US military moves Navy, Air Force assets to the Middle East: What to know
Trump says US ‘armada’ is heading towards the Gulf, raising fears of a military escalation in the region.
Aljazeera, By Yashraj Sharma, 25 Jan 2026
A United States aircraft carrier strike group is heading towards the Gulf as tensions build with Iran.
The US military last staged a major build-up in the Middle East in June – days before striking three Iranian nuclear sites during Israel’s 12-day war with Tehran.
This month, US President Donald Trump backed antigovernment protesters in Iran. “Help is on its way,” he told them as the government cracked down. But last week, he dialled down the military rhetoric. The protests have since been quashed.
So what are the US military assets moving to the Gulf? And is the US preparing to strike Iran again?
Why is the US moving warships?
Trump said on Thursday that a US “armada” is heading towards the Gulf region with Iran being its focus.
US officials said an aircraft carrier strike group and other assets are to arrive in the Middle East in the coming days.
“We’re watching Iran. We have a big force going towards Iran,” Trump said.
“And maybe we won’t have to use it. … We have a lot of ships going that direction. Just in case, we have a big flotilla going in that direction, and we’ll see what happens,” he added.
The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln changed its path from the South China Sea more than a week ago towards the Middle East. Its carrier strike group includes Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles capable of striking targets deep inside Iran.
The US military vessels en route to the Middle East are also equipped with the Aegis combat system, which provides air and missile defence against ballistic and cruise missiles and other aerial threats.
When Washington hit Iran’s nuclear sites, US forces reportedly launched 30 Tomahawk missiles from submarines and carried out strikes with B-2 bombers.
When asked on Thursday if he wanted Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to step down, Trump replied: “I don’t want to get into that, but they know what we want. There is a lot of killing.”
He also reiterated claims that his threats to use force stopped authorities in Iran from executing more than 800 people who had taken part in the protests, a claim denied by Iranian officials.
An unnamed US official told the Reuters news agency that additional air defence systems were being considered for the Middle East, which could be critical to guard against an Iranian strike on US bases in the region.
Iranian state media said the protests killed 3,117 people, including 2,427 civilians and members of the security forces.
How widespread is the US military presence in the Middle East?
The US has operated military bases in the Middle East for decades and has 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers stationed there.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the US operates a broad network of military sites, both permanent and temporary, at at least 19 locations in the region.
Of these, eight are permanent bases, located in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The first US deployment of soldiers in the Middle East was in July 1958 when combat troops were sent to Beirut. At its height, almost 15,000 Marines and Army soldiers were in Lebanon.
The US naval movement towards Iran was ordered despite a new National Defense Strategy being released on Friday. The document is drawn up every four years by the Department of Defense, and the latest security blueprint outlines a pullback of US forces in other parts of the world to prioritise security in the Western Hemisphere.
How has Iran responded?
Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi, who heads coordination between Iran’s army and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, warned on Thursday that any military strike on Iran would turn all US bases in the region into “legitimate targets”.
General Mohammad Pakpour, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, said two days later that Iran is “more ready than ever, finger on the trigger”.
He warned Washington and Israel “to avoid any miscalculation”……………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/25/us-military-moves-navy-air-force-assets-to-the-middle-east-what-to-know
The Funeral of Hegemony
How America’s Decision to Attack Iran Would Be Strategic Suicide
Ibrahim Majed, Jan 25, 2026, https://ddgeopolitics.substack.com/p/the-funeral-of-hegemony?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1769298&post_id=185644623&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
n American attack on Iran would not be a limited military operation, a punitive strike, or a calibrated act of deterrence.
It would represent a strategic rupture, a point at which accumulated American power begins converting itself into cascading liabilities. This is not a moral argument, nor is it a humanitarian one, it is more like a balance-sheet assessment of empire.
The question is not whether the United States can strike Iran. It can, and we’ve seen it. In June 2025, American warplanes joined Israel’s twelve-day campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities. Tehran struck back at a U.S. base in Qatar. The damage was extensive on both sides.
The question is what the United States loses the moment it does so again, and this time, without a ceasefire to stop the bleeding.
What follows is not ideology, but an autopsy written before the patient is declared dead.
The Liquidation of ‘FOB Israel’
For decades, Washington has not treated Israel merely as an ally, but as a Forward Operating Base, an unsinkable aircraft carrier, an intelligence nerve center, and the technological anchor of U.S. power projection in the Middle East.
A war with Iran inverts this logic.
Iran’s response would not be symbolic or theatrical. It would be functional. Through what Tehran describes as the Unity of Arenas, a coordinated strategy of simultaneous pressure across multiple fronts, retaliation would be applied with a singular objective: rendering Israel operationally unreliable as a base.
This doctrine is not a myth. It was first operationalized in 2021 during the Saif al-Quds war, when a joint command structure coordinated operations between Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian-aligned groups. The concept matured through 2023 and 2024, expanding the geography of confrontation to encircle Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
If airports are disrupted, ports degraded, and civilian life in Israel’s economic and technological core placed under persistent stress, the asset ceases to function as an anchor. The United States would no longer project power from Israel, it would divert power into Israel merely to keep it viable.
At the moment of maximum strategic need, Washington loses its most valuable regional platform.
And then the anchor chain is cut.
The Trap of Strategic Overstretch
The U.S. military is built for dominance through speed, precision, and overwhelming force. Iran is built for endurance.
It will not fight where the United States is strongest. It will fight in time, depth, and dispersion, and force escalation without resolution.
The June 2025 strikes exposed this dynamic. Iran acknowledged extensive damage to its nuclear infrastructure. But within months, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was claiming that Iran had “reconstructed everything that was damaged.” Whether true or not, the statement illustrated Iran’s strategy: absorb the blow, reconstitute, and wait.
Once engaged, Washington faces a structural dilemma: it cannot disengage without reputational collapse, yet it cannot remain without accelerating exhaustion. Every escalation deepens commitment. Every deployment degrades readiness. Every month consumes forces needed elsewhere.
The U.S. military currently maintains approximately 50,000 troops across bases in the Middle East. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group has just been diverted from the South China Sea, the very theater where America’s strategic future will be decided, and is now steaming toward the Gulf.
Iran seeks defeat by entropy—the slow erosion of capacity through overuse.
This is how empires bleed.
Economic Hemorrhage
A war with Iran would not be financed through shared sacrifice. It would be financed through monetary expansion and debt.
The consequences are predictable: inflationary pressure, rising energy costs, and the diversion of capital away from domestic resilience. Infrastructure, innovation, and social cohesion would erode as resources are consumed by a conflict offering no strategic return.
The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most critical energy chokepoint. Roughly one-fifth of global oil consumption passes through its narrow waters. Iran has long threatened to mine or close the strait in the event of war, and this threat grows more credible as conflict intensifies.
Tehran could also target energy infrastructure across Gulf states: pipelines, terminals, refineries. The resulting supply disruptions would send shockwaves through global markets, punishing American allies in Europe and Asia far more than the United States itself.
The empire would stabilize its periphery by hollowing out its core. History is unforgiving to systems that consume their own interior to preserve external dominance.
The China Dividend
The greatest beneficiary of a U.S.–Iran war would not be Iran. It would be China.
While Washington’s strategic nervous system is absorbed by escalation management in the Middle East, Beijing gains freedom of maneuver. The Indo-Pacific becomes secondary. Influence expands. Partnerships deepen. American deterrence thins.
This calculus is openly acknowledged in Beijing. As one prominent Chinese scholar at Renmin University recently observed: “Washington’s deeper involvement in the Middle East is favorable to Beijing, reducing Washington’s ability to place focused attention and pressure on China.”
The arithmetic is brutal. If the United States deploys two carrier strike groups off the coast of Iran, and it can only maintain three on station globally at any given time, that leaves one for the entire Pacific theater. Taiwan. The Philippines. Japan. All left with diminished coverage.
Every missile expended in the Gulf is one unavailable in East Asia. Every carrier tied down is one removed from Pacific balance.
In a zero-sum system, China collects the dividend without firing a shot.
Unconventional Retaliation
Perhaps the most underestimated consequence of attacking Iran is retaliation by actors who are not Iranian at all.
A U.S. strike would not be perceived globally as a bilateral conflict. It would be read as a hegemonic act and a signal that force remains Washington’s primary language. This perception would activate a diffuse ecosystem of anti-hegemony actors: ideological extremists, decentralized cells, and radicalized individuals scattered across continents.
They require no coordination, no command structure, and no attribution. The danger is not scale, but diffusion. American embassies, corporations, logistics nodes, and symbolic targets would face persistent, low-intensity pressure worldwide. Deterrence fails when the enemy is not a state but an environment.
This is the empire’s nightmare: a world where American presence itself becomes the trigger.
The Collapse of Credibility
Power ultimately rests on belief.
If the United States initiates a war it cannot conclude, fails to secure trade routes, exports inflation to allies, and generates instability rather than order, confidence erodes. Allies will hedge, partners will diversify, and rivals will start to probe.
The June 2025 campaign was supposed to demonstrate resolve. Instead, it demonstrated limitations. Six months later, western-backed protests have erupted across all 31 Iranian provinces, and the regime still stands. The strikes did not produce regime change. They did not eliminate the nuclear program. They did not deter reconstruction.
If the most powerful navy in history cannot impose decisive control over critical chokepoints, if it cannot translate kinetic superiority into political outcomes, the myth dissolves.
The emperor is revealed, not as weak, but overextended.
The Self-Inflicted Defeat
The final assessment is brutally simple. The greatest threat to American power is not Iran’s missile program. It is the American decision to attack it.
By doing so, the United States would neutralize its forward base, exhaust its military, hollow out its economy, accelerate China’s rise, and globalize resistance to its presence.
Empires do not collapse only when defeated. They collapse when they choose wars that consume them faster than their rivals.
In the case of Iran, this would not be miscalculation, it would be strategic suicide.
The Gratuitous Barbarity of Trump’s So-Called ‘Board of Peace’
Like Bush and Blair planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump is planning to systematically violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and especially the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for civilians in war zones or under military occupation.
It is perhaps no wonder that Trump and Blair see eye to eye on Palestine, as they share the same ignorance, egotism and inhumanity, and the same disdain for international law.
In the fantasy being pushed by Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Jared Kushner, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.
Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies, Jan 23, 2026, Common Dreams
At the opening ceremony for Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace in Davos, Jared Kushner unveiled glossy images of his vision for a “new Gaza”: shining apartment towers, luxury developments, and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. There were no Palestinians at the ceremony—and none on the Board of Peace itself. In Kushner’s fantasy, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.
But how, exactly, are Palestinians to be “demilitarized” and pacified to make way for this Riviera of the Middle East? The assassination of Gaza’s Khan Younis police chief in a drive-by shooting this January offers a chilling clue. It was not an isolated act of lawlessness, but an ominous signal of what lies ahead. As Israeli-backed Palestinian militias openly take credit for targeted killings, the United States is reviving a familiar, deadly—and thoroughly discredited—playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan, in which death squads, night raids, and “kill or capture” missions are cynically repackaged as stabilization and peace.
