This was not inevitable. This is a war Israel chose. It could have been prevented. Diplomatic talks were ongoing when the bombers took off for Iran. Israel’s continuing, illegal, unjustified airstrikes are unlikely to achieve their stated aim – permanently ending Tehran’s presumed efforts to build nuclear weapons – and may accelerate it. They must stop now. Likewise, Iran must halt its retaliation immediately and drop its escalatory threats to attack US and UK bases.
This conflict is not limited, as was the case last year, to tit-for-tat exchanges and “precision strikes” on a narrow range of military targets. It’s reached a wholly different level. Potentially nothing is off the table. Civilians are being killed on both sides. Leaders are targets. The rhetoric is out of control. With Israel fighting on several fronts, and Iran’s battered regime backed against a wall, the Middle East is closer than ever to a disastrous conflagration.
Reasons can always be found to go to war. The roots of major conflicts often reach back decades – and this is true of the Israel-Iran vendetta, which dates to the 1979 Islamic revolution. The so-called “shadow war” between the two intensified in recent years. Yet all-out conflict had been avoided, until now. So who is principally to blame for this sudden, unprecedented explosion?
Answer: three angry old men whose behaviour raises serious doubts about their judgment, common sense, motives and even their sanity.
So? US foreign policy has done a number of the whole world. It’s not an excuse for Khamenei and his goons to uphold this regime.
If you don’t want to be governed by conservatives, quit lining all the progressives against the wall and shooting them.
Blaming Khamenei for governing like a conservative Muslim, when you’re in a region absolutely choked with religious conservative governments, seems to miss the forest for the trees. Especially after the US was instrumental in undermining and dismantling all the modernist secular democracies from the first half of the 20th century.