Iran: C’est la nature du régime, imbécile ! (Forty years on, will Europe finally understand the Islamic republic’s vital commitment to the revolutionary principle of permanent war on US interests and allies ?)

The permanent revolution,: And Results and prospects: Trotsky, Leon: Bookshttps://themilitant.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/UCLA_Shah_protest_8617_750.jpgNapoléon (…) accomplit la Terreur en remplaçant la révolution permanente par la guerre permanente. Karl Marx (1844)
Les étapes du développement de la révolution en URSS, en fin de compte, se déterminent par des replis dans le développement de la révolution mondiale, que l’opposition léniniste à toujours considéré comme un processus unique, « la soumission des intérêts de la lutte de classe dans un seul pays aux intérêts de cette lutte à l’échelle mondiale ». C’est le slogan de base de Lénine, lequel détermine les tâches stratégiques du prolétariat socialiste de l’URSS, et qui est en même temps l’une des règles principales de la théorie de la révolution permanente. Léon Trotsky (1919)
L‘Armée de la République islamique d’Iran et le Corps des Gardes de la Révolution islamique … seront responsables, non seulement de la garde et de la préservation des frontières du pays, mais aussi de l’exécution de la mission idéologique du jihad sur la voie de Dieu, c’est-à-dire de l’expansion de la souveraineté de la Loi de Dieu à travers le monde. Préambule de la constitution iranienne (1979-1989)
Attention à ne pas trop généraliser à partir du cas iranien. Les mouvements revivalistes islamiques ne balayent pas le Moyen-Orient et ne seront probablement pas la vague de l’avenir. Zbigniew Brzezinski (conseiller de Carter, 1979)
L’ennemi est ici, on nous ment que c’est l’Amérique ! Slogan du peuple iranien
Lâchez la Syrie occupez-vous de nous ! Slogan du peuple iranien
Mort aux paysans ! Vivent les oppresseurs ! Slogan (ironique) de manifestants paysans iraniens
L’Iran aurait pu être la Corée du Sud; il est devenu la Corée du Nord. (…) Mais n’oubliez pas qu’Ahmadinejad n’est que le représentant d’un régime de nature totalitaire, qui ne peut se réformer et évoluer, quelle que soit la personne qui le représente. (…) Le slogan du régime est : « L’énergie nucléaire est notre droit indéniable. » Je lui réponds: ce droit, nous l’avions, c’est vous et les vôtres qui nous en avez privés. (…) Mon père (…) a décidé, dès les années 1970, de lancer un programme de production d’énergie nucléaire à des fins exclusivement civiles. C’est pourquoi nous avons signé le traité de non-prolifération (…) Aujourd’hui, le problème ne vient pas de l’idée de se doter de l’énergie nucléaire ; il provient de la nature du régime islamique. (…) je ne crois pas que les mollahs soient assez fous pour penser un jour utiliser la bombe contre Israël: ils savent très bien qu’ils seraient aussitôt anéantis. Ce qu’ils veulent, c’est disposer de la bombe pour pouvoir s’institutionnaliser une fois pour toutes dans la région et étendre leurs zones d’influence. Ils rêvent de créer un califat chiite du XXIe siècle et entendent l’imposer par la bombe atomique (…) il est manifeste qu’un gouvernement paranoïaque crée des crises un peu partout pour tenter de regagner à l’extérieur la légitimité qu’il a perdue à l’intérieur. Les dérives du clan au pouvoir ne se limitent pas au soutien au Hamas, elles vont jusqu’à l’Amérique latine de Chavez. Il ne s’agit en rien d’une vision qui vise à défendre notre intérêt national. Si le régime veut survivre, il doit absolument mettre en échec le monde libre, combattre ses valeurs. La République islamique ne peut pas perdurer dans un monde où l’on parle des droits de l’homme ou de la démocratie. Tous ces principes sont du cyanure pour les islamistes. Comment voulez-vous que les successeurs de Khomeini, dont le but reste l’exportation de la révolution, puissent s’asseoir un jour à la même table que le président Sarkozy ou le président Obama? Dans les mois à venir, un jeu diplomatique peut s’engager, mais, au final, il ne faut pas se faire d’illusion. Même si Khatami revenait au pouvoir, le comportement du régime resterait identique, car le vrai décideur c’est Khamenei. Je ne vois aucune raison pour laquelle le régime islamiste accepterait un changement de comportement. Cela provoquerait, de manière certaine, sa chute. Il ne peut plus revenir en arrière. J’ai bien peur que la diplomatie ne tourne en rond une nouvelle fois et que la course à la bombe ne continue pendant ce temps. Reza Pahlavi
La légitimité et la crédibilité d’un régime politique ne s’apprécie pas qu’à la seule aune du vote populaire, mais également à celle de sa capacité à assurer le bien être de son peuple et d’œuvrer pour l’intérêt national dans le respect des droits de l’homme. Un pouvoir qui ne puisse satisfaire cette double exigence est aussi digne de confiance qu’un gouvernement d’occupation, c’est hélas, Monsieur Khamenei, le cas de l’Iran de ces trente dernières années. (…) Il n’existe, de par le monde, qu’une poignée de régimes ayant privé leurs peuples aussi bien des droits humains fondamentaux que conduit leurs pays à la faillite économique. Il n’est donc pas étonnant de compter parmi vos rares pays alliés la Syrie, le Soudan ou la Corée du Nord. Reza Pahlavi
The uprising, once again showed that overthrowing theocracy in Iran is a national demand. Prince Reza Pahlavi
Le monde entier comprend que le bon peuple d’Iran veut un changement, et qu’à part le vaste pouvoir militaire des Etats-Unis, le peuple iranien est ce que ses dirigeants craignent le plus. Donald Trump
Les régimes oppresseurs ne peuvent perdurer à jamais, et le jour viendra où le peuple iranien fera face à un choix. Le monde regarde ! Donald Trump
L’Iran échoue à tous les niveaux, malgré le très mauvais accord passé avec le gouvernement Obama. Le grand peuple iranien est réprimé depuis des années. Il a faim de nourriture et de liberté. La richesse de l’Iran est confisquée, comme les droits de l’homme. Il est temps que ça change. Donald Trump
Les Iraniens courageux affluent dans les rues en quête de liberté, de justice et de droits fondamentaux qui leur ont été refusés pendant des décennies. Le régime cruel de l’Iran gaspille des dizaines de milliards de dollars pour répandre la haine au lieu de les investir dans la construction d’hôpitaux et d’écoles. Tenant compte de cela, il n’est pas étonnant de voir les mères et les pères descendre dans les rues. Le régime iranien est terrifié de son propre peuple. C’est d’ailleurs pour cela qu’il emprisonne les étudiants et interdit l’accès aux médias sociaux. Cependant, je suis sûr que la peur ne triomphera pas, et cela grâce au peuple iranien qui est intelligent, sophistiqué et fier. Aujourd’hui, le peuple iranien risque tout pour la liberté, mais malheureusement, de nombreux gouvernements européens regardent en silence alors que de jeunes Iraniens héroïques sont battus dans les rues. Ce n’est pas juste. Pour ma part, je ne resterai pas silencieux. Ce régime essaie désespérément de semer la haine entre nous, mais il échouera. Lorsque le régime tombera enfin, les Iraniens et les Israéliens seront à nouveau de grands amis. Je souhaite au peuple iranien du succès dans sa noble quête de liberté. Benjamin Netanyahou
En tant que défenseur de la rue arabe, [l’Iran] ne peut pas avoir un dialogue apaisé avec les Etats-Unis, dialogue au cours duquel il accepterait les demandes de cet Etat qui est le protecteur par excellence d’Israël. Téhéran a le soutien de la rue arabe, talon d’Achille des Alliés Arabes des Etats-Unis, car justement il refuse tout compromis et laisse entendre qu’il pourra un jour lui offrir une bombe nucléaire qui neutralisera la dissuasion israélienne. Pour préserver cette promesse utile, Téhéran doit sans cesse exagérer ses capacités militaires ou nucléaires et des slogans anti-israéliens. Il faut cependant préciser que sur un plan concret, les actions médiatiques de Téhéran ne visent pas la sécurité d’Israël, mais celle des Alliés arabes des Etats-Unis, Etats dont les dirigeants ne peuvent satisfaire les attentes belliqueuses de la rue arabe. Ainsi Téhéran a un levier de pression extraordinaire sur Washington. Comme toute forme de dissuasion, ce système exige un entretien permanent. Téhéran doit sans cesse fouetter la colère et les frustrations de la rue arabe ! Il doit aussi garder ses milices actives, de chaînes de propagande en effervescence et son programme nucléaire le plus opaque possible, sinon il ne serait pas menaçant. C’est pourquoi, il ne peut pas accepter des compensations purement économiques offertes par les Six en échange d’un apaisement ou une suspension de ses activités nucléaires. Ce refus permanent de compromis est vital pour le régime. (…) Il n’y a rien qui fasse plus peur aux mollahs qu’un réchauffement avec les Etats-Unis : ils risquent d’y perdre la rue arabe, puis le pouvoir. C’est pourquoi, le 9 septembre, quand Téhéran a accepté une rencontre pour désactiver les sanctions promises en juillet, il s’est aussitôt mis en action pour faire capoter ce projet de dialogue apaisé qui est un véritable danger pour sa survie. Iran Resist
L’analyse des témoignages des jeunes des grandes villes iraniennes et l’observation de leurs comportements sur les réseaux sociaux montrent que la politique sociale répressive des ayatollahs a produit des effets inattendus. La nouvelle génération de 15 à 25 ans vit dans le rejet du système de valeurs, promulgué par l’école et les médias de la République islamique. Pendant ces dernières décennies, le décalage entre l’espace public, maîtrisé par les agents de mœurs, et l’espace privé, où presque tout est permis, n’a cessé de progresser. Pourtant, malgré le non-respect que les jeunes citadins affichent pour les mesures islamiques – vestimentaires, alimentaires, sexuelles, … –, leurs témoignages révèlent qu’en dépit de leur apparence rebelle, ils ont en partie intériorisé l’image négative que la société leur inflige à cause du rejet de ses normes et valeurs. Cette image devient doublement négative lorsqu’ils se reprochent leur inaction, comme si la capacité d’agir sur leur sort et de faire valoir leurs droits fondamentaux ne dépendait que d’eux et de la volonté individuelle. Les catastrophes naturelles qui dévastent le pays (comme le tremblement de terre, les inondations ou les sècheresses, etc.) et les situations politiques ingérables (comme la menace de guerre, les sanctions économiques, ou certaines décisions politiques jugées inacceptables, etc.) aiguisent leur conscience de l’impuissance et déclenchent chez eux une avalanche de reproches et de haine de soi. Peut-être cette auto culpabilisation relève-t-elle d’un besoin de se sentir responsable, de se procurer une semblable illusion de puissance. Peut-être est-elle un simple mécanisme d’auto-défense. Mais, elle n’en reste pas moins destructrice pour autant, car elle les empêche d’avoir une vision objective de leur situation. Dans un pays où la moindre critique et protestation sont violemment réprimées, et où l’on peut encourir de lourdes peines de prisons pour avoir contesté une décision politique, quelle est la marge de manœuvre des individus? Quatre décennies de l’atteinte physique, l’atteinte juridique, et l’atteinte à la dignité humaine ont profondément privé les jeunes de reconnaissance sociale et les ont affectés dans le sentiment de leur propre valeur. La non reconnaissance du droit et de l’estime sociale en Iran ont créé des conditions collectives dans lesquelles les jeunes ne peuvent parvenir à une attitude positive envers eux-mêmes. En l’absence de confiance en soi, de respect de soi, et d’estime de soi, nul n’est en mesure de s’identifier à ses fins et à ses désirs en tant qu’être autonome et individualisé. Or, faut-il s’étonner si, aujourd’hui, l’émigration est devenue la seule perspective de l’avenir des jeunes Iraniens? Mahnaz Shirali
On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it. The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to « stand down » and « knock it off » as they drew up plans to « strike back » against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book « Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump ». Why did Obama go soft on Russia? My opinion is that it was because he was singularly focused on the nuclear deal with Iran. Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama’s estimation, upset that negotiation. This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision. Obama’s supporters claim he did stand up to Russia by deploying sanctions after the election to punish them for their actions. But, Obama, according to the Washington Post, « approved a modest package… with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic. » In other words, a toothless response to a serious incursion. Scott Jennings (CNN)
Radicals linked to Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group, stashed thousands of disposable ice packs containing ammonium nitrate – a common ingredient in homemade bombs. The plot was uncovered by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police in the autumn of 2015, just months after the UK signed up to the Iran nuclear deal. Three metric tonnes of ammonium nitrate was discovered – more than was used in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and damaged hundreds of buildings. Police raided four properties in north-west London – three businesses and a home – and a man in his 40s was arrested on suspicion of plotting terrorism. The man was eventually released without charge. Well-placed sources said the plot had been disrupted by a covert intelligence operation rather than seeking a prosecution. The discovery was so serious that David Cameron and Theresa May, then the prime minister and home secretary, were personally briefed on what had been found. Yet for years the nefarious activity has been kept hidden from the public, including MPs who were debating whether to fully ban Hizbollah, until now. It raises questions about whether senior UK government figures chose not to reveal the plot in part because they were invested in keeping the Iran nuclear deal afloat. (…) It became clear, according to well-placed sources, that the UK storage was not in isolation but part of an international Hizbollah plot to lay the groundwork for future attacks. The group had previously been caught storing ice packs in Thailand. And in 2017, two years after the London bust, a New York Hizbollah member would appear to seek out a foreign ice pack manufacturer. Ice packs provide the perfect cover, according to sources – seemingly harmless and easy to transport. Proving beyond doubt they were purchased for terrorism was tricky.  But the most relevant case was in Cyprus, where a startlingly similar plot had been busted just months before the discovery in London. There, a 26-year-old man called Hussein Bassam Abdallah, a dual Lebanese and Canadian national, was caught caching more than 65,000 ice packs in a basement. During interrogation he admitted to being a member of Hizbollah’s military wing, saying he had once been trained to use an AK47 assault rifle. Abdallah said the 8.2 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored was for terrorist attacks. He pleaded guilty and was given a six-year prison sentence in June 2015. In Abdallah’s luggage police found two photocopies of a forged British passport. Cypriot police say they were not the foreign government agency that tipped Britain off to the London cell. (…) A UK intelligence source said: “MI5 worked independently and closely with international partners to disrupt the threat of malign intent from Iran and its proxies in the UK.” The decision not to inform the public of the discovery, despite a major debate with Britain’s closest ally America about the success of the Iran nuclear deal, will raise eyebrows. Keeping MPs in the dark amid a fierce debate about whether to designate the entire of Hezbollah a terrorist group – rather than just its militant wing – will also be questioned. The US labelled the entire group a terrorist organisation in the 1990s. But in Britain, only its armed wing was banned. The set-up had led senior British counter-terrorism figures to believe there was some form of understanding that Hizbollah would not target the UK directly. Hizbollah was only added to the banned terrorist group list in its entirety in February 2019 – more than three years after the plot was uncovered. The Telegraph
There is a reason America’s European and Asian allies are determined to end the US quarantine of Iranian businesses. Trump’s increasingly tough sanctions give countries and corporations an uncomfortable pair of options: Buy Iranian oil and invest there, or do business with the US — but you can’t do both. The latest punishment came last Friday, when the administration vowed to sanction anyone doing business with Iran’s petrochemical industry, a lucrative exporting sector run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is now rightly listed by Washington as a terror organization. America’s allies are eager to revive the smooth flow of goods and business with Iran; their diplomacy is meant to put pressure on Washington to start a process that would lead to new direct talks. Iran, they claim, will behave better, now that its economy is strained. America should take advantage and aim for a fresh rapprochement. The problem with the allies’ theory: No such hunger for reconciliation is in evidence in Tehran. Instead, the regime is still signaling obstinacy. The ayatollahs are as committed as ever to their revolutionary principles, the main one of which is waging war on US interests and allies. Take Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, long touted as a symbol of moderation and openness and a welcome guest in Western TV studios. Yet defending Iran’s habit of hanging gay people in the public square, Zarif told the German newspaper Bild this week: “Our society has moral principles, and according to these principles we live.” Hosting Germany’s Maas this week, Zarif also pushed back against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent offer of negotiations “without preconditions.” The Islamic Republic won’t talk to those who wage “economic war” against it, Zarif said, threatening for good measure that, as an Iranian enemy, America “cannot expect to stay safe.” The theocracy is hardening, rather than softening, its line, notwithstanding entreaties from Tokyo, Berlin and Brussels. These well-meaning outsiders inevitably point to supposed moderates that America can do business with, and, as always, they urge Washington to ignore Tehran’s malign rhetoric and muscle-flexing. It’s true that some Iranian politicians favor making cosmetic concessions to the West to ensure the Islamic Republic’s survival. But the ultimate decider, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has long soured on such concessions. Negotiation, he recently said, “has no benefit and carries harm.” In a perfect world, the global economy would be better off when everyone can do business with everyone without fear of punishment. But the existence of a militantly anti-Western regime like Iran’s is a reminder that ours isn’t a perfect world. Abe, then, would be better off warning Iran about its joint missile development with Japan’s menacing neighbor, North Korea (a reminder that the regime’s behavior is destructive far beyond its immediate neighborhood.) Talks may be worthwhile — but not before Khamenei leaves the stage. Once the old dictator is gone, the ensuing internal struggle may work to the West’s advantage. Economic pressure may then embolden Iranians hoping to throw off the regime’s yoke. Or it may not. Either way, dealing with the regime as it exists is futile, as more than four decades of experience have shown. Trump should turn a deaf ear to Abe and the rest of the world’s eager go-betweens. Benny Avni
When it comes to countering terrorism: follow the money. The world fought the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIL by cutting off their money. We must do the same today and acknowledge that the epicenter of modern terrorism is IRAN. Iran bankrolls a ‘coalition of terrorists’ around the world that further Iran‘s policy of expansionism. With Iran‘s backing of over $1 billion, Hezbollah has turned Lebanon into a launching pad for terror. Hezbollah’s funding, weaponry and even its food all come from Iran. Iranian money has landed directly in the pockets of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip and in Judea and Samaria. With Hamas’ help and the Palestinian branch of the Iranian Quds Force, Iran is trying to turn Judea and Samaria into a fourth military front against Israel. Danny Danon
Après des décennies de complaisance et de lâcheté occidentales avec le régime enturbanné, particulièrement sous les mandats du sinistre Barack « Imam » Hussein Obama, idole de l’établissement culturo-médiatique mondialiste, l’actuel président américain Donald Trump, au grand désespoir des Zéropéens, les Britanniques en tête en leur qualité de soutien traditionnel du clergé chiite, semble déterminé à prendre le taureau par les cornes et étouffer la principale tête de la Bête islamiste. Celle dont l’irruption en 1979 a été le point de départ de l’essor considérable de l’islam politique, cette idéologie mortifère, combinaison du nazisme et du communisme. Après quarante années de turpitudes et de sévices en tous genre infligés principalement au peuple iranien, mais également, par des voies directes ou indirectes, à l’ensemble du monde civilisé, le régime des turbans noirs et des turbans blancs est confronté à la plus grave crise de son histoire, déjà beaucoup trop longue. La pétro-mollahrchie ne peut plus exporter le pétrole iranien qui constitue sa source essentielle de revenus pour financer son activisme terroriste et ses sordides réseaux clientélistes dans la région. Les chiens de garde du régime sont désormais officiellement reconnus par la première puissance mondiale comme ce qu’ils ont toujours été depuis leur naissance, à savoir des terroristes fanatiques aux ordres de leurs maîtres enturbannés. Enfin, la théocratie milicienne n’arrive plus à dériver les colères et frustrations de la population vers l’extérieur. Les Iraniens ont aujourd’hui compris, dans leur immense majorité, que ceux qui les dirigent sont leurs plus grands ennemis. En tout état de cause, les jours de la mafia ochlo-théocratique sont comptés. Quelle que soit l’issue de la présente crise, le désastre économique, la paupérisation générale de la population contrastant avec l’opulence insolente des mollahs au pouvoir, celle de leurs sbires, de leurs familles et de leurs clients, la corruption délirante de l’oligarchie khomeyniste dont l’ampleur insoupçonnée est révélée davantage chaque jour et le discrédit massif de la mollahrchie et de son idéologie condamnent ce régime cauchemardesque aux poubelles de l’Histoire à brève échéance. L’inscription des « Gardiens de la Révolution » sur la liste des organisations terroristes établie par l’administration américaine a étonné nombre de prétendus « observateurs » et « experts » des affaires iraniennes, qui se sont émus notamment qu’une « armée régulière (sic) d’un pays » puisse être assimilée à une entité terroriste. C’est en réalité une décision d’une extrême logique au regard du pédigree de cette sinistre milice dont la dénomination officielle (« Sépâh-é Pâsdârân-é Enghelâb-é Eslâmi » i.e « les Gardiens de la Révolution islamique) fait apparaître expressément que cette organisation paramilitaire n’est nullement en charge de la défense de l’Iran et du peuple iranien, mais de la seule « Révolution islamique » et, par suite, du régime qui en est le fer de lance. (…) Ce n’est, en effet, qu’à compter de 1982 que les voyous fanatisés dénommés « Pasdarans » ont vu leur rôle accru, de manière importante, durant cette guerre, lorsque celle-ci a pris un virage intégralement idéologique, avec la volonté de Khomeyni de la prolonger indéfiniment sous le prétexte d’exporter son abjecte révolution dans la région, au mépris des vies gaspillées sur les théâtres d’opération, pour continuer d’asseoir son pouvoir tyrannique, museler toute critique de sa politique irresponsable et réprimer avec une férocité implacable tous ses opposants. (…) Pour se faire une idée ce qui se passe en Iran depuis quarante ans, il faudrait se représenter une France dans laquelle la voyoucratie et la racaille islamisée de banlieue aurait réussi à s’accaparer la quasi-intégralité des ressources de l’Etat et le contrôle des grands groupes économiques nationaux, industriels et commerciaux, pour les utiliser à son profit exclusif, dans le but non seulement de mener grand train aux dépens du reste de la population, mais aussi de financer un gigantesque réseau clientéliste aux ramifications internationales, aux seules fins de bâtir un système d’influence fondé sur une idéologie mortifère, sans aucune considération de l’intérêt national du peuple français. (…) A la différence de ses prédécesseurs à la Maison Blanche et des nombreux dirigeants occidentaux qui se sont succedés depuis quarante ans, dont l’archétype fut l’Imam Hussein Obama, lequel a fait montre d’une complaisance et d’une lâcheté funeste dans la gestion du « cas iranien », Donald Trump a le mérite de ne pas se laisser intimider par la mafia enturbannée. S’il devait persister dans cette attitude ferme, il pourrait être celui qui aura aidé le peuple iranien, allié naturel du monde libre et civilisé, à terrasser la Bête islamiste avant que les métastases de ce cancer ne finissent de se propager sur la planète. Chasser cette Bête de la tanière qu’elle s’est aménagée, il y a quatre décennies, au détriment d’un pays martyr, serait pour la région un événement d’une portée équivalente à la chute du Mur de Berlin pour l’Europe. Il s’agirait d’un coup décisif à cette synthèse idéologique du nazisme et du communisme que constitue l’islam politique. Car n’en déplaisent aux fascistes tiers-mondistes, aux obsédés de l’« antisionisme » et autres anti-américains pavloviens qui fantasment sur la « résistance » de la dictature des turbans noirs et des turbans blancs, la disparition de l’ochlo-théocratie khomeyniste et l’avènement d’un Iran libre, laïque et démocratique, renouant avec le sillon tracé par la dynastie Pahlavi, serait un gage considérable de paix dans la région et le monde. En s’alliant au peuple iranien dans ce combat, le président Donald Trump pourrait entrer dans l’Histoire comme le Roosevelt du 21e siècle. Iran-Resist