Gaza is now being positioned as the next laboratory for this model, under the banner of Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” with consequences that history has already shown to be catastrophic.
That strategy was laid bare on January 12th, 2026, when Lieutenant-Colonel Mahmoud al-Astal, the police chief of Khan Younis in Gaza, was assassinated by a death squad based in the Israeli-occupied part of Gaza beyond the “yellow line.” A militia leader known as Abu Safin immediately took credit for the killing, which he said was ordered by Shin Beit, Israel’s anti-Palestinian spy agency.
Another Israeli-backed militia, reputedly linked to ISIS, killed a well-known Gaza journalist, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, in October. That militia’s leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was disowned by his family for running a pro-Israel death squad and was killed on November 4th, reportedly by one of his own gang.
These Israeli-run death squad operations follow a similar pattern to the targeted killings of Iraqi civil society leaders as resistance grew to the hostile US military occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004. But as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, these targeted killings are likely to grow into a much more systematic and widespread use of death squads and military “kill or capture” night raids in the next phase of Trump’s “peace” plan.
President Trump has announced that the so-called “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) in Gaza will be under the command of US Major General Jasper Jeffers, who was, until recently, the head of US Special Operations Command. Jeffers is a veteran of “special operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US occupation responded to widespread armed resistance with death squad operations, thousands of airstrikes, and night raids by special operations forces that peaked at over a thousand night raids per month in Afghanistan by 2011.
But like Israel’s Palestinian death squads during the first stage of Trump’s “peace” plan, the US mass killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq began on a smaller scale.
For an article in the New Statesman, published on March 15, 2004, British journalist Stephen Grey investigated the assassination of Abdul-Latif al-Mayah, the director of the Baghdad Centre for Human Rights and the fourth professor from al-Mustansariya University to be killed. Professor al-Mayah was dragged out of his car on his way to work, shot 20 times and left dead in the street. A senior US military spokesman blamed his death on “the guerrillas,” and told Grey, “Silencing urban professionals… works against everything we’re trying to do here.”
On further investigation, Grey discovered that it was forces within the occupation government, not the resistance, that killed Professor Al-Mayah. An Iraqi police officer eventually told him, “Dr. Abdul-Latif was becoming more and more popular because he spoke for people on the street here… There are political parties in this city who are systematically killing people. They are politicians that are backed by the Americans and who arrived in Iraq from exile with a list of their enemies. I’ve seen these lists. They are killing people one by one.”
A few months later, retired Colonel James Steele, a veteran of the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the US war in El Salvador and the Iran-Contra scandal, arrived in Iraq to oversee the recruitment and training of new Special Police Commandos (SPC), who were then unleashed as death squads in Mosul, Baghdad and other cities, under command of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
Steven Casteel, who ran the Iraqi Interior Ministry after the US invasion, was the former intelligence chief for the US Drug Enforcement Agency in Latin America, where it worked with the Los Pepes death squad to hunt down and kill Pepe Escobar, the leader of the Medellin drug cartel.
In Iraq, Steele and Casteel both reported directly to US Ambassador John Negroponte, another veteran of US covert operations in Vietnam and Latin America.
Just as John Negroponte, James Steele and Steven Casteel brought the methods they learned and used in Vietnam and Latin America to Iraq, Jasper Jeffers brings his training and experience from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza, and will clearly bring other special operations and CIA officers with similar backgrounds into the leadership of the so-called International Stabilization Force (ISF).
The ISF, as described in Trump’s “Peace Plan,” is supposed to be an international force that would provide security, support a new Palestinian police force, and oversee the demilitarization and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip. But the Arab and Muslim countries that originally showed an interest in contributing forces to the ISF all changed their minds once they understood that this would not be a peacekeeping mission, but a force to hunt down and “disarm” Hamas and impose a new form of foreign occupation in Gaza.
Turkey wants to send troops, but so far, Israel has objected, and the other countries that have expressed interest, such as Indonesia, say there is no clear mandate or rules of engagement. And what Muslim country will send forces to Gaza while Israel controls over half of the territory and moves the “Yellow Line” even deeper into Gaza?
Even if some Arab and Muslim countries are persuaded to join the ISF, the most difficult and politically explosive job of actually destroying Hamas will most likely be in the hands of the US and Israeli Special Ops commanders, the mercenaries they bring in and the death squads they recruit.
We can expect to see General Jeffers and his team provide more training and direction to Palestinians already collaborating with Israel in death squad operations, and try to recruit more militia members from current and former Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank and from the Palestinian diaspora.
CIA and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) officers with experience in death squad operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to oversee these operations from the shadows, using the same “disguised, quiet, media-free approach” that senior US military officers hailed as a success in Central America as they adapted it to the “war on terror” and the “war on drugs.”
For political reasons, Jeffers will probably use JSOC officers mainly for training and planning, and employ private military contractors to conduct night raids and other combat operations. Along with the huge expansion of US and allied special operations forces in recent US wars, there has been a proliferation of for-profit military contractors that employ former special operations officers from US and allied countries as unaccountable mercenaries.
These privatized forces have already been deployed in Gaza, notably by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its food distribution sites became death traps for desperate, hungry people forced to risk their lives just to try to feed their families. Israeli forces and mercenaries killed at least a thousand people at and around these sites.
The tens of thousands of Americans and others who took part in night raids in Iraq or Afghanistan and special operations in other US wars have created a huge pool of experienced assassins and shock troops that Jeffers can draw on, with for-profit military and “security” firms serving as cut-outs to shield decision-makers from accountability. More routine functions, such as manning checkpoints, can be delegated to other ISF forces, military police veterans and less specialized mercenaries.
The appointment of General Jeffers to command Trump’s ISF, and Israel’s formation and deployment of Palestinian death squads during the first phase of Trump’s phony peace plan, should be all the red flags the world needs to see what is coming—and to categorically reject Trump’s obscene plan before it goes any farther.
Like Bush and Blair planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump is planning to systematically violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and especially the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for civilians in war zones or under military occupation.
Tony Blair’s role in Trump’s plan is further evidence that the plan has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with the Western imperialism that keeps rearing its ugly head around the world, and which has bedevilled Palestine for more than a century.
Appointing Blair to any role in governing Gaza ignores not only his role in US and British aggression against Iraq, but also his lead role in the U.K. and EU’s decision, in 2003, to abandon earlier efforts to bring Palestinian factions together in the interest of Palestinian unity. Instead, they adopted a militarized, “counterinsurgency” strategy toward Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups. Blair’s failed policy helped pave the way for Hamas’s election victory in 2006, and for the endless, US-backed Israeli violence against Gaza ever since.
It is perhaps no wonder that Trump and Blair see eye to eye on Palestine, as they share the same ignorance, egotism and inhumanity, and the same disdain for international law. But the savage methods used by US special operations forces and US-trained death squads to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq only fueled broader resistance, which ultimately drove U.S occupation forces out of both countries.
The same tactics will lead to the same failure in Gaza. But unleashing such horrific violence on the already desperate, starving, unhoused, captive people of Gaza is a policy of such gratuitous barbarity and injustice that it should compel the whole world to come together to put a stop to it.
The Magic System Of Zionism
Caitlin Johnstone, Jan 24, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-magic-system-of-zionism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=185598042&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
If I spoke critically of something abusive that India was doing in Kashmir, would you expect me to be accused of an anti-Hindu hate crime?
If you criticized an Indian military operation, would you have to preface it with “I don’t hate Hindus or their religion and am not the slightest bit Hinduphobic”?
If there was worldwide opposition to something that Indian military forces were doing, would you expect western governments to start frantically churning out laws to ban that opposition because it was making members of the Hindu community feel unsafe?
Would it ever in your wildest imaginings occur to you that a criticism of the violent actions of the government of India could in any way be interpreted as an attack on the Hindu faith and the membership of that religion?
You can probably see where I’m going with this.
You don’t expect to see criticisms of the state of India framed as an attack on its majority religion because people in your society haven’t been conditioned to have that expectation. But we have been conditioned to have that expectation about Israel.
The association between antisemitism and criticism of the state of Israel isn’t natural. It’s not something that would organically occur to an untrained mind.
If a man who’d never heard of Israel or Palestine were shown footage of the genocide in Gaza, he would reflexively recoil in horror and say what he was looking at was a bad thing. If somebody then ran up and explained to him that what he just said was actually a hateful act of religious persecution, he would be very surprised and confused. Because he hadn’t been indoctrinated into making that association, in the same way you haven’t been indoctrinated into associating criticism of the Indian government with an attack on the religion of Hinduism.
It’s a completely counterintuitive association. There’s nothing about it that that you could find your way into through your own observation and reasoning. It’s something you’d need to be taught by others. You need it to be explained to you.
That’s the literal translation of the Hebrew word “hasbara”. It means “explaining”. Israel and its supporters have spent decades “explaining” to the world that criticism of the state of Israel is actually a terrible hate crime against Jews and their religion, because otherwise it would never occur to a normal person that that is the case.
It’s actually astonishingly impressive. The political ideology of support for this tiny apartheid state has been so effective at explaining to the world what thoughts they should think about it that those efforts touch all our lives. It’s so effective that you could be at a social gathering all the way across the sea in the United States and, unless you are very familiar with the people around you, if the subject of Israel comes up you’ll immediately understand that you could be in for a very uncomfortable evening.
It’s stunning how much influence this ideology has had throughout our society’s culture and institutions. It’s almost magical.
There was a segment in last year’s Louis Theroux documentary The Settlers that stuck with me where Israeli settler leader Daniella Weiss refers to Zionism as a “magic system”.
“Jewish settlements in Gaza is a very difficult step that demands a lot of work,” Weiss told Theroux. “You have to influence the leftists, the government, the nations of the world, using the magic system: Zionism.”
It isn’t surprising to learn that Weiss views her operations as a kind of magic. On paper she and her ilk shouldn’t be able to do what they do. Forcefully dropping a foreign ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization and violently hammering it into place against every organic impulse of the region is freakish enough, but then convincing the rest of the world to support this? To the point that it actually affects our interpersonal relationships and interactions on the other side of the planet? It shouldn’t work. But it does.
I don’t really know what magic is, but it makes sense that some Zionists would see it that way. Because from the outside looking in all that mass-scale psychosocial manipulation kind of does look like an inexplicable sort of wizardry.
Luckily, the magic seems to be wearing off. The old tricks just aren’t working anymore. Calling someone who criticizes Israel an “antisemite” is widely recognized for the fraudulent manipulation that it is. Pro-Palestine politicians are winning elections despite highly coordinated smear campaigns saying their candidacy makes Jews feel unsafe. Everyone knows Israel lies about everything all the time. Trust in the media is at an all-time low, while awareness of the pro-Israel bias of the mainstream press is at an all-time high.
People are still showing up for protests and pro-Palestine events. The public is turning against Israel in unprecedented numbers. Nobody’s buying the old song and dance anymore.
Maybe the people are finding a little magic of their own.
3 Myths About the Shah of Iran — “Dictator, CIA Puppet, Brutal”
Quick article debunking Cold War-era propaganda that’s still being repeated
SL Kanthan, Jan 22, 2026, https://slkanthan.substack.com/p/3-myths-about-the-shah-of-iran-dictator?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=844398&post_id=185383071&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Now that Iran is experiencing the biggest protests since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, there is renewed interest in the history of the country during the Shah era. This is a short article to debunk three myths about the Shah of Iran. I have written a much longer article on this topic — here is the link. Okay, let’s look at the myths and debunk/clarify them.
The three talking points to demonize Mohammad Reza Pahlavi are:
- He was a dictator
- He was a puppet of the US, since he was installed by the CIA in the 1953 coup
- He ran a brutal secret police known as the SAVA
All of these accusations have some truths and some lies. The claims are exaggerated and miss the context.
Shah being a Dictator
First, the Shah was a monarch and would be considered a “dictator” by today’s Western standards. But, in those years, most countries in the world were under dictatorships — left or right. From the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc to China and the Middle East to Latin America and even Spain and South Korea, dictators ruled the world!
What matters is this: Iranians had incomparably more political freedom, more economic freedom and more social freedom under the Shah than under the current theocratic regime in Iran.
Below [on original] is a photo of protesters — in Tehran from 1978 — with a sign that says, “Down with the Shah, the blood-sucker.” Can you imagine a similar sign today that says, “Down with Khamenei, the blood-sucker”? The protesters will be hanged from a crane.
Anti-Shah groups such as liberal university students, communists (like the Tudeh Party), and Islamic extremists thrived in Iran under the Shah. A terrorist group named as Fedayeen of Islam tried to assassinate the Shah — they fired five bullets, of which 4 narrowly missed, and one hit him in the shoulder.
Ironically, all the anti-Shah groups were brutally suppressed and eliminated by their former ally, Khomeini, after the revolution.
Within a month after coming to power, Khomeini denounced leftist Iranians as “non-Muslims” who “are at war with the philosophical beliefs of Islam.”
One year later, the Ayatollah openly declared a jihad on Iran’s liberals, Marxists and communists.
During the Shah’s rule, Iran had a parliament (majlis) which was freely elected by the people. In fact, one of the Prime Ministers — Mossadegh — was so powerful that the Shah had to flee the country for a couple of days in 1953!
The simple fact is that, if the Shah were a true dictator, there would have been no revolution in 1979!
Shah was a Puppet of the USA
This is a Soviet-era propaganda that is still being repeated today — remember that during the Cold War, both the US and the USSR were fighting over control of Iran, a very strategic country in terms of resources, influence and location.
The USSR was funding communist groups within Iran to destabilize the Shah’s government. And from radio stations near the Iranian border, the Soviets were blasting anti-Shah propaganda 7 hours a day.
The Shah was a very Westernized man who gravitated towards the US/Europe. But, of course, in such relations, the US would naturally have more power.
But he was not a “puppet.” In fact, the CIA complained in a classified psychological profile that the Shah was a “megalomaniac” who followed his “own plans, while disregarding US interests.” Not the description of a subservient leader.
The Shah also met with Soviet leaders in an act of extraordinary diplomacy during the intense Cold War. Here he is [on original] in Moscow with his wife Soraya in 1956:
About that infamous 1953 CIA coup: It was a coup to stop a coup
Contrary to the popular myth, the Shah was NOT installed by the CIA in a 1953 coup. He had actually come to power in 1941– that was 12 years before the coup and even 6 years before the CIA was created!
But… here is the nuance. The CIA certainly carried out the coup and helped the Shah, who had left/fled the country for 3–4 days.
Here is what happened:
Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh was an influential and ambitious populist, who nationalized the oil sector in 1951. But it was a total disaster — Iran’s oil production fell a staggering 95% over the next two years, as the British withdrew all their technicians, and Iranians did not have the skill to operate the refineries.
At that point, the Shah tried to fire Mossadegh, but couldn’t. (So much for being a brutal dictator). Afraid of a coup or worse (assassination), the Shah fled to Italy for a couple of days.
At the same time, powerful Western oil interests and the deep state (MI6/CIA) were waiting for an opportunity to get rid of Mossadegh. Hence the CIA coup of 1953.
It was a coup to stop a coup.
SAVAK — The Shah’s Brutal Secret Police
After the 1953 coup discussed above, the Shah sought help from the West. That’s why SAVAK was created in 1957 with help from the CIA and MI6. Yes, SAVAK was ruthless, operated outside the law, and engaged in spying, arrests, torture etc.
But guess what happened after the Islamic Revolution? SAVAK was not dismantled, but simply renamed as SAVAMA! In fact, the deputy chief of SAVAK — General Hossein Fardoust — became the head of SAVAMA. All the infrastructure, files, intelligence, torture methods, along with most intel agents continued under Khomeini.
The anti-Shah people never talk about this inconvenient fact.
Conclusion
For ideologues on the far left, a good dictator is an anti-American dictator. So, they worship Stalin, Fidel Castro, Islamic regime in Iran etc., while hating on the Shah.
This is a short summary. You can read my much longer article on Substack:
Kushner Reveals Dystopic Plan to Build Data Centers on Ruins of Gaza Genocide.
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’”
The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza to make real estate opportunities for investors.
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’”
The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza to make real estate opportunities for investors.
By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, January 22, 2026, https://truthout.org/articles/kushner-reveals-dystopic-plan-to-build-data-centers-on-ruins-of-gaza-genocide/
White House Adviser Jared Kushner revealed a neocolonial plan to transform Gaza into a home for luxury tourist resorts and data centers at the World Economic Forum on Thursday.
The plan has been widely condemned by human rights advocates, who say it is an an attempt to erase Palestinians by building a capitalist dystopia on the ruins of Israel’s genocide.
At the signing ceremony for President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Kushner shared a set of slides depicting a colonialist fantasy of the Gaza Strip under a hypothetical “demilitarization” of Hamas — despite the group’s repeated refusal to disarm, saying it would leave them defenseless against further attacks by Israel or otherwise.
The slides show computer-generated photos of high rise buildings along the coast and rows of residential buildings elsewhere.
The presentation includes a blueprint of Gaza divided into sections, which Kushner says is the U.S.’s plan for “catastrophic success” in the event of demilitarization of Hamas. The blueprint, labelled as the “Master Plan,” shows the entirety of the coast — where Palestinians have long fished for sustenance — dedicated to “coastal tourism,” with a sea port and an airport. There are large swaths dedicated to “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities.”
Tellingly, numerous parts of the map located next to residential areas are dedicated to industry and “data centers.” Ruinous technology like AI, reports have said, are slated to be a major part of the White House’s plan for Gaza, with other slides in the pitch deck reported by The Wall Street Journal showing a transformation of the Strip into a “smart city” with “tech driven governance.”
Nowhere is there a designation for cultural sites, nor does the map seem to be built around keeping or restoring any parts of Gaza that retain Palestinian heritage or life. The plan appears to be to finish Israel’s razing of the territory, clear the rubble in which thousands of Palestinians’ bodies are thought to be trapped, and replace it with real estate opportunities for investors.
“Gaza, as President Trump has been saying, has amazing potential,” said Kushner.
At the signing ceremony, Trump said that Gaza, home to millions of Palestinians, is “a great location” that should be viewed as a “big real estate site,” and expressed his interest in the region as a “real estate person at heart.”
“I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property — what it could be for so many people, it’ll be so great, people that are living so poorly are gonna be living so well,” Trump said.
Kushner touted the White House’s goal of applying “free market economy principles” to the razing and redevelopment of Gaza. He also expressed a desire to replace the humanitarian aid system for Palestinians in the region using those principles.
Palestinians have strongly condemned the plan.
“This is a plan to erase Gaza’s indigenous character, turn what remains of her people into a cheap labor force to manage their ‘industrial zones’ and create an exclusive coastline for ‘tourism,’” wrote Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa. “Palestinians will be pushed behind walls and gates, retrained in ‘technical schools’ to serve Israel’s supremacists ideology. The indigenous traditions and social fabric of this land will be obliterated utterly.”
“If the goal is truly peace, then the path is simple: end the occupation and help restore the rights that have been taken from Palestinians since 1948,” said Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer from Gaza. “We, the Palestinian people, are the ones who must determine our own future. Peace cannot be imposed while our land is occupied, our lives controlled, and our voices ignored.”
A Board of Peace built on the rubble of Gaza
22 January 2026 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/a-board-of-peace-built-on-the-rubble-of-gaza/
There are moments in politics when language becomes so detached from reality that it tips from cynicism into a farce. Appointing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace” for Gaza is one such moment.
Netanyahu is not a neutral stakeholder. He is not a reluctant participant dragged into a tragic conflict. He is the leader who has overseen the systematic destruction of Gaza: tens of thousands of civilians killed, entire neighbourhoods erased, hospitals flattened, universities bombed, and a population deliberately deprived of food, water, shelter, and hope. He is also the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
That Israel has rejected those charges or dismissed them as political is beside the point. Courts exist precisely because perpetrators rarely accept responsibility for their own actions. The question is not whether Netanyahu agrees with the accusations – it is whether the facts on the ground support them.
They do.
International law defines genocide not by slogans or historical analogies, but by actions and intent. Killing members of a protected group. Causing serious bodily or mental harm. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a group’s destruction, in whole or in part. Gaza today bears the unmistakable imprint of each of these elements.
Add to this the repeated, dehumanising rhetoric from senior Israeli officials – Palestinians described as “human animals”, Gaza spoken of as something to be “flattened”, “erased”, or emptied – and the claim that this is merely an unfortunate but lawful military campaign collapses under its own weight.
Legal processes move slowly. They always do. Genocide is almost never recognised as such while it is unfolding. Rwanda was denied until the machetes were put down. Srebrenica was minimised until the mass graves were opened. History shows that moral clarity arrives long before judicial finality.
Which is precisely why Netanyahu’s elevation to a “Board of Peace” is so grotesque. Peace is not brokered by those actively prosecuting a war of annihilation. Reconstruction is not overseen by those who created the ruins. And justice is not served by rehabilitating leaders while the bodies are still being pulled from the rubble.
Trump’s board is not a peace initiative. It is a branding exercise – one that launders responsibility, flattens moral distinctions, and asks the world to accept Orwellian doublespeak as diplomacy.
Calling this arrangement a farce is not rhetorical excess. It is an accurate description. When an alleged war criminal is recast as a peacemaker, language itself has been bombed into submission.
And Gaza, once again, is expected to pay the price.
It wasn’t Trump’s mind or morality that stopped his Iran attack.
