FLASH
Shkruar nga Sherelle Jacobs
By directly attacking Israel from its own territory, Iran has started a battle it cannot win.
Iran's Stalin? Some see Ayatollah Khamenei as the complete embodiment of the brutality of the regime planted by the "Lenin" of the Islamic Republic, its founder Ayatollah Khomeini.
The Iranian regime has chosen suicide. It is true, it will take some time for the logical end of the Supreme Leader's fatal and possibly irreversible path to appear.
But one thing seems clear: the Iranian theocracy has now entered a deadly cycle. Unless Israel is thrown a lifeline, it is increasingly likely that Tehran will either face a Soviet-style collapse in the middle of a regional war it cannot afford, or we will see a bloody change of regime, as the revolution will be eaten by its children.
By directly attacking Israel from its own territory, Iran has started a battle it cannot win. Some might argue that it was Israel that started this, when an Iranian general was killed in Syria in an airstrike that hit parts of Tehran's "consulate". But the new "red lines" of Jerusalem are now perfectly visible to anyone who is reasonable.
Israel knows it cannot allow the Iranian attack to pass without a response. Just as I know that Tehran - perhaps soon with nuclear weapons - is likely to escalate coordinated displays of aggression from Syria to the east and from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the north. And as the West continues to shift its focus more and more toward Asia, Israel may have decided that the time is now or never. Today, he can count on America's support in the event of an all-out regional war. But that may not be the case in a few years.
So Jerusalem is unlikely to withdraw. But while a regional war would severely test Israel, it would destroy Iran. This is because Tehran does not have the luxury of confronting him. To raise the billions needed to fund its nuclear program and prop up Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, Iran has sharply raised taxes and devalued its currency to dangerous levels.
The situation may have reached a tipping point, and Iran can no longer increase spending to meet the demands of military escalation without bankrupting itself or experiencing a complete economic collapse, which could trigger a major popular revolt.
However, it seems equally unlikely that Tehran will back down without trying its chances in this war. Otherwise, his credibility among the new generation of Islamists who support the regime would surely be destroyed. Khamenei would try to revert to his earlier strategy of channeling their fighting energies into an internal war against rebels who reject the veil on women.
As the theocracy has recently been preoccupied with internal strife, it seems unlikely that its critics have failed to recognize the regime's temporary weakness to attempt an uprising. Regardless of who dominated the power struggle, the elders of the 1979 revolution could be scorned on the one hand as incompetent and on the other as crazy.
So why is Khamenei's inner circle committed to a head-on confrontation with Israel? Has the regime gone mad? Khamenei himself, the Middle East's second-longest-serving leader, may no longer act rationally.
Defenders of the Iranian nuclear deal in the West have naively described the positions of the Supreme Leader as "tactical" and "pragmatist". But much evidence suggests otherwise. As with Putin, Western analysts find it difficult to appreciate Khamenei's overarching sense of destiny, hovering on the fine line between delusion and apocalypticism.
Unlike his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini, who feared being corrupted by French decadence while living in exile, Khamenei was said to be obsessed with what he perceived to be depravities in Western civilization. He devoured novels highlighting the weaknesses of the West (the novel Les Miserables among his favorites) and is reported to have personally translated into Persian the tracts of Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb's Clash of Civilizations, cited as an inspiration for Osama bin Laden.
Khamenei's dangerous Messianism may have been underestimated. He is to his predecessor Khomeini as Stalin was to Lenin. Extremely ambitious, but very insecure, and as he has tried to create a cult of personality around himself.
Since the short-lived leadership of rival reformist cleric Mohammed Khatami, moderates have been purged, while a loyal faction of hardliners has emerged. Have Khamenei's delusions of grandeur turned into total chaos?
The new bile spewed through televised speeches against the "evil Zionist regime" or American "arrogance" are so patterned - much like the speeches of the Soviet apparatchiks of old - that they can be read from top to bottom or bottom to top (perhaps creating the illusion of stability and of immutable truth in a society characterized by chaos). While his men eat from kettles, and despite official claims that he leads a very modest life, he is believed to spend his time in the Shah's restored palaces. Recently he surprised big and small when he declared that God speaks through him.
In a country where 60 percent of people live in poverty, and where women's refusal to wear headscarves has become a powerful symbol of resistance, his strategy seems to have shifted from religious populism to survival.
The aim no longer seems to be to convince Iranians to maintain their faith in the revolutionary cause, but to retain the support of a narrow base of loyalists who can protect it from overthrow. Of course, it is likely that this faction is war-prone, having been radicalized to the point that it is unable to sniff out geopolitical developments or make proper cost-benefit calculations.
The disease of the theocratic regime has spread its metastases throughout the country. Pathological self-deception has managed to oil the theocratic machinery like black gold, oil. Clerics allow men to marry prostitutes for 1 hour, while young women are constantly subjected to hymenoplasty (stitching) before marriage.
These may seem like trivial details, but by creating a virtual reality in which black is white, where perversity is modesty, and where Iran can win against Little Satan (Israel), then the regime may be incapacitated. to escape the suicidal end of his radicalism even if he wanted to.
To show restraint at this crucial moment would risk unraveling the intricate universe of lies that holds the system together. And this creates a deadly geopolitical situation. World powers may call for calm, as if this were just a game. But the terrifying reality is that Iran may simply have gone mad. /Adapted Pamphlet, taken from "Daily Telegraph"
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