C’est la nature du régime, imbécile !

Alors que du Golfe d’Oman au Yemen et à la frontière syro-israélienne et à l’instar de son très probablement feu commandant des opérations extérieures, un régime iranien aux abois multiplie les provocations…

Et qu’entre deux manoeuvres d’apaisement ou de détournement des sanctions américaines, leurs idiots utiles européens ou asiatiques accusent le président Trump …

Pendant que se confirment pour préserver un accord nucléaire iranien plus que douteux

Tant l’insigne lâcheté d’une Administration Obama prête, entre deux actes de haute trahison avec les Iraniens ou les Russes, à tolérer une ingérence étrangère dans ses propres élections …

Que celle de dirigeants britanniques n’hésitant pas à taire la découverte de trois tonnes d’explosifs stockés sur leur propre sol par le mouvement terroriste Hezbollah  …

Comment ne pas voir avec nos amis du site de résistance iranien Iran-Resist …

Ou les quelques spécialistes encore un peu lucides comme Mahnaz Shirali ou Benny Avni

L’incroyable cécité d’un Occident …

Qui depuis 40 ans n’a toujours pas compris que la nature même d’un régime révolutionnaire comme la République islamique …

Pour faire oublier la corruption et l’incompétence à l’intérieur …

C’est à l’instar du requin qui se noie s’il arrête de nager …

La provocation et l’agression permanente à l’extérieur …

Du moins, après l’accident industriel Obama, jusqu’à l’arrivée au pouvoir à Washington …

De celui qui avec l’élimination de « l’ochlo-théocratie khomeyniste » et l’avènement enfin d’un « Iran libre, laïc et démocratique » …

Pourrait « entrer dans l’Histoire comme le Roosevelt du 21e siècle » ?

Mollahs : Endgame
Sam Safi
Iran-Resist
06.06.2019

Après des décennies de complaisance et de lâcheté occidentales avec le régime enturbanné, particulièrement sous les mandats du sinistre Barack « Imam » Hussein Obama, idole de l’établissement culturo-médiatique mondialiste, l’actuel président américain Donald Trump, au grand désespoir des Zéropéens, les Britanniques en tête en leur qualité de soutien traditionnel du clergé chiite, semble déterminé à prendre le taureau par les cornes et étouffer la principale tête de la Bête islamiste. Celle dont l’irruption en 1979 a été le point de départ de l’essor considérable de l’islam politique, cette idéologie mortifère, combinaison du nazisme et du communisme.

La récréation est terminée. Après quarante années de turpitudes et de sévices en tous genre infligés principalement au peuple iranien, mais également, par des voies directes ou indirectes, à l’ensemble du monde civilisé, le régime des turbans noirs et des turbans blancs est confronté à la plus grave crise de son histoire, déjà beaucoup trop longue. La pétro-mollahrchie ne peut plus exporter le pétrole iranien qui constitue sa source essentielle de revenus pour financer son activisme terroriste et ses sordides réseaux clientélistes dans la région. Les chiens de garde du régime sont désormais officiellement reconnus par la première puissance mondiale comme ce qu’ils ont toujours été depuis leur naissance, à savoir des terroristes fanatiques aux ordres de leurs maîtres enturbannés. Enfin, la théocratie milicienne n’arrive plus à dériver les colères et frustrations de la population vers l’extérieur. Les Iraniens ont aujourd’hui compris, dans leur immense majorité, que ceux qui les dirigent sont leurs plus grands ennemis.

En tout état de cause, les jours de la mafia ochlo-théocratique sont comptés. Quelle que soit l’issue de la présente crise, le désastre économique, la paupérisation générale de la population contrastant avec l’opulence insolente des mollahs au pouvoir, celle de leurs sbires, de leurs familles et de leurs clients, la corruption délirante de l’oligarchie khomeyniste dont l’ampleur insoupçonnée est révélée davantage chaque jour et le discrédit massif de la mollahrchie et de son idéologie condamnent ce régime cauchemardesque aux poubelles de l’Histoire à brève échéance.

Les molosses de Khamenei aux abois

L’inscription des « Gardiens de la Révolution » sur la liste des organisations terroristes établie par l’administration américaine a étonné nombre de prétendus « observateurs » et « experts » des affaires iraniennes, qui se sont émus notamment qu’une « armée régulière (sic) d’un pays » puisse être assimilée à une entité terroriste. C’est en réalité une décision d’une extrême logique au regard du pédigrée de cette sinistre milice dont la dénomination officielle (« Sépâh-é Pâsdârân-é Enghelâb-é Eslâmi » i.e « les Gardiens de la Révolution islamique) fait apparaître expressément que cette organisation paramilitaire n’est nullement en charge de la défense de l’Iran et du peuple iranien, mais de la seule « Révolution islamique » et, par suite, du régime qui en est le fer de lance.

L’Iran dispose en effet toujours de son armée nationale (« Artesh ») créée par la dynastie Pahlavi. Cependant, celle-ci a été volontairement appauvrie et affaiblie par les mollahs, depuis quatre décennies, en raison de son patriotisme persistant et de son lien historique avec le pouvoir impérial.

Contrairement à ce que tentent de faire croire aujourd’hui les cerbères des tyrans au turban et leurs lobbystes déguisés en « spécialistes » ou « experts », c’est bien l’armée régulière iranienne qui, durant la guerre Iran/Irak, a joué un rôle essentiel dans la libération du territoire national durant la première phase du conflit entre 1980 et 1982.

Ce n’est, en effet, qu’à compter de 1982 que les voyous fanatisés dénommés « Pasdarans » ont vu leur rôle accru, de manière importante, durant cette guerre, lorsque celle-ci a pris un virage intégralement idéologique, avec la volonté de Khomeyni de la prolonger indéfiniment sous le prétexte d’exporter son abjecte révolution dans la région, au mépris des vies gaspillées sur les théâtres d’opération, pour continuer d’asseoir son pouvoir tyrannique, museler toute critique de sa politique irresponsable et réprimer avec une férocité implacable tous ses opposants.

Soutenir le contraire serait méconnaître la réalité historique et surtout oublier que, loin de pouvoir rivaliser initialement avec l’armée nationale iranienne en termes de qualités et de compétences, les membres de cette milice, au début de la contre-révolution khomeyniste, étaient essentiellement issus des fanges les plus sordides de la population criminogène où se recrutaient traditionnellement les membres de la pègre, les loubards à couteau, les proxénètes et autres trafiquants de drogue, activités qu’ils continuent, au demeurant, de pratiquer sous leurs nouveaux habits, mais à une échelle bien plus importante avec des conséquences catastrophiques sur la société iranienne.

C’est, au demeurant, sur cette canaille en uniforme, avec laquelle il a noué une relation privilégiée durant ses années à la présidence du régime (1981-1989), que Khamenei s’est appuyé pour accéder au pouvoir suprême et éliminer ses principaux rivaux, à commencer par Montazeri, pourtant dauphin désigné de Khomeyni jusqu’aux dernières semaines ayant précédé la mort de l’ancien touriste de Neauphle-le-Château.

En contrepartie, le mollah collectionneur de pipes et de bagues, une fois au sommet du pouvoir clerico-mafieux, récompensera ses bouledogues en les autorisant à faire main basse sur la quasi-totalité des secteurs stratégiques de l’économie iranienne, leur permettant ainsi de constituer progressivement un véritable Etat dans l’Etat formant aujourd’hui un complexe militaro-industriel dans lequel réside le pouvoir profond de l’ochlo- théocratie.

Pour se faire une idée ce qui se passe en Iran depuis quarante ans, il faudrait se représenter une France dans laquelle la voyoucratie et la racaille islamisée de banlieue aurait réussi à s’accaparer la quasi-intégralité des ressources de l’Etat et le contrôle des grands groupes économiques nationaux, industriels et commerciaux, pour les utiliser à son profit exclusif, dans le but non seulement de mener grand train aux dépens du reste de la population, mais aussi de financer un gigantesque réseau clientéliste aux ramifications internationales, aux seules fins de bâtir un système d’influence fondé sur une idéologie mortifère, sans aucune considération de l’intérêt national du peuple français.

Quel avenir pour le Grand Timonier enturbanné ?

Outre l’effondrement économique, le mécontentement populaire et la pression militaire américaine, le régime peut également être sérieusement ébranlé par la disparition prochaine de son « Guide Suprême ». Il faut néanmoins rester prudent sur ce point. Ces dernières années, à chaque fois que la cléricature khomeyniste s’est senti sévèrement menacée, elle a fait courir le bruit de l’imminence de la mort de Khamenei pour tromper ses adversaires en leur laissant entrevoir, à court terme, un tournant majeur qui résulterait de cette disparition, conduisant ces derniers à apaiser leur colère ou modérer leurs revendications.

C’est ainsi que lors du soulèvement débuté à l’été 2009, consécutivement à la réélection grossièrement frauduleuse du pantin Ahmadinejad, le parrain de la mollahrchie, Rafsandjani, avait habilement manipulé Wikileaks en laissant fuiter une de ses déclarations prétendant que son ancien compagnon de lutte révolutionnaire, dont la légitimité était alors violemment et ouvertement contestée par les masses de manifestants, souffrait d’un cancer en phase terminale ne lui laissant plus que quelques mois à vivre…

Plusieurs années après la répression féroce de ce mouvement massif de contestation du régime, lors des négociations concernant le prétendu « Iran deal » (cet accord honteux au sujet duquel les mollahs se vantaient régulièrement dans leurs médias d’avoir enfumé les Occidentaux, avant qu’il ne soit dénoncé l’année dernière par le président des USA), les agents de la cléricature sont de nouveau parvenus, en février 2015, à intoxiquer les services et médias étrangers, dont le Figaro, en leur faisant croire que la mort du Guide de l’ochlo-théocratie, atteint d’un cancer de la prostate au stade métastatique, était imminente…

Une fois encore, les années ont passé et Khamenei est toujours vivant. Ce qui n’est plus le cas de son ancien comparse Rafsandjani, le co-fondateur du régime, décédé en janvier 2017 et de celui qui était, un temps, présenté comme son successeur au poste suprême, l’Irakien milliardaire fraîchement naturalisé Shahroudi, disparu en décembre 2018…

Cela dit, jusqu’à preuve du contraire, le Lider Maximo khomeyniste, qui sera octogénaire dans quelques semaines, n’est pas éternel et, si le régime parvient à survivre encore quelques temps, sa succession sera nécessairement ouverte. Elle devrait échoir à son fils Mojtaba ou au fidèle Ebrahim Raissi qui, par son profil de criminel de masse, de mollah borné et son titre de « seyyed », toujours de nature à faire tourner les têtes de sectateurs fidèles prêts à s’extasier à la vue d’un turban noir, semble tout désigné pour cette fonction.

Le scénario d’un coup d’état des Pasdarans paraît, en revanche, peu crédible. Ces miliciens n’ont vocation qu’à être les bras et les couteaux des mollahs. Il est consternant de lire les prédictions de prétendus « experts » annonçant l’avènement prochain parmi eux d’un « Reza Shah islamique » (sic !) en la personne de Ghassem Soleymani, chef de la section Al Qods des Gardiens de la Révolution, dont l’idéologie n’est autre que la variante chiite de celle de l’organisation terroriste Al Qaïda avec laquelle elle entretient du reste des relations très étroites.

Soleymani est un quasi-illettré sans aucune vision politique et stratégique pour l’Iran autre que celle d’être une base arrière de mouvements terroristes djihadistes anti-occidentaux dirigée par des mollahs fanatiques. A ces « experts », il convient de souligner que parler à son sujet d’un futur « Reza Shah islamique » est aussi pertinent que d’évoquer un « Emmanuel Macron communiste », un « Philippe de Villiers europhile », un « Adolf Hitler philosémite », ou un « Robespierre royaliste ».

A court terme, il est néanmoins préférable que Khamenei et les autres vieillards qui l’entourent restent en vie, ne serait-ce que pour répondre, très prochainement, de leurs innombrables crimes et forfaitures devant le peuple iranien.

Une prochaine Chute du Mur islamique ?

A la différence de ses prédécesseurs à la Maison Blanche et des nombreux dirigeants occidentaux qui se sont succédés depuis quarante ans, dont l’archétype fut l’Imam Hussein Obama, lequel a fait montre d’une complaisance et d’une lâcheté funeste dans la gestion du « cas iranien », Donald Trump a le mérite de ne pas se laisser intimider par la mafia enturbannée.

S’il devait persister dans cette attitude ferme, il pourrait être celui qui aura aidé le peuple iranien, allié naturel du monde libre et civilisé, à terrasser la Bête islamiste avant que les métastases de ce cancer ne finissent de se propager sur la planète.

Chasser cette Bête de la tanière qu’elle s’est aménagée, il y a quatre décennies, au détriment d’un pays martyr, serait pour la région un événement d’une portée équivalente à la chute du Mur de Berlin pour l’Europe.

Il s’agirait d’un coup décisif à cette synthèse idéologique du nazisme et du communisme que constitue l’islam politique.

Car n’en déplaisent aux fascistes tiers-mondistes, aux obsédés de l’« antisionisme » et autres anti-américains pavloviens qui fantasment sur la « résistance » de la dictature des turbans noirs et des turbans blancs, la disparition de l’ochlo-théocratie khomeyniste et l’avènement d’un Iran libre, laïque et démocratique, renouant avec le sillon tracé par la dynastie Pahlavi, serait un gage considérable de paix dans la région et le monde.

En s’alliant au peuple iranien dans ce combat, le président Donald Trump pourrait entrer dans l’Histoire comme le Roosevelt du 21e siècle.

Libérés de ce régime sordide qui vampirise leur pays, tous les Iraniens pourront alors entonner avec fierté le chant que nombre d’entre eux ont déjà le courage de scander devant le tombeau du fondateur de leur nation à l’occasion du jour de Cyrus le Grand, le 7 Aban (29 octobre), au grand dam des mollahs et de leurs mercenaires : « Iran vatan-é mâst, Kourosh pédar-é mâst ! » (« L’Iran est notre patrie, Cyrus est notre père ! »).

Voir aussi:

US allies’ sad Tehran wild-goose chase
Benny Avni
New York Post
June 11, 2019

America’s allies are lining up to mediate between Washington and the Tehran regime. But they’re jumping the gun.

Witness Japan’s President Shinzo Abe, who arrives in Tehran Wednesday for a two-day visit, marking the 90th anniversary of diplomatic relations between his country and Iran. Tokyo officials defend their soft-on-Tehran approach as a “balanced” way to deal with the Mideast. Whatever the merits of that claim, the Abe visit is mostly about oil.

The trip comes shortly after the Japanese leader hosted his golfing buddy President Trump in Tokyo. The symbolism is deliberate: Abe seeks to revive a US-Iranian channel of communication, per Japanese media. And he isn’t alone in his efforts. Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, was in Tehran this week, trying to buck up confidence in the nuclear deal that Trump ditched.

There is a reason America’s European and Asian allies are determined to end the US quarantine of Iranian businesses. Trump’s increasingly tough sanctions give countries and corporations an uncomfortable pair of options: Buy Iranian oil and invest there, or do business with the US — but you can’t do both.

The latest punishment came last Friday, when the administration vowed to sanction anyone doing business with Iran’s petrochemical industry, a lucrative exporting sector run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is now rightly listed by Washington as a terror organization.

America’s allies are eager to revive the smooth flow of goods and business with Iran; their diplomacy is meant to put pressure on Washington to start a process that would lead to new direct talks. Iran, they claim, will behave better, now that its economy is strained. America should take advantage and aim for a fresh rapprochement.

The problem with the allies’ theory: No such hunger for reconciliation is in evidence in Tehran. Instead, the regime is still signaling obstinacy. The ayatollahs are as committed as ever to their revolutionary principles, the main one of which is waging war on US interests and allies.

Take Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, long touted as a symbol of moderation and openness and a welcome guest in Western TV studios. Yet defending Iran’s habit of hanging gay people in the public square, Zarif told the German newspaper Bild this week: “Our society has moral principles, and according to these principles we live.”

Hosting Germany’s Maas this week, Zarif also pushed back against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent offer of negotiations “without preconditions.” The Islamic Republic won’t talk to those who wage “economic war” against it, Zarif said, threatening for good measure that, as an Iranian enemy, America “cannot expect to stay safe.”

The theocracy is hardening, rather than softening, its line, notwithstanding entreaties from Tokyo, Berlin and Brussels. These well-meaning outsiders inevitably point to supposed moderates that America can do business with, and, as always, they urge Washington to ignore Tehran’s malign rhetoric and muscle-flexing.

It’s true that some Iranian politicians favor making cosmetic concessions to the West to ensure the Islamic Republic’s survival. But the ultimate decider, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has long soured on such concessions. Negotiation, he recently said, “has no benefit and carries harm.”

In a perfect world, the global economy would be better off when everyone can do business with everyone without fear of punishment. But the existence of a militantly anti-Western regime like Iran’s is a reminder that ours isn’t a perfect world.

Abe, then, would be better off warning Iran about its joint missile development with Japan’s menacing neighbor, North Korea (a reminder that the regime’s behavior is destructive far beyond its immediate neighborhood.)

Talks may be worthwhile — but not before Khamenei leaves the stage. Once the old dictator is gone, the ensuing internal struggle may work to the West’s advantage.

Economic pressure may then embolden Iranians hoping to throw off the regime’s yoke. Or it may not. Either way, dealing with the regime as it exists is futile, as more than four decades of experience have shown.

Trump should turn a deaf ear to Abe and the rest of the world’s eager go-betweens.

Voir également:

Iran-linked terrorists caught stockpiling explosives in north-west London
Ben Riley-Smith
The Telegraph
9 June 2019

Terrorists linked to Iran were caught stockpiling tonnes of explosive materials on the outskirts of London in a secret British bomb factory, The Telegraph can reveal

Radicals linked to Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group, stashed thousands of disposable ice packs containing ammonium nitrate – a common ingredient in homemade bombs.

The plot was uncovered by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police in the autumn of 2015, just months after the UK signed up to the Iran nuclear deal. Three metric tonnes of ammonium nitrate was discovered – more than was used in the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and damaged hundreds of buildings.

Police raided four properties in north-west London – three businesses and a home – and a man in his 40s was arrested on suspicion of plotting terrorism.

The man was eventually released without charge. Well-placed sources said the plot had been disrupted by a covert intelligence operation rather than seeking a prosecution.

The discovery was so serious that David Cameron and Theresa May, then the prime minister and home secretary, were personally briefed on what had been found.

Yet for years the nefarious activity has been kept hidden from the public, including MPs who were debating whether to fully ban Hizbollah, until now.

It raises questions about whether senior UK government figures chose not to reveal the plot in part because they were invested in keeping the Iran nuclear deal afloat.

The disclosure follows a three-month investigation by The Telegraph in which more than 30 current and former officials in Britain, America and Cyprus were approached and court documents were obtained.

One well-placed source described the plot as “proper organised terrorism”, while another said enough explosive materials were stored to do “a lot of damage”.

Ben Wallace, the security minister, said: “The Security Service and police work tirelessly to keep the public safe from a host of national security threats. Necessarily, their efforts and success will often go unseen.”

The Telegraph understands the discovery followed a tip-off from a foreign government. To understand what they were facing, agents from MI5 and officers from Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command launched a covert operation.

It became clear, according to well-placed sources, that the UK storage was not in isolation but part of an international Hizbollah plot to lay the groundwork for future attacks.

The group had previously been caught storing ice packs in Thailand. And in 2017, two years after the London bust, a New York Hizbollah member would appear to seek out a foreign ice pack manufacturer.

Why ice packs?

Ice packs provide the perfect cover, according to sources – seemingly harmless and easy to transport. Proving beyond doubt they were purchased for terrorism was tricky.

But the most relevant case was in Cyprus, where a startlingly similar plot had been busted just months before the discovery in London. There, a 26-year-old man called Hussein Bassam Abdallah, a dual Lebanese and Canadian national, was caught caching more than 65,000 ice packs in a basement. During interrogation he admitted to being a member of Hizbollah’s military wing, saying he had once been trained to use an AK47 assault rifle.

Abdallah said the 8.2 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored was for terrorist attacks. He pleaded guilty and was given a six-year prison sentence in June 2015.

In Abdallah’s luggage police found two photocopies of a forged British passport. Cypriot police say they were not the foreign government agency that tipped Britain off to the London cell.

But they did offer assistance when made aware of the UK case, meeting their British counterparts and sharing reports on what they had uncovered.

MI5’s intelligence investigation is understood to have lasted months. The aim was both to disrupt the plot but also get a clearer picture what Hizbollah was up to.

Such investigations can involve everything from eavesdropping on calls to deploying covert sources and trying to turn suspects.

The exact methods used in this case are unknown. Soon conclusions begun to emerge. The plot was at an early stage. It amounted to pre-planning. No target had been selected and no attack was imminent.

Well-placed sources said there was no evidence Britain itself would have been the target. And the ammonium nitrate remained concealed in its ice packs, rather than removed and mixed – a much more advanced and dangerous state. On September 30, the Met made their move.

Officers used search warrants to raid four properties in north-west London – three businesses and one residential address. That same day a man in his 40s was arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences under Section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006. Neither his name nor his nationality have been disclosed.

His was the only arrest, although sources told The Telegraph at least two people were involved.  The man was released on bail. Eventually a decision was taken not to bring charges.

The exact reasons why remain unclear, but it is understood investigators were confident they had disrupted the plot and gained useful information about Hizbollah’s activities in Britain and overseas.

A UK intelligence source said: “MI5 worked independently and closely with international partners to disrupt the threat of malign intent from Iran and its proxies in the UK.”

The decision not to inform the public of the discovery, despite a major debate with Britain’s closest ally America about the success of the Iran nuclear deal, will raise eyebrows.

Keeping MPs in the dark amid a fierce debate about whether to designate the entire of Hezbollah a terrorist group – rather than just its militant wing – will also be questioned.

The US labelled the entire group a terrorist organisation in the 1990s. But in Britain, only its armed wing was banned. The set-up had led senior British counter-terrorism figures to believe there was some form of understanding that Hizbollah would not target the UK directly.

Hizbollah was only added to the banned terrorist group list in its entirety in February 2019 – more than three years after the plot was uncovered.

A spokesman for the press department of the Iranian Embassy in London said: « Iran has categorically rejected time and again any type of terrorism and extremism, has been victim of terrorism against its innocent people, and is in the forefront fighting this inhuman phenomenon.

« Any attempt to link Iran to terrorism, by claims from unknown sources, is totally rejected. »

Voir encore:

Comment la République islamique réprime les jeunes Iraniens

Malgré le non-respect que les jeunes citadins affichent pour les mesures islamiques, leurs témoignages révèlent qu’ils ont en partie intériorisé l’image négative que la société leur inflige à cause du rejet de ses normes et valeurs.

Mahnaz Shirali Sociologue politique, directrice d’études à l’ICP et enseignante à Sciences-Po
Huffington Post
03/06/2019

Quarante ans de la République islamique ont profondément désislamisé la population. Plus la politique étrangère de Téhéran isole le pays, plus les Iraniens s’éloignent du régime et de sa religion, et plus ils adoptent la culture occidentale.

Les jeunes Iraniens, qu’ils vivent à Téhéran ou dans les villes de provinces, ressemblent davantage à leurs pairs en Europe ou aux Etats-Unis qu’à leurs parents. Ils écoutent la même musique, s’habillent de la même manière et regardent les mêmes séries que les jeunes Parisiens ou New-Yorkais. Sauf que ces derniers ne connaissent pas le même décalage entre la vie privée et l’espace public et n’ont jamais subi les humiliations que les “agents de mœurs” de la République islamique infligent aux jeunes de leur pays.

L’analyse des témoignages des jeunes des grandes villes iraniennes et l’observation de leurs comportements sur les réseaux sociaux montrent que la politique sociale répressive des ayatollahs a produit des effets inattendus. La nouvelle génération de 15 à 25 ans vit dans le rejet du système de valeurs, promulgué par l’école et les médias de la République islamique. Pendant ces dernières décennies, le décalage entre l’espace public, maîtrisé par les agents de mœurs, et l’espace privé, où presque tout est permis, n’a cessé de progresser.

Pourtant, malgré le non-respect que les jeunes citadins affichent pour les mesures islamiques – vestimentaires, alimentaires, sexuelles, … –, leurs témoignages révèlent qu’en dépit de leur apparence rebelle, ils ont en partie intériorisé l’image négative que la société leur inflige à cause du rejet de ses normes et valeurs.

Cette image devient doublement négative lorsqu’ils se reprochent leur inaction, comme si la capacité d’agir sur leur sort et de faire valoir leurs droits fondamentaux ne dépendait que d’eux et de la volonté individuelle. Les catastrophes naturelles qui dévastent le pays (comme le tremblement de terre, les inondations ou les sècheresses, etc.) et les situations politiques ingérables (comme la menace de guerre, les sanctions économiques, ou certaines décisions politiques jugées inacceptables, etc.) aiguisent leur conscience de l’impuissance et déclenchent chez eux une avalanche de reproches et de haine de soi. Peut-être cette auto culpabilisation relève-t-elle d’un besoin de se sentir responsable, de se procurer une semblable illusion de puissance. Peut-être est-elle un simple mécanisme d’auto-défense. Mais, elle n’en reste pas moins destructrice pour autant, car elle les empêche d’avoir une vision objective de leur situation. Dans un pays où la moindre critique et protestation sont violemment réprimées, et où l’on peut encourir de lourdes peines de prisons pour avoir contesté une décision politique, quelle est la marge de manœuvre des individus?

Quatre décennies de l’atteinte physique, l’atteinte juridique, et l’atteinte à la dignité humaine ont profondément privé les jeunes de reconnaissance sociale et les ont affectés dans le sentiment de leur propre valeur. La non reconnaissance du droit et de l’estime sociale en Iran ont créé des conditions collectives dans lesquelles les jeunes ne peuvent parvenir à une attitude positive envers eux-mêmes. En l’absence de confiance en soi, de respect de soi, et d’estime de soi, nul n’est en mesure de s’identifier à ses fins et à ses désirs en tant qu’être autonome et individualisé. Or, faut-il s’étonner si, aujourd’hui, l’émigration est devenue la seule perspective de l’avenir des jeunes Iraniens?

Voir par ailleurs:

Did Team Obama Warn Iranian Terror Commander about Israeli Assassination Attempt?

Debra Heine
PJ media
January 11, 2018

A Kuwaiti newspaper reported last week that Washington gave Israel the green light to assassinate terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force (which has been designated a terrorist organization).

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens pointed out a disturbing detail in the story that has long been rumored but has gone largely unreported in the American press:

Bret Stephens @BretStephensNYT

The story here, Kuwaiti-sourced, is that Obama team tipped Tehran to an Israeli attempt to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general who has the blood of hundreds of American troops in his hand. What says @brhodes? https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.832387 

According to the report, Israel was « on the verge » of assassinating Soleimani three years ago near Damascus, but the Obama administration warned Iranian leadership of the plan, effectively quashing the operation. The incident reportedly « sparked a sharp disagreement between the Israeli and American security and intelligence apparatuses regarding the issue. »

Stephens tagged former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes in his tweet, but it was ignored until Obama’s former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor saw it on Wednesday:

Tommy Vietor @TVietor08

Yeah WTF Ben? Immediately confirm or deny this totally unsubstantiated claim and then tell us why you don’t support assassinations.

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Stephens responded by noting dryly that the Iran Contra scandal started in a similar way, and that the Obama administration certainly had no objection to assassinations when it came to other terrorists:

Vieter, who drove Obama’s press van before he became president, responded thus:

Tommy Vietor  @TVietor08

Yeah @BretStephensNYT taking out Osama bin Laden is the same as assassinating an Iranian political leader. https://twitter.com/bretstephensnyt/status/951216401301299202 …Stephens seemed taken aback:

Stephens seemed taken aback:
Bret Stephens @BretStephensNYT

Seriously, @TVietor08? Suleimani is an “Iranian political leader”? Actually he’s head of the Quds Force, which is a US designated sponsor of terrorism. Suleimani is sanctioned by name. Here, read about it: https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/hp644.aspx  https://twitter.com/tvietor08/status/951219021332074496 

Indeed, as the Washington Times reported in 2015, Shiite militants under Qassem Soleimani’s command are responsible for more than 500 U.S. service member deaths in Iraq between 2005-2011.

The Quds forces, led by Gen. Qassem Soleimani, set up factories to produce the weapon, which unleashes rocket-type projectiles that penetrate American armored vehicles. As head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, Gen. Soleimani is Iran’s top terrorist commander, committed to the downfall of Israel and the United States and the destabilization of governments in the region.

But Vieter wasn’t through digging. His next tweet all but confirmed the story.

Tommy Vietor @TVietor08

We were well aware of the dangers posed by QS and the IRGC. Obama sanctioned them repeatedly, among other deterrents. But an assassination of QS by Israel would be destabilizing to put it mildly.

Ben Rhodes finally weighed in, but it was too late.

Voir de même:

Report: U.S. Gives Israel Green Light to Assassinate Iranian General Soleimani
Al Jarida, a Kuwaiti newspaper which in recent years had broken exclusive stories from Israel, says Israel was ‘on the verge’ of assassinating Soleimani, but the U.S. warned Tehran and thwarted the operation
Haaretz
Jan 01, 2018

Washington gave Israel a green light to assassinate Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force, the overseas arm of Iran‘s Revolutionary Guard, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida reported on Monday.

Al-Jarida, which in recent years had broken exclusive stories from Israel, quoted a source in Jerusalem as saying that « there is an American-Israeli agreement » that Soleimani is a « threat to the two countries’ interests in the region. » It is generally assumed in the Arab world that the paper is used as an Israeli platform for conveying messages to other countries in the Middle East.

The agreement between Israel and the United States, according to the report, comes three years after Washington thwarted an Israeli attempt to kill the general.

