Following the announcement of a memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, it is time to revisit some criminal documents.
Back in early March, as Israel mobilised all its American cards to launch a war on Iran, Zionist writer Bret Stephens, who has a regular column in The New York Times, where he fervently defends an Israel that trains dogs to rape human beings – published his bucket list of what he wished Israel and the US should achieve against what he thought would soon be a defeated Iran.
With the immediate cessation of hostilities between Iran and the US, it is time to revisit that gaudy, delusional and unhinged column.
Stephens envisaged four scenarios of Israeli victory against Iran. The first was regime change, which he thought “nobody should discount, especially if Iran continues to be battered militarily and politically, perhaps with the loss of additional echelons of leadership”.
The second was regime modification – “a regime that stays in place but complies with US and Israeli demands”. That isolation, he wrote, “will be especially pronounced if US forces seize Kharg Island . . . which serves as the terminal for roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports”.
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The third was a prolonged war, ultimately crushing Iran through economic sanctions – “What this third scenario suggests is that the regime will only survive in a zombified state.”
The fourth was “not regime change, but state collapse. The most worrisome form it could take would resemble Syria during its 13-year civil war, in which the regime would survive in some areas of Iran, fall in others, invite foreign intervention and lead to killing on an epic scale. Along with that killing would come waves of refugees throughout the Middle East and into Europe and Australia . . . The Israelis may not entirely mind that scenario, on the theory that a fractured Iran is someone else’s problem.”
What is Stephens’s own recommendation? “What, then, should the Trump administration do? My prescription: Seize Kharg Island. Mine or blockade Iran’s remaining ports. Destroy as much Iranian military capability as possible over the next week or two, including a second Midnight Hammer operation to destroy what’s left of Iran’s nuclear capacity and know-how.”
As we say in Persian: the camel dreams of cotton seeds, gobbling them up now in great fistfuls and then one by one.
Israel lost, Iran endured
That disgusting column is a historic document of the mass-murdering mindset of hallucinating Zionists given a full column every damned week in this city to spew hatred of other nations in what they think is the best interest of the genocidal Israel they are paid to defend.
Back to reality – the day after Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, 106 days after Israelis triggered the US president to join them bombing a sovereign nation state. In nearly 80 years of mass murder, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and land theft in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt, Israel has been dealt a crushing defeat of historic proportions.
The world must adjust its lenses when looking at the US. Americans overwhelmingly opposed this war
They dragged the gullible bully Trump into this war against the will and judgement of the overwhelming majority of Americans – and still Israel lost the war in every single aspect of their delusional objectives and more. Still they and those who waved their racist flag suffered a historic defeat.
Their Mossad and Hasbara, their Aipac and Anti-Defamation League (ADL), their bought and paid for American politicians, their Iranian monarchist stooges and their comprador think tankers at the Hoover Institution and elsewhere – all put together – still suffered a major defeat.
With this memorandum of understanding, Iran is stronger than it was before. Its regime is intact, its sovereign right to nuclear knowledge and technology remains in place, and its territorial integrity – all the way to the precious Strait of Hormuz – is stronger than ever.
Yes, Israelis fooled Trump to help them destroy Iran’s civic infrastructure, cultural monument sites, university campuses, public health facilities and mass-murder the innocent children of Minab school and much more. But to what end? There are videos of monkeys with machine guns on the internet shooting at people indiscriminately too.
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Iranian scholars and world heritage authorities are busy addressing the savageries genocidal Zionists have perpetrated in Iran. University campuses and scientific institutions are rebuilding.
Parents are mourning the children this Israeli-instigated war murdered. Ordinary people are resuming their daily lives. Iran will recover and Iranians will soon resume their historic struggles for their civil liberties, having siphoned the treasonous monarchists, their comprador think tankers and their ugly Israeli effigies into the sewer system of history.
Fresh on the heels of a still-unfolding genocide in Gaza and land theft in Palestine, Israel opened two new fronts for murderous mayhem in Lebanon and Iran, hoodwinking the gullible bully Trump to join them in the act.
As the world watched this criminality unfold, two pro-Israel New York Times columnists, Thomas Friedman and Bret Stephens, were busy hoping in despair to change the whole discourse, making the diabolical settler colony look like the victim on a righteous crusade.
