Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Look at the pattern. The US and its allies have ‘neutralized’ Houthis in Yemen, making Saudi Arabia and its friends breathe easy. Hamas invited the destruction of its Gaza Strip fortress by invading Israel, and so did Lebanon because it couldn’t control Hezbollah. In less than two weeks now, a Sunni terror outfit, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), forced Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to take asylum in Russia, bringing to an end a five-decade-long tyranny.
The stage seems set for the next phase: a regime change in Iran, which, some fear, may be secretly nuclear-armed, and, therefore, handled carefully. All of its proxies—Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah—have been crippled or destroyed. Even the brutal Assad citadel in Syria, run by a Shia subsect, the Alawites, in a Sunni majority country, has been overthrown.
No, the current scenario in the Middle East is not one of the routine, regular, wars of attrition that pockmarked it for decades. Its next potential target may be Iran…and then Russia.
In a nutshell, the adjoining Sunni countries—from Saudi Arabia to Turkiye—including their ‘favorable’ terror gangs, have all joined hands, covertly or overtly, against Shia Iran and taken out its proxies, one by one, to potentially ‘liberate’ the volatile region from the Shia citadel once and for all.
Many were surprised as to why Israel did not, despite Tehran’s threats, launch a full-scale and effective attack on Iran which has been using its Sunni (Hamas, Houti), and Shia proxies (Hezbollah, Assad) against Jerusalem for decades. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had hinted at what the West and its Sunni-Jewish allies could be planning: supporting a civil war for the overthrow of the Ayatollahs.
They did not want to attack Iran directly, lest the Iranians, already on the brink of a civil war, unite to support their fundamentalist regime. So, the strategy was to go as per the algorithm of such wars.
On November 12, Netanyahu said in a direct message to Iranians that their Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government feared the people of Iran more than Israel.
“That’s why they spend so much time and money trying to crush your hopes and curb your dreams,” he said in a video message. “Well, I say to you this: Don’t let your dreams die. I hear the whispers: Women, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,” he said, referring to the ongoing women’s rights agitations and their slogans in Iran.
“Don’t lose hope. And know that Israel and others in the free world stand with you,” Netanyahu said.
He also cited Iran’s October 1 ballistic missile attack on Israel, saying it cost Tehran about USD 2.3 billion of “your precious money” but caused marginal damage in Israel. Israel briefly hit back at Iran on October 26.
Even earlier, Netanyahu made appeals addressing the Iranian people directly, as well as to civilians in Gaza and Lebanon.
He said life in Iran could be different if the country were free and that funds could be used for education, roads, water, and hospitals instead of war. “But that’s what Khamenei’s regime denies you every single day. They obsess about destroying Israel, rather than about building Iran,” he said.
“I know that you don’t want this war. I don’t want this war either. The people of Israel don’t want this war.”
Thus, Israel and its allies are all gunning to take down the Ayatollahs’ regime that has kept the Middle East on a boil since they overthrew Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi’s monarchist government in 1979.
That was why, after Israel neutralized Iran’s proxies, Turkiye started the next move: the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria.