When a British security guard was killed in an Iranian drone attack last month, the response from the government was robust. Boris Johnson warned that Iran will have to ‘face up to the consequences’. But has the West fully grasped the reality of what Iran and its ‘Ghost Armada’ is really up to at sea? And how can Britain deal with Iran’s silent partnership on the waves with China?
The past four decades in which the Khomeinist ideology has dominated Iranian state structures, a new breed of “Iranologists” has emerged in Western academic and media circles. Most old Iranologists saw Iran as a glorious but long dead civilization distinguished by religious tolerance, ethnic diversity and an abiding love of artistic creativity. Those who focused on Iran’s story after the advent of Islam recognized monarchy and the Shi’ite clerical institution that, while at times in conflict, played complementary roles in Iranian society.
With the seizure of power in 1979 by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a new breed of Iranologists emerged to declare the definite end of monarchy in Iran and the advent of a theocratic regime backed by re-energized clergy.
The Iranian regime has ratcheted up its assaults at sea while the Biden administration and the European Union continue pressing to revive the disastrous Obama nuclear deal and lift sanctions against the ruling mullahs.
On July 30, 2021, the oil tanker MV Mercer Street was attacked by an armed drone 280km from the port of Al-Daqam in the Sea of Oman. Two crew members, one British and one Romanian, were killed in the attack. The ship is Japanese-owned and Liberian-flagged, and is managed by Zodiac Maritime, a British company that is one of Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s businesses.
The June sham election of Ebrahim Raisi as president of Iran is likely to bring even more political instability to the Middle East partly because the nation’s militant clerics have now moved the country further towards a one-party state.
On Iran’s own official count, voter turnout in a population of 82 million was 48.8 %, a quarter lower than in 2017. “It was a protest vote … against the political system,” says Sanam Vakil, Iran expert at Chatham House, “… frustration that (Iranians) are no longer … considered … important to this process.”
Israel says it’s only ten weeks before Iran has enough weapons-grade material to make a nuke.
Winston Churchill wrote that there was never a war that could have so easily been avoided as World War II. Almost the precise opposite must be said about the coming war with Iran over its nuclear weapons: there have been few wars as inevitable as the one that will soon erupt.
Negotiators at the Vienna-based talks on re-establishing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) have reportedly drafted an agreement and returned to their respective capitals, apparently in the hopes of securing an endorsement for the revived “nuclear deal” with Iran, which by the way Iran never signed. While some differences still remain, the P5+1 nations (the US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) were trying to restore the JCPOA deal before the new Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi took office last week.
President Biden’s negotiating team, to win the support of Iran’s hardline dominated regime, had reportedly agreed to a substantial lifting of Trump administration-imposed sanctions on Iran.
State media in Iran admit the country is going through a fifth wave of Covid-19, with more than 500 deaths a day. It shows images of calm, well-equipped hospitals, but patients’ families, activists and doctors say that is far from the truth. They talk about dangerous overcrowding and shortages of basic needs, and post videos on social media showing patients being treated in hospital gardens and parking lots.
The Iranian government called out the United States in a statement commemorating the 76th anniversary of the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and called for a world without nuclear weapons.
Saeed Khatibzadeh, a spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, declared on Saturday that the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, showed the world that the US “spares no inhumane efforts and acts to achieve its illegitimate and irrational objectives.”
The Biden administration has signaled that it is in a hurry to negotiate with the government of Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a mass murderer who is known as the Butcher of Tehran, in order to revive former US President Barack Obama’s catastrophic 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — which Iran never signed — and lift sanctions against the Iranian regime.
Just last month, Iran was exposed in an attempt to kidnap a dual US-Iranian citizen, Masih Alinejad, from her home in New York City.
The war crimes trial in Sweden of a former Iranian official could reveal further damaging details about the role played in the mass execution of prisoners 30 years ago by Iran’s president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, barely a week after his inauguration.
Hamid Noury, 60, was charged last week with “war crimes and murder” over the killings of more than 100 armed opponents and political prisoners during the final year of the 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq.
Noury’s trial is due to start on 10 August. He was arrested in Sweden in 2019 while visiting relatives.
The US, UK and Israel are all certain Iran is behind the attack on the Mercer Street ship and plan to work on a joint response to it.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab all made statements that Iran was behind Friday’s deadly bombing off the coast of Oman, hours after Iran denied involvement, a move that the prime minister called “cowardly.”
Iran has reportedly said the ‘suicide drone’ attack on an oil tanker, which killed two people, was in retaliation for an Israeli airstrike on a military airport in Syria.
Two members of the crew, a Briton and a Romanian, died on Thursday off the coast of Oman when a MV Mercer Street oil tanker was attacked by an armed drone believed to be operated by Iran.
Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid blamed ‘Iranian terrorism’ for the attack, while a US official said the use of a ‘suicide drone’ raised the possibility a government was behind the incident.
When the people of Iran rose up by the millions against the Iranian regime in 2009, the Obama administration stayed abhorrently silent. People on the streets in Iran began chanting, “Obama, Obama, are you with them [the ruling mullahs] or with us?” The Obama administration offered no support. The administration’s dismissal of their agony not only enabled the mullahs brutally to crush the demonstrations with impunity; the mullahs were even rewarded with a deal that would enable them to have legitimate nuclear weapons capability down the road and billions of dollars thrown in.
A Korean veteran shooter told reporters this week that having an Iranian athlete accused of being a terrorist compete at the Tokyo Games is “absurd and ridiculous,” adding pressure on the International Olympic Committee to investigate the allegations.
International critics have accused Javad Foroughi, who won gold in the 10-meter pistol on Saturday, of being a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a powerful paramilitary organization considered by the United States as a terrorist group. The IOC has challenged critics to show proof of his alleged ties to the IRGC, but it’s still unclear if any such evidence would surface.
At least three U.S. journalists working for Voice of America were the subjects of attempted Iranian abduction and surveillance efforts in 2019 and 2020, a former senior State Department official familiar with the security threats told the Washington Free Beacon.
In one botched plot in late 2019, Iranian operatives allegedly tried to use a female “honey trap” to lure a male VOA journalist to a hotel room in Irbil, Iraq, according to the former State Department official—a plan that failed when the reporter, who has since left VOA, declined to show up to the hotel. The plot closely mirrors the case of Ruhollah Zam, an Iranian dissident ex-pat who was lured from France to Iraq by a female Iranian operative and then taken to Iran where he was executed by the government last year.