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition, 21 Jan 26
A week ago President Trump was posturing about an imminent attack to overthrow the Iranian regime embroiled in massive protests. His declared motive was to save the Iranian protesters seeking internal regime change who were being slaughtered by the regime.
Then Trump pivoted, declaring since the regime was no longer planning to execute protesters, he wouldn’t attack.
But it wasn’t Iranian government benevolence that persuaded Trump to stand down. The two reasons Trump’s explanation was covering up were reality on the ground and a phone call.
The massive but failed protests were not solely a spontaneous internal revolt. They were fomented and supported by both the US and Israel to complete their long sought dream of regime change to destabilize Iran, Israel’s last hegemonic rival in the region. Israel’s Mossad was definitely on the ground and likely the CIA as well. Trump was cheering on the protests from the sidelines.
Trump was poised to attack to complete the regime change operation when protest success appeared imminent. But Iran’s government quickly and decisively snuffed out the protests, ending Trump’s dream of adding more thousands to his massive, murderous death toll bombing 7 countries in his first year of term two.
Trump also got a call from the real boss of US Middle East policy….Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. He told Trump that with the regime intact, Israel would be decimated by thousands of Iranian missiles once Trump attacked.
Iran’s government may be secure for now but Israeli, US dream of Iranian regime change will never cease.
Trump lied to the New York Times when he said the only thing that can stop him from foreign intervention is “my own mind, my own morality.” What stopped Trump from attacking Iran again, as he did in June, is what stopped him then… failure on the ground and a call from the guy giving Trump his orders on Middle East foreign policy.
Welcome to the Peace IPO: Gaza, Rebranded as a Prospectus
In a February 2024 bull-session at Harvard, Kushner gazed at Gaza and saw—not a besieged enclave packed with families and memory – but “very valuable” waterfront property, and he floated the idea of moving civilians out so Israel could “clean it up.” As you do.
21 January 2026 David Tyler, https://theaimn.net/welcome-to-the-peace-ipo-gaza-rebranded-as-a-prospectus/
Trump’s so‑called “Board of Peace” looks less like a new deal than Jared Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” 2019 plan re-branded. It’s as flash as a rat with a gold tooth in a new suit and a limited‑edition Speedmaster, but woefully vapid. It’s a real‑estate pitch pimped as an opportunity to the canny. Palestinians appear merely as background labour: extras, porters, shoeshine boys and waiters in a production where they’re expected to serve, not share.
While Israel’s Likud‑led far‑right coalition continues its military actions, attacks and land grabs that UN experts and human‑rights organisations describe as genocidal in effect.
The difference is not the logic. The difference is the volume. And a crass vulgarity meter off the scale. But nothing can distract from the monumental inhumanity and asinine stupidity of the whole project.
Not to mention calculated cruelty. In 2019, the sales pitch was polite. It spoke in the soothing language of workshops and investment frameworks; a $50 billion vision to “unlock” Palestinian potential, as if the West Bank and Gaza were a start-up stuck in beta because it hadn’t embraced enough deregulation. Palestinians boycotted it because the plan put money in the driver’s seat and rights in the boot.
In 2026, the pitch is blunt: join the Board, bring capital, buy a seat at the table, said to be a US$1 billion buy-in for “permanent” membership, while the souls whose land is now an upscale reno, get “technocratic committees,” “transition governance,” and the home comforts of Israeli management.
Peace, in other words, has gone subscription-tier.
How we got this Frankenstein
The Frankenstein story begins with another colour-coded Excel spreadsheet. As so many other, modern horrors do.
Kushner’s original “Peace to Prosperity” treated Palestine as an underperforming asset. The cure was foreign capital, investment corridors, industrial parks, tax-free zones, economic carrots without a match-stick of political liberation. The occupation, the siege, the “asymmetry” or inequality of power was left intact, politely ignored, like rust and dried blood, under a quick new paint-job.
Of course, the plan didn’t just sideline Palestinians’ political agency, the elephant in the room. It shut them out. Local and global fat cats would use Palestinians as a labour pool and a “stability problem,” while sovereignty, restitution and justice sat outside, like poor, uninvited relatives at a wedding.
Then came the moment where the whole philosophy slipped its tie and revealed the raw instinct underneath it.
In a February 2024 bull-session at Harvard, Kushner gazed at Gaza and saw—not a besieged enclave packed with families and memory – but “very valuable” waterfront property, and he floated the idea of moving civilians out so Israel could “clean it up.” As you do. That is not a diplomatic remark. It is a hard-nosed developer’s call. It is the real-estate gaze: people only get in the way, land is your opportunity.
Fast-forward to Trump’s “Board of Peace,” and you can see the same gaze. Formulated.
The language is a sales brochure parody. The White House frames the Board as part of a “Comprehensive Plan” and celebrates the creation of a Gaza administrative committee as a “vital step” in a multi-phase roadmap for “peace, stability, reconstruction, and prosperity.” Al Jazeera notes a three-tier structure that puts Trump and pro-Israel officials at the top while Palestinians get to take out the garbage. The landowners are relegated to municipal duties. ABC says invitation mail-outs are thick and fast. It worries that Trump is setting up as an alternative, $uperior, model to UN mechanisms.
Satire is writing itself by the time we get to the seat price. Bloomberg reports Trump wants nations to pay $1 billion for permanent membership, with renewable term options for non-paying participants.
This is not diplomacy. This is a club. It is peace by buy-in. A moral authority with an admission fee?
Why it could be proposed at all
Something this offensive to Gaza’s actual inhabitants only makes sense once Palestine is reclassified, from homeland to high-yield opportunity zone.
That reclassification didn’t happen overnight. It took decades of a broader architecture of policy and language to reduce Palestinian rights to “final status issues”; treat their political claims as a negotiating inconvenience, and normalise de facto control on the ground as an unchangeable reality.
Once you perform that trick; once you turn rights into “issues,” and a people into an “administrative challenge”, then the next step becomes conceivable: the coastline becomes an asset; the survivors become “human resources”; and peace becomes a portfolio strategy.
Trump’s political brand fits perfectly. He fuses branding with foreign policy. He doesn’t ask, “What is just?” He asks, “What sells?” He doesn’t ask, “What do people consent to?” He asks, “Who’s paying?”
CounterPunch repeatedly frames the Trump approach to “peace” as chaotic, self-interested statecraft where the prize is not justice but leverage, contracts, and strategic positioning; the kind of diplomacy that behaves like a market raid.
So the Board of Peace is not an aberration. It is the system, finally saying the quiet part out loud.
Satire interlude: Peace, now with equity options
There is, apparently, a new path to peace in Gaza: an Initial Public Offering.
The prospectus is glossy. The board is illustrious. Only one thing missing from the term sheet is the consent of the people who actually live there.
Trump, now moonlighting as Chair of Global Serenity LLC, has got up a committee that includes himself, Kushner, and Tony Blair: a trio whose track record is a museum of modern hubris. It’s less a diplomatic team than a support group for men who believe history is a distressed asset they were born to privatise.
The sales pitch is an elegantly simple Levantine Walz:
One. Label Gaza “valuable waterfront property”; a phrase typically intoned just before someone proposes a golf course over a mass grave.
Two. Announce that peace comes with tiers. A “permanent seat”? $1 billion, thank you. Peace, but make it premium.
Three. Invite governments and investors to bid for moral authority while Palestinians are quietly sidelined into the business plan as “local capacity.”
Kushner, once tasked with making peace by people who confused “son-in-law” with “diplomat,” returns as the visionary architect. The same man who dismissed political claims as obstacles and mused that Gazans could be moved out so someone could finally do something tasteful with the shoreline.
Having failed at “Peace to Prosperity,” he has now moved on to “Peace to Portfolio Diversification.”
What it really represents
Strip away the PR turd-polish and the Board of Peace represents three deeper trends:
Neoliberal occupation
Economic-first “solutions” that treat Palestinians as an economic population to be “developed” rather than a political people to be free. This was the Bahrain model: investment theatre without dismantling the structures that make normal economic life impossible.
Financialisation of justice
A $1 billion buy-in doesn’t just raise governance questions; it changes the moral architecture. It says legitimacy can be bought. It says peace is an asset class. It says the right to influence the future of Gaza belongs to whoever can wire the funds.
Erasure by technocracy
National claims, refugees, restitution, the right of return are all swept aside and replaced with “governance development,” “capacity building,” “administrative transition.” The jargon fog in which an occupied people are recoded as an admin problem consultants can solve.
The real genius is euphemism density. Layer upon layer. Occupation becomes “security architecture.” Siege becomes “border management.” External control becomes “oversight.” And the bombed-out landscape becomes “an opportunity corridor.”
What’s likely to happen next
Here the satire ends and the stakes bite. Legitimacy will be radioactive so long as Palestinians remain excluded from real sovereignty while the conditions of coercion persist. A structure unveiled about them, without them, is not peace, it’s administration.
Those positioned to profit will circle early. Reconstruction is always where politics, contracts, and influence meet. A pay-to-play architecture is an engraved invitation to opportunists and aligned states seeking leverage.
Civil society backlash will grow precisely because the moral inversion is so blatant: catastrophe monetised; rights treated as optional add-ons.
And the core problem, the one no amount of branding can fix, remains brutally simple:
If you build “peace” on the denial of self-determination, on the absence of accountability, and on the conversion of a people’s catastrophe into a capital project, you won’t get peace.
You’ll get a prospectus. You’ll get a boardroom. You’ll get a beachfront brochure printed on the ashes.
The Debt That Cannot Be Traded
The “Board of Peace” is a gamble that history can be treated as a distressed asset, and that a people’s identity can be diluted into a dividend. It assumes that if you make the brochure glossy enough, the ghosts of the past and the demands of the present will simply vanish into the “transition committees.”
But there is a flaw in the real-estate gaze: it mistakes silence for consent and rubble for a blank slate.
True peace is not a subscription service, and it certainly isn’t a premium tier accessible only to those with a billion dollars to burn. If we have learned anything from the century that birthed this Frankenstein, it is that human dignity is the one currency that cannot be devalued by an Excel spreadsheet. The “Board” may try to privatise the future, but they cannot buy the air, the memory, or the sheer, stubborn persistence of fifteen million people who refuse to be “extras” in their own story.
The old truth remains: you can build a boardroom on a shoreline, and you can print a prospectus on the ashes, but you cannot govern a people who haven’t been seen, only managed. In the end, the most “valuable property” in Gaza isn’t the waterfront; it is the unyielding agency of those who live there.
That is the debt that eventually comes due, and it is the only one that can’t be settled at a discount and the only one we keep turning away from at incalculable cost to our collective humanity.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
IAEA chief warns Iran nuclear standoff ‘cannot go on forever’
The UN nuclear watchdog’s chief warned Tuesday that a standoff with Iran over inspections and its near-bomb-grade uranium stockpiles cannot continue indefinitely, raising the prospect that Tehran could be declared in non-compliance with its obligations.