By systematically demonising Iran as the nefarious regime, the entire New York Times enterprise was trying to fool a whole nation into believing Iran was evil, Israel was righteous and Trump’s egomaniacal follies were all for a good cause.
A victory for Americans
On the American side: if you were to heed the dominant American media you would think Trump began this war all on his own and then arrogantly left Israel out of his decision-making process when negotiating a peace. It is in fact entirely the other way around.
Israel – represented by its prime minister and Mossad chief – fooled Trump into joining this war and has remained a singular source of menace, pushing for continued bombing of Iran and Lebanon.
What did Iranians achieve in this war? Their precious homeland did not fall to the murderous Zionists. It did not disintegrate
President Trump finally had to yield to the unstillable will of the American people, cut Israel loose and reach an agreement with Iranians for the best interest of Americans. This is the humiliation the genocidal Zionists like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, ad nauseam, have to face in the United States.
The world must adjust its lenses when looking at the US. Americans overwhelmingly opposed this war. This was an illegal war that the US Congress had not authorised, and masses of millions of Americans actively opposed it. This victory is therefore an Iranian and American victory.
In the US, this victory belongs to anti-war activists and the broader population. In Iran, this victory belongs to the Iranian people and their steadfast determination to resist murderous aggression by Israel that is consumed by a genocidal ideology.
The sovereignty of a defiant nation (the exact opposite of a European settler colony in Palestine) belongs to that nation, not to the state that is temporarily entrusted with serving them.
What did Iranians achieve in this war? Their precious homeland did not fall to the murderous Zionists. It did not disintegrate. The Israeli scarecrow Reza Pahlavi did not return and is forever lost in ignominy.
The inalienable right of Iranians to nuclear knowledge and technology did not fold. Their government – whatever legitimate criticism they still rightly level against it – did not collapse. They suffered the blows of the murderous Israeli bombers standing firm. And they hit back hard.
They hit Israel to the delight of millions of people around the world. They struck all US military bases in the region. And then they produced their trump card – no pun intended – and closed the Strait of Hormuz.
This war, just like the Israeli genocide in Gaza, turned the whole world against Israel. Poll after poll shows Israel is today the most detested colonial entity on Earth.
According to the survey, “the findings place Israel at the bottom of the Global Country Perceptions 2026 ranking, a survey of 46,667 respondents assessing how 129 countries and three international organisations are viewed around the world.”
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The Iranian victory is a decisive American victory too. Poll after poll has declared loudly and clearly that Americans opposed this war, holding Israel chiefly responsible for their country entering it.
A recent Pew Research Centre survey found that “negative views of Israel, Netanyahu continue to rise among Americans – especially young people”. The polls clearly indicate that 60 percent of US adults have an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year; 59 percent have little or no confidence in Netanyahu to do the right thing regarding world affairs, up from 52 percent. In both political parties, majorities of adults under the age of 50 now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively.
Mounting evidence shows the murderous Israelis are guarding dark and diabolic dungeons where Palestinian men and women are raped – a fact that even The New York Times had to admit, though in a cowardly way as an opinion piece rather than as a thoroughly investigated fact.
Israel is long overdue for a historic reckoning for what they have done to Palestine and Palestinians, Lebanon and the Lebanese, Iran and Iranians, etc.
Accountable to Iranians
None of this means all is now hunky-dory, happily ever after, in Iran. Iranians now have to win the peace too. Iran has enormous economic, social and political problems.
They have always fought foreign invasions and domestic tyranny at one and the same time – and they will continue to do so
Iranians won this war not because they were made more radical, as the juvenile American punditry puts it, but because the war triggered a deep-rooted anticolonial nationalism in them.
They have always fought foreign invasions and domestic tyranny at one and the same time – and they will continue to do so.
Iranians in and out of their homeland have every right to criticise their government and continue to demand and exact their civil liberties and their inalienable human rights: the right to peaceful assembly guaranteed in their constitution, the right to a free press, the right to form independent labour unions, student organisations and women’s rights advocates.
These are their inalienable rights – all of them achievable only if they have their national sovereignty intact, their territorial integrity in place, murderous Mossad agents prevented from infiltrating their peaceful protests and vicious Israeli-US bombs stopped from targeting their innocent children and civic infrastructures.
Iranians have a long and perilous road ahead of them, as do all nations, where securing their civil liberties is today the most radical, the most revolutionary, aspiration of any country, no matter what government may fancy ruling over them.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
