Why Iran? The Context & The Consequences

The first thing that the likes of the ignorant Senator Ted Cruz should understand is that Iran is Persian not Arab, and represents an independent civilization going back to the times of ancient Greece. And that Islam is a religion not an ethnicity, as is Judaism. He also needs to go re-read his Bible, specifically Genesis 12:1-3 which says:

Then the LORD said to Abram, “Leave your country, your kindred, and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; and all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.”

This is Abram, the father of the three great Abrahamic religions; Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Israel is never mentioned, and it also very specifically states that “all the families of the earth will be blessed through you”. To misquote the Bible, explicitly misrepresenting the stated words of the Christian God, is to be a heretic. Ted Cruz should be reminded that he was elected to serve Americans, not to serve a foreign power. Here, displaying his utter ignorance and mendacity in his service of a foreign power:

The Scofield Bible, a heretical reinterpretation of the King James Bible by Scofield, is a core text of the Dispensationalist movement that believes in an End Times in the present (rather than the End Times being seen as the fall of Rome as accepted in mainstream Christianity). I have written about the highly questionable origins and mainstreaming of the Scofield Bible, together with the related mainstreaming of the capitalist-friendly Prosperity Gospel. All of which was a political project, not a religious one.

After Scofield died the Oxford University Press issued a 1967 (the year of the Six Day War) update entitled The New Scofield Bible which included specific additions that greatly increased the support for the state of Israel and its rights to take the Palestinian lands; “close to an endorsement of US foreign policy on the state of Israel” (Donald Akenson, The Americanization Of The Apocalypse, p. 435). The Scofield Bible teaches the notion that Gentiles are “blessed in association with Israel”, and that God supports the stealing of the Palestinian lands to create Israel and the demolition of the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in the Muslim world, to rebuild The Temple (a core belief of the most extremist Zionists); also the return of Jewish religious sacrifices.

This very political project of spreading a gospel that thoroughly supported capitalism and Western civilizational supremacy in a US that at the end of WW2 was not particularly religious (and where the religious slanted toward the social gospel that was supportive of the New Deal) is detailed by Kevin M. Kruse, in One Nation Under God. An extremely successful political project that mirrored the Othering of the Soviet Union and China as “godless communists”, and later the Othering of “Muslim terrorists”.

The deranged neoliberal armageddon cultist Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, is but one of the more severe examples of the success of this Christian Zionism and Prosperity Gospel project, in producing a significant religious fundamentalist section of the US population that perfectly serves US imperial objectives. A classic case of Gramsci’s cultural hegemony used to cognitively corral a major part of the population into supporting the US oligarchy against its own political-economic interests, the creation of a false consciousness.

In the same piece, I covered how the US Jewish community turned to the political right during the attack upon their community during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Embracing the US Empire and capitalism and clinging close to the centres of US power as a defensive mechanism; a project methodically carried out over seven decades. It is a strategy also carried out by the government of Israel, making itself indispensable to the West while also seeking power within the Western polity aided by significant parts of the Jewish diaspora. This greatly suited a West that was happy to have its own neo-colonial servant in such an important region, one that would carry out the Western dirty work not just in the Middle East but across the world with plausible deniability for the West. As Joe Biden stated, if an Israel had not existed the US would have had to invent one.

Theodor Herzl, the grandfather of Zionism, was an atheist. Just as an atheist cannot be a Christian or a Moslem, they cannot be a Jew if we accept that Judaism is a religion and not an ethnicity (with the latter disproven by basic genetics). Herzl was open to different locations for his Jewish state, as a political and secular project. Netanyahu was raised in a secular family, and from his statements and actions can be seen also as an atheist. He was the personal secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the atheist founder of Revisionist Zionism, a man who with Netanyahu’s atheist father had an overwhelming influence on his political philosophy.

