Mick Hartley

Janice Turner, in the Times, on Trump’s failing in Iran:

American bombers have returned to base and the US president has swerved from apocalyptic threats to calling right-wing commentators “nut jobs”. Negotiations begin, the news cycle turns, the world tentatively starts to memory-hole this deranged six weeks.

Unless you’re Iranian. There is no ceasefire here, say the regime’s opponents — the vast majority of its people — just a war-hardened elite ever keener to murder its citizens. Not content with a reported 657 hangings this year, the head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, has issued an order to expedite death penalties for thousands held since the January uprisings.

Prisoners include doctors who treated the wounded. And are overwhelmingly young. What monstrous death cult hangs a teenage wrestling champion like Saleh Mohammadi? One that gunned down as many as 40,000 peaceful protesters; that targets women’s eyes and genitals and rapes virgin girls before execution so they won’t (say believers) go to heaven; that picked off whole families on rooftops with sniper rifles and stormed hospitals to put bullets in the heads of patients on drips. Stacks of body-bags were full of sons and daughters, the girls’ long, black hair tumbling out.

To many, Iranians looked naive for believing Donald Trump’s promise that America’s “overwhelming strength and devastating force” could provide their “only chance for generations”. What nation welcomes western warmongering, a foreign power dispatching its leader and cheers the bombings in its capital? One that has been occupied by a theocracy for 47 years, where any act against the regime is punished as moharebeh (waging war against God); one that first tried every other means possible and has no other hope.

While the left demonstrated against America’s war and condemned the killing of children in bombings without mentioning the many more murdered by the mullahs, while it chanted its comfortable clichés, unchanged since Vietnam, it could not compute that outside Iranian embassies across the world the Iranian diaspora — many of them left-leaning and no lovers of Trump — were dancing because the ayatollah was dead.

Unfortunately for the Iranians, the US president currently directing the war against the Tehran regime is Donald Trump, who appears to have no comprehension of how Iran could be freed. Anything but the total defeat of the theocrats will be seen as – and will be – a victory for them. They don’t care how many Iranians die as long as they remain in power. There’s no deal to be brokered with them: they’re absolutist in their thinking, and utterly ruthless. The wretched people of Iran, suffering and weakened under the mullahs now for over 40 years, simply don’t have the power or the weaponry to seize control. Only US boots on the ground is going to do that – and that’s the one option Trump isn’t willing to consider.

Iranians are used to America’s broken promises. After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the 2009 election, the Green Movement protests filled the streets and the Islamic regime teetered. Yet President Obama refused to speak out and, according to The Iran Wars by the Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon, told the CIA to end all links with Green activists and wrote personal letters to the ayatollah promising not to undermine his regime. Obama got his nuclear deal but has since said he regrets turning his back on Iran’s democrats, who were soon savagely suppressed.

Trump’s explicit injunction to the Iranians, that it was “time to take control of your destiny”, makes his apparent abandonment all the more despicable. It is reminiscent of President Bush in 1991 at the end of the first Gulf War saying “the Iraqi people should put Saddam aside” to solve their internal problems and “facilitate the acceptance of Iraq back into the family of peace-loving nations”. This emboldened the Shia in southern Iraq and the Kurds in the north to rise up. But when Saddam brutally crushed both rebellions, the US sat on its hands.

Why is the world so uniquely quiet about the Iranian regime? The January massacres were several times bigger than the Srebrenica massacres of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. In fact, since they were conducted during an internet blackout, we have no idea how many died. Many relatives were never told what happened to their loved ones and suspect they were thrown into mass graves. Thousands of others now dread the call from prison to collect the body of their summarily executed child.

Yet just this week Spain returned its ambassador to Tehran, while Britain still refuses to proscribe the IRGC, a Labour manifesto pledge, despite MI5 dealing with at least 20 plots against Iranian dissidents and British Jews since 2022.

Well…it’s not over yet. And there are positives. Iran’s proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah – have been severely weakened. And the Arab states are now clear in their hostility to Iran.