The report says Israel was « on the verge » of assassinating Soleimani three years ago, near Damascus, but the United States warned the Iranian leadership of the plan, revealing that Israel was closely tracking the Iranian general.

The incident, the report said, « sparked a sharp disagreement between the Israeli and American security and intelligence apparatuses regarding the issue. »

The Kuwaiti report also identified Iran’s second in command in Syria, known as « Abu Baker, » as Mohammad Reda Falah Zadeh. It said he also « might be a target » for Israel, as well as other actors in the region.

Voir enfin:

Iran appoints fiery general who vows to destroy Israel as new IRGC head
Hossein Salami takes command of hardline military force weeks after US blacklisted it as a terror group; Mohammed Ali Jafari pushed out after over a decade at the helm
The Times of Israel
21 April 2019

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, right, arrives at a graduation ceremony of the Revolutionary Guard’s officers, while deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Salami, second right, former commanders of the Revolutionary Guard Mohsen Rezaei, second left, and Yahya Rahim Safavi salute him, on May 20, 2015, in Tehran, Iran. (Official website of the Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP)

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei shuffled the top ranks of the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Sunday, appointing the deputy chief of the hardline force as its top leader.

Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami was made commander of the IRGC, replacing Maj. Gen. Mohammed Ali Jafari, who has headed the military force since 2007, according to Iranian media reports.

Salami has frequently vowed to destroy Israel and “break America.” Iran was “planning to break America, Israel, and their partners and allies. Our ground forces should cleanse the planet from the filth of their existence,” Salami said in February. The previous month, he vowed to wipe Israel off the “global political map,” and to unleash an “inferno” on the Jewish state.

Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, the new head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. (YouTube screen capture)

He also said “Iran has warned the Zionist regime not to play with fire, because they will be destroyed before the US helps them.” Any new war, he said, “will result in Israel’s defeat within three days, in a way that they will not find enough graves to bury their dead.”

The IRGC shakeup comes weeks after the US designated the group a terror organization, the first time it has ever blacklisted an entire military branch under the rule.

Tehran has raged against the move, and responded by labeling the US military a terror group under its own designation. It also rallied around the IRGC, with some lawmakers dressing in the division’s uniforms in parliament in reaction to the designation.

Jafari had called the American move “laughable,” even while warning of a possible retaliation.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was formed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, with a mission to defend the clerical regime, and the force has amassed strong power both at home and abroad.

The Guards’ prized unit is the Quds Force, headed by powerful general Qassem Soleimani, which supports Iran-backed forces around the region, including Syrian President Bashar Assad and Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.

It also oversees the country’s ballistic missile program and runs its own intelligence operations.

Jafari was demoted to the post of commander of a cultural and educational division, according to reports.

Agencies contributed to this report.

Voir par ailleurs:

Rewriting the Iranian Revolution
A new book attempts to portray the Shah of Iran as a frustrated democrat
Amir-Hussein Radjy
The New Republic
July 6, 2017

On November 5, 1978, rioters put Tehran to the torch while the army stood by. “Not even a bloody nose,” the shah had instructed his generals from his home in the city’s northern hills, Niavaran Palace. Before the winter’s end, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the last in 2,500 years of shahs of Iran, would leave his throne for exile. Morose, melancholy and withdrawn, he barely resembled the resolute tyrant of Reza Baraheni’s Crowned Cannibals, the late 70s bestseller that depicted the shah’s rule as a period of macabre palace orgies and prisons brimming with dissident youth.

Baraheni’s book, fêted by America’s literati and reprinted in part by the New York Review of Books, contained many fabrications. The shah undoubtedly ran a repressive and undemocratic regime, but his vilification by human rights activists and the press in the seventies provided a new wave of revisionist historians with an easy foil. Andrew Scott Cooper in his first book, Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East, linked the souring attitude toward Iran in the West with the shah’s insistence on maintaining high oil prices. In between, Cooper, seemingly, has succumbed to the charms of Iran’s last royal family. And no wonder: In an age of “Islamic terrorism,” the shah, a secular modernizer who spoke flawless French, appears sympathetic and comprehensible.

A former Human Rights Watch researcher, Cooper delights in refuting the “charnel house” image of the shah’s rule. The shah once balked at the New York Times’ comparison of him with Louis XIV. “I’m the leader of a revolution,” he replied, “the Bourbon was the very soul of reaction.” The monarch, who ruled absolutely, wished to be remembered as a liberalizer. Cooper complies—he points out the moment in 1977 when the shah threw open his jails to the Red Cross. Amnesty International had reported 25,000 to 100,000 political prisoners—the Red Cross ended up finding some 3,000. The shah’s human rights record was nowhere near as grim as Iran’s revolutionaries, or indeed President Jimmy Carter, believed.

In The Fall of Heaven, his new book on the Pahlavi dynasty’s final days, Cooper attempts to portray Iran’s last monarch as a frustrated democrat, arguing that the shah’s liberalization program begun during the final years of his reign was ill-timed—right when American support for the shah, under pressure from human rights campaigners, wavered. Cooper cleverly moves the shah’s third wife, Farah Pahlavi, at once a Marie Antoinette figure and the saving grace of a corrupt regime, toward center stage of the royal pageant, always highlighting, but never overstating her role by the shah’s side.

On the afternoon of the riots, Cooper recounts, the U.S. ambassador Bill Sullivan, summoned by the shah for an audience, could find no-one, not even a footman amid the palace’s empty rooms, to lead him to the king. Iran’s Imperial Government was in disarray. At last, from a side door in the hall, out walked the queen, who was astonished to find Sullivan dawdling in the shadows. She led him to the shah, sequestered away in his private study. Unbeknownst to all but a handful of close associates and doctors, the shah was dying of cancer. Houchang Nahavandi, a regime insider, declares in his biography of the shah that the queen held a “de facto” regency in the final months. It is, doubtless, an exaggeration, but reflects the controversy about Farah Pahlavi and her circle, whose influence grew as the monarchy waned in 1978.

The following day, the shah appeared on national television. “I once again repeat my oath to the Iranian nation to undertake not to allow the past mistakes, unlawful acts, oppression and corruption to recur but to make up for them,” he said. “I have heard the revolutionary message of you the people.” It was an astonishing mea culpa. Had not the shah, after weeks of refusing, just appointed a military government of order? In private, he repudiated the speech (written by two of the queen’s aides). But there was little he could do. Within months, Pahlavi Iran, a showcase for Westernization, yielded to the Islamic state led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The ally, praised by President Carter the year before as an “island of stability” in a troubled region, turned into one of America’s staunchest foes. An era of Islamist revolutions across the Middle East had begun.

To all appearances in Washington, the shah—who had firmly led his country through two decades of social and economic progress—wasn’t going anywhere. In early August 1978, the CIA reassured the White House that Iran was not even in a “pre-revolutionary situation.” No one could imagine Iran without the shah. The Communists had been violently suppressed, the liberal opposition silenced, and the Islamists—well, the Shia clergy were powerful, but had they ever ruled?

Within a month of his audience with the shah, Sullivan fired off another report countenancing just that. It was titled: “Thinking the Unthinkable.” He foresaw a “Gandhi-like” position for Khomeini in the new Iran. While the White House hesitated over the suggested blueprint for action, Sullivan’s confidence in his own judgment and good intentions gently wreaked havoc on U.S. support for the shah. The ambassador’s rogue overtures to the Islamist opposition, including Khomeini, exiled in Paris, infuriated Carter, and contributed toward growing confusion over U.S. policy among palace officials.

Yet the shah was not a victim of history, as both Cooper’s book and the shah’s own memoirs, Answer to History, which he penned in exile, would suggest. The shah needed little help bringing about his own demise. “This country is lost because the shah cannot make up his mind,” an Iranian general told Sullivan. “You must know this and you must tell this to your government.” The king was neither able to accept the idea of reducing himself to a figurehead in a parliamentary government, nor of killing thousands to preserve his throne. He could not believe that Khomeini, whom he described as a “worn fanatic old man,” would overthrow him. His people were ungrateful.

The Fall of Heaven parses what went wrong in the 1970s, leaning heavily on the memoirs and testimony of regime loyalists, alive and dead. Cooper seems influenced by Asadollah Alam, the powerful minister of court who doubled as royal confidante, and wrote a close account of the shah’s rule, which he locked away in a Swiss bank. In his diaries, as at court, Alam was indefatigably shrewd: With an eye—one suspects—on posterity, he exonerated himself, heaping blame for the regime’s abuses on his rival the prime minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda. The court minister bemoaned the government’s arrogance toward the mass of Iranians, and dared utter criticisms to his master—albeit wrapped in thick and courtly blandishments—when Hoveyda did not. “Pride comes before a fall,” he wrote about the shah’s hero, Charles De Gaulle, “though such absolute self-confidence is surely a sign of genius.” In his will, Alam stipulated his diaries be published when the Pahlavis no longer ruled Iran. He died a year before the revolution.

The feeling has long existed in royalist circles that had the shah allowed critical voices at court, he might have been less perplexed by the sudden explosion of discontent following an economic downturn in the late 1970s. The independent-minded Farah, The Fall of Heaven underlines, was known for speaking up. Accounts like Nahavandi’s claim she never broke the cordon sanitaire around the shah. But Cooper reveals a series of sensational meetings between the queen and Parviz Sabeti, a senior officer in the shah’s feared intelligence services, who went to the queen with his dossiers on the corruption among courtiers and the royal family, after being stonewalled by his superiors. “How can my son,” Farah cried, “become king if this is going on?” When the shah heeded such warnings, it was too much, too late. In early November 1978, he acquiesced to the arrest of dozens of former officials, among them Hoveyda, recently dismissed from office, whom his rivals denounced as responsible for the regime’s greed.

Only when things began to go patently wrong, after student protests erupted in the religious city of Qom in January 1978, did the queen’s political influence become decisive at court, encouraging the shah to pursue his liberalization program and to appease the swelling opposition. In the decade before, the queen had asserted herself as the patron of Iran’s cultural avant-garde—hosting Andy Warhol in Tehran and laying the foundations for the commercial success of a generation of freethinking Iranian artists—as well as causes like rural literacy and environmental conservation.

Yet the shah, like his court minister, had suspected his wife’s liberalism as an import from Paris, where she had studied, and her circle of left-leaning intellectuals as mere devotees of radical chic. “An angel of purity,” Alam said, “but she is inexperienced and impulsive.” The queen could not understand why a man would be jailed for reading Anton Chekhov—and interceded for the release of such prisoners. When the shah turned toward his wife for political advice in his final year on the throne, his congenital suspicion toward her democratic views, unlike what Cooper writes, never really diminished—or his ambivalence about her political role. “You don’t have to be Joan of Arc,” he told the queen, when she offered to stay behind as a symbol for the few royalists left.

By the time the shah began a program of liberalization—relaxing, as he had suppressed years before, freedoms of press, speech and protest—it was too late. Muhammad Reza had always displayed fastidious respect for counsel and the letter of the constitution whenever his authority was weakest. It is, however, difficult to judge the sincerity of princes. “The problem this time was that no one, not his most devoted supporters, and certainly not his foes,” Cooper observes, without irony, “could imagine that the king who relished power as much as he did would ever voluntarily relinquish it.”

It is no wonder a thin web of counterfactuals hangs over The Fall of Heaven—the success of revolutions like the Iranian, or the Russian or the French, rely upon magnificent contingencies. Cooper even suggests that the disappearance of the Iranian-Lebanese Shiite leader, the Imam Musa Sadr, while visiting Libya in August 1978, foiled a brewing concordat between the shah and Iran’s senior clergy, who by and large were wary of Khomeini’s radicalism. The New York Times review judged “fanciful” the theory that Sadr, however charismatic, could have reversed the course of Iranian and Shia history.

What might have happened differently has been, since the shah’s exile, the ceaseless parlor game of ancien régimistes. Cooper’s book, perhaps unintentionally, plays along, encouraging the reader toward the conclusion that—had the shah not been weakened by cancer, or had Carter more firmly expressed his support for the monarchy, or had the Iranian people been grateful for the shah’s many real achievements—Iran would have moved toward a benign, British-style constitutional monarchy. “The Shah spent the last two and half years of his reign,” Cooper concludes, “dismantling personal rule in an attempt to democratize Iranian political life.”

Few historians will agree with Cooper’s out-and-out revisionism. That the shah was planning free elections—conveniently in the future—obscures the point of his anti-democratic character. His most ardent loyalists, chief among them Alam, knew this. Biographers of the monarch’s last years, beginning with William Shawcross’s unsurpassable The Shah’s Last Ride (1988), have always understood that he was as much an opportunist as he was a visionary—how else could he have survived 37 years on the Peacock Throne? Then again, curiously, The Fall of Heaven—whose title recalls the country’s halcyon days as an economic and political leader in the Middle East—reflects how many Iranians feel today. “This sober narrative,” the exiled journalist Nazila Fathi wrote in the Washington Post, “will resonate with many Iranians—including myself—who lived under the grim conditions Khomeini introduced after the revolution.” Historians should resist the temptation to view the past as mere prologue, however grim the present.

The Iranian revolution, we can say glancing at the tempest of Islamic movements that swept the world afterward, was one of the foundational events of the twenty-first century. But it would be a mistake to say that history has vindicated the après-moi-le-déluge attitude of the shah. The Iranian historian Abbas Milani in The Shah (2011), a far more balanced portrait, concludes that Muhammad Reza “arguably made the worst possible choice” at every critical juncture in the revolution. The shah’s story resonates with us as the tragedies of Sophocles or Shakespeare do—as tales of the hubris of men who believe they are doing good, but who instead work horrible mistakes.

