Why Iran? Context & Consequences

Yesterday, in a pub amid the spires and ivory college walls of Cambridge, I tapped out my take on the war so far. It prompted reader Dave Hansell, who should be on a steel city retainer, to supply a link to the best single text I’ve yet to encounter on the failed US-Israeli decapitation strike on Iran.

That’s saying something. These past eight days I’ve read, viewed and listened to scores if not hundreds of such accounts.

His depth and breadth masterly, Roger Boyd weaves cultural aspects with geopolitics and realpolitik to arrive at an assessment consistent with mine but vastly richer. We’re talking 4,260 words. But, hey, it’s Sunday, and this is kind of important.

And if those things don’t persuade you, how about the fact it’s from start to finish an enthralling read?

Why Iran? The Context & The Consequences

The first thing that the likes of the ignorant Senator Ted Cruz should understand is that Iran is Persian not Arab, and represents an independent civilization going back to the times of ancient Greece. And that Islam is a religion not an ethnicity, as is Judaism. He also needs to go re-read his Bible, specifically Genesis 12:1-3 which says:

Then the LORD said to Abram, “Leave your country, your kindred, and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; and all the families of the earth will be blessed through you.

This is Abram, the father of the three great Abrahamic religions; Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Israel is never mentioned, and it also very specifically states that “all the families of the earth will be blessed through you”. To misquote the Bible, explicitly misrepresenting the stated words of the Christian God, is to be a heretic. Ted Cruz should be reminded that he was elected to serve Americans, not to serve a foreign power. Here, displaying his utter ignorance and mendacity in his service of a foreign power.

The Scofield Bible, a heretical reinterpretation of the King James Bible by Scofield, is a core text of the Dispensationalist movement that believes in an End Times in the present (rather than the End Times being seen as the fall of Rome as accepted in mainstream Christianity). I have written about the highly questionable origins and mainstreaming of the Scofield Bible, together with the related mainstreaming of the capitalist-friendly Prosperity Gospel. All of which was a political project, not a religious one.

After Scofield died the Oxford University Press issued a 1967 (the year of the Six Day War) update entitled The New Scofield Bible which included specific additions that greatly increased the support for the state of Israel and its rights to take the Palestinian lands; “close to an endorsement of US foreign policy on the state of Israel” (Donald Akenson, The Americanization Of The Apocalypse, p. 435). The Scofield Bible teaches the notion that Gentiles are “blessed in association with Israel”, and that God supports the stealing of the Palestinian lands to create Israel and the demolition of the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in the Muslim world, to rebuild The Temple (a core belief of the most extremist Zionists); also the return of Jewish religious sacrifices.

This very political project of spreading a gospel that thoroughly supported capitalism and Western civilizational supremacy in a US that at the end of WW2 was not particularly religious (and where the religious slanted toward the social gospel that was supportive of the New Deal) is detailed by Kevin M. Kruse, in One Nation Under God. An extremely successful political project that mirrored the Othering of the Soviet Union and China as “godless communists”, and later the Othering of “Muslim terrorists”.

The deranged neoliberal armageddon cultist Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, is but one of the more severe examples of the success of this Christian Zionism and Prosperity Gospel project, in producing a significant religious fundamentalist section of the US population that perfectly serves US imperial objectives. A classic case of Gramsci’s cultural hegemony used to cognitively corral a major part of the population into supporting the US oligarchy against its own political-economic interests, the creation of a false consciousness.

In the same piece, I covered how the US Jewish community turned to the political right during the attack upon their community during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Embracing the US Empire and capitalism and clinging close to the centres of US power as a defensive mechanism; a project methodically carried out over seven decades. It is a strategy also carried out by the government of Israel, making itself indispensable to the West while also seeking power within the Western polity aided by significant parts of the Jewish diaspora. This greatly suited a West that was happy to have its own neo-colonial servant in such an important region, one that would carry out the Western dirty work not just in the Middle East but across the world with plausible deniability for the West. As Joe Biden stated, if an Israel had not existed the US would have had to invent one.