“This cannot go on forever because at some point I will have to say, ‘I don’t have any idea where this material is,’” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said.
“This cannot go on like this for a long time without me having to declare them in non-compliance.”
Grossi said he was exercising diplomatic restraint but stressed that Iran, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, does not have the option to pick and choose which obligations to meet.
Iran said in December last year it will not yield to international pressure to allow renewed inspections of nuclear sites hit by the United States in June.
Grossi also acknowledged parallel diplomatic efforts aimed at easing tensions between Iran and the United States, saying he hoped they would avert renewed military confrontation.
The IAEA has long sought answers from Iran over past nuclear activities and the whereabouts of undeclared nuclear material, issues Grossi has said cannot be resolved without access to relevant sites.
Iran International 21st Jan 2026, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601205064
The Mirage of the Enemy: Deconstructing Contemporary Media Bias
Following the “12-Day War” strikes in June 2025, which targeted Iranian facilities at Natanz and Fordow, the narrative shifted from “containment” to “inevitable conflict.” By painting the Iranian leadership as “Mad Mullahs” who cannot be deterred, the West creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where diplomacy is framed as cowardice and bombardment as “safety.”
20 January 2026 David Tyler , Australian Independent Media
In the opening weeks of 2026, the Western media’s portrait of Iran has reached a fever pitch of distortion. We are told, with the practised urgency of a countdown, that we are witnessing the final days of a “mad” regime, a nuclear-armed chaos factory that must be dismantled for the safety of the world. Yet, if we pull back the curtain on this narrative, we find a much more complex and tragic story, one where Iran is not merely a rogue actor, but a civilisation trapped between the hammer of domestic repression, and the anvil of imperial design whilst being wickedly misreported by a mainstream media, at the service of a power elite.
To understand Iran today, we must first dismantle two colliding fictions that monopolise our screens: the myth of the “irrational” religious state and the “imminent” nuclear menace. Blend in blame the victim in the guise of Coalition Islamophobia such Tony Abbott’s jibe that Islam “has a massive problem”.
The Original Sin: A Democracy Interrupted
The “anti-Western” sentiment so often cited by CNN or the ABC as proof of Iranian fanaticism did not emerge from a theological vacuum. It was set up in 1953. When Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a secular nationalist, dared to nationalise Iran’s oil to benefit his own people, the CIA and MI6 responded with Operation Ajax. By toppling a democratically elected leader to reinstate the Shah, the West sent a clear message: Iranian sovereignty is secondary to the flow of crude.
Historical amnesia is the bedrock of modern disinformation. We are taught to see the 1979 Revolution as a sudden burst of “madness,” ignoring a quarter-century of torture by the Shah’s SAVAK secret police that preceded it. The West did not lose a “friend” in 1979; it lost a compliant oil warden, and it has never forgiven the Iranian people for the replacement.
The Nuclear Paradox: A Richly Hypocritical Charge
The most potent weapon in the media’s arsenal is the “Nuclear Menace.” For over two decades, we have been told Iran is “months away” from a bomb. It’s a claim that persists despite IAEA confirmations of compliance and US intelligence assessments that Tehran has not, in fact, decided to weaponise.
There is a profound irony in watching nuclear-armed powers; including Israel, with its uninspected arsenal of hundreds of warheads; lecture a nation under total siege about the “danger of annihilation.” This is the collision of the Whipping Boy and the Existential Threat: Iran must be small enough to be bullied by sanctions, yet large enough to justify the $100 billion arms deals the U.S. signs with its regional rivals.
Following the “12-Day War” strikes in June 2025, which targeted Iranian facilities at Natanz and Fordow, the narrative shifted from “containment” to “inevitable conflict.” By painting the Iranian leadership as “Mad Mullahs” who cannot be deterred, the West creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where diplomacy is framed as cowardice and bombardment as “safety.”
The Starlink Catastrophe: A Digital Trojan Horse
Nowhere is the gap between Western “solidarity” and tactical reality more glaring than in the recent Starlink disaster. Throughout late 2025, Western pundits celebrated a “digital liberation” as thousands of Starlink internet terminals were reportedly smuggled into Iran to bypass government blackouts. It was framed as a gift from the tech elite “billionaire-Bros” to the brave dissidents in the streets of Tehran.
Were the dissidents ranks swollen by foreign agents? Certainly. It was Israel who prevailed upon “Help is on its way” Trump not to proceed because so many “assets” had been lost. We will never know the true figures. But we do know that rebels were trapped. In reality, it was a digital Trojan Horse. By January 2026, it was clear that the “liberation” had been turned into a mass-surveillance dragnet. The Iranian Cyber Police (FATA) and the IRGC’s intelligence wing had not been outsmarted; they had been waiting.
The Trap: Because Starlink terminals require a clear line of sight to the sky, activists were forced to place them on rooftops and in open squares.
The Triangulation: Using signal-intercept technology and GPS-tracking beacons embedded in intercepted shipments, the Iranian police were able to map the exact coordinates of every active terminal.
The Fallout: In a series of ruthless raids across Tehran, Isfahan, and Mashhad, thousands of individuals, believing they were using “secure” Western tech, unwittingly broadcast their locations to the state.
This catastrophe reveals a dark truth: Western “help” often functions more as a tool for intelligence gathering than for any liberation. The thousands of young Iranians and “helpers” now in custody are the human cost of a “regime change” fantasy that prioritises high-tech optics over the safety of the people on the ground.
Sanctions as Slow-Motion War
We are told that sanctions target “the regime,” (never the government) but the reality is collective punishment. By severing Iran from the SWIFT banking system, the West has triggered 70% food inflation and chronic shortages of life-saving medicines. This is the Shock Doctrine in action: hollow out the middle class, starve the vulnerable, and wait for the “inevitable” uprising.
As the 2026 protests continue, fuelled by both genuine grievance and economic desperation, we must be wary of “selective outrage.” The same outlets that decry Iranian repression remain silent on Saudi beheadings or the UAE’s labour- camps. This hypocrisy suggests that the West is not interested in Iranian freedom, but in Iranian subservience.
Myths vs. Realities of 2026
| The Myth | The Ground Reality | The Strategic Goal |
| “Irrational Actors” | Iran’s strategy is a defensive response to 70 years of encirclement. | Justify pre-emptive strikes. |
| “Tech Liberation” | Tools like Starlink were compromised, leading to 2,400+ arrests. | Co-opt domestic dissent for foreign Intel. |
| “Targeted Sanctions” | 85 million people are suffering from medicine and food shortages. | Destabilise for regime change. |
This guide deconstructs the mechanisms of “perception management” used by mainstream Western media as we navigate the crises of 2026. It highlights the stark contrast between the breathless coverage of Iran’s internal strife and the calculated silence or obfuscation regarding the “old news” of a post-Assad Syria and the enduring genocide in Gaza.
1. Selective Credibility: The Death Toll Gap
One of the most potent tools of manipulation is the Hierarchy of Proof. In 2026, we see a radical divergence in how Western outlets verify human loss.
In Iran: Media outlets like CBS and the ABC frequently lead with headlines such as “Over 12,000 feared dead,” citing “anonymous sources” or single activists with a VPN. These figures are treated as objective truth to manufacture a sense of immediate, catastrophic urgency that demands foreign intervention.
In Gaza: Despite the “first live-streamed genocide” producing mountains of forensic video evidence, Western media continues to use the “Gaza Health Ministry” caveat to cast doubt on Palestinian death tolls. Even as the count surpassed 70,000 in late 2025, it was framed as “disputed” or “unverifiable,” a technique designed to stall public empathy and political action.
2. The Starlink Catastrophe: A Case Study in Techno-Orientalism
The recent tragedy involving Starlink terminals in Iran serves as a masterclass in how Western media markets “liberation” while obscuring tactical reality. In late 2025, a narrative was sold to the Western public: Silicon Valley would “break the mullahs’ internet” by smuggling thousands of terminals into the country.
The catastrophe unfolded in three distinct phases of media manipulation:………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://theaimn.net/the-mirage-of-the-enemy-deconstructing-contemporary-media-bias/
Betrayed: How Liberals Supported Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and Turned Against the Progressive Shah.
COMMENT. This is a terrific article, much needed, and the original is richly illustrated.
It does set the record straight on the Shah, who basically ran a pretty decent system, and liberated women.
One thing to mention. The USA helped with manipulation to put the Shah into power, but later decided he wasn’t compliant enough. When he wanted to get nuclear power, that was the last straw, and the USA helped manipulate him out again
The Left’s Lethal Miscalculation Still Goes On!
SL Kanthan, Jan 19, 2026, https://slkanthan.substack.com/p/betrayed-how-liberals-supported-islamic?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=844398&post_id=184864947&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
History repeats itself and rhymes in uncanny ways. And there are profound contradictions in political ideologies. The partnership of liberals and right-wing fundamentalist Islam is one of those phenomenon that would leave any objective thinker immensely confused.
Let’s look at the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, where liberals and communists joined forces with religious leader Khomeini to overthrow the progressive but authoritarian Shah, under whom Iran made astonishing progress in terms of economy, modernization and social justice. Of course, immediately after coming to power, Ayatollah Khomeini crushed the Marxists and anyone remotely considered liberal.
Fast forward to 2026, Western liberals are generally very pro-Iran, and many of them are staunchly supporting the current theocratic government that is putting down the nationwide protests with brute force. Khamenei has admitted that “thousands” of protesters have been killed, but he blames the victims for sedition.
The photos and videos of body bags of dead Iranian protesters left to rot on the ground have not changed the opinion of liberal social media influencers.
Western liberals now are driven by the same motive as the Iranian liberals in the 1970s — that is, anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism. Anti-Zionism is also a major factor now.
However, such blind ideology leads to a situation where the cure is much worse than the disease. Let’s dive in.
Shah, the Progressive Leader
The Shah of Iran – Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – would be considered a leftist role model these days!
He did things that would make Mao Zedong cheer — for example, the Shah ended feudalism, took lands away from the landlord, and distributed the land to 1.5 million farmers. That helped about 9 million Iranians, a third of the population.
The Shah of Iran emancipated girls and women and did admirable things. Consider these:
- By 1979, 33% of the university students in Iran were women. That’s an astonishing number in the Middle East.
- There were 22 female ministers in the Iranian parliament.
- Iranian women were doctors, judges, professors and so on.
- How did the Shah achieve it? It was not easy. Here’s how he did it:
- The Shah made education free and compulsory for all Iranian girls (and boys) — up to the age of 14. Also, poor children were provided a free meal in schools.
- Reza Pahlavi built thousands of schools all over Iran, especially in rural areas.
- He abolished child marriage and raised the age to 18.
- He gave Iranian women the right to vote in 1963 — eight years ahead of Switzerland!
- Reza Pahlavi cracked down on Sharia law that limited women’s potential. His father, the first Shah, had already banned chador, the Iranian version of burqa.
