Matein Khalid
There is precious little good news to emerge from the Middle East since the IDF launched its spectacular blitzkrieg and leadership decapitation strike against Iran’s nuclear asset and military/intelligence elite last Friday. This weekend was grim with Iran’s ballistic missile strike on Haifa and Tel Aviv with even a real miss on the IDF command and control complex in Kirya. Netanyahu’s boast that he would order IDF warplanes to destroy 100 buildings in Iran for every building destroyed by an Iranian missile in Israel also suggested a protracted, bloody conflict. Yet Brent has plunged to 71.80 as I write with Nasdaq up 300 points on diplomatic signals that Iran wants to join Trump’s call for immediate peace deal talk under his aegis.
It is also significant that Iran has dare not retaliate against US forces in the Gulf or Iraq. Since the IDF and Mossad destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon last autumn and a Turkish backed insurgency overthrew its 54-year old Baathist dynastic vassal state in Syria last December, the Ayatollah’s “axis of resistance” in the Levant no longer restrains Israel military strike, as Operation Rising Lion suggests. In fact, the lion and sun were the ancient symbols of Iran’s Zoroastrian imperial past and even adorned the flag of the last Pahlavi Shah. I wonder if Bibi wants to anoint Prince Reza Cyrus Pahlavi as the next Shah of Iran.
For Reza’s sake, I hope he stays in Washington and does not allow himself to be used by this cynical Israeli megalomaniac. His life is too precious to his wife and daughters as well as his mother Empress Farah, who has faced so much tragedy in her life with the loss of her husband, younger son Ali Reza and daughter Laila. Prince Reza Cyrus should also remember the fate of Bachir Gemayel, whom another nutcase Israeli Prime Minister (Begin) had anointed President of Lebanon in 1982 after the IDF’s Operation Peace for Galilee, which ensured no peace for either Israel or Lebanon, midwifed the rise of Hezbollah and claimed 20,000 civilian lives in siege of Beirut.
Even though the IDF has scored yet another military and intelligence coup against Iran, I doubt if Netanyahu’s call for a popular revolt will happen, let alone succeed. After all, the Ayatollah regime has massacred tens of thousands of young Iranian lives in the periodic revolts against the Islamic Republic that have occurred from the very first months of its existence in 1979.
It was surreal to see Bibi speaking the Persian words zan, zindagi, azadi (women, life, freedom). Anybody with a remotely humane moral compass wishes the beautiful Iranian people liberation from this evil and nightmarish mullah regime that has strangled Iran since 1979. Whatever happens, there is no doubt that June 2025 will join February 1979, August 1990, March 2003 and October 2023 as one of the decisive hinge months of Middle East history. That much, at least, is certain!
Also published on Medium.
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