Theodor Herzl, the grandfather of Zionism, was an atheist. Just as an atheist cannot be a Christian or a Moslem, they cannot be a Jew if we accept that Judaism is a religion and not an ethnicity (with the latter disproven by basic genetics). Herzl was open to different locations for his Jewish state, as a political and secular project. Netanyahu was raised in a secular family, and from his statements and actions can be seen also as an atheist. He was the personal secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the atheist founder of Revisionist Zionism, a man who with Netanyahu’s atheist father had an overwhelming influence on his political philosophy.

But time is running out for both the US and Israel with respect to these political projects. From 2007 to 2021 Evangelical (the core of religious Zionism in the US) worship fell from 30% to 24% of the population, and more recently that number is 23%; with only 14% of those 18 to 29 against 30% of those 30 and older. Evangelical worship is slowly but surely dying out and by 2025 that 14% may very well be all under the age of 39, while those currently 50 and above enter the years of accelerating death rates. The majority of US Jews under the age of 50 are already not Zionist, with the core of US Zionism funded by a small group of the ageing Jewish Zionist rich. At the same time the secular project of Israel is being rent asunder by the civil war between the secular (mostly Ashkenazi) liberal European Jews and the ultra-orthodox predominantly European Haredi Jews and the non-European Mizrahi Jews who have been historically racially discriminated against within Israel. All are happy to slaughter Arabs and steal their land, but the latter two want to establish a truly Jewish fundamentalist state which would reject the whole liberal project of the Ashkenazi.

In extremis, Israel would become the Jewish version of the ISIS Caliphate. A state and political project that disingenuously and aggressively thrusts its “Jewishness” forwards to claim the victimhood of the Holocaust is now ironically threatened by the imposition of an actual Jewish religious state; underlining the fact that Zionism is not a religious project and is a separate thing to Judaism. All the while, the US and Western global power that peaked in the 1990s is in a secular decline and with it the ability of Israel’s “big brother” to sustain and protect it.

The antagonism of the West to Iran has always been about energy and geopolitics, not about religion or “human rights” or any other such disingenuous blather. As with Russia and China, Iran resisted outright colonization, although there was a great amount of UK internal interference and influence in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It possessed both vast amounts of fossil fuels and a strategic geographic location in the Middle East, while maintaining its own culture and civilization. In the post-WW2 years its politics took a more democratic turn and in the early 1950s a nationalist leader, Mosaddegh came to power and moved to take control of the vast fossil fuel resources for the benefit of Iranians. This could not be allowed by the West and an MI6/CIA coup took place in 1953, installing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (of the previously obedient vassal Pahlavi dynasty) as the dictator Shah of Iran. He set about destroying the socialist opposition through extensive arrests, torture and disappearances carried out by the brutal Savak secret police. The propagandistic use of pictures from this era showing a “prosperous” and “Western” Iran show how the elites lived, not the majority. It also shows how disingenuous so many of the Western “critical” scholars are, who push “critical” and “feminist” tropes in the service of empire while utterly ignoring political-economic, imperial and neocolonial realities. After 26 years of the Shah the only real opposition that was left was the religious establishment and that is why they dominated the revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah.

With the revolution there was no purging of the capitalist elite and other oppositional forces, as with the Soviet Union and China; while a significant portion fled the majority stayed to represent a liberal and Western leaning minority that is open to Western dominance and treason against the state. The West calls these the “progressives” when in fact they are hardline neoliberals who would be happy to turn their nation into a Western vassal that facilitates their own internal domination and kleptocracy; just as under the Shah. A newly independent Iran was not acceptable to the West and it pushed Iraq to invade Iran to crush the new regime, resulting in the Iran-Iraq War that stretched from September 1980 to August 1988. Iran was not defeated, but massive amounts of resources that should have gone toward building a new Iran were consumed by a war that included the widespread use of poisoned gas by the Iraqis (made from ingredients knowingly and happily supplied by the West). This can be seen somewhat as a parallel for the Western invasions of the Soviet Union in support of the White Russian forces, together with the Polish invasion, following the Russian Revolution of 1917; an attempt to snuff out the new regime before it could truly establish itself. Both failed, but at great cost to the new regimes. And yes, as late as 1988 Iraq was doing the US Empire’s dirty work, the massive cost of which drove Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait (after being given the nod by the US) to gain new revenues.