And indeed, Cooper reminds us that the American and British actors in the tragedy of Iran’s revolution were as hapless as anyone else. “We should be careful not to over-generalize from the Iranian case,” Carter’s national security advisor wrote the day after Khomeini’s return to Iran. “Islamic revivalist movements are not sweeping the Middle East and are not likely to be the wave of the future.”

Amir-Hussein Radjy is a writer. He lives in Cairo.

11 Responses to Iran: C’est la nature du régime, imbécile ! (Forty years on, will Europe finally understand the Islamic republic’s vital commitment to the revolutionary principle of permanent war on US interests and allies ?)

  1. jcdurbant dit :

    WHAT IRANIAN PROVOCATIONS ?

    “There’s a political strategy underlying this for Iran. The goal is to get the U.S. to “swerve” and slow its sanctions designations and enforcement, or, potentially “get the administration interested in premature diplomacy and have the administration try to reward Iran for coming to the table.”

    Behnam Ben Taleblu (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies)

    According to Capt. Bill Urban, U.S. Central Command’s top spokesman, the video shows men aboard an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps military patrol boat returning to one of the abandoned tankers, the M/T Kokuka Courageous, and removing an unexploded mine from its damaged hull…

    https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2019/06/pompeo-blames-tanker-attacks-iran-offers-no-evidence/157719/?oref=defenseone_today_nl

    J’aime

  2. jcdurbant dit :

    WHAT IRANIAN PROVOCATIONS ?

    If the point of the attack was to signal that there’ll be disruptions to the flow of oil in the Strait of Hormuz until U.S. sanctions are lifted, the regime may have wanted to minimize damage to the ship. Had they detonated the mine at the water line, water would have rushed in and potentially threatened the ship, magnifying this crisis internationally possibly beyond Iran’s comfort zone. Detonating it above the water line sent a message without putting the ship in danger. According to CBS, “Katada said the crew members also spotted an Iranian naval ship nearby, but didn’t specify whether that was before or after the attacks.” Did divers from the Iranian ship sneak up and plant the mines? (…) If not and if Katada is right that something was fired at the ship instead of planted on it, wouldn’t the crew have noticed where the fire was coming from? (…) Is Katada maybe worried about further attacks by Iran and potentially other impediments to his shipping business in the Gulf, figuring that placating the Iranians here by spinning some story that contradicts the U.S. account of what happened might save him some trouble in the future?

    https://hotair.com/archives/2019/06/14/owner-tanker-attacked-gulf-contradicts-pentagon-hit-flying-objects-not-mines

    J’aime

  3. jcdurbant dit :

    WHAT EUROPEAN HYPOCRISY ?

    Despite the video footage, the proximity of the attacks to the Iranian naval base, the open threats against shipping in the Straits of Hormuz made by Tangsiri and other senior Iranian officials in recent weeks, and the IRGC’s aggressive detainment of the crew of the Front Altair — the second ship attacked on Thursday — Germany, the EU, Russia, and China refused to admit that Iran carried out the attacks. The European Union similarly refuses to lay the blame on Iran. It released a statement saying, “While we are gathering additional information and evidence and consolidating the elements available, we will refrain from speculations and premature conclusions.” Russia also refuses to acknowledge that Iran is behind the attacks. China’s President Xi Jinping met with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at a high-profile summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Council on Friday. There, he pledged to develop a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Iran. Even Japan, whose Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in the middle of a meeting with Khamenei in Tehran when the Japanese and Norwegian tankers were bombed, has yet to acknowledge that Iran was responsible for the attacks. Abe was in Tehran hoping to mediate between Khamenei and President Donald Trump. Kahmenei flatly refused his offer.

    On the face of it, the refusal of ostensible U.S. allies like Germany, Japan, and the EU — and U.S. adversaries like China and Russia — to acknowledge Iran’s obvious guilt for the attacks on oil shipping and pipelines in the Persian Gulf region over the past month is odd. Don’t they want to end Iran’s aggression? Why would they shield Iran from responsibility for aggression that threatens the global economy and threatens their own economic interests far more than it threatens U.S. economic interests? After all, since the U.S. began producing shale oil, U.S. exposure to global oil shocks has dramatically decreased. The U.S. today is the largest oil producing country. States like Japan and China are much more vulnerable to oil supply disruptions from the Straits of Hormuz and the Bab al Mandab, another maritime choke point now controlled by Iran’s Houthi proxies in Yemen.

    There are various reasons that a variety of governments do not wish to acknowledge Iran’s responsibility for the attacks. First, as has been reported, Maas and Abe were both in Iran ostensibly to reinstate negotiations between Iran and the U.S. As self-appointed mediators, the Japanese and the Europeans likely wish to be seen as neutral parties. They likely fear that by acknowledging that Iran is responsible for the attacks on shipping, Iran will refuse to speak to them.

    As for negotiations, the Europeans – led by the Germans – have refused to accept any U.S. demands for significant revisions of the 2015 nuclear deal the Obama administration led them in concluding with the Iranian regime. In the lead up to Trump’s decision last May to pull out of the nuclear deal, senior state department official Brian Hook conducted intensive negotiations with the EU to convince them to make substantive changes in the agreement. They refused.

    If they acknowledge that Iran is behind the attacks in the Persian Gulf, it will make it more difficult for them to maintain their position that Iran’s terrorism, and other forms of aggression, as well as its missile tests are all of a piece with its nuclear proliferation. If that happens, they will be hard pressed to maintain their stubborn allegiance to the 2015 deal, which is founded on the false premise that Iran is an inherently peaceful, non-hostile actor that just needs to be appeased.

    Another reason that so many governments – both hostile and ostensibly allied with the U.S. — refuse to acknowledge Iran’s effectively self-evident responsibility for the tanker attacks is because doing so will make it more difficult for them to argue against U.S. sanctions.

    Governments in Japan, Germany, China and other states are interested in ending or abating U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. As Benny Avni argued Wednesday in the New York Sun, the German and Japanese push to renew negotiations between Iran and the U.S. is at least in part due to their desire “to revive the smooth flow of goods and business with Iran.” Their diplomacy, he argued, “is meant to put pressure on Washington to start a process that would lead to direct talks. Iran, they claim, will behave better now that its economy is strained. America should take advantage and aim for a fresh rapprochement,” he wrote.

    Obviously, Iran’s wanton and repeated aggression against peaceful maritime traffic in international waterways is evidence that the contrary is true. Iran is certainly hurting economically as a result of U.S. sanctions. But its response is not to improve its behavior in order to diminish U.S. economic pressure. Rather, Iran is responding to the U.S. sanctions by escalating its aggression, thus proving that the Trump administration’s decision to renew and strengthen economic sanctions against Iran was justified and reasonable.

    It is difficult to imagine that mere embarrassment will pry the Europeans away from their preference for ignoring the reality of Iranian aggression in order to pursue their longstanding policy of appeasing Iran and its terrorist proxies. Germany and the EU still refuse to acknowledge that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is permitted to operate openly in EU states despite the fact that it has been caught planning and carrying out terrorist attacks in Europe repeatedly in recent years. Indeed, Britain took no action against Hezbollah after Israel tipped it off in 2015 that Hezbollah had built a bomb factory in North London. The British Parliament only outlawed the Iranian proxy force in February 2019.

    Whereas Britain, with its close ties to the U.S., has sometimes evinced a willingness to abandon general European appeasement of terrorists and state sponsors of terror, Germany, France, and other major European governments have never entertained the prospect of abandoning appeasement for confrontation, let alone defeating terrorists and their state sponsors. Acknowledging Iran’s aggression is largely inconceivable for Germany and its EU partners.

    As for Russia and China, their refusal to take action against Iran stems in part from their strategic competition with the United States. If they admit that Iran is behind the attacks, like the Europeans and the Japanese, they will need to admit that the U.S. strategy of maximum pressure is reasonable and justified. Such an admission would strengthen the U.S. position.

    Admitting Iran’s responsibility would empower the U.S. to diminish Iran’s capacity to continue committing acts of naval aggression, either directly or through its Houthi proxy. As Jim Hanson from the Security Studies Group suggested on Fox News, such action could include U.S. strikes against Houthi bases in Yemen or IRGC bases in Jask or other locations.

    Given the behavior of U.S. allies and adversaries in light of Iran’s self-evident aggression against merchant tankers in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. cannot expect to operate with their support as it pursues its goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and denying the regime the means to continue sponsoring terrorism and aggression against the U.S. and its regional and global allies.

    As a consequence, going forward, the Trump administration must continue to place all of its evidence of Iranian aggression on the table and continue to pursue its policy of maximum aggression. Unlike appeasement, the U.S.’s policy is based on reality. And so, unlike appeasement, it is a policy with the potential to actually succeed.

    Caroline Glick

    https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/06/17/caroline-glick-why-foreign-governments-are-shielding-iran/

    J’aime

  4. jcdurbant dit :

    QUEL DOUBLE LANGAGE DES MOLLAHS ET DE POUTINE ? (La seule chose qu’il leur reste, c’est leur pouvoir de nuisance)

    « Cela s’inscrit dans la ligne politique engagée par l’Iran depuis quarante ans. Ils déploient une politique de chantage sans pour autant l’assumer. Ils déploient une politique de chantage sans pour autant l’assumer. Ils jettent de l’huile sur le feu, mais de manière modérée. La seule chose qu’il leur reste, c’est leur pouvoir de nuisance. »

    Mahnaz Shirali

    Et si les Gardiens de la révolution ont nié fermement toute « confrontation avec des navires étrangers, y compris Britanniques, au cours des dernières 24 heures », ils ont aussi déclaré dans la foulée que les États-Unis et le Royaume-Uni « regretteront amèrement » l’affaire de Gibraltar.

    Un double discours qui n’étonne pas la directrice d’étude à l’Institut catholique de Paris et spécialiste de l’Iran, Mahnaz Shirali : « Cela s’inscrit dans la ligne politique engagée par l’Iran depuis quarante ans. Ils déploient une politique de chantage sans pour autant l’assumer. Ils jettent de l’huile sur le feu, mais de manière modérée. »

    Du côté des alliés de l’Iran, la réaction ne s’est pas fait attendre. « Washington a tout fait pour que cette crise, cette aggravation, persiste », a dénoncé le vice-ministre russe des Affaires étrangères, Sergueï Riabkov, qui a exprimé sa crainte d’une « confrontation directe ». Acculé par la politique « de pression maximale » mise en place par Washington depuis un an, et qui asphyxie son économie, Téhéran s’est lancé début mai dans une politique offensive vis-à-vis de l’Occident.

    Reprise du programme de développement nucléaire, destruction d’un drone américain sur son territoire, sont autant de signaux de détresse envoyés par l’Iran. Car si les tensions grimpent de jour en jour avec les États-Unis et leur allié britannique, Téhéran prend soin de ne jamais franchir la ligne rouge qui mènerait à un conflit armé…

    https://www.la-croix.com/Monde/Moyen-Orient/LIran-bande-muscles-tente-dempecher-passage-dun-petrolier-britannique-2019-07-11-1201034913

    J’aime

  5. jcdurbant dit :

    ATTENTION: UN VANDALISME POLITIQUE PEUT EN CACHER UN AUTRE !

    https://www.24heures.ch/monde/L-ambassadeur-anglais-compromet-encore-Trump/story/31032673

    Oui, un accord tellement brillant qu’il contraignait aussi bien les EU d’Obama que le Royaume-uni de Cameron et May comme les gouvernements de leurs alliés à fermer les yeux sur non seulement denotoires dérives ballistiques mais, du Yemen à la Syrie et du Liban à la Palestine, la mise à feu et à sang de la totalité du Moyen-Orient ! Sans compter, excusez du peu, la découverte de pas moins d’une tonne d’explosifs stockée à Londres pour d’éventuels attentats terroristes !

    http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/un-complot-terroriste-decouvert-a-londres-et-lie-a-l-iran-garde-secret-20190610

    Et, complot pour complot, on pourrait aussi se demander pourquoi ça sort maintenant et à qui profite le crime ?

    https://fr.gatestoneinstitute.org/14109/collusion-ue-iran

    J’aime

  6. jcdurbant dit :

    QUEL TERRORISME D’ETAT IRANIEN ? (Et quelle politique d’apaisement française ?)

