By Ameer Ali –

Dr. Ameer Ali

Had the Omayyad soldiers led by Abdul Rahman won at the Battle of Tours against the Carolingian troops under Charles Martel in 732, speculated Edward Gibbon in his multi-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpit might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet”. This fear of a Muslim power overpowering the West and ruling over Christians had been a constant factor motivating almost all wars fought between European and Muslim powers. That fear was finally put to rest at the end of the 19^th century with the demise of the “sick man of Europe”, the Ottoman Empire, and in the wake of rising nationalism. The Middle Eastern territories of that empire were carved out between Britain and France as their respective zones of influence by the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement with approval from Russia and Italy.

That fear however appears to have been deliberately rekindled by Donald Trump and his White House cabal to present Iran to the world as the current Islamic menace which is threatening to destroy the imperial hegemony of US and Western civilization. The argument to justify the war on the premiss that Iran is on the verge of developing nuclear weapons to attack US and that it already has a stock of missiles which threaten the security of America is bogus propaganda. As Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from1997-2007 and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2005 maintains there is no “structured nuclear weapon program” in Iran, and there is absolutely no credible evidence that Iran is about to become a nuclear power.  But as a sovereign nation it has every right to defend itself against any foreign aggressor.   

US enmity towards this country has more than a seventy-year history beginning from 1953 when a democratically elected government in Iran was overthrown by a jointly engineered coup by the CIA and British intelligence services.  After the 1979 Iranian Revolution that enmity developed into a political paranoia, and to Trump the Iran War has become a crusade. That the rise of Iran is a threat to Western civilization became self-evident from the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference held in February this year.  Rubio saw the war against Iran as a clash of civilizations. “We are part of one civilization” he said. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir”.  Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth with the Crusader tattoo in Latin, Deus Vult (God wills it), inscribed on his body was inspired by quoting Psalms 144 which he read out to convince his supporters that the war is “anointed by Jesus” to bring on Armageddon. To complete the picture, the Western media by dubbing pro-Palestinian protests as antisemitism is systematically promoting Islamophobia to garner popular support for the war against Iran. Both Trump and Netanyahu believe that the war is for the return of the Messiah to save the divine path to establish Greater Israel. Thus, the war is portrayed as a religious crusade to annihilate Iran or the “empire of evil” as Isaac Herzog the President of Israel called it by the “empire of chaos” as Samir Amin described US.

It is the same crusader spirit that drives Israel’s vision of Greater Israel also and the origins of which goes back to Theodore Herzl, the father of political Zionism. To Herzl, Greater Israel stretched “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates” as found in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh. It includes Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, parts of Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. From the point of view of the Zionists, it is Iran that heads the Axis of Resistance, which includes Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza against Israeli expansion, and hence the need to destroy Iran.  The current war was started by Israel on 28 February when it suspected that Trump might accept a negotiated settlement following Qatar’s mediation efforts. Israel would have none of it. Once Israel fired the first shot, and in the face of strong pressure from the Zionist lobby in Washington there was no choice for Trump except to join in. The resignation of Joe Kent the top US counter-terrorism official in Trump administration exposes this fact. Without any consultation with his European allies and with no notification to the UN Trump jumped in with that convicted war criminal Netanyahu without any exit strategy. Left isolated by his European he had no alternative but to turn it into a Holy War at least to gather public support. It has misfired and become an illegal, criminal and un-holy misadventure with painful consequences to the entire world.

US never understood the depth of Iranian nationalism and the revolutionary psyche of Karbala the historic germ of that nationalism. Today’s second generation of post-revolutionary Iran is as nationalistic as the first generation. Ali Shariati’s slogan “every day is Ashura and every place is Karbala” is still revibrating in the hearts and minds of this second generation. This is one of the fears that made US strategists reluctant to send ground troops to Iran. Killing a leader or two and instigating riots with hired thugs is not going to cause regime change. Hormuz Strait, that narrow waterway is the umbilical cord which feeds energy and strength to the industrialized and agricultural economies of several countries is Iran’s trump card, and with that card Iran has vowed to use it discriminately between Iran’s friends and foes to allow or disallow their respective oil carriers to pass through this waterway. Rising oil prices and cost push inflation – a gift from Trump, is worsening the cost-of-living crisis even in US. According to Trump this is a “small price” for a secure world. On the contrary, it is a huge price paid by the meek and the poor to feed Trump’s megalomaniac aspirations. In desperation therefore, Trump has appealed to his allies to send in warships to protect their own oil carriers, but several of those allies both European and Asian including Australia are avoiding to getting trapped in this illegal war. Germany is calling for a political or diplomatic and not military solution to end this un-holy war.  Having let down by NATO Trump has now decided to bomb Iran’s Kharg island and other underground facilities closer to Hormuz. This will only increase the fuel crisis and economic pain.

There are signs already that the blowback from the Arab world or the expected butterfly effect is beginning to emerge with a rejuvenated Hezbollah attacking Northern Israel, while the Islamic State or Daesh in Iraq is also mobilising its resistance forces after 20 years to enter the regional war, and there are the Houthis in Yemen flexing their muscles in support of Iran. But what about the Gulf countries themselves? American bases in those countries were allowed on the promise that US would provide security to the local regimes if any threat to them comes from outside and particularly from Iran. But more than the bases themselves UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and other puppets have allowed American forces and Israeli Mossad to operate from inside their hotels and other facilities and hence have become legitimate targets for Iran to attack. However, if the threat were to come from Israel US will leave these regimes on their own. Since 1958 these regimes never prepared themselves to stand on their own either individually or collectively and build a modern defence force to protect them. Israel’s expansionism to create Greater Israel is a threat to all of them and the Western countries will never come to their aid in case Israel starts invading. Will the Arabs wake up at least now before becoming vassal states of Greater Israel?

Iran is proving to be a model of resistance against America’s bullying. Trump’s warmongering has provoked Cuba also and is promising “unbreakable resistance”. Given these developments Trump’s un-holy war may bring about a regime change more probably in US than Iran.