PATRICK BULGER | Iran faces destruction on a biblical scale

The Middle East is at war yet again, this time delivering a predictable wave of destruction to Iran and the Arab Gulf states, the demise of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the real prospect of years of civil war and chaos.

This is a clash of ideologies cloaked in religion in a region that supplies the bulk of the oil so vital to the Western world despised by the regime’s clerical hardliners. And, at the centre of it all, of course, the terrifying spectre of a bellicose Israel, intent on revenge and still smarting from the October 7 2023 atrocities. Some believe we are on the brink of World War 3; others see the conflict as localised, a result of the October 7 invasion of Israel by the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas, which Israel had long identified as an Iranian proxy.

Just as Gaza was flattened by Israel in what its critics call a genocide in which 70,000 Palestinians died, so too is “fortress ” Iran being reduced to a pile of rubble as the US and Israel carry on their sustained bombing.

To leftists in the Global South, Iran is a bastion of anti-imperialist resistance, its noble leaders and armed forces fortified by religious belief. For the mullahs, mere survival in this war will count as victory.

How did we get here? One has to go back to at least 1979 to trace the genesis of the conflict, to a time in which Israel and its Arab enemies were making peace. Simultaneously, a new regime was coming to power in Tehran that would reshape the regional picture.

Did Israel start the war or was it US President Donald Trump, who made criticism of the US’s “forever wars” a central theme of his MAGA campaign for the presidency in 2020?

In March 1979, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed a treaty with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, which became the first Arab nation to recognise Israel. Just weeks earlier, however, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei had returned to Tehran from exile in Paris, his grim bearded countenance endorsing his claim as the pre-eminent spiritual and political leader of the revolution that would overthrow the last Shah, a modernising influence despised by the conservative ulama clerical class.

Khomenei promised a new dawn for Iran, but within a few short years had dispatched his allies en route to establishing a theocracy, the infringement of whose laws counted as a blasphemy. Socialists, communists, liberals and secular Muslims were all targeted.

The Sadat peace deal heralded an Arab consensus and concession that Israel, having defied military force in 1948, 1967 and 1973, was reluctantly being accepted as a permanent feature of the Middle East’s capricious landscape. The Iranian Revolution, by contrast, boldly committed itself to the destruction of what it called the “Zionist entity” and the “Great Satan” in Washington.

The bitter harvest borne of the seeds of hatred, propaganda and war-mongering has been reaped in the past week, with the US and Israel jointly attacking Iran for reasons that are obscure and will be argued over by historians in the years ahead. Within two hours of the start of the war on Iran, its leader Ayatollah Khamenei and a host of ministers and advisers lay dead under bombed buildings.

Did Israel start the war or was it US President Donald Trump, who made criticism of the US’s “forever wars” a central theme of his MAGA campaign for the presidency in 2020? Hard to tell from the contrasting messages emanating from Washington.

“The president had a feeling, again, based on fact, that Iran was going to strike the US ... and he made a determination to launch Operation Epic Fury based on all those reasons,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, after secretary of state Marco Rubio had suggested a day earlier that the US launched its attack knowing the Israelis were about to do it. The justifications were offered despite talks with the Islamic Republic’s leaders.

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for war on Iran for decades. After the disastrous US invasion of Iraq in 2003, “regime change” had suddenly come back into vogue, with Trump lamenting a new possible leader: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead. Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports.” Trump is demanding he have a say in the choice of a new leader.

Supporters of Israel/US were overjoyed at the demise of an 86-year-old reported to have had prostate cancer, their euphoria not curbed by the certainty that he wouldn’t have lived for much longer anyway. Some believe by not taking cover in one of the Islamic Republic’s fabled bunkers, Khamenei was choosing martyrdom over survival.

Khamenei’s death inevitably has stoked further talk of “regime change”, a notion fortified by the protests of January when the regime is said to have killed tens of thousands of people demonstrating in the main about the state of an economy brought to its knees by years of Western sanctions and corruption by the ruling clerics.

Now, 47 years after Begin and Sadat signed their peace treaty (for which Sadat was assassinated just two years afterwards in 1981), Israel and the Arab Gulf states find themselves facing a common enemy in Iran, which has unleashed attacks on the favourite shopping and entertainment meccas of the world’s ultrarich, including super-rich South Africans. Munitions have rained down on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, including the crown jewel, Dubai.

At a glance, it may seem incongruous that one Muslim state is attacking others, but to Iran’s theocratic rulers these partners of the West have drifted from the true teachings of Islam, consorting with the enemies of the faith in the form of the US, and allowing idolatrous and blasphemous lifestyles to underline their progression from desert tribesmen to modern folk who enjoy the shiny toys of the West.

While other Muslim countries acclimatised themselves to Western hegemony, and are ruled by autocratic regimes that offer some economic but not political freedom, Iran has made itself a bastion of religious radicalism. Much of its population may yearn for freedom but stay quiet on pain of lashing or death.

When Khomenei returned from Paris in 1979, he was vague about the role the clerics would play in a new Iran. It took some time before the moderates, the secularists, the socialists and communists would realise that the favour of their agitation for the overthrow of the shah would not be returned.

Khomenei set about reshaping Iran to his own radical views, especially on the role and status of women and the promotion of civil liberties. Within a few years, the high hopes expressed during the overthrow of the Shah had come to nothing. “Dissidents” were murdered in their tens of thousands.

At the knee of the old master returned from Paris knelt the late Ali Khamenei, a relatively minor cleric. As the favoured successor, he set about consolidating his power. He served as president for two terms before being named Supreme Leader after Khomenei’s death in June 1989. Lacking the credentials to be considered a true religious authority, Khomenei bent the rules to elevate Khamenei.

Khomenei had also left no doubt as to his illiberal legacy, issuing a fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie for “blasphemy ” in his novel, The Satanic Verses, just months before joining the after-life.

Reputed to be worth several billion dollars at the time of his death, Khamenei made up for his lack of spiritual heft with ruthless control. He founded the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and greatly increased the authority of the religious police, whose job consisted in keeping women in line by enforcing a strict dress code, among other measures. He also founded the Lebanon-based anti-Israel proxy Hezbollah, which would become the foundation of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” to wage war on Israel.

He brutally slapped down dissent, notably in November 2019, and again in 2022-23 after the huge “women, life, freedom” protests upon the death of Mahsa Amini (detained for not wearing a hijab) and again earlier this year.

Fresh from his audacious kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, Trump has chosen to ignore the old magician’s adage, to “never repeat the same trick twice”.

If he thought Iran would prove as easy a nut to crack as Venezuela, he may yet be in for a surprise. A measure of how deeply he believed his own propaganda was his statement that he was amazed the Iranians hadn’t capitulated, given the scale of US armoury parked in the neighbourhood.

Within a week of the start of the war (which in Vladimir Putin style Trump calls a “massive and ongoing operation” rather than a war, to avoid the need for Congress’s approval), the US had established air superiority over much of Iran.

So far, though, the popular uprising so prominent in the Western imagination has failed to materialise, and given the potent hierarchy of power and control in Iran seems unlikely to do so in the near future.

The war came after Rubio extolled the virtues of colonialism and the West’s history, exhorting pride rather than shame as the defining motif for European politics.

Coming after what many characterise as a genocide in Gaza, the sites of demolition and destruction in Iran’s major centres will seem familiar: buildings reduced to rubble, infrastructure laid to waste, no concern for civilian casualties. For Israel this may be a comforting site for now. For much of the rest of the world, with no obvious skin in the game, it’s an abomination, even if the figurehead and the regime themselves are not worthy of our admiration.

With his well-recorded lack of boundaries, Trump may indeed raze Iran. But as chaos and civil war follow, anxious governments will be asking themselves, who’s next?