    En juin, lors d’un conseil de défense, il a été demandé aux services secrets français, pour faciliter le dialogue avec Téhéran, de mettre en sourdine leurs inquiétudes sur ce qu’ils qualifient de « terrorisme d’Etat ». Les services français ont toujours à l’esprit, en effet, le projet d’attentat avorté ayant ciblé, le 30 juin 2018, un rassemblement, à Villepinte, au nord de Paris, des Moudjahidine du peuple, mouvement d’opposition au régime iranien. La tentative avait échoué après l’arrestation en Belgique, le jour même, d’un couple d’origine iranienne. Les enquêteurs avaient trouvé dans leur véhicule 500 grammes d’explosifs de type TATP et un détonateur. A en croire les services de renseignement, ils recevaient leurs ordres d’un diplomate iranien, Assadollah ­Assadi, en poste en Autriche depuis 2014. Une grande part des informations avaient été fournies aux Français et aux Belges par le Mossad, l’un des services secrets israéliens. « Cette affaire est gravissime, elle aurait pu faire un carnage, assure un membre de la communauté du renseignement français, c’est notre Skripal à nous [Sergueï Skripal, un ex-agent russe passé à l’ennemi britannique, fut victime, en mars 2018, d’une tentative d’empoisonnement, dans le sud de l’Angleterre, perpétrée par le renseignement militaire russe], mais il faut faire profil bas. » La certitude de l’implication du régime iranien fut si forte que, le 2 octobre 2018, Paris accusa publiquement l’Iran d’avoir commandité le projet, ce que Téhéran a vivement démenti. Le gouvernement français annonça qu’il allait geler les avoirs en France du vice-ministre du renseignement iranien chargé des opérations, de M. Asadi et de la direction de la sécurité intérieure du ministère du renseignement de Téhéran. Un espion iranien, agissant sous couverture diplomatique à Paris, fut expulsé en septembre 2018. Mais, selon les services, la riposte française est loin d’avoir été à la hauteur, d’autant que les personnes visées n’avaient pas d’actifs en France…​

    https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/07/31/les-services-secrets-francais-pries-de-moderer-leurs-critiques-sur-l-iran_5495233_3210.html

    J’aime

  7. jcdurbant dit :

    AU MOINS UN AMERICAIN QUI A COMPRIS LA VRAIE NATURE DU REGIME IRANIEN (As long as its leaders consider Iran less a nation-state than a revolutionary cause, it will remain a terrorist threat potentially more dangerous than Al Qaeda or ISIS)

    “From my first day at CENTCOM, I knew we faced two principal adversaries: stateless Sunni Islamist terrorists and the revolutionary Shiite regime of Iran, the most destabilizing country in the region. Iran was by far the more deadly of the two threats. (…) Attorney General Eric Holder said the bombing plot was ‘directed and approved by elements of the Iranian government and, specifically, senior members of the Qods Force.’ The Qods were the Special Operations Force of the Revolutionary Guards, reporting to the top of the Iranian government. (…) I saw the intelligence: we had recorded Tehran’s approval of the operation. Had the bomb gone off, those in the restaurant and on the street would have been ripped apart, blood rushing down sewer drains. It would have been the worst attack on us since 9/11. I sensed that only Iran’s impression of America’s impotence could have led them to risk such an act within a couple of miles of the White House. Absent one fundamental mistake — the terrorists had engaged an undercover DEA agent in an attempt to smuggle the bomb — the Iranians would have pulled off this devastating attack. Had that bomb exploded, it would have changed history. I believed we had to respond forcefully. My military options would raise the cost for this attack beyond anything the mullahs and the Qods generals could pay,” he writes. “First, though, the President had to go before the American people and forcefully lay out the enormous savagery of the intended attack. The American public — and the global public — had to understand the gravity of the plot. In March 1917, President Wilson received, via British intelligence, a copy of a telegram sent by German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the president of Mexico.” The Germans proposed an alliance that would see Mexico recovering parts of Texas and other states if it helped Germany on America’s entry into the war. Outraged, Wilson publicized the telegram to alert and mobilize the public. As President Wilson had done, so too should President Obama go before the American public, lay out the evidence, denounce the Iranian regime, and hold it to account. Washington was not interested in my Zimmermann analogy. We treated an act of war as a law enforcement violation, jailing the low-level courier.(…) I proposed to Washington that we launch another drone on the same track, position a few F-18 aircraft out of sight, and shoot down the Iranian aircraft if it attacked the drone. The White House refused to grant permission. I wanted calculated actions, to restrain the regime so it couldn’t thrust us into a war. If you allow yourself to be goaded and trifled with, one of two things will happen: eventually a harder, larger fight will explode, or you will get moved out of the neighborhood. In my view, we had to hold Iran to account and strike back when attacked. But there was a reason for the administration’s restraint. The administration was secretly negotiating with Iran, although I was not privy to the details at the time. In my military judgment, America had undertaken a poorly calculated, long-shot gamble. At the same time, the administration was lecturing our Arab friends that they had to accommodate Iran as if it were a moderate neighbor in the region and not an enemy committed to their destruction. As long as its leaders consider Iran less a nation-state than a revolutionary cause, Iran will remain a terrorist threat potentially more dangerous than Al Qaeda or ISIS. While I fully endorse civilian control of the military, I would not surrender my independent judgment. In 2010, I argued strongly against pulling all our troops out of Iraq. In 2011, I urged retaliation against Iran for plotting to blow up a restaurant in our nation’s capital. In 2012, I argued for retaining a small but capable contingent of troops in Afghanistan. Each step along the way, I argued for political clarity and offered options that gave the Commander in Chief a rheostat he could dial up or down to protect our nation. In December 2012, I received an unauthorized phone call telling me that in an hour, the Pentagon would be announcing my relief. I was leaving a region aflame and in disarray The Iranians had not been held to account, and I anticipated that they would feel emboldened to challenge us more in the future.”

    US General Jim Mattis

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/act-of-war-mattis-says-obamas-inept-response-to-cafe-milano-bomb-plot-emboldened-iran

    J’aime

  8. jcdurbant dit :

    WHAT DESIGN FLAW IN THE POLICY OF MAXIMUM PRESSURE ON IRAN ? (When America pressures Iran to rein in its proxies sowing chaos in the Middle East, guess whose side the Economist blames for raising the risks of war ?)

    President Donald Trump says America’s forces are “locked and loaded” to strike at those responsible for the devastating drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s industry on September 14th. Is he about to pull the trigger for another American war in the Middle East?

    Responsibility for the strikes on the Khurais oilfield and the Abqaiq oil-processing facility — the biggest such plant in the world — was claimed by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels fighting a Saudi-led coalition in the war in Yemen. But American officials dismissed this notion. Not only was the weaponry involved made in Iran, they say. They also believe the attacks had come not from the south-east of the Arabian peninsula, ie, Yemen, but the north, from Iraq, where Iran runs proxy Shia militias; or indeed from the territory of Iran itself. “Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply,” tweeted Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state. “There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.”

    Mr Trump was more bellicose but, notably, less specific. He did not name Iran, though he suggested America knew who was responsible for the attacks, and was awaiting confirmation from Saudi Arabia as to the culprit. Within hours, the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen mostly endorsed Mr Pompeo’s account.

    Even so, Mr Trump has been here before with his threats of war. He used the same “locked and loaded” phrase to menace North Korea in August 2017, before he met and “fell in love” with its dictator, Kim Jong Un, the next year. And just three months ago, Mr Trump revealed America had also been “cocked and loaded” when he aborted an air-raid against Iran just ten minutes before it was due to strike, because of the likely civilian casualties.

    That planned raid was to punish Iran for shooting down an American surveillance drone, one of a series of Iranian provocations in recent months. They have included sabotage attacks, blamed on Iranian proxies, on ships in the Gulf; frequent drone strikes from the Houthis in Yemen (Mr Pompeo tweeted that Iran was behind “nearly 100” attacks on Saudi Arabia); and Iran’s announcement in July that it had breached limits imposed on its stockpile of low-enriched uranium that it accepted in 2015 in its agreement with world powers on curbing its nuclear program, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

    Mr Trump was elected on a promise to get America out of its drawn-out wars in the Middle East, and has often sought to draw down America’s military presence in the region. Indeed, his reluctance to resort to military action is one of many differences of opinion that led to the departure of his hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton.

    Yet the attacks on Abqaiq and Khurais — if Iran was indeed responsible — are its most serious provocations yet. That is one of three reasons why Mr Trump’s latest threats may be more substantial than his earlier ones. The second is their very familiarity. A man as conscious of his own image and importance as the president will not want to become known for repeatedly crying wolf.

    Third is what Emile Hokayem, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank in London, calls a “design flaw” in the policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran that America adopted when Mr Trump pulled it out of the JCPOA last year. The policy, of crippling Iran’s economy through sanctions in the hope of forcing it to abandon its nuclear programme and rein in its proxies elsewhere in the Middle East, “lacks a strategy of escalation”. Iran, for its part, certainly does have such a strategy. As it steadily ratchets up its provocations, America and its Saudi allies risk looking toothless.

    At the very least, faint hopes that Mr Trump might meet Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, in the next few weeks seem dashed. The idea for the first such presidential summit since the Iranian revolution in 1979 was pushed by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, at the G7 summit in Biarritz last month. Mr Trump and Mr Rouhani seemed to entertain the idea, but it was always opposed by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Some think the attack on Saudi Arabia is an attempt by hardliners to scupper any hope of a rapprochement.

    The oil market, badly disrupted by the lost production, may in fact be a deterrent to American military action. Part of the immediate spike in the price (of about 20% initially, before easing back) was the result of the supply shock. It reduced Saudi oil output by nearly 60%, and the world’s by 6%. Saudi officials said they hoped to restore one-third of production by the end of Monday. But getting back to pre-attack levels will take weeks.

    In response, Mr Trump on Sunday authorised the release of stocks from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to “keep the markets well-supplied”. He also said the government would expedite approvals of oil projects in Texas and elsewhere. The pressure on the price, however, comes not just from the big cut in production, but from the mounting fear of conflict—ie, of much more severe disruption to come. With worries growing about the problems facing the global economy, war in the Middle East would hardly be a solution.

    https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2019/09/16/the-attack-on-saudi-oil-facilities-raises-the-risks-of-war

    J’aime

  9. jcdurbant dit :

    LA REVOLUTION ISLAMIQUE A UN NOUVEAU GARDIEN (Danseur mondain: Devinez qui vient de resigner avec les mollahs pour une nouvelle saison de Dance avec les dictateurs ?)

    Le 23 septembre 2019, dans un palace près du siège de l’ONU à New-York, le président français s’est entretenu longuement avec son homologue iranien, Hassan Rohani. Devant les caméras et les nombreux journalistes, les deux leaders ont échangé une chaleureuse poignée de mains. Pourtant, quelques heures plus tôt, Macron, le Premier ministre britannique Johnson et la chancelière allemande Merkel, avaient publié ensemble un communiqué musclé et ont clairement haussé le ton contre Téhéran. Ils désignaient sans équivoque l’Iran comme le responsable des attaques contre les installations pétrolières saoudiennes et exhortaient les Ayatollahs à s’abstenir de toute nouvelle provocation. Ce n’est pas la première fois que Macron rencontre Rohani et les deux hommes s’entretiennent fréquemment au téléphone et échangent des missives. Le chef de la diplomatie iranienne Zarif est le bienvenu à Paris et était persona grata également au dernier sommet du G7 à Biarritz. Bizarre de constater que Macron préfère rencontrer de nombreuses fois des leaders de la République islamique iranienne et non le Premier ministre de l’Etat juif où la communauté française est la plus importante du Moyen-Orient. Sa visite officielle tant promise à Jérusalem est reportée, une fois encore, sine die… Mais en fait que cherche-t-elle vraiment la France ? Une confrontation avec l’Amérique de Trump ? Mettre en colère les Israéliens et prouver que Nétanyahou est un belliqueux ? « L’enfant terrible » de la région par rapport aux paisibles et gentils ayatollahs qui ne souhaitent pas retourner à la table des négociations ? Que cherche-t-elle cette France laïque, championne des droits de l’Homme, chez un Etat voyou, autocratique, aux valeurs du Moyen-Age, semant la terreur, bafouant quotidiennement les libertés, pendant les homosexuels sur la place publique ? …

    http://www.tribunejuive.info/international/macron-le-nouveau-gardien-de-la-revolution-islamique-iranienne-freddy-eytan

    J’aime

  10. jcdurbant dit :

    SAUDI ARABIA’S BLACK SEPTEMBER (Taking advantage of Trump’s election-induced passivity, Iran’s precise, carefully-calibrated, devastating yet bloodless and perfectly deniable surgical operation on Saudi oil fields evidently shows they have discovered a chink in Saudi Arabia’s armor)

    To summarize, the September 14 attack on the Saudi oil facilities was a brilliant feat of arms. It was precise, carefully-calibrated, devastating yet bloodless – a model of a surgical operation that reaped for Iran a rich political and military harvest at the minimal cost of a few cheap unmanned vehicles, yet with a low risk of retribution. The planning and execution of the operation was flawless. The Iranians managed to mask their own role, to divert responsibility to their Houthi allies, to sneak two flights of unmanned air vehicles into two of Saudi Arabia’s most important oil facilities, and to execute unprecedented precision strikes on their installations without even breaking a window in a nearby town. And all this with utter surprise, with no intelligence leaks and without being detected either upon launch or on the way to the targets. The US armed forces could not do any better. (…) While there is no information on who directed this feat of arms, there is no doubt that it was authorized by the highest level of government in Iran. Simply put, its strategic purpose was to knock Saudi Arabia out of the war. It stands to reason that this prospect became tempting after Iran’s success in knocking the UAE out of the war. In June 2019 the UAE announced that it was withdrawing most of its troops from Yemen and shifting from a “military first” to “diplomacy first” policy in that country. Speculations about UAE motives abounded. Yet the impact of the purported attacks on Dubai and Abu Dhabi international airports by long-range Houthi UAVs during the summer of 2018 cannot be dismissed. Whether these attacks actually took place is controversial. In May 2019 the Houthis released a video purporting to show security camera footage of an attack by a fairly large, straight-wing and most probably propeller-driven UAV on a truck park inside Abu Dhabi’s international airport, causing an explosion. The Emirati authorities conceded that an “incident involving supply trucks” had occurred in that airport but did not specify its nature or cause. The video could be fabricated. Abu Dhabi’s airport is almost 1400 km. away from Houthiland, and thus the prospects of a simple propeller UAV traversing this distance with no hitch are far from sure, and the video itself has some suspicious features. Yet, if the attack did occur, it might have damped the ardor of UAE to involve itself any further in the Yemen war. The UAE’s warning after the Sept 14 attack about the consequence of any attack on their major cities illustrates its concern. Iran took big political and military risks by launching an attack of such magnitude on September 14. Had its key role in this attack been exposed right away, it night have faced both military retaliation from the US and diplomatic censure from the international community. That Iran was ready to take this risk indicates Iranian confidence in its ability to hide its role as well as confidence in US passivity. The Iranians clearly sense US reluctance to use force in the region. After all, the US failed to retaliate significantly after Iran shot down a $220 million American UAV several months ago. This, coupled with the UAE withdrawal, may have emboldened Iran to raise the stakes in its struggle for regional hegemony. It now threatens to raise the stakes even further, by threatening through the Houthis to launch further and even more devastating attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. Whether this will knock Saudi Arabia out of the war, leaving Iran the master of Yemen and the key holder of the Bab el-Mandeb straights remain to be seen. Nevertheless, this impressive feat of arms has raised Iran’s prestige in the region, and no less important within Iran itself, and this at a time when US sanctions are imposing hardships on the Iranian public. Judging by the hardly concealed glee in the tightly controlled Iranian press, the regime is exploiting its success to the hilt to ensure public resilience in face of the economic pressures.

