I lived in Iran for two and a half years, I speak the language fluently. He has twenty years of experience working in the security sector in several other areas throughout the Middle East, so there is nothing new here.
Now, for context, if you do not humble yourself before the US and its regional ally, then you are branded as a dictator, a fascist. Then sanctions come to destroy your economy, then protests begin, supposedly spontaneous protests. They are fabricated, wake up. And then we hear statements: Oh, we have to go in and remove the regime for freedom, for democracy. It is not true. It is done for oil or other strategic reasons, of course, and that is what we are seeing now being built. It is known as a casus belli, a Latin term meaning: a cause for war. If you look back over the last 100 years, all wars have had fabricated reasons in order to justify or to gain public acceptance for military action against sovereign states, and that is what we are seeing right now in the case of Iran. The difference is that this is a much tougher target than any the military machine has ever faced before. This is not Iraq divided between Sunnis and Shiites, nor is it tribal Afghanistan. Iran is a cohesive country despite what the media tells you, there is a lot of pride there, and there is a very strong infrastructure that, despite sanctions, remains well-funded to keep the regime going. Part of that is the Basij militia, about a million full-time men, and between three and four million part-time reservists. These people are armed, religious, fanatical, and willing to die for Iran and for their government. A ground offensive will be extremely difficult. Conventional military forces will not really work because of the terrain in Iran. So what are we going to see? I think we are going to see salvos of missiles being launched in the next week or so, and that will continue for months. We are going to see strong cyber operations targeting key national infrastructure. We are going to see naval engagements in strategic waterways throughout the region. Are we really going to see any serious moves toward regime change? No, this is empty talk. This is pure propaganda. The regime will remain in power and will only become even stronger, more inclined to militarization and even to the actual production of nuclear weapons, which has not been the case so far. And in fact, the USA, Israel and the EU will finally get the real danger that they have obviously been wanting all along. I hope that not too many people will die in this chaos caused by the "spontaneous" protests and all the rockets that will be fired. But this is the continuation of the military machine. Submit or the machine - the military-industrial complex of the eternal war machine - will try to replace you with puppets that serve the USA and its ally in the region. The same old story. There is no mystery.
