive the Ayatollahs, Hezbollah and Putin for helping Assad murder 500,000 Syrians in the bloodiest civil war in the Arab world since Algeria in the 1990’s.

Economists estimate that Ali Khamenei squandered $200 billion in Iran’s oil wealth in payments to Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the Houthis. The Supreme Leader’s return on his failed imperial project? A cosmic zero. It is the tragedy of the Iranian people that they exchanged the pragmatic/secular regime of the Shah for the medieval theocratic madness that has now repressed them for 45 years. The mullahs must now answer for their crimes before the Iranian people. Zan, zindagi, azadi!

Trump knows that regime change in Iran is no longer a pipe dream as the youth of Persia have revolted en masse thrice in the past decade. Khamenei is on his deathbed and the IRGC’s top generals will not accept his son Mojtaba, the ultimate Aga Zadeh as his heir. In an ideal world, President Pezeshkian would invite Raza Cyrus Pahlavi to return to Iran as a secular constitutional monarch, abolish the Mullahcracy and return Iran to the civilized world it once graced. How many people in the Islamic world know that the current Nobel laureate in peace is Nargis Mohammadi, an Iranian mother of three, who led the world’s only women-led revolution against the mullahs and is now imprisoned in Evin by her tormentors.

This is a moment for a supreme diplomat to bring peace after a generation of war in the killing fields of the Middle East. Yet I doubt if the Trump Cabinet contains a Dr. Kissinger or Prince Metternich while the Israeli Cabinet seems full of rabid zealots whose venom disgraces the ideals of Judaism. What a pity, what a world.