- He gave Iranian women equal rights in marriage, divorce and custody. The Islamic laws were quite misogynistic.
In 1962, the Shah of Iran came to the US with his wife and met with President JFK.
The two really clicked, and the Shah was impressed by Kennedy’s Peace Corps. So, the Shah went back home and created a Literacy Corps and Health Corps to have young well-educated Iranians volunteer as teachers and doctors in rural Iran. It was also a bit like Mao’s “barefoot doctors,” but more modern and sophisticated.
Modernization of Iran Under Pahlavi Dynasty — “White Revolution”
Under the Shah and his father (the first king of the Pahlavi Dynasty), Iran made astonishing progress.
- Iran’s GDP grew a stunning 700-fold between 1925 and 1975! The per-capita income grew 200 times!
- Between 1960 and 1976, the real GDP — adjusted for inflation — grew an astonishing 5-fold.
- Between 1948 and 1978, the constant PPP GDP-per-capita grew from $250 to nearly $10,000.
Iran used to be a poor and an illiterate country divided by ethnic and religious identities. In 1925, a quarter of the population was nomadic. Infrastructure was terrible, manufacturing was negligible (except for artisans like those making Persian rugs) and there was no real military.
Under the two visionary Shahs (1925-1941 and 1941-1978), Iran underwent massive modernization. Initially, the private sector did not have enough money or the rich Iranians were not interested in factories, since they could make easy money from imports. Thus, Reza Pahlavi’s government encouraged public-private partnerships, co-invested in numerous factories, raised tariffs on imports, and made Iran self-sufficient in many areas.
Father and the son Shahs electrified villages and built massive infrastructure to connect various parts of Iran — like the Trans-Iranian railway, which is still an engineering marvel in some regions. The Shah helped create joint ventures for auto manufacturing and Iranian cars (like “Paykan”) for the first time. Iran Air was flying (often non-stop) to global hot spots like New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo!
- Under the Shah, a vast majority (60%) of the oil revenue was spent on improving Iran’s transportation, infrastructure and industrialization.
- Iran had no military before the Pahlavi Dynasty. However, by the 1970s, Iran had the most powerful military in the Middle East.
Iran under the Shah also had smart and pragmatic foreign policy. The Shah was greatly liked by the US and the West. Yes, it was geopolitics of the Cold War, but Iranians benefited from the US-Iran relations.
In 1962, the Shah of Iran visited the US and had an amazing ticker-tape parade on Broadway Street in Manhattan, New York City.
“CIA Puppet and SAVAK”
Two of the criticisms about the Shah are that “he was installed by the CIA after the 1953 coup” and that his secret intelligence group SAVAK was brutal and cruel. Let’s explore:
- The CIA coup in 1953 did NOT install the Shah, who came to power in 1941. Yes, his father went into exile when the Brits and the Russians invaded Iran; and he was placed on the throne at the age of 21.
- Fast forward to 1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh — who had become too powerful — had nationalized the oil sector two years earlier. Powerful Western oil interests and deep state (MI6/CIA) colluded to get rid of Mossadegh. The Shah had fled the country for only 3-4 days.
- This is just a matter of survival in politics and geopolitics. It was a partnership of shared values, although the US definitely and obviously was the more powerful one in the relationship. The Shah eventually became so independent that the US/West secretly supported Khomeini. Recently declassified US diplomatic cables show that the Carter administration had extensive contacts with Khomeini, and basically told the Iranian military to stand down.
- As for SAVAK, it was created in 1957 by the Shah with the help of the British and American intelligence to prevent further coups or the rise of extremists like communists and religious terrorist groups. Remember that the USSR was meddling a lot in the Iranian affairs. And SAVAK did operate outside the law, engaged in spying, arrests, torture etc.
- But guess what happened after the Islamic Revolution? SAVAK was not dismantled, but simply renamed as SAVAMA! In fact, the deputy chief of SAVAK – General Hossein Fardoust – became the head of SAVAMA. All the infrastructure, files, intelligence, torture methods, along with most intel agents continued under Khomeini.
So What Underpinned the 1979 Revolution?
If the Shah was so great, as I have argued, why did was he overthrown in the 1979 revolution?
Well, a whole slew of incompatible radicals and disgruntled groups got together in a strange alliance. The common excuse is that the Shah was authoritarian. However, if the Shah had been as tyrannical as the current government, he would have survived. But let’s take a look at the opposition:
- Islamic clergy — The mullahs were the #1 instigator, since they had lost a lot of their power and wealth in a secular society. Their hatred for the Shah and his father was intense. Some of the Shiite extremist groups like Fadayan-e Islam even assassinated Iranian Prime Ministers (four, to be precise!)
Socialists and Communists — The leftists were a small group in Iran since the 1920s. But when the USSR and the British joined to attack and defeat Iran in 1941, communism spread quickly. A communist political party known as Tudeh was founded in 1941. (Ironically, it was crushed by Khomeini! More on that later). The Soviet Union secretly funded the communists; and openly spread anti-Shah propaganda through newspapers and radio stations (operated out of Azerbaijan). Tudeh had a vast following, especially in trade unions; and quite a few military officers secretly belonged to the party. The communists kept demanding higher wages, even though the Shah passed laws for industrial workers to get 20% of corporate profits. These extremists wanted a communist Iran, and nothing else would satisfy them.
College Students — Khomeini really hated them! These spoiled kids were the clueless and idealistic group, which dreamed of democracy and freedom from imperialism, although they were very Westernized. Not much different from the current liberals, who live in the US but spend all day demonizing the US.
All these people had underestimated the religious fundamentalists. Some naively thought a religious person would never lie! And they all thought the religious poor were too harmless or incompetent to take over the leadership. In the desperation to beat the Shah, none of these groups used their brain. They missed all the red flags and projected their fantasy into Khomeini, who despised them.
How Ayatollah Khomeini Back-stabbed Communists, Liberals & Women
Consider the timeline:
Jan 16: The Shah of Iran leaves Iran, unwilling to push the country into a civil war.
Feb 1: Khomeini comes to Iran after exile. He had spent the last few weeks in France
Feb 11: Khomeini becomes the new leader of Iran.
March 7: Mandatory hijab law gets passed.
March 8: Liberal women stage a massive protest, but their new “friend” turned out to be far more totalitarian than the Shah.
What did Khomeini do to women?
- He systematically reversed much of the Shah’s contribution to women’s liberation.
- Khomeini introduced Sharia laws, made hijab mandatory, segregated public places (men v. women), reduced marriage for girls from 18 to 9 (!), banned women from being judges and other key roles, banned women from sports stadiums, banned women from singing or dancing and so on.
- Remember how the Shah raised marriage of girls to 18? The “Supreme Leader” of Iran reduced the age to 9. Nine!
Khomeini and his followers were brutal in enforcement. Women who did not wear a hijab or “dress modestly” were beaten, stoned, and sometimes attacked with acid that would disfigure their face. The Iranian parliament passed a law that women without hijab could face 72 lashes.
The obsession with hijab still goes on, although in the last 3-4 years, the government has relaxed a bit in Tehran. In 2016, Iran’s top chess player – Dorsa Derakhshani – left Iran because she was banned from the national team for not wearing a hijab or wearing “tight jeans.” There have also been many cases of men throwing acid on women’s faces for not dressing properly — like Marziyeh Ebrahimi in the photo below [on original]
Khamenei’s morality police have harassed, beaten up and arrested countless women for not dressing properly. Young Iranians are arrested for singing or dancing on Instagram or other social media. Last year, a woman (Parastoo Ahmadi) was arrested for live streaming her singing. It was a beautiful and classy performance but women cannot sing in public under Islamic laws! See below: [on original]
How did Khomeini attack the students?
Khomeini shut down the universities for nearly three years, starting from 1980! He fired or arrested all the leftist professors and student leaders. Some were even executed. All the leftist newspapers on campuses were shut down — by brute violence. The entire college curriculum was rewritten to be Islamic. Courses in music and other topics were banned. Soon, Western movies were banned and movie theaters were closed. Alcohol was banned, needless to say.
How did Khomeini attack the communists?
Tudeh, the communist party, had survived 38 years under Shah, even though he was harsh on them, since they were more pro-Soviet than pro-Iran. However, the party did not even last five years under the Islamic Republic. In 1984, the leader of the communist party – Noureddin Kianouri – was tortured and forced into confession, broadcast on TV.
Another Marxist-Leninist group was the OIPFG, a violent underground guerrilla organization that worked against the Shah and supported the Islamic revolution. These clowns were also ruthlessly crushed by Khomeini.
Khomeini eliminated all opposition groups, including the National Front, which was founded by Mossadegh, the man who nationalized the Iranian oil industry in 1951 and is still idolized by Western liberals.
The regimes of Khomeini and Khamenei have continued to be unrepentantly repressive for 47 years.
In 1988, for example, up to 30,000 political prisoners — all of whom once helped overthrow the Shah — were executed over a period of three months. These belonged to the MEK, Tudeh and Fedayeen, who were all deemed to be guilty of “crimes against Allah.”
End of the Shah
The Shah left Iran on Jan 16, 1978, partly because he was already sick with cancer, and partly because he didn’t want to plunge the nation into a bitter civil war. The US didn’t even the decency to let him at first. So, he went to Morocco, Panama, the Bahamas etc. Eventually, he was admitted into a hospital at Cornell in late 1978. A few months later, he died in exile in Egypt.
Hostile and Irrational Foreign Policy of the Islamic Republic
There is a golden mean between being a total puppet of the USA and being an uncompromising enemy of the USA. However, the rabid religious in Iran lack such a nuanced approach that arises out of geopolitical maturity.
In 1979, the Shah went to the US for cancer treatment. Rather than focusing on governance of the new nation, the Islamists wanted to kill the Shah, and demanded the US to send him back to Iran. When the US refused this barbaric demand, Khomeini’s radical students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 American civilians hostage for 444 days. During this time, the Americans were tortured and humiliated in shocking ways.
This needless and uncivilized action by Khomeini set the US and Iran on a collision path. Obviously, the country that has suffered more in this conflict is Iran.
Furthermore, the delusional Ayatollahs wanted to spread their “revolution” and expand their sphere of influence. Thus, they armed and funded Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Houthis in Yemen, Shiite militias in Iraq etc. Then, the Iranian government cries about US interference or attempts to do a regime change in Iran.
Conclusion
History is written by winners… and sometimes by losers. In Iran’s case, the US didn’t want to admit that it made a mistake, so Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah was demonized. “We let the bad guy fall, so don’t feel too bad.”
And Western liberals have a strange affinity for right-wing Islamic fundamentalism. Perhaps it comes out of guilt about imperialism, colonialism, Zionism, and endless wars in the Middle East. Not to mention political correctness, which disrupts critical thinking.