But time is running out for both the US and Israel with respect to these political projects. From 2007 to 2021 Evangelical (the core of religious Zionism in the US) worship fell from 30% to 24% of the population, and more recently that number is 23%; with only 14% of those 18 to 29 against 30% of those 30 and older. Evangelical worship is slowly but surely dying out and by 2025 that 14% may very well be all under the age of 39, while those currently 50 and above enter the years of accelerating death rates. The majority of US Jews under the age of 50 are already not Zionist, with the core of US Zionism funded by a small group of the ageing Jewish Zionist rich. At the same time the secular project of Israel is being rent asunder by the civil war between the secular (mostly Ashkenazi) liberal European Jews and the ultra-orthodox predominantly European Haredi Jews and the non-European Mizrahi Jews who have been historically racially discriminated against within Israel. All are happy to slaughter Arabs and steal their land, but the latter two want to establish a truly Jewish fundamentalist state which would reject the whole liberal project of the Ashkenazi.

In extremis, Israel would become the Jewish version of the ISIS Caliphate. A state and political project that disingenuously and aggressively thrusts its “Jewishness” forwards to claim the victimhood of the Holocaust is now ironically threatened by the imposition of an actual Jewish religious state; underlining the fact that Zionism is not a religious project and is a separate thing to Judaism. All the while, the US and Western global power that peaked in the 1990s is in a secular decline and with it the ability of Israel’s “big brother” to sustain and protect it.

The antagonism of the West to Iran has always been about energy and geopolitics, not about religion or “human rights” or any other such disingenuous blather. As with Russia and China, Iran resisted outright colonization, although there was a great amount of UK internal interference and influence in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It possessed both vast amounts of fossil fuels and a strategic geographic location in the Middle East, while maintaining its own culture and civilization. In the post-WW2 years its politics took a more democratic turn and in the early 1950s a nationalist leader, Mosaddegh came to power and moved to take control of the vast fossil fuel resources for the benefit of Iranians. This could not be allowed by the West and an MI6/CIA coup took place in 1953, installing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (of the previously obedient vassal Pahlavi dynasty) as the dictator Shah of Iran. He set about destroying the socialist opposition through extensive arrests, torture and disappearances carried out by the brutal Savak secret police. The propagandistic use of pictures from this era showing a “prosperous” and “Western” Iran show how the elites lived, not the majority. It also shows how disingenuous so many of the Western “critical” scholars are, who push “critical” and “feminist” tropes in the service of empire while utterly ignoring political-economic, imperial and neocolonial realities. After 26 years of the Shah the only real opposition that was left was the religious establishment and that is why they dominated the revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah.

With the revolution there was no purging of the capitalist elite and other oppositional forces, as with the Soviet Union and China; while a significant portion fled the majority stayed to represent a liberal and Western leaning minority that is open to Western dominance and treason against the state. The West calls these the “progressives” when in fact they are hardline neoliberals who would be happy to turn their nation into a Western vassal that facilitates their own internal domination and kleptocracy; just as under the Shah. A newly independent Iran was not acceptable to the West and it pushed Iraq to invade Iran to crush the new regime, resulting in the Iran-Iraq War that stretched from September 1980 to August 1988. Iran was not defeated, but massive amounts of resources that should have gone toward building a new Iran were consumed by a war that included the widespread use of poisoned gas by the Iraqis (made from ingredients knowingly and happily supplied by the West). This can be seen somewhat as a parallel for the Western invasions of the Soviet Union in support of the White Russian forces, together with the Polish invasion, following the Russian Revolution of 1917; an attempt to snuff out the new regime before it could truly establish itself. Both failed, but at great cost to the new regimes. And yes, as late as 1988 Iraq was doing the US Empire’s dirty work, the massive cost of which drove Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait (after being given the nod by the US) to gain new revenues.

