Another week, another explosion at or near an Iranian military installation (or is it a nuclear research facility?). As usual, the regime doesn’t know what to say. The mullahcracy is so intensely divided that different “spokesmen” from different ministries/news outlets/cults/mafias put out different versions. There was an explosion, or at least “the sound of an explosion.” This goes out on the wires. Then, no, there was no explosion, it was just the sound of our fierce military training. Then again, yes, there was something, but not to worry, just go home and shut up. And so it goes in the Islamic Republic of Iran, as our president so loves to call his intended international partners.
I’ve been reporting for many months about the ongoing sabotage of pipelines, refineries, military sites, Revolutionary Guards’ aircraft and trains, and groups of regime thugs. and have received the usual cold shoulder from publications “of record,” which is to say silent sneers. But the tempo of attacks, most notably the monster blast a week ago that vaporized General Moghaddam and his foreign visitors (at least some of whom had taken the shuttle from Pyongyang to be with him on what they wrongly expected would be a happy day) led the Washington Post’s man in Tehran, Thomas Erdbrink, to note the phenomenon in a useful story entitled “Mysterious Explosions Pose Dilemma for Iranian leaders.” He gives us a pretty good rundown of the explosions, and, living as he does in Tehran, gives ample space to regime “explanations” such as bad welding, western sanctions, and so forth. Given the number of foreign journalists who have come to a bad end in Iran, you’d do the same.
Safe in London, on the other hand, Roger Cohen of the New York Times has no doubt about what’s happening: his guy Obama is waging a secret war against the mullahs. “It would take tremendous naïveté,” he lectures the great unwashed, “to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran’s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity. An intense, well-funded cyberwar against Tehran is ongoing.”
So color me tremendously naive. I would really love to believe Roger Cohen; the very idea that Obama, at long last, has ordered a response to the Iranian war against the west (totally unmentioned, needless to say), is delightful. But I don’t believe it, and Cohen doesn’t give us any evidence for it, aside from intoning, as the mullahs themselves are so wont to do, that it’s the infidels and the Zionists.
Yes, there’s a cyberwar, but Revolutionary Guards generals don’t get vaporized by Stuxnet. And Cohen’s judgment is so swayed by his fandom for Obama that it verges on the worst of the early Chris Matthews. Try this, for example:
Foreign policy has been Obama’s strongest suit. He deserves great credit for killing Osama bin Laden, acting for the liberation of Libya, getting behind the Arab quest for freedom, winding down the war in Iraq, dealing repeated blows to Al Qaeda and restoring America’s battered image.
I suppose some copy editor took out “ordering the” before “killing” and the “of” right after it, but sure, full marks for seeing it through. As for the Libyan, Egyptian, Tunisian and Iraqi decisions, the jury’s out, and seems to be leaning against Cohen’s client nowadays. The blows to Al Qaeda–by which he is referring to drone attacks and the like–are fine, albeit the really vicious body blow was the defeat of AQ and their sponsors in Iraq. If you think our national image has been “restored” under this president as a result of his great foreign policy, more power to you. Ring up Roger in London, maybe he’ll give you tea.
Since I’m pretty much the only guy in town who forecast the war against the mullahs, and it’s now so obvious that even MSM reporters and columnists can mention it without blushing, I’m sticking to my story. I don’t think the ongoing assault against the regime is coming from outside Iran. I think it comes from the Iranian opposition within the country. And I think it shows that the opposition is a great deal stronger than the experts have opined.
If you were Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, what would you be saying to that unhealthy face in the mirror? You’d say, “they come and go at will; they obviously have the full cooperation of traitors at very high levels of the regime, even inside the Guards. They not only knew Moghaddam was going to be there, but exactly where and when. Now Isfahan, another heavily guarded base. That doesn’t look like Zionists and infidels, whose pathetic collaborators we round up easily over and over again; it looks like people who are trusted and supported by the traitors in my own house.”
When a regime cracks, even very high officials start to do favors for the opposition, hoping to avoid the worst if the regime comes down. Khamenei knows that the head of the shah’s secret intelligence service went on to hold the same position under the fanatical Ayatollah Khomeini. Recent events will have convinced the supreme leader that his own security may be as compromised as the shah’s was.
Add to this the dreams common to regular users of opium (Khamenei is one of them) and you’ve got a very explosive situation.
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