90 million Iranians are suffering because of the religious hardliners, for whom compromise is a dirty word. Even after the death of thousands of protesters over the last decade, the government has not agreed to change one policy. The people don’t have many basic political, economic, social or personal freedoms.
One of the Shah’s son hopes to be return to Iran and restore the old glory along with democracy. It really depends on the US/EU since the Iranian people themselves cannot fight back or change the status quo.
Anyways, hope you found this article useful and interesting. There are no simple truths in geopolitics, but it’s good to have different perspectives .
A Cruel Truce: Israel’s Ongoing Demolition of Gaza
15 January 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/a-cruel-truce-israels-ongoing-demolition-of-gaza/
What matters peace if it permits killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a society supposedly once at war? This is the situation facing Gaza as the occupying Israeli forces go about their business making the Strip even more uninhabitable for the Palestinian residents, ensuring that that land will be vacated, either through force or massaged consent, to enable its eventual seizure.
In a January 12 report, The New York Times found that Israel had razed over 2,500 buildings in the Strip since the ceasefire with Hamas commenced on October 10, 2025. These have been initiated on the Israeli side of the demarcated side known as the Yellow Line. The report, however, also notes the demolition of buildings on the side controlled by Hamas. “The scale of ongoing destruction is stark. Across eastern Gaza, in areas under Israeli control, satellite imagery reveals that entire blocks have been erased since the cease-fire, as well as swaths of farmland and agricultural greenhouses.”
The NYT quoted the grave words of Gaza-based political analyst Mohammed Al-Astal: “The Israeli military is destroying everything in front of it – homes, schools, factories and streets. There’s no security justification for what it’s doing.” A former Israeli official did not disagree. “This is absolute destruction,” assessed Shaul Arieli, commander of Israeli forces in Gaza in the 1990s. “It’s not selective, it’s everything.”
Under the thin covering of a cruel truce, Israel’s demolition campaign, according to the Palestinian National Initiative Movement, is intended to “deepen the humanitarian catastrophe and impose forced displacement and collective punishment on the people of Gaza.”
Justifications provided to the NYT were not reassuring, relying on that part of President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan affirming that, “All military, terror, and offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapons production facilities, will be destroyed and not rebuilt.” An Israeli military official denied a lack of discrimination in the destruction. At times, buildings collapsed because of the IDF’s detonation of explosives in tunnels underneath them. The air force had also been striking structures deemed a threat to Israeli soldiers, some of them being adjacent to the Yellow Line. It was also conceded that demolitions were taking place on both sides of the Yellow Line, though Israeli forces had not crossed the line in doing so.
This pattern is not a newly discovered one. The BBC took note of this in November last year when it revealed that “entire neighbourhoods controlled by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have been levelled in less than a month, apparently through demolitions.” The broadcaster’s Verify unit had analysed satellite imagery showing “that the destruction of buildings in Gaza by the Israeli military has been continuing on a huge scale.” Many of the buildings destroyed showed no indication of being damaged prior to their razing, notably in such areas as eastern Khan Younis, around Abasan al-Kabira. Gardens, trees and a number of small orchards were also pulverised in the exercise.
Such actions should have been considered blatant violations of the ceasefire terms. Israeli officials, current and former, were having none of it. Ex-head of the National Security Doctrine Department, Eitan Shamir, suggested that the IDF had acted in accordance with the terms, seeing as they did not apply to areas of the Strip behind the Yellow Line. This gorgeous casuistry also found form in the cold language of an IDF spokesperson who explained that, in accordance with the agreement, “all terror infrastructure, including tunnels, is to be dismantled throughout Gaza. Israel is acting in response to threats, violations, and terror infrastructure.” The level of destruction permitted relies on the beholder’s definition of the threat posed.
In December, it was the turn of Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency, which found much the same thing. “Satellite images showed the latest demolitions took place between November 5 and December 13, with most concentrated in the Shujayea and the Tuffah neighbourhood.” The images also revealed demolitions in the southern city of Rafah and the levelling of agricultural facilities east of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza.
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the destruction by an occupying power of real or personal property belonging either individually or collectively to private persons, or to a State, public authorities, or social or co-operative organisations, except in circumstances where it is absolutely necessary as part of military operations (Article 53).
In an email to Al Jazeera in December, Adil Haque of Rutgers Law School was sceptical that the systematically destructive activities of the IDF had complied with the provisions of the Convention. “With a general ceasefire in place, and only a few sporadic exchanges of fire, it is not plausible that such significant destruction of civilian property has been rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.” Absolute necessity, he explained, had to “arise from military operations, that is, from combat or direct preparations for combat.”
In responding to the NYT report, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, summed up the grim state of affairs with characteristic sharpness. “The so called peace plan,” she fumed on social media, “is allowing Israel to ‘finish the job’: 450 killed; 2,500 structures destroyed; lifesaving aid blocked.” Less a peace plan, it would seem, than a state of ongoing, permitted violence falling just short of war.
The Regime Change Machine Is Turning on Iran Again
the strategy shifts from direct confrontation to destabilization from within, through sabotage, information warfare, and regime-change pressure. That is why unrest inside Iran is being treated as an opening to exploit. That has been the official US and Israeli strategy for decades. And Israeli officials are already framing this like a Syria scenario.
This is all built to shape diaspora perception — and then feed Western headlines. Israel and the United States aren’t operating separately; they operate as an ecosystem. Israel drives the information war: narrative shaping, psychological operations, and online influence. The U.S. provides the infrastructure layer: funding pipelines, Persian-language media influence, pro-democracy NGO networks, and diaspora-facing institutions that convert narrative momentum into political pressure.
Even if Iranians overthrew their government today, that does not mean Iran’s future would suddenly be decided freely. Because the moment a state collapses, a vacuum opens. Washington and Tel Aviv will fill that vacuum. They will intervene politically, economically, and through media and proxy networks to shape the outcome.
January 16th, 2026, Mnar Adley, https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-israel-iran-protests-regime-change/290644/
Make no mistake: the U.S. and Israel are ready to seize this moment in Iran’s mass protests to drive a regime change operation. And it’s not even subtle.
Trump has openly threatened airstrikes against Iran — and he’s told protesters to keep going, promising: “Help is on the way.”
And Israeli security analysts are already gaming out a collapse scenario — suggesting the Israeli military could hit Iran’s strategic infrastructure and government targets if the state begins to crumble — to weaken the Islamic government and shape the outcome towards regime change with a plan to install Reza Pahlavi, the son of the brutal dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
And the timing matters. Iran sits at the heart of the Axis of Resistance, and Israel has been hit with many political and regional losses from resistance in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen. With its global reputation destroyed after the genocide in Gaza and stalled normalization plans with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, Israel’s default issue is to attack Iran, as the Islamic Republic is the number one target of the apartheid state.
This is why Israel is seizing this moment now. Its own intelligence agency posted on its Farsi-language account urging Iranians to join the protests, even claiming that Mossad was with them “in the field.”
What began as legitimate protests over the collapsing rial, rising prices, economic hardship and calls for real political reforms is now bwwwwwweing hijacked by pro-monarchy rioters waving Shah-era flags, openly calling on Israel and the United States to help overthrow the government.
Reports indicate these rioters who are openly backed by Israel have burned down over 30 mosques, and committed attacks and killings against civilians and pro-government demonstrators, using military-style weapons, hunting rifles, knives, axes, and blades, while targeting police and state institutions.
MintPress has documented how Israeli intelligence covertly transfer weapons into Iran through its eastern border and often times through Israeli-tied Cargo Ships that travel past Yemen through the Red Sea. A MintPress investigation revealed that Zodiac Maritime, operator of the Mercer Street, has deep ties to the IDF and Mossad — using commercial ships to move arms and operatives for covert operations, including assassination missions inside Iran.
Phony Human Rights Groups
Despite these facts, Western corporate media are pushing out bogus casualty and mass arrest numbers that are being shared by diaspora Iranians in the push for regime change. But we at MintPress News traced these numbers back to one source: the Human Rights Activist News Agency – an arm of the Human Rights Agency in Iran (HRAI).
A new MintPress investigation found that this agency and its news arm are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA cutout organization.
They’ve become the go-to source for some of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press. In the past week alone, their numbers have been repeated across outlets like CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, Sky News, and The New York Post, among others.
Even mainstream liberal commentators repeat these claims as settled fact. One example of this is Owen Jones, who wrote in The Guardian that Human Rights Iran is a “respected” group, and that their death toll claims are “probably significant underestimates.”
But what these reports almost never disclose is the funding pipeline connecting it directly to the CIA. Human Rights Activists in Iran presents itself as independent, but it’s based in Fairfax, Virginia — right inside the Washington intelligence ecosystem of the CIA. On its website, it describes itself as “non-political,” and even claims it does not accept financial aid from political groups or governments. Yet in the same paragraph, it admits its major donor is from the National Endowment for Democracy, a group created by the CIA to covertly do what the CIA once did openly.
And Human Rights Iran isn’t the only “human rights” NGO being signal-boosted into Western headlines. Another organization widely cited in coverage of Iran is the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, led by Roya Boroumand — cited by outlets including The Washington Post, PBS, and ABC News.
And again, the proximity to the U.S. foreign policy apparatus is rarely mentioned.
Although the Boroumand Center does not prominently advertise it in its funding disclaimer, it has been supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. A 2024 NED press release described the center as a “partner” organization — and the NED awarded Boroumand its 2024 Goler T. Butcher medal for democracy promotion.
At that ceremony, NED officials openly praised the Boroumand Center’s work as an “indispensable resource” and said the NED was “proud to support” their advocacy toward what it called a “democratic future for Iran.”
And sitting on the center’s board is Francis Fukuyama — a former NED board member, and an editor of the NED’s own publication, the Journal of Democracy.
So when Western corporate media presents these organizations as neutral, independent referees while using them to justify escalations, sanctions narratives, and regime change pressure, understand what’s happening.
Propaganda Onslaught
These messages are being reinforced digitally on social media through coordinated media messaging, diaspora amplification, and bot-driven campaigns traced back to hubs including Tel Aviv, Virginia and LA, boosting hashtags calling for the downfall of the Islamic government.
Of course, Iranians have the right to self-determination But what is happening now is unfolding inside a long-standing U.S.-Israeli framework built around sanctions, information warfare, and “democracy promotion” pipelines, including CIA-linked front structures like the National Endowment for Democracy, designed to steer unrest and manipulate Iranian diaspora toward regime change.
We have to remember: Israel has spent decades pushing the nuclear red-herring — the claim Iran is always “months away” from an atom bomb — to justify sanctions, sabotage, and escalation.
This summer, Israel and its allies tried to pull the U.S. into direct strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. But instead of a clean victory, Israel took a major blow when Iran retaliated, hitting military targets and causing damage reportedly worth billions, including in and around Tel Aviv.
Israel can’t win a full-scale war with Iran on its own.