    Evidently, the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors have discovered a chink in Saudi Arabia’s armor. Air and missile defense radars are configured to detect high-flying threats. Since they are not required to detect ground-hugging objects, they are usually aimed a few degrees above the horizon to avoid ground clutter from nearby topographic features. This creates a gap between the radar fence and the ground, through which low-flying air threats can sneak in undetected. The Iranians apparently used this technique in earlier operations deep inside Saudi Arabia. In May 2019 two Saudi oil pumping stations in Afif and Dawadimi (770 and 820 km. respectively from the Yemeni border) were struck by UAVs, causing a temporary surge in global oil prices. On August 17 the Shayba oil field in eastern Saudi Arabia, almost 1200 km. from Houthiland, was struck, causing gas fires. Regardless from where the UAVs came from – they might have been launched locally by dissidents or by Houthi raiders – the fact is that they succeeded to slip through whatever defenses may have been protecting those installations. In many senses, the May and August raids were the precursors of the more devastating September 14 attack. (…) Defense systems require detection and tracking of their targets. Without detection there is no engagement and no interception. It stands to reason, then, that the inactivity of the Saudi air defenses was an inevitable result of the lack of early warning and detection. This had nothing to do with any real or imaginary flaws in the US- and European-supplied Saudi air and missile defense systems but with the fact that they were not designed to deal with ground-hugging threats. Simply put, the Iranians outfoxed the defense systems. To summarize, the September 14 attack on the Saudi oil facilities was a brilliant feat of arms. It was precise, carefully-calibrated, devastating yet bloodless – a model of a surgical operation that reaped for Iran a rich political and military harvest at the minimal cost of a few cheap unmanned vehicles, yet with a low risk of retribution. The planning and execution of the operation was flawless. The Iranians managed to mask their own role, to divert responsibility to their Houthi allies, to sneak two flights of unmanned air vehicles into two of Saudi Arabia’s most important oil facilities, and to execute unprecedented precision strikes on their installations without even breaking a window in a nearby town. And all this with utter surprise, with no intelligence leaks and without being detected either upon launch or on the way to the targets. The US armed forces could not do any better. While there is no information on who directed this feat of arms, there is no doubt that it was authorized by the highest level of government in Iran. Simply put, its strategic purpose was to knock Saudi Arabia out of the war. It stands to reason that this prospect became tempting after Iran’s success in knocking the UAE out of the war. In June 2019 the UAE announced that it was withdrawing most of its troops from Yemen and shifting from a “military first” to “diplomacy first” policy in that country. Speculations about UAE motives abounded. Yet the impact of the purported attacks on Dubai and Abu Dhabi international airports by long-range Houthi UAVs during the summer of 2018 cannot be dismissed. Whether these attacks actually took place is controversial. In May 2019 the Houthis released a video purporting to show security camera footage of an attack by a fairly large, straight-wing and most probably propeller-driven UAV on a truck park inside Abu Dhabi’s international airport, causing an explosion. The Emirati authorities conceded that an “incident involving supply trucks” had occurred in that airport but did not specify its nature or cause. The video could be fabricated. Abu Dhabi’s airport is almost 1400 km. away from Houthiland, and thus the prospects of a simple propeller UAV traversing this distance with no hitch are far from sure, and the video itself has some suspicious features. Yet, if the attack did occur, it might have damped the ardor of UAE to involve itself any further in the Yemen war. The UAE’s warning after the Sept 14 attack about the consequence of any attack on their major cities illustrates its concern. Iran took big political and military risks by launching an attack of such magnitude on September 14. Had its key role in this attack been exposed right away, it night have faced both military retaliation from the US and diplomatic censure from the international community. That Iran was ready to take this risk indicates Iranian confidence in its ability to hide its role as well as confidence in US passivity. The Iranians clearly sense US reluctance to use force in the region. After all, the US failed to retaliate significantly after Iran shot down a $220 million American UAV several months ago. This, coupled with the UAE withdrawal, may have emboldened Iran to raise the stakes in its struggle for regional hegemony. It now threatens to raise the stakes even further, by threatening through the Houthis to launch further and even more devastating attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities.

    What was the secret of the Iranian’s success in the Sept 14 attack? While detailed information is still lacking, we can hazard some speculation about its ingredients. First is the successful maintenance of absolute secrecy which assured a complete surprise. The second factor is a good appreciation of the performance and vulnerabilities of Saudi Arabia air and missile defense systems. Third, a comprehensive intelligence picture of their deployment at the time of the attack. Fourth, a meticulous planning of flight paths to avoid terrain obstacles and to circumvent Saudi radars or fly below their horizons. Fifth, the last word in automatic optical homing to ensure surgical precision. Of these five factors, the most decisive factor is the undetected access to the targets. The surgical precision was useful but not crucial. Even with coarser GPS guidance, and armed with explosive warheads, the incoming UAVs could devastate the Khurais and Abqaiq facilities, albeit less elegantly and probably with some loss of Saudi lives. Simply put, good secret-keeping and good intelligence allowed the Iranians to exploit the gaps in Saudi Arabia air and missile defense.

    Could this happen to Israel?

    As noted, UAVs are not hard to shoot down, provided they are detected in time. Simple, relatively low-tech radar guided anti-aircraft guns can destroy low flying UAVs once they are detected. A good example of a simple yet effective close air defense system that can shoot down low flying UAVs is the Russian “Panzir” (SA-22), comprised of a radar, two 30 mm. cannons and 12 short-range ground-to-air heat-seeking missiles mounted on a truck chassis. Comparable systems can be improvised in the West in short order. More readily but more expensively, the Patriot system can shoot down UAVs, as was demonstrated by Israel during the 2014 Gaza war. The key question then is not how to shoot down UAVs but how to detect them in time. The Iranians sneaked through the inherent, built-in gaps in Saudi detection systems. Do such gaps exist in Israel, and if so, can they be closed? When asked by CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” program why his county’s air defense systems failed to detect the incoming UAVs, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman replied that “Saudi Arabia is almost the size of a continent. It is bigger than all of Western Europe. We have 360 degrees of threats. It’s challenging to cover all of this fully.” In other words, Saudi Arabia does not have a comprehensive, country-wide detection system, due to its huge size. There are probably only local “bubbles” of radar coverage, in between which low-flying raiders can penetrate. In contrast, Israel is one of the smallest countries in the world. Israel Air Force controllers routinely shush away civilian ultralight aircraft and paragliders that stray into no-fly zones – which are basically comparable to low-flying UAVs. It can therefore be deduced that Israel’s airspace is fully transparent to air force controllers, at least from a certain altitude and above. Whether there exists a gap between the detectability horizon of Israel’s airspace control radars and the ground, of the kind that allowed the Houthi and Iranian UAVs to sneak below radar coverage, is unknown. Still, even if such gap exists it can be easily closed by existing means such as inexpensive Doppler radars of the kind used in the US Marine Corps MRZR anti-drone system (These radars, incidentally, are of Israeli origin).

    The sophistication of the September 14 attack in Saudi Arabia stands in stark contrast to the desultory efforts of Iran’s Quds force to strike Israel in recent times. Quds forces fired 32 rockets on May 10, 2018 targeting the Golan Heights. Most failed to reach Israel and fell harmlessly in Syria while four were shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome system. In January 2019 Quds forces near Damascus fired one rocket at Israel’s Mount Hermon. The rocket was destroyed by Iron Dome. On August 25, 2019 Israel frustrated a Quds force drone attack on its territory by destroying the base near Damascus from which the attack was to originate. These feeble, low-scale operations were aimed to retaliate against effective (and painful) Israeli strikes on Quds assets in Syria. The contrast to the level of effort and ingenuity invested by Iran in the September 14 attack on Saudi Arabia cannot be sharper. This disparity begs an explanation.

    Perhaps the answer lies in Iran’s strategic priorities. It stands to reason that Yemen and the preservation of the Houthi regime takes precedence in Iran’s calculus; while confronting Israel is relegated, for the time being, to the back burner. There are important reasons for Iran to make this choice. The painful sanctions by the US probably contribute to its urgent need to break the logjam and bring Saudi Arabia to the negotiating table. When this is achieved, there is little doubt that Iran will turn westwards and ratchet-up its confrontation with Israel. No one can know when this might happen, but if and when it does, a September 14-style attack on Israel’s key infrastructures cannot be excluded. This is a serious threat. Israel’s successes thus far in the so-called “war between the wars” against Iran should not be taken for granted. Complacence is the mother of misfortune. The key to avoiding a Saudi-style debacle in Israel is prior intelligence and seamless early warning systems. Israel’s political and military leadership must draw the appropriate conclusions from Saudi Arabia’s “Black September.”

    Dr. Uri Rubin

    https://jiss.org.il/en/rubin-saudi-arabias-black-september/

    J’aime

  11. jcdurbant dit :

    C’EST LA NATURE DU REGIME, IMBECILE ! (Quelle voyoucratie russe condamnée, à l’instar du requin contraint au mouvement permanent pour alimenter ses branchies, à la fuite en avant perpétuelle et à la multiplication des crises ?)

    Je regarde C dans l’air et je comprends pas: tout le monde est d’accord que le régime russe est devenu un régime-voyou, mais multiplie les discussions sans fin sur de prétendues « raisons objectives » pour la multiplication des actions agressives de Poutine dans son entourage immédiat ou ailleurs, sans jamais en tirer les évidentes conséquences, à savoir que comme pour les régimes dits « révolutionnaires » et en fait kleptocratiques comme l’Iran ou la Corée du nord, sa seule survie, c’est, à l’instar du requin condamné au mouvement permanent pour alimenter ses branchies en oxygène, la fuite en avant perpétuelle et la multiplication des crises …

    _______________

    Comment éviter que la Russie envahisse l’Ukraine ? C’est l’une des questions au cœur des négociations qui se déroulent à Genève depuis lundi entre Russes et Américains, alors que 100 000 soldats russes ont été massés à la frontière ukrainienne. Vladimir Poutine s’est ainsi rappelé ces derniers mois au bon souvenir de l’administration Biden qui aimerait se concentrer sur le nouveau grand antagoniste des États-Unis, la Chine. Et le président russe avance ses exigences.

    Quelles sont -elles ? Stopper l’élargissement de l’Otan enclenché depuis 1990. Il demande pour cela des « garanties juridiques » contre une éventuelle adhésion de l’Ukraine ou de la Géorgie à l’Otan, et contre le déploiement de systèmes d’armes offensifs à proximité immédiate des frontières russes. En clair, le maître du Kremlin veut récupérer les zones tampons perdues après l’effondrement de l’Union soviétique et réclame une partition des sphères d’influence, un peu comme à Yalta, en 1945. Sous peine de relancer, à tout moment, la guerre à l’est de l’Ukraine, qui a déjà fait 13 000 morts depuis sept ans.

    En 2014, des insurgés ukrainiens soutenus par la Russie ont pris le contrôle d’une partie du Donbass. En septembre de la même année, une ligne de démarcation a figé les positions sur 427 kilomètres. Mais depuis la tension est latente et récemment la Russie a déployé hommes et matériels à la frontière.

    Après avoir annexé la Crimée, puis encouragé les séparatistes du Donbass, la Russie menace l’Ukraine d’une invasion à grande échelle. Le président Poutine qui craint d’être encerclé par l’Alliance atlantique exige donc un nouveau traité international qui rétablirait l’influence russe en Europe de l’Est. Un chantage à la guerre qui a permis l’ouverture de pourparlers avec les Américains, sans les Européens.

    Et maintenant ? Comment parvenir à la désescalade dans le dossier ukrainien ? Pourquoi les Européens sont-ils absents des discussions ? Vladimir Poutine se sent-il menacé par l’Otan et/ou par les aspirations démocratiques de ses voisins ? Pourquoi le renseignement estonien s’inquiète-t-il du développement de « deepfake » par les Russes ? Enfin, après avoir apporté son aide au président du Kazakhstan, confronté ces derniers jours à un soulèvement populaire, la Russie profitera-t-elle de la crise pour se réimposer dans le pays ?

    Invités :

    – François Clemenceau rédacteur en chef international – Le Journal du Dimanche

    – Clémentine Fauconnier, politologue, spécialiste de la Russie

    – Isabelle Mandraud, cheffe adjointe du service international – Le Monde. Auteure de « Poutine, la stratégie du désordre »

    – Pierre Servent, expert en stratégie militaire – Consultant défense pour France Télévisions

    https://www.france.tv/france-5/c-dans-l-air/64551-poutine-part-en-guerre-froide.html

    J’aime

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