By VIMAL SUMBLY
The United States and Israel have unleashed a full-fledged war on Iran. Although at a disproportionately disadvantageous position, Iran is trying to fight and hit back targeting multiple American bases in the Middle East. No matter how much resistance Iran tries to put up, the result is a foregone conclusion.
Iran is not like Venezuela and Iranians are not like Venezuelans that they may take it lying down. Even militarily Iran is not that weak. In fact, Iran has been supplying short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, which it has been using in Ukraine.
Iran has already paid a heavy price with the death of its supreme spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and top military brass. The damage is likely going to be massive and much more as the war unfolds and till the time the Americans do not achieve their motive of affecting the regime change.
Like during the Iraq War that completely destabilised the country, deposed its dictator Saddam Hussein, eventually executing him through a kangaroo court trial, the US is now claiming that Iran was building up the nuclear arsenal. The US during its attack on Iraq had claimed that Saddam Hussein was developing chemical weapons. Nothing was found out after the country was overrun.
The same is going to be the case with Iran. Iran, despite its intransigent attitude towards the West, the US in particular, remained open to negotiations. It also allowed its nuclear sites to be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which found nothing wrong with Iran’s civilian nuclear programme.
But nuclear weapons were not the reason. Even the Americans knew that. The purpose was to change the regime and remove supreme leader Khamenei. He was killed on the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday. Khamenei reportedly refused to move out to some safer place apparently hoping that his death may unite the Iranian people against the US attack and probably it will. He indeed will live as a great martyr not only for Iran, but the entire Shia world. He will be seen as a great symbol of Islamic resistance against the West and the US.
Iran is not the first country in recent months, which the United States under Donald Trump has targeted. Earlier, it removed Syrian President Bashar Al Assad from Syria who has now taken shelter in Russia. Assad was replaced by Ahmed al Sharaa, a former Islamic State commander, who has the blood of western people on his hands. Trump just did not care and got him installed as the Syrian President and then hosted him in the White House.
Also read: Trump, Netanyahu, and the long road to regime change in Iran
Then there was brazen and blatant attack on Venezuela leading to the capture of its president Nicolas Maduro. He was accused of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking. He, along with his wife, is currently being held in a high-security New York jail. But the actual reason for his capture was the control over Venezuelan oil and Trump made no secret of it.
And now comes Iran, which again is rich in oil resources. Iran had agreed to negotiate. But Trump never wanted any negotiations with the Iranian regime. For him the target was the regime itself, thus a full-fledged attack on yet another sovereign country.
The attack was preceded by nearly a year-long unrest across Iran. A narrative was built up by the western media about the “authoritarian regime” in Iran. Iran is a democracy, which holds regular elections. While supreme leader Khamenei was nominated for lifetime, the Iranian President is elected after every four years.
Agreed that people of Iran were really fed up with the existing Islamic Iranian regime. Does that give any authority to a foreign country to attack it and affect regime change? Iran holds elections every four years. No doubt the Islamic system of governance in Iran is quite controlled and does not allow or encourage any reforms, yet the government there is a representative one. Moreover, the Islamic regime in Iran is not as orthodox and puritanical as in some Arabian countries particularly Saudi Arabia that Trump is friends with.
If the yardsticks that the Americans used for Iran, like authoritarian regime and piling up of nuclear arsenal, are to be applied uniformly and universally, then there are many more countries which should be in line for US President Donald Trump to affect regime change. First and foremost should be North Korea. It is a dictatorship. It possesses nuclear arsenal. But will the US dare to target North Korea? Instead, Trump has often been seen trying to extend an olive branch to its dictator Kim Jong Un. Nuclear weapons do act as deterrent indeed even against superpowers. Kim has proved it.
The problem with the Islamic regime in Iran was that it had antagonised the entire western world. It had aligned itself with Russia and also China. Since Russia itself remains embroiled in its own war with Ukraine, it could hardly do anything for Iran. In fact, Iran should have taken a cue from what happened to Bashar Al Assad in Syria. Assad was a strong Russian ally. Despite that he could not hold for long, just because Russia remained occupied with Ukraine.
For Trump, affecting a regime change in Iran serves multiple purposes. First, it further weakens Russia’s position. Second, once there is a regime change in Iran, the US will have indirect control over the massive oil reserves of the country. China, which right now imports a huge quantity of oil from Iran, will find it difficult to import in future. Thus, the US will be able to cut China to size to an extent.
Above all, with such a brazen attack on Iran, Trump has reaffirmed the singular supremacy of America that it continues to remain the only “superpower”, way ahead of others. In all likelihood, Trump will not stop flexing the US military muscle here. He may already have identified some other place, some other country.
But he must be resisted the way European countries resisted his ambitions on Greenland. Trump is setting a dangerous precedent by running over sovereign countries. He has already disrupted the global rule-based economic order with his unilateral punitive tariffs and now he is unsettling the global diplomatic regime. This must stop.
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