So the strategy shifts from direct confrontation to destabilization from within, through sabotage, information warfare, and regime-change pressure. That is why unrest inside Iran is being treated as an opening to exploit. That has been the official US and Israeli strategy for decades. And Israeli officials are already framing this like a Syria scenario.
In the last year alone, Israel has been deploying an AI enabled operation on X targeting Iranians in the diaspora — using fake bot accounts, AI-generated personas, fabricated crisis content, and synchronized posting to push regime change messaging — pushing the idea that Iran must be de-Islamicized, that the Islamic Republic must fall, and that the “solution” is a secular, Western-aligned order. Ironic, of course, considering it is being pushed by an ethnic-Jewish state.
And when they say “de-Islamicize Iran,” Israel means destroy its revolutionary spirit from its roots. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew a US and British backed Monarchy is rooted in Islamic history and stories of Imam Hussain and Karbala, standing against a tyrannical system of exploitation, class warfare and oppression no matter the cost even if it means to stand alone.
That story is the moral backbone of Iran’s resistance identity, including why it backs Palestinian liberation, working class movements, independence and rejects U.S. and Israeli imperialism in the region and is part of a resistance movement for liberation.
Therefore, weakening that Islamic identity weakens resistance, targeting not just Iran, but Hezbollah, Yemen, and Gaza. That is why secularization is being sold as “liberation,” even though Iran is a majority-Muslim country.
This AI signal boosting promoting secularism, the monarchy, and regime change to the diaspora is not new. During previous unrest, hashtags like #WomenLifeFreedom and #IraniansDetestSoleimani were aggressively signal-boosted by bot networks — with MintPress analyses showing major traffic patterns tied not to Iran, but to hubs in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, and even MAGA-linked account clusters pushing the messaging. In some cases, over 80% of the traffic tied to these hashtags was coming from outside of Iran, according to X activity patterns and Google Analytics.
Read more: The Regime Change Machine Is Turning on Iran AgainThis is all built to shape diaspora perception — and then feed Western headlines. Israel and the United States aren’t operating separately; they operate as an ecosystem. Israel drives the information war: narrative shaping, psychological operations, and online influence. The U.S. provides the infrastructure layer: funding pipelines, Persian-language media influence, pro-democracy NGO networks, and diaspora-facing institutions that convert narrative momentum into political pressure.
Modern regime change against Iran doesn’t start with tanks. It starts with civil society capture — shaping what people believe, what they protest for, and what outcome they’re pushed toward through “pro-democracy NGOs” that are CIA cutouts. The stated goal and policy is to covertly do what the CIA once did openly.
That pipeline runs through a network of “democracy promotion” groups tied into U.S. foreign policy that can be traced back to the CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy, and organizations in its wider orbit like Foundation for Democracy in Iran, United for Iran, Tavaana, NUFDI, the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, and Farashgard. Different branding — same function: media narratives, activist training, diaspora pressure campaigns, and political steering toward one destination: regime change.
One of the pressure points repeatedly weaponized is culture, especially women and the hijab, framing Islamic governance as backward, while selling “freedom” as secularization and Western capitalism as the future of freedom.
Now here’s the part most people never hear: it’s an influence architecture, where Washington-linked NGOs generate the numbers, Western outlets repeat them as fact, and the funding networks behind them stay off-screen and are represented as “independent.”
In Washington, Iran policy runs through institutions that are funded by weapons manufactures like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and pro-Israel billionaires with board members that read like a war criminal roster.
The pressure campaign is sustained by think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Atlantic Council, pushing maximum pressure, sanctions escalation, and regime change year after year.
These institutions are fueled by donor networks tied to hardline pro-Israel politics — billionaire megadonors like Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and Haim Saban — who bankroll the ecosystem that keeps Iran framed as the permanent enemy and regime change as the permanent solution.
Imperial Games
And of course, Iran sits inside a broader U.S. Cold War framework targeting Russia, China, and Iran as the core adversarial bloc. Iran’s “crime” is refusing to submit — standing independent, backing resistance, and defying U.S. and Israeli power.
So the policy becomes familiar: isolate, sanction, destabilize. And if that fails, destroy.
Israel’s strategic doctrine has long treated the region’s strongest adversarial states – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran – as targets for destabilization, because these states and alliances block Israeli dominance.
Its plan to weaken these states is documented in its Yinon Plan — the argument that Israel’s long-term security is strengthened when major states are broken into smaller sectarian and ethnic entities.
In 1996, a strategy paper written for Netanyahu’s circle called “A Clean Break” argued for reshaping Israel’s environment by weakening hostile states and rolling back adversaries. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Brookings Institute published “Which Path to Persia?” treating regime change in Iran as a standing policy option, while outlining methods from pressure campaigns to covert destabilization.
If regime change doesn’t deliver a compliant Iran, partition becomes the fallback. The plan is to carve out a Sunni statelet across western Iraq and eastern Syria — specifically to cut the land corridor that connects Iran to its allies. That corridor runs Iran → Iraq → Syria → Lebanon — the route that links Tehran to the Mediterranean and to Hezbollah. And if you break that corridor, you isolate Iran, weaken the Axis of Resistance, and sever the regional link that makes Iran such a strategic problem for Israel.
The plan has already been partially executed with the U.S. and Israel’s proxy war in Syria, the new HTS leadership, the arming of Kurdish separatists, and breaking off Kurdistan into its own state in Iraq. This is called the Sunnistan plan inked by neocon war hawk John Bolton, and it is being put into action through policy by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, AEI, and the Washington Institute.
This has been the official plan for Iran and the region to target any resistance to U.S. and Israeli imperialism. So when bystanders call for regime change under the guise of humanitarianism, they do not realize they are falling into the trap of imperialist propaganda and war planning that is fueled by a very sophisticated messaging system.
Even if Iranians overthrew their government today, that does not mean Iran’s future would suddenly be decided freely. Because the moment a state collapses, a vacuum opens. Washington and Tel Aviv will fill that vacuum. They will intervene politically, economically, and through media and proxy networks to shape the outcome.
And that’s why the replacement is being preloaded right now. If the Islamic Republic falls, the preferred answer is ready: Reza Pahlavi, a secular figurehead. A pro-West, pro-normalization with Israel, reversing the Islamic Revolution’s economic independence, and reopening Iran’s strategic industries — oil, gas, infrastructure — to Western capital and privatization. That’s the sad truth.
Iran is not a chessboard. It is 90 million human beings, with a civilization, culture, and identity far deeper than any foreign policy narrative. This is a people shaped by deep history and resilience, not a caricature in a policy playbook. And if the world truly believes in self-determination, then Iran’s future cannot be decided by think tanks in Washington or intelligence agencies in Tel Aviv.
Yet Western governments — where police state repression is increasingly the norm at home — are acting like they have the moral authority to tell Iranians to overthrow their own government.
In the United States, Trump has unleashed ICE in ways that have involved grave abuses, all while that same government lectures the world about human rights and “freedom.”
And history shows us this clearly: when the empire intervenes, it’s ordinary people who bleed first. Iran’s future belongs only to Iranians.
Study reveals ‘persistent danger’ from Israel’s white phosphorus strikes in southern Lebanon
Middle East
An investigation mapping out 248 strikes highlights Israel’s use of white phosphorus during the recent conflict in southern Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024. Open-source researcher Ahmad Baydoun, who conducted the study, emphasises the serious and ongoing concerns regarding the substance’s impact on health, agriculture and the environment.
The FRANCE 24 Observers/ Djamel BELAYACHI, 03/12/2025, https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20251203-study-reveals-persistent-danger-israeli-white-phosphorus-strikes-southern-lebanon
Burnt olive groves, devastated fields and toxic fragments buried underground – in southern Lebanon, Israel‘s use of white phosphorus during the conflict with Hezbollah from October 2023 to November 2024 left a lasting mark.
Although not explicitly prohibited by international law, the use of white phosphorus is regulated as an incendiary weapon. Its use against civilians or in populated areas is prohibited. In June 2024, the Israeli army claimed that it did not use white phosphorus shells to target or set fires, adding that “Israel Defence Forces procedures require that such shells are not used in densely populated areas, subject to certain exceptions”.
‘91% of white phosphorus strikes took place before Israeli forces entered southern Lebanon’
Ahmad Baydoun is an open source intelligence (OSINT) researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. According to data from the study he led, presented in an interactive map published in October 2025, a significant proportion of white phosphorus strikes in southern Lebanon hit civilian and agricultural areas.
Collecting this data involved combining digital tools, verification of images posted on social media (particularly Facebook and Instagram), and testimonies from residents on the ground. Baydoun explains:
“Israel justifies the use of white phosphorus as a smoke screen to protect the movements of its troops or to mark targets. But according to my research, 91 percent of white phosphorus strikes took place before Israeli forces entered southern Lebanon in October 2024, which contradicts the official Israeli version. Furthermore, 39 percent of all phosphorus strikes we documented took place over civilian areas, 16 percent over agricultural land, and only 44 percent in uninhabited areas or areas far from residents.”
NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented the use of white phosphorus in or near residential areas, contradicting official Israeli statements.
‘A persistent danger to human life and livestock’
White phosphorus was used only with artillery during the last war, according to Baydoun. The munition explodes, scattering incandescent fragments over a wide area, reaching temperatures of up to 800°C.
Baydoun told our team:
“The munitions explode in the air and produce 115 small fragments that sink into the ground and continue to emit this toxic substance for ten to fifteen minutes. Fragments can remain active in the ground. They can remain dormant until they are exposed to oxygen again. Then they reactivate and produce smoke.
We had a farmer in southern Lebanon who, a year after the initial strike, hit a fragment with a stick, and the fragment started emitting toxic smoke again, demonstrating the ongoing danger to people’s lives and livestock.”
The study lists nearly 28,700 fragments scattered throughout the region, which are considered very difficult to extract.
“It is very difficult to extract them from the ground. If someone has livestock and that livestock eats one of these fragments, it dies immediately, and if a human consumes the meat from that livestock, they also die.”
Among the villages in southern Lebanon most affected by white phosphorus strikes are Al-Khiam (30 incidents), Meiss El-Jabal (28 strikes), Kfar Kila (26 strikes), Yaroun (24 strikes) and Rmaysh (17 strikes).
Fear of consuming local products
Thanks to the geolocation of hundreds of photos and videos, Baydoun’s project has precisely documented 248 strikes. Residents can check whether their land or homes have been affected.
Many residents express fear of consuming local products, particularly olive oil and vegetables, over concerns of invisible contamination. In February 2025, analyses conducted by the Lebanese Ministries of Agriculture and Environment did not detect traces of phosphorus in olive samples. However, high concentrations were found in some soils, posing a potential risk to future harvests.
According to the United Nations FAO, nearly 2,100 hectares of orchards were burned, 2.3 million livestock were killed, and agricultural losses in the south of the country and the Bekaa Valley (in eastern Lebanon) exceeded 704 million dollars between October 2023 and November 2024.
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