Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the “Supreme Leader” of Iran, is dead. The Middle East is in flames with drone destruction pouring from the skies causing deaths on the ground. As the war, started by the USA and Israel, raged over Iran, which retaliated in drone and missile strikes on Abu Dhabi and Dubai in the UAE, Doha in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Jordan, there was no knowing what it would lead to or where it would end. The US President Donald Trump, whose declaration of war was couched in the euphemism — major combat operations — and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be the only ones exulting in having engineered a change in Iran’s leadership.
The US President, who had promised to end wars and not start any as he aimed to put America first, has recklessly triggered this war which has already ballooned into a huge regional conflict in which civilians have died in many countries. That he may have ordered operations without careful aforethought about what comes after is in keeping with Mr Trump’s playbook by which he has been involved in at least six previous instances of starting military operations, including in Iran whose uranium enrichment facilities were bombed just last June.
The rationale for starting this war, apart from Israel’s permanent fear of Iran’s unswerving enmity, is unclear. After all, Mr Trump had boasted last year that Iran’s enrichment capability had been obliterated and that their capacity to produce even one nuclear warhead had been set back years. Mr Trump is using the opportunity to egg Iranians on to take matters in their own hand and take over the administration, but is that even possible?
Almost as many people will be celebrating Khamenei’s death as mourning his demise. He had for close to four decades run a most repressive regime, brutally crushing dissent while his murderous protector in the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps killed their countrymen for demonstrating dissent or shot or hanged women on whom the most repressive and draconian measures had indeed been imposed. It does not, however, follow that his death will lead to any change of heart in the regime which will probably be headed by the same kind of theocrats and their quasi-military cohorts who have subjugated the people and hijacked the country.
A brutal repression of protests against an economic downturn — inflation is running at 70 per cent now — may have taken an estimated 6,000 lives in January with the unofficial death toll running up to much larger, possibly leading to a false sense of security settling on the Iranian leadership. A major coordinated strike based on Israeli and American intelligence took down many of the senior leaders leaving a vacuum that the theologians and the feared revolutionary guards will be aiming to fill. If that happens, this air strike will be just another that would have done little to change the thinking in what is avowedly a free country in which the people elect their administrative leaders.
In retaliation, Iran aimed missiles at 27 US and Israeli military establishments but also struck iconic hotels and buildings in Dubai even as violent demonstrations broke out in Iraq and Pakistan and peaceful protests in India over Khamenei’s death. How those nations housing American troops in bases on their soil respond to their sovereignty being breached in this manner could add another deadly dimension to this war. What happens next could reshape the whole of the Middle East, the global economy and the balance of world power for more than a generation.
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