Ayatollah Khamenei

Saturday

Freddy Gray

Trump launches a remote-control regime-change war on Iran

"We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground," said Donald Trump, as he stood at the lectern in his white USA cap and announced the launch of a "massive and ongoing" military operation against Iran.  "It will be totally, again, obliterated." He had to say "again" because he has insisted over and over that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been "utterly obliterated" last summer, after Operation Midnight Hammer.  But the objective of these latest midnight or very early morning strikes, conducted again by US and Israeli forces working together, is already far broader than the wiping out of weapons of mass destruction – whether that be uranium enrichment sites or Iran's ballistic missile capabilities.

iran

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Will Trump ‘totally obliterate’ Iran’s nuclear program – again?

Donald Trump spent much of the second half of last year boasting about the total and utter success of his military strikes on Iran. “As you know,” he said in August, “we took out the nuclear capability of Iran, and to use the term that people try to dispute without any knowledge, it was obliterated.” Iran’s nuclear program, he assured the world, had been set back by “decades.” Yet yesterday, just six months on, there he was again – meeting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu once more to discuss the urgent need to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

The mullahs mean their threats

I write at the very beginning of July. Where I live in Connecticut, people are unpacking flags and bunting in preparation for the July 4 festivities. Elsewhere, the trumpets sounding to accompany Donald Trump’s triumphant announcement of a ceasefire between Iran and Israel have subsided. It is clear that the President dearly wants peace. So does Israel. For its part, Iran wants the extermination of “the Zionist entity” and, beyond that, the eventual extinction of the “Great Satan,” America. How do I know? Iranian spokesmen keep telling the world just that. I wonder if Salman Rushdie has reached out to Trump now that he has joined the exclusive club of those upon whom the lunatics in charge of Iran have explicitly pronounced a fatwa – a death sentence.

Iran
Iran
Colin Freeman

Who replaces the ayatollahs if the Iranian regime falls?

The masked gunmen of Jaish al-Adl are probably not the kind of people Donald Trump had in mind when he talked about “regime change” in Iran. A terror group in Iran’s southeastern Baluchistan region, they have a bloodthirsty record of shootings and suicide bombings, all part of a jihad for a separate Baluchi homeland. They are, however, excited by Israel and America’s bombing campaign, which they see as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to achieve their goal. As they declared recently: “We extend the hand of brotherhood to all the people of Iran to join the ranks of the Resistance.” How long that brotherhood would last is another matter.