The current complex Iraqi political situation shows that Iran is not a major power capable of controlling developments in Iraq according to its wishes and interests, as it did years ago.

It has resorted to its Iraqi proxies to disrupt parliamentary sessions that were supposed to elect the president, in addition to its striking Erbil with twelve ballistic missiles. Moreover, the Negev meeting between the foreign ministers of Israel and four Arab countries along with the United States to discuss the Iranian file are all evidence that the Iranian regime is only good at manufacturing enemies and increasing its regional and international isolation.

It is also evidence that Iranian arrogance has finally reached the peak of its trajectory and that Iran was small and remains small even if it wears the mantle of a big power.

Its rulers have not learned from the long history of mankind that no nation can build an empire as long as it needs others to secure any of its essential basic needs, be they small or large.

No other small country has displayed imperial designs, when it needed water, medicine, money, men, weapons or equipment from the outside.

There are many examples of this, from the days of Alexander the Great and to the current Russian-American-European war in Ukraine.

What does the Iranian regime have in terms of qualifications and potentialities to justify its succumbing to temptations of grandeur or to dream of emulating great countries with imperial ambitions? How could its military and civilian leaders be tempted by the illusion and arrogance of power and be blinded by racism and sectarianism?

This introduction is inspired by a statement published by the Revolutionary Guard Corps on its website, in which it said that “Iran’s missile prowess and its regional influence are red lines,” and that “the slightest mistake from the enemies by the Islamic homeland anywhere will be met with decisive and destructive answers.”

With the same arrogance, many Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese analysts and commentators with absolute loyalty to Wilayat al-Faqih have publicly threatened, on television, that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards could enter Iraq, militarily and make of Iraqi Kurdistan a second Ukraine.

Another example: the commander of the Quds Force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Ismail Qa’ani, spoke of the recent Revolutionary Guard missiles that struck Erbil. He said, “Today, the United States is terrified of the resistance factions in Iraq,” and “the criminal Zionist entity that was once raising a slogan from the Nile to the Euphrates is now humiliated, as the Zionists sleep with terror and panic and are worried about when they wake up.”

If these statements were issued by the United States, China, India, Russia, or any major European country, they might have had some significance. But when they come from a tired and wobbly country such as Iran, a country leaning on the shoulders of Russia, China, North Korea and Venezuela and relying on Iraq’s money and the markets of Syria, this becomes reason for astonishment.

Iran, according to the testimony of many neutral international organisations, is a country mired in its internal and external concerns and suffocating problems that paralyse its ability to maintain its presence in the four Arab countries it now occupies without the help of other states. It cannot go on without continued weakness, fragmentation and disarray in these countries, which is not guaranteed.

One remembers, here, Robert McNamara, former US secretary of defence under President John F Kennedy in 1962, who said, “Let’s make the Soviet Union an armed fortress, but not have butter.”

The government of Wali al-Faqih is today caught in the same deceptive game. It has been forced to spend three-quarters of the Iranian people’s revenues on its nuclear and armaments projects, plotting here and there while financing organisations and militias. This is on top of the effects of US and international sanctions that have weakened its economy, impoverished its people and isolated them from their regional neighbours and from the world. Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was finally forced to bow his head to the “Great Satan” and to the Europeans, the Chinese and the Russians, begging them to lift the sanctions and return some of Iran’s frozen funds.

So far, despite all the difficulties and troubles suffered by the Iranian government and the Iranian people, he has not realised that his continuous attacks against neighbouring countries, directly perpetrated by his Revolutionary Guards or executed by his Yemeni or Iraqi proxy militias, have only helped shelve the Palestinian cause and prompted many Arab countries to consider Iran their number one enemy and Israel their trusted ally. From the womb of the Negev meeting, a new political-military alliance may be born with the single goal of confronting and exhausting Iran.

Today, the Iranian regime is obliged to wage its security, economic and social wars at home while bearing the cost of soft and hard wars with its enemies abroad. Is not this the worst kind of foolishness, negligence and stupidity?

Source » thearabweekly