{"id":313950,"date":"2026-03-09T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T12:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=313950"},"modified":"2026-03-05T10:46:48","modified_gmt":"2026-03-05T10:46:48","slug":"iran-in-the-middle-east-persia-is-still-a-great-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/03\/iran-in-the-middle-east-persia-is-still-a-great-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"Iran in the Middle East: Persia Is Still a Great Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Bye Bye, Ayatollah Khamenei<\/p><\/div>\n

2 Mar 2026 – <\/em>0n 26th<\/sup> February at 21:38h Donald Trump launched his war against IRAN. He could not help himself.\u00a0 Drunk on his power and on his self-image of invincibility, egged on by the Israeli war-criminal Netanyahu, high on their joint destruction of Gaza, Trump agreed to bomb.\u00a0 As Israel launched its largest-ever bombing operation, The Donald could not bear to miss the fun. Bombing makes such great television!\u00a0 Bombing Iranian nuclear installations last June was such fun, The Donald wanted a repeat. Trump is not one to deny himself pleasure. Flattery from Netanyahu is one of the pleasures he loves best.<\/p>\n

The French poet Jean de la Fontaine wrote that \u201ca flatterer lives at the expense of the person who listens to him.\u201d\u00a0 Trump doesn\u2019t read La Fontaine; and he probably wouldn\u2019t understand the moral of the story. Netanyahu certainly lives at the expense of the United States, and he kills at their expense as well.\u00a0\u00a0 Binyamin and The Donald are preening themselves for having assassinated the 86-year-old religious tyrant Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but what do they expect it to achieve?<\/p>\n

As my old friend and Lebanese peacemaker Dr Ghassan Rubeiz wrote in my previous blog post, \u201cHistory repeatedly teaches us this lesson: external powers that topple governments through military force rarely produce the outcomes they promise.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 Peace is never created with bombs.<\/p>\n

George W. Bush had no idea what he was doing when he started bombing Afghanistan: he didn\u2019t even know the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims!\u00a0\u00a0 Does Donald Trump have any idea what he is doing in Iran?\u00a0 I think he is clueless; but Trump enjoys the explosions that destroy so many lives, because they make \u201cgreat television\u201d !<\/p>\n

IRAN HAS BEEN A VICTIM FOR 1000 YEARS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Negotiations between Iran and Trump\u2019s America are devilled by history. The USA are celebrating 250 years of existence. \u00a0Iran\u2019s proud ancestry dates back thousands of years.\u00a0 Persians have felt under threat for centuries: from Greeks, Arabs, Turks, from the Ottoman Empire, from British imperial ambitions, from American greed and domination.<\/p>\n

Americans talk about democracy, forgetting that when Iran launched a democratic experiment in 1953, the CIA fomented a military coup and had Mossadegh, the elected prime minister, killed.\u00a0 Their puppet dictator Mohamed Reza Shah was the son of the general who had ousted the Qajar dynasty in a 1925 coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, founding his own dynasty as Reza Shah Pahlevi. He was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, after an Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941 during the Second World War.\u00a0 Britain and America needed to control Iranian oil supplies. Oil still drives American foreign policy.<\/p>\n

The Shah was driven out by a popular revolution in 1979, shocking America. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to establish a despotic theocratic regime. The late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was one of his assistants, who had been arrested by the Shah\u2019s SAVAK police, and tortured.\u00a0 I was also arrested by the SAVAK in 1972, simply \u2013 so far as I could make out – because I was a foreigner who spoke Persian, in a border town where I had been offered hospitality by a local farmer after a snow storm cut off all possibility for travel. In a Police State, fear is everywhere.\u00a0 Few people will regret the disappearance of Khamenei, the vicious 86-year-old dictator who was assassinated on February 27th<\/sup> in an Israeli bombing raid. \u00a0But assassinating political leaders is a poor way to conduct foreign policy, or make friends. Iranians need stable government and an economic relaunch. Iranians will not be grateful if chaos or civil war follow the assassination : and they will blame Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