In the 1990s, and 2000s, the US became bogged down in its wars in the Middle East; failing at the first Iraqi hurdle of its “seven nations in five years” project or Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan; while also becoming bogged down in Afghanistan. With the focus of the US Empire elsewhere, Iran gained some room for manoeuvre and prospered on a relative basis. Using purchasing power parity, Iran’s GDP per capita increased from US$7,260 in 1990 to US$18,490 in 2010. Then came the oil price collapse of the mid 2010s on top of the sanctions against Iran’s legal nuclear enrichment activities. These included the actions of the US vassal EU to disconnect Iran from the SWIFT international payments system. At no time has there been any call for sanctions against an Israel which is in open violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; the issue with Iran has nothing to do with its civilian nuclear program. If Iran actually had nuclear weapons it would more be in the stronger position that a nuclear-armed North Korea enjoys. The US failed occupation of Iraq from 2003 onwards actually lead to significant Iranian influence in an Iraq that had previously been its enemy, possibly a reason for the US to escalate sanctions against Iran; especially with Iran’s role in combating the Western destabilization of Syria and the Western security services created ISIS project.

In 2015 Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (China, US, Russia, France, UK) plus Germany and the EU to limit its uranium enrichment activities in return for sanctions relief and other provisions; taking effect in January 2016. In May 2018, the Trump administration pulled out of the JCPOA on utterly spurious grounds even though the IAEA confirmed that Iran was following the terms of the agreement, as Iran did until July 2019 when it became obvious that the US vassals would not continue with sanctions relief given the US position. The previous sanctions, plus increased sanctions were imposed from May 2018 onwards. The Biden administration disingenuously took part in new negotiations, but escalated the conditions upon Iran significantly above those in the JCPOA.

Iran successfully pivoted away from the West, signing a 25-year cooperation program with China in 2020 which promised long term investment and trade. China has been the predominant purchaser of Iranian oil (Iran’s gas reserves are used for domestic energy consumption needs) in the past years. Then, with the mass sanctioning of Russia after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Iran was able to develop much closer relations with a Russia that had nothing to lose in working with a fellow sanctioned nation. In January 2025, Iran and Russia signed a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that aims to boost bilateral economic and trade ties. Russia is building a number of nuclear reactors in Iran to aid it with its electricity supply shortfalls. In 2024 Iran also became a full member of BRICS, and in late May 2025 the first train ran on the Urumqi (China) to Tehran (Iran) railway, providing a direct rail freight link between the two nations; developing Iran as a transport hub with links to both China and Russia.

Iran has already nearly regained the peak PPP GDP per capita level of 2011, with GDP growth of 5% in 2023 and 3% in 2024 and is now threatening to become a development success that is totally independent of the West. On top of this, it has established peaceful diplomatic relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council states and the US had been ignominiously thrown out of Afghanistan. All the while, US global power is declining and its soft power significantly undermined by its support of the Zionist genocide; with Israel increasingly becoming a pariah even among the populations (but not the oligarchies) of the West. Syria has been subjugated under the rule of an ex-ISIS leader remade as a politician by the Western intelligence agencies, and significantly occupied by both Israel and Turkey, but this also signifies a new challenge to Israeli regional dominance in Turkey. At the same time, the Israeli economy and society are being worn down by the ongoing genocide, low intensity war with Hezbollah and Ansar Allah, and the internal civil war. Israel is in danger of falling while Iran rises as an integrated and important part of BRINCISTAN (now with only one S with the subjugation of Syria) of Belarus, Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, Iraq and the “Stans”.

Continue reading on Roger Boyd’s substack …

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