EVEN before Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination had been confirmed, Donald Trump was describing him as “one of the most evil people in History”, underlining yet again his ignorance about the past. Since then, the lame excuse for Israeli-US hostilities has shifted from impending regime change to thwarting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions or halting its production of ballistic missiles.
In negotiations taking place in Geneva until recently, which were supposed to continue this week, Iran was willing to concede a lot on the nuclear front, but insisted on the right every other nation has to enrich uranium up to a certified level, and wasn’t willing to compromise its missile production. Anyone slightly more sensible than Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner might have pounced upon Tehran’s stance.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been claiming for almost 35 years that Iran was on the verge of going nuclear. That was nonsense. Khamenei even issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. While that might have involved subterfuge, the current casus belli makes a mockery of Trump’s repeated insistence since last June that Iranian nuclear facilities had been ‘obliterated’. The alternative excuse is that Iran could be close to developing intercontinental missiles that could hit the US. That’s palpable nonsense reminiscent of the ridiculous claims about Iraq a quarter-century ago. Even US intel agencies ridicule the idea of any imminent threat from Iran.
Iran has never posed an existential threat to Israel, but it’s the only Middle Eastern power that has challenged rampant Zionism. The US has for decades been the chief upholder of that odious ideology, barely bothered by the anti-Palestinian genocide. The assault against Iran was undertaken only after its regional allies had been subdued, with both Syria and Lebanon opting for Israeli/ US vassalage. Hezbollah nonetheless reacted to the Khamenei murder by lobbing a missile or two across the border into Israel, even as the Western-backed government in Beirut outlawed its military activities.
The ME is being ruptured rather than restructured.
Remaking the Middle East has been a decades-long project for the Zionists and their Western allies. It has never quite worked despite marginal successes in the Gulf and beyond. Now the Gulf states are recoiling from Iran’s lashing out at neighbours that harbour US bases. Mind you, the bases peppered across the region were insufficient for the assault that the US and Israel had in mind. The US armada in the vicinity could have obstructed any negotiations, but the Iranians carried on despite being compelled to make their case at gunpoint.
The absurdity of US diplomacy might have been obvious from the chosen interlocutors, real estate agents Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — the latter Trump’s son-in-law, who has no official standing and is desperately keen on turning Gaza into a Palestinian-free resort, which would thrill his Zionist uncles. These are not serious people, but then one has to wonder whether anyone else from the Mara-a-Lago mafia might have been marginally better. Marco Rubio? Pete Hegseth? Tulsi Gabbard? The collective IQ of the confederation of dunces Trump has gathered around him roughly equals that of the Western leaders who have latched on to a project about whose likely consequences they pretend to be as unaware as the clueless captain of their tribe.
There is no reason to admire the regime that has ruled Iran for the past half-century, but its predecessor was equally abhorrent. The latter was the result of a democracy-thwarting US-UK operation in 1953. Iran might indeed have flowered as a pluralist state had Reza Pahlavi not been reinstalled as a tyrant by his Western admirers, paving the way for atrocities and an Islamist takeover. The alternative since 1979 has been dismal.
Saddam Hussein’s nearly decade-long Western-backed war (supported by many of its Arab neighbours) wreaked havoc, but the theocracy remained intact. It was only strengthened by the two US-led aggressions against Iraq, which helped to nurture Islamic State, just as the Pakistani/ US/ Saudi role in Afghanistan yielded Al Qaeda, and later the first incarnation of the Taliban — the very entity that Pakistan has now gone to war against, after facing terrorist attacks while bereft of any advantage from the strategic depth that previous military chiefs boasted about.
Whether or not a coherent post-Khamenei regime surfaces in Iran, it’s unlikely that the Israeli-sponsored scion of the one-time king-of-kings — offered ample space in the Washington Post to express his gratitude to the imperialists (without mentioning his Israeli sponsors) — will find much of a welcome in Iran, even among opponents of the regime.
No one really knows what the future holds, but if Iran undergoes a transformation (hopefully for the better), so will its Gulf neighbours (hopefully not for the worse).
Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2026