Iran’s day of reckoning is nearing

Iran has been engaging in dangerous brinkmanship with the United States since the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979.

start from iran hostage crisis52 American diplomats were held in Tehran for 444 days, suspected of funding Hamas, Hezbollah, other militias, and terrorist groups supported by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), such as Yemen's Houthis. It developed.

Underpinning the conflict between Iran and the United States is the Iranian government's decades-long determined pursuit of nuclear weapons. That most important goal is nearing the finish line. If Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei chooses, Iran's path to a nuclear explosion will now be measured in days rather than weeks.

On October 7, Iran went too far. Support from the Revolutionary Guards and Hamas's heinous attack plans against Israeli civilians are now engulfing the Gaza Strip in an all-out war. Elements of that war spread to Lebanon on Tuesday, when Israel carried out what was described as a deadly attack. Saleh al-Arouria senior Hamas official.

almost 1,200 Israelis killed — and U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria attacked 118 times by Iranian-backed militias. Khamenei is waging a proxy war with the United States, but it is probably much more serious, given Russian President Vladimir Putin's growing ties with Iran and Moscow over stalling the Ukraine war. There will be a relationship.

But Iran's day of reckoning is drawing near. Israel's decision to target Lebanon's al-Arouri, who had fled after Israel's invasion of Gaza, was intended as a dynamic wake-up call by Jerusalem against Khamenei and Hezbollah's top Shiite cleric Hassan Nasrallah. Conceivable.

Last August, Nasrullah declared“Any assassination of Lebanese, Syrians, Iranians or Palestinians on Lebanese soil will be met with a firm response. I will not allow that to happen.”

A new Israeli unit known as “Niri”, a Hebrew acronym for “Israel's Eternals Do Not Lie,” is now in operation. Jerusalem has made it clear that those who aided and abetted the October 7 attack on Israel are not safe anywhere. These include Mohamed Deif, Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniya, Moussa Abu Marzouk, and other Hamas military and political leaders, as well as its sponsors.

The Middle East is currently at a tipping point. For decades, Iran has survived as a terrorist regime by exploiting regional interests and benefiting from U.S. domestic politics. First as a check on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then as the poster boy for why neoconservatives are itching to drag America into another “forever war.”

But you don't have to be a neocon to understand that Iran is a cancer that infects the entire Middle East. Tehran effectively provided the funds on October 7th. The Revolutionary Guards turned Shiite Hezbollah and southern Lebanon into loaded weapons aimed at Israel, supporting President Bashir al-Assad's murderous regime in Syria.

Khamenei's plot has served to undermine continued US efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.Tehran continues threaten Closing the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route. This is a tactic straight out of Iranian strategy dating back to 1988, resulting in Operation Praying Mantis The aircraft carrier Samuel B. Roberts launched an attack on the Iranian Navy after it hit an Iranian mine, seriously injuring 10 U.S. sailors.

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khamenei is currently same game In the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Bab el-Mandeb Strait, they operate courtesy of Houthi rebels backed by the Revolutionary Guards operating in northern Yemen. So far, the U.S. response has been minimal, but poorly explained Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called it “necessary and appropriate.”

Iran has so far been very effective in upending the narrative in the Middle East, and young viewers in Europe and America, influenced by TikTok, are hooked on it. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are suffering and dying because Khamenei, likely at the behest of President Putin, ordered Hamas to attack Israel in order to thwart his country's accelerating nuclear program. Iran's support for Assad has left tens of thousands of Syrians dead.

In Yemen, even more 377,000 people Others have died directly or indirectly as a result of Tehran's proxy war against Riyadh. Ukrainians killed in Iranian drone strikes. In Iraq, deaths continue to occur due to Iranian intervention. Iran's death toll is in the hundreds of thousands, but this does not include the systematic oppression and killing of its own people, including men, women, and children.

It is time for the US government to hold Iran accountable. But this is a US election year, which Khamenei calculates will buy him more time to pursue nuclear weapons and further destabilize the Middle East. Israel's occupation of al-Arouri should dispel that idea from the Iranian government. In effect, it was a gauntlet.

In a speech commemorating the fourth anniversary of his death on Wednesday, he said: Qassem Soleimani, Prime Minister Nasrallah suggested that Hezbollah was trying to keep Hezbollah out of the Israeli Defense Forces' crosshairs. He seems to sense that Iran's day of reckoning is drawing near, and that he wants to avoid being a part of it. He made his usual exaggerated threats and abuse, but by the end of his speech his sword remained sheathed.

Nasrallah, intentionally or not, revealed the scale of the web that Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guards had spread across the Middle East on behalf of Iran. Nasrallah acknowledged that the former Revolutionary Guards commander created “Islamic resistance” movements in Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza, Palestine, Syria and Yemen and turned them into an “Islamic axis.” [Islamic] resistance. “

Iran is indeed a deadly cancer in the region, and Washington should have had a cure ready.

Israel is likely to continue to press the issue and expand its attacks against Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Tehran's nuclear program now poses an existential threat to Jerusalem, and Hezbollah has become a key cog in Khamenei's strategy to prevent the IDF from attacking Iran's nuclear program. Earlier, on Christmas Day, Israel also notified the Revolutionary Guards and killed one of its key advisers in Syria, Sheed Raji Mousavi.

Khamenei's reckoning is near. The only question is whether Israel or the United States will provide it and save the Middle East in the process.

mark tothAn economist and entrepreneur, he is a former director of the World Trade Center in St. Louis. Colonel (retired) Jonathan SweetHe served as a military intelligence officer for 30 years and led the U.S. European Military Intelligence Operations Division from 2012 to 2014.