If Iran Re-emerges From the Ashes

Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr have outlined a remade Islamic Republic emerging from the unprovoked war by Israel and the United States, respectively, President Donald Trump. A war out of aggression in violation of international law.

The Islamic Republic has already undergone dramatic molt. While Trump is still bragging, in interviews (see an especially ridiculos on Pod Force One), that Irans first, second and maybe third line of leaders are gone (after the “decapitation” strike on 28 February), so is its navy, its airforce, etc., Bajoghli and Nasr focus on remarkable lessons learned after the first US/Israeli attack in June last year which led to decentralizing from Tehran to provincