High noon for Israel and the ayatollahs

In today’s fast-changing world, revolutionary movements have a limited lifespan. When young, those who join them are ablaze with fervour and can cow millions of people into sharing their murderous views, but as the movements and their once charismatic leaders grow older and practical difficulties they are unable to deal with pile up, opportunists rise to the top, the general population loses faith and before long everything starts crashing to the ground.

This is what happened in Russia which, according to the late Helmut Schmidt, by the 1970s had degenerated into an “Upper Volta with rockets” and was so badly governed that dissidents such as Andrei Amalrik were already predicting the disintegration of the Communist order. For well over a decade, something very similar has been going on in Iran. Like the Bolsheviks who had seized power in Russia 60 years before they overthrew the Shah in 1979, the Islamists believed that they alone were privy to ultimate truths and were therefore entitled to eliminate all those who had different ideas. For a while, their fierce conviction so impressed their compatriots that they found it relatively easy to crush their opponents, but those days have ended. This confronts the Israelis with a dilemma. For self-evident reasons, they would dearly like to see “regime change” in a country that is ruled by bloodthirsty religious fanatics who have never made any secret of their determination to wipe out what they call the “Zionist entity” or “the little Satan” (the big one is the United States), but some say they fear that by attacking Iran militarily they are throwing the mullahs a lifeline.

When confronted by a foreign power, people tend to rally round the flag in defence of their homeland even when they hate their own rulers. After Nazi Germany, which up to then had been a close ally, invaded the Soviet Union, the Georgian “internationalist” Josef Stalin suddenly became a mouthpiece for Russian patriotism. And while Iran’s “supreme leader” Ali Khamenei would like to see a bit more Muslim solidarity from the Sunnis, he has also begun to make allusions to the spirit of resistance that he says has always been characteristic of the Persian people.  

The Israelis hope that, by humiliating an incompetent regime and killing its military commanders one after another, they will encourage the Iranian people to take to the streets and help them remove it. This could happen if the clerics and their enforcers who are on Israel’s hit list started to flee the country, as their Syrian friend Bashar al-Assad did with his family when things got too hot for them at home, but so far there have been few signs that many are seeking refuge in other parts of the world. Instead, the true believers among them will want to die fighting for their creed. Such an attitude, which is underlined by the almost endless supply of suicide bombers who dream of meeting 72 houris in paradise, they can call on, is one of the things that have made Islamism such a formidable force.

Until very recently, most Western politicians have been reluctant to say much in public about the threat posed by Islamic militancy for fear of annoying the large Muslim communities in their countries and the leftists who, for tactical reasons and because they think it helps them in the war they are waging against capitalism, have grown accustomed to making the most of the many grievances of immigrants and their offspring. This is why the remarks by new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who while in Canada praised Israel for “doing the dirty work for all of us” by taking on the “mullah regime which has brought death and destruction to the world,” caused such a stir.

Though on occasion members of the French government have been even more outspoken than Merz when it comes to reacting to the Islamist challenge, in that Canadian summit meeting of the G7, President Emmanuel Macron, British PM Keir Starmer and others preferred to go on about the need for peace, diplomacy and dialogue, which would mean returning things to as they were before the Israeli offensive got underway. However, they soon found that Donald Trump was not on the same page: to widespread surprise, in what seemed to be an attempt to take some credit for Israel’s military successes, he said that “we” dominated the air space over Tehran and called for the “unconditional surrender” of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship. He also tweeted that he knew where Khamenei was holed up but would not kill him, “at least not for now.”

Since the downfall of the Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein over 20 years ago, talk about the desirability of bringing about “regime change” in parts of the Muslim work has been frowned upon in Western capitals where, despite the power they wield, governments are simply not prepared to do whatever would prove necessary to ensure that what came next would be even slightly better. Much is made of the probability that it would be far worse and it is frequently pointed out that, under Muammar Gaddafi, Libya was a rather more reliable “partner” when it came to stopping illegal immigration into Europe than she became and that, notwithstanding his notorious brutality, Saddam, unlike the Islamic State’s leaders, had never posed a serious threat to the Western democracies,

In other words, the standard view is that the North Americans and Europeans should stand aside and let Middle Easterners, Africans and the rest of them find their own solutions to the many problems besetting them. While this may seem fair enough, a hands-off approach implies letting the sworn enemies of the West acquire the means to cause great harm to countries which, not that long ago, would have made short work of them. In addition to doing their best to build a nuclear arsenal that would allow them to annihilate Israel, the Iranian mullahs spent a considerable proportion of their resources financing terrorist organisations. As well as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, they are assumed to have spawned a large number of sleeper cells that will be waiting for orders to strike in the Americas and Europe. That must have been what Khamenei had in mind when he warned that his regime could still inflict “irreparable damage” on the United States and its allies should they dare help Israel destroy his stockpiles of enriched uranium. Was it only bluster from a man whose world is falling apart? We could soon know the answer to that disturbing
question.