Posted on 07/06/2025 7:27:58 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The illusion of Iranian power was kept alive for decades by American engagement with the would-be lords of the Middle East. Now the spell is broken, and the ‘Axis of Resistance’ is shattered.
A billboard with the "doomsday clock," counting down the days until Israel's destruction, is pictured in downtown Tehran, Iran, on November 4, 2024. Israel bombed the clock on Monday.
A few months before he was buried under the rubble of his Beirut bunker, the late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, repeated to his followers, as he had done many times before, his famous line that Israel was “weaker than a spider’s web.” That is, Israel was an artificial implant that structurally was bound to collapse. All it needed was sustained violence and patience. The end result was inevitable: Israel would vanish from the map with a wave of the hand.
The fantasy that Nasrallah peddled to his followers and “resistance” fans was not, on its face, entirely ungrounded. Iran, a much larger country than Israel, with 10 times the population, was a rising power. Its regional reach spanned from the Gulf to the Mediterranean. It had established missile bases on Israel’s borders and on a critical maritime passageway in the Red Sea. It controlled four Arab capitals and dominated the landmass across Iraq through Syria into Lebanon. In addition, Iran was allied with the United States’ two great rivals, Russia and China. In short, for Nasrallah and the resistance faithful, it appeared certain that Iran was inexorably ascendant.
In reality, Iran’s winning hand was a mirage. It took Israel 21 months to blow through it—15 of which were during a hostile American administration that actively tried to hobble the Israeli effort, to prevent the Iranian Wizard of Oz and his legions of flying monkeys from being scattered to the winds.
Gaza, Iran’s southern front, is now a wasteland, which, if President Donald Trump implements his stated plan, will be emptied of most if not all of its inhabitants—or at least those who choose not to live in rubble. Whether Trump’s Gaza plans rise or fall, it’s unlikely that Israel will ever cede control over the strip’s border with Egypt, which means that Gaza as an active front against Israel is gone for good.
Next to go was Hezbollah, the oldest and best equipped of Iran’s regional terror assets—indeed, the lynchpin of its regional network. Within three months in 2024, Israel eliminated the group’s entire command structure, decimated its infrastructure along the shared border, and blew up its weapons caches. Despite a U.S.-imposed cease-fire, Israel has maintained operational freedom and continues to take out cadres and arms caches inside Lebanon at will, with Hezbollah unable to mount any response.
Not long after Nasrallah’s demise, the other big piece on the Iranian board tumbled. In a matter of days in December 2024, the Assad regime, the Islamic Republic’s strategic ally since the 1979 revolution, was gone. Hollowed out by a decade and a half of war, and with Hezbollah eviscerated and Russia bogged down in Ukraine, the 53-year rule of the Assad family was suddenly history. In its place, a new Sunni regime in Damascus, Syria, is now intercepting weapons shipments to Hezbollah.
Iran’s multiple militias in Iraq, another card in the mullah’s winning fantasy poker hand, didn’t bother to deploy in Syria and have largely been irrelevant in the axis’ confrontation with Israel. While Iran maintains political clout in Baghdad, its militias there have proved worthless as a military instrument in its regional project, as Iraqi Shia turn out to look good only on paper while displaying little motivation to get slaughtered by a superior enemy on behalf of Iranian adventurism.
With its Levantine network in shambles, Tehran’s most relevant proxy over the past 20 months has been the Ansar Allah group (the Houthis) in Yemen. The Houthis have held global shipping in the Red Sea hostage while occasionally lobbing missiles and attack drones at Israel. As a result, they too have been hit hard, by both the IDF and the United States and Britain. In recent days, the Houthis have threatened to resume targeting U.S. ships in the Red Sea, which would likely invite a punishing response.
Finally, there was Iran itself: the home base of the mighty resistance axis. In recent years, Israel had already shown how thoroughly it had penetrated Iran. From the theft of the mullahs’ entire nuclear archive to multiple sabotage operations and high-value targeted assassinations, including taking out Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the heart of Tehran in July 2024, Israel showed the ability to operate with ease throughout Iran—including in the country’s most sensitive and well-guarded places. The country’s intelligence services and decision-making echelons were forced to assume that Israel was privy to the regime’s secrets and could kill its leadership at will.
After making short shrift of Iran’s air defense systems in October, Israel demonstrated its total military superiority this month, gaining full control of Iran’s airspace and going to work on its nuclear facilities, ballistic missiles and launchers, command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the nuclear program’s top scientists, clearing the way for the United States to demolish Iran’s three main nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. And with that, Iran’s nuclear dreams went up in smoke, much like its regional enterprise.
Since Israel thrashed Hezbollah a year ago, and the cascade of wins that followed, the global reaction to its achievement has been one of surprise—shock at the comprehensiveness of the Israeli domination and the complete Oz-like hollowness of the Iranians. But the Iranian regional position, much like its nuclear program, was a function not of Iranian strength but most crucially of U.S. support. If the Iranians were illusionists, the fuel for their tricks came from an America that repeatedly wrote monetary and diplomatic checks under the assumption that the magic act was real.
If only the Iranian people could get rid of the mullahs.
“the fuel for their tricks came from an America that repeatedly wrote monetary and diplomatic checks under the assumption that the magic act was real.”
We can thank the Kenyan and his sock puppet for all that.
The Kenyan and Valarie Jarrett.
“the fuel for their tricks came from an America that repeatedly wrote monetary and diplomatic checks under the assumption that the magic act was real.”
We can thank the Kenyan and his sock puppet for all that.
Precisely correct, but some credit should be given to the Clintons, President Carter and the State department.
…because they thought it was a good idea that Iran, rather than Saudi Arabia, be the regional hegemon.
These idiots fought an *8 year* war to a stalemate with Saddam. You know, 100 hour Saddam.
Valarie Jarrett = Val Jar = “the Persian Serpent”
“After making short shrift of Iran’s air defense systems in October, Israel demonstrated its total military superiority this month, gaining full control of Iran’s airspace and going to work on its nuclear facilities, ballistic missiles and launchers, command and control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and the nuclear program’s top scientists, clearing the way for the United States to demolish Iran’s three main nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. And with that, Iran’s nuclear dreams went up in smoke, much like its regional enterprise.”
Iran probably can still build about 8 bombs total at the rate of about one a year.
The 60% U-235 is still in Iran. There’s probably at least one operable late model centrifuge still useable.
“The 60% U-235 is still in Iran. There’s probably at least one operable late model centrifuge still useable.”
Who told you that? Your source?
Not credible.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.