The Iranians a proud of their history. Persian language and identity have been a rich part of humanity since pre-historic times.\u00a0 Ancient Greece traded with the Persians, and Alexander the Great conquered them. \u00a0The Persians never became Christianized, for they already had their own monotheistic Zoroastrian religion. \u00a0The 7th<\/sup> century explosion of Arab enthusiasm and Islamic expansionism overwhelmed the \u2018known world\u2019 from Spain to Afghanistan. Islam became dominant in Persia. \u00a0In the 13th<\/sup> century, the equally explosive expansion of Genghis Khan\u2019s Turco-Mongol empire once again threatened Persian language and identity, giving rise to the 500-year dominance of the Sunni Muslim Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n

Shia Muslims follow the descendants of Caliph Ali\u2019s union with the Prophet Mohamed’s daughter Fatima, and the succession of Twelve Imams. The twelfth and last Shia Imam disappeared in 873 leaving no offspring. \u00a0Feeling squeezed between Arab and Turkish powers, around 1501 Shah Ismail I of the Safavid dynasty decided to reinforce Persian identity by adopting the Shia version of Islam, resisting the dominant Sunni orthodoxy imposed by the Umayyad Arabs who had killed the Caliph Ali and his sons.<\/p>\n

Freed from the Ottomans in 1920, Persia was now squeezed by Western Capitalists. Anglo-American dominance promoted extreme inequalities of wealth and bred the conditions for Iranians\u2019 revolt against the Shah\u2019s western economic model. \u00a0The 1979 popular revolution against the brutal dictatorship of Mohamed Reza Shah, introduced Shia Islamism as an alternative to the corruption of Western Capitalism. Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile, to a hero\u2019s welcome. \u00a045 years later, his theocratic regime is exhausted and discredited.\u00a0 Tens of thousands marched against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and many hundreds of protesters have been killed by his thugs.<\/p>\n

But it would be incredibly stupid to believe that American bombs offer a solution. What have been the success stories of U.S. intervention in recent years?\u00a0 \u00a0Who celebrates Libya\u2019s permanent civil war? \u00a0Or the Taliban\u2019s takeover in Afghanistan? \u00a0Or the Shia takeover of Iraq that led directly to Syria\u2019s civil war and the Islamic State? \u00a0And who believes that we should praise the rise of Al-Qaeda Look-a-Likes as the new rulers in Damascus, where soldiers are currently massacring Alawites in the west of Syria, and Kurds in the east?<\/p>\n

If we are serious about changing Iran, then we need to recognize their fabulous history, their pride, their desire for independence and the fact that Westerners have been a part of their victimization for the past 100 years. \u00a0If the British and European governments have anything useful to offer Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu, it should be an insistence that political partnerships are built on respect, not by bombs and bullying.<\/p>\n

Persians are a proud people. They will not negotiate with people they cannot trust, or who fail to show them respect.\u00a0 There is an Iranian proverb that says: \u201cIf you tripped over a stone, it was probably put there by an Englishman or an American.\u201d \u00a0We do not remember that proverb, but they do.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Robin Poulton, Chevalier de l\u2019Ordre Royal du Sahametrei (Cambodia), Chevalier de l’Ordre National (Mali), <\/em>is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network<\/em><\/a> who has been working in West African peace and development since 1980. An International Peace Consultant and founder of EPES Mandala Consulting Ltd., former Weapons-for-Development advisor to EU-ASAC, <\/em>researcher with UNIDIR Geneva (United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research)<\/em>, School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, West Africa Research Association and elsewhere, he is author most recently of <\/em>Peace Is Possible about peace building and disarmament in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge. Website<\/em>: <\/em>https:\/\/robinpoulton.com\/<\/em><\/a>. Email: <\/em>poultonrobin@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Mar 2026 – 0n 26th February at 21:38h Donald Trump launched his war against IRAN. He could not help himself.\u00a0 Drunk on his power and on his self-image of invincibility, egged on by the Israeli war-criminal Netanyahu, high on their joint destruction of Gaza, Trump agreed to bomb.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":212097,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[417,100,3281,950,742,88,3925,767,475,2571,3924,818,1190,2159,880,99,249,2200,70,481,886],"class_list":["post-313950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-bullying","tag-direct-violence","tag-evil-empire","tag-invasion","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-khamenei","tag-middle-east","tag-netanyahu","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-peace-hoax","tag-proxy-war","tag-regime-change","tag-rogue-states","tag-state-terrorism","tag-structural-violence","tag-trump","tag-us-empire","tag-usa","tag-warfare","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313950"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313952,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313950\/revisions\/313952"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}