In the 1990s, and 2000s, the US became bogged down in its wars in the Middle East; failing at the first Iraqi hurdle of its “seven nations in five years” project or Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan; while also becoming bogged down in Afghanistan. With the focus of the US Empire elsewhere, Iran gained some room for manoeuvre and prospered on a relative basis. Using purchasing power parity, Iran’s GDP per capita increased from US$7,260 in 1990 to US$18,490 in 2010. Then came the oil price collapse of the mid 2010s on top of the sanctions against Iran’s legal nuclear enrichment activities. These included the actions of the US vassal EU to disconnect Iran from the SWIFT international payments system. At no time has there been any call for sanctions against an Israel which is in open violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; the issue with Iran has nothing to do with its civilian nuclear program. If Iran actually had nuclear weapons it would more be in the stronger position that a nuclear-armed North Korea enjoys. The US failed occupation of Iraq from 2003 onwards actually lead to significant Iranian influence in an Iraq that had previously been its enemy, possibly a reason for the US to escalate sanctions against Iran; especially with Iran’s role in combating the Western destabilization of Syria and the Western security services created ISIS project.

In 2015 Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (China, US, Russia, France, UK) plus Germany and the EU to limit its uranium enrichment activities in return for sanctions relief and other provisions; taking effect in January 2016. In May 2018, the Trump administration pulled out of the JCPOA on utterly spurious grounds even though the IAEA confirmed that Iran was following the terms of the agreement, as Iran did until July 2019 when it became obvious that the US vassals would not continue with sanctions relief given the US position. The previous sanctions, plus increased sanctions were imposed from May 2018 onwards. The Biden administration disingenuously took part in new negotiations, but escalated the conditions upon Iran significantly above those in the JCPOA.

Iran successfully pivoted away from the West, signing a 25-year cooperation program with China in 2020 which promised long term investment and trade. China has been the predominant purchaser of Iranian oil (Iran’s gas reserves are used for domestic energy consumption needs) in the past years. Then, with the mass sanctioning of Russia after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Iran was able to develop much closer relations with a Russia that had nothing to lose in working with a fellow sanctioned nation. In January 2025, Iran and Russia signed a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that aims to boost bilateral economic and trade ties. Russia is building a number of nuclear reactors in Iran to aid it with its electricity supply shortfalls. In 2024 Iran also became a full member of BRICS, and in late May 2025 the first train ran on the Urumqi (China) to Tehran (Iran) railway, providing a direct rail freight link between the two nations; developing Iran as a transport hub with links to both China and Russia.

Iran has already nearly regained the peak PPP GDP per capita level of 2011, with GDP growth of 5% in 2023 and 3% in 2024 and is now threatening to become a development success that is totally independent of the West. On top of this, it has established peaceful diplomatic relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council states and the US had been ignominiously thrown out of Afghanistan. All the while, US global power is declining and its soft power significantly undermined by its support of the Zionist genocide; with Israel increasingly becoming a pariah even among the populations (but not the oligarchies) of the West. Syria has been subjugated under the rule of an ex-ISIS leader remade as a politician by the Western intelligence agencies, and significantly occupied by both Israel and Turkey, but this also signifies a new challenge to Israeli regional dominance in Turkey. At the same time, the Israeli economy and society are being worn down by the ongoing genocide, low intensity war with Hezbollah and Ansar Allah, and the internal civil war. Israel is in danger of falling while Iran rises as an integrated and important part of BRINCISTAN (now with only one S with the subjugation of Syria) of Belarus, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, Iraq and the “Stans”.

While Russia refuses to accept any US terms with respect to the Ukrainian War that would represent a “defeat at the negotiating table”, and is gaining in strength rather than having been destroyed by Western sanctions and proxy military aggression. And while the Trump administration did a TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) on its trade war with China once the latter displayed its relative economic and financial power, the fiasco of the Trump birthday military procession took place and the administration was unable to bully the rest of the world into trade surrender. Then to add to this was the utter inability of the vaunted US military to quell the Ansar Allah movement in Yemen, with Ansar Allah still acting to control traffic in the Red Sea and to bombard Israel. With the increasing civil resistance against the new authoritarianism at home, which has nothing to do with an illegal immigration which could be rapidly dealt with by arresting a few of the illegal immigrant-hiring CEOs, and also the increasing psychological dishevelment of 79-year-old Trump himself. The Trump of today is not the Trump of his first term and not even the Trump of 2024 that already looked like a shadow of his former self. He may not have declined to the level of Biden who was 81 in the final year of his administration, but is most certainly in the age of decline; not helped by his historical lack of exercise, obesity and diet. We should not underestimate the readiness of his administration to cover up this decline, given the great lengths that the previous administration went to to cover up and deny Biden’s decline into dementia. The parallels with the end of the Soviet Union with one sick and ageing leader after another are redolent.

The US is becoming increasingly strife-torn and internationally derided and resisted. In such a situation, regime change in Iran would be a “Hail Mary” pass that delivered both Iraq and Iran to Western domination, while greatly undermining the positions of Russia and China, and displaying that the US “still has it”.

That was the real reason for the attack upon Iran, nothing to do with its nuclear program that was confirmed by Tulsi Gabbard, the US Director of National Intelligence, only recently as not being military in nature; echoing the findings of the IAEA. Even Jon Stewart called out the utter BS of the “urgent” need for an attack on Iran (as well as the fiasco of Trump’s birthday military parade and the parallels between US imperial discourse and the new domestic authoritarian discourse).

It has nothing to do with Iran “supporting terrorists” which is just Western code for Iran supporting groups that resist the West’s imperial agenda. It has nothing to do with religion, especially when Iran is the home to a Jewish community that has never been persecuted. It is about geopolitics, and the maintenance of US/Western global power for as long as possible. And also about the survival of a Netanyahu that knows that he will be off to jail for both his corruption and the genocide once he loses power, a man who needed his own “Hail Mary” pass.

But this was based on the usual Western fantasies that greatly underestimate the enemy and greatly overestimate their own capabilities. Iran was not a Syria that had been undermined for a decade and a half of Western (including the Gulf states) aggression and a sanctions blockade, ruled by an incompetent and corrupt Assad regime sitting between the Western dominated Israel, Jordan and Iraq, and an avaricious Turkey and a destroyed and infiltrated Lebanon. Iran is a strong nation of 93 million, equipped with its own independent industrial and military sectors with a colossal mountainous geography situated between fellow Moslem nations to the east, north and west. Together with the ability to destroy the oil and gas infrastructure which is critical to world energy supplies.

That the US, and other Western nations, were very fully involved in the “Israeli” surprise attack upon Iran on June 13th is blindingly obvious to those that look closely, and listen to the statements of Western politicians. The US President was actively involved through disingenuous negotiations with Iran, and his statements saying that he was against any Israeli attack until after the next round of negotiations which would have taken place after the Israeli attack started. This attack was planned for at least eight months, if not longer, and was designed through the use of Iranian traitorous elements to decapitate the Iranian leadership and destabilize the nation to the point that it could be divided and subjugated.

But none of this happened. The murdered Iranian leaders were rapidly replaced with newer (and most probably more hard line) cadres, the Iranian air defence system was brought back online quickly rather than being down much longer as envisaged by the attackers, much of the traitorous network was quickly rolled up by the Iranian security forces, and Iran’s military capabilities were not seriously undermined as many hits seemed to be on fake mockups and only affected above ground installations. In addition, Iran did not unleash thousands of missiles upon an Israel that could then once again sell itself as a victim requiring Western rescue from the consequences of its crimes, but rather went for the slow economic, financial and social bleed of relatively small numbers of rockets each day. Both using up the capabilities of the vaunted “Iron Sieve” and utterly destabilizing an Israel that has no strategic depth and is utterly dependent upon imports and the willingness of the productive liberal Ashkenazi to remain in the country.

Netanyahu’s move to stop Israeli’s from leaving their country is a sign of the success of the Iranian campaign after only a matter of days. The liberal Ashkenazi want Brooklyn-on-the-Mediterranean with the genocide carried out of sight “over there”, and certainly not to feel even some of the fear that the Palestinians feel every day, and definitely not within a fundamentalist religious state. They did not move to the occupied lands of Palestine to experience this:

They are more than ready to flee to their ancestral homes abroad if their Brooklyn-on-the-Mediterranean liberal project is seen as ended. As many already have; they have no stomach for the punishments that they so easily and enthusiastically dish out to others.

With the “shock and awe” attempt and utter failure, and Iran now slowly bleeding out Israel, Netanyahu’s only option is to embroil the West fully in the conflict. Something that the West did not want, instead wanting to have its “deniability” fig leaf while fully taking part in the subjugation of a destabilized Iran a la Libya and Syria under the cover of “humanitarian intervention” and the puppet Pahlavi regime kept in reserve in the West. So now it must either retreat and order Israel to stop its attacks, which may very well require the taking out of Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders and cause consternation among the US Zionist donor class, or roll up its sleeves and descend into another Middle Eastern quagmire which will sap its strength. It is the latter prospect that is currently holding back the Trump administration from directly attacking Iran, together with up to date - most probably much more accurate and less sanguine than the misleading and self-serving Israeli intelligence - US intelligence reports on Iran’s capabilities and regime stability.

Trump also stands on the edge of a precipice, having to decide between the Zionist donor class that brought him to power and has financially rescued him a number of times and the MAGA coalition that elected him to focus on making America great again by focusing on domestic issues and ending, and especially not starting, foreign wars. With more Republican voters than Democrat voters against direct US involvement in a war with Iran, the mid-terms could return Democratic and RINO (Republican In Name Only) House and Senate majorities that would be more than happy to once again bring impeachment proceedings against him. Any financial and economic crisis stemming from direct US involvement would also destroy his economic agenda. He would truly become a lame duck president, hated by both Democrats and Republicans. This is the dilemma that faces a Trump that is so obviously in decline under the pressures of the presidency at the age of 79.

Both Putin and Xi are a much younger and seemingly healthier 72, both with extremely high levels of domestic and international legitimacy and with the former able to stand for reelection in 2030 and the latter not bothered with such liberal democratic trappings. To them Trump is a passing phenomenon to be dealt with during the secular decline of the West. They win if Trump decides to intervene directly (with the West sucked into a Middle Eastern quagmire and possibly engulfed in an economic and financial maelstrom while further losing support in the rest of the world) and win if he doesn’t (with Iran and BRINCISTAN growing stronger while Israel is thrown into domestic crisis and with the Trump administration in conflict with the Zionist donor class); they will not become directly involved in the conflict. Trump and the West have walked themselves into a trap with no positive outcome available.

Fundamentally, the US and its Western vassals are faced with a defeat or a defeat; a conundrum. Made worse by the very real possible issue of a financial collapse given the probable closure of the Straits of Hormuz and the prospect of yet more massive debt-fuelled US government war spending. Will the losing struggle of the West to maintain its dominance take on an even greater military aggression, to add to the Ukraine proxy war and the Zionist genocide? Or will it maintain its somewhat peaceful progress? For Israel there is an existential threat as a continued campaign without direct Western intervention is simply not tenable, especially given the Iranian intelligent slow-bleed strategy, while an ending of its attacks upon Iran may very well bring the fall of the government and a more intense stage of internal conflict. Its only positive option is US and Western direct intervention, and that is why the US Zionist donor network is being utilized to the hilt as the foreign interference operation (along with AIPAC etc.) that it is.

The YouTube channel “The Mizrahi Perspective” provides excellent insights into the internal political workings of Israel, its colossal internal and external propaganda machines and its colossal state of denial. A denial cracked by October 7th, cracked again by the Iranian missile attacks, and a denial which will finally break under the force of geopolitical realities; its time is limited. Also, the wider impacts of Israel’s genocidal and aggressor stance. Here, he talks about the dilemma that Netanyahu and Trump now face:

Today, Trump seems to have taken a step back by saying that he will give diplomacy another couple of weeks. But who can trust a Trump that lied so deliberately to mislead the Iranians prior to the attack? One can assume that Iran’s slow bleed of Israel will continue, one so devastating that Israel has now made the filming and reporting of Iranian missile strikes a gaolable offence and banned Al Jazeera from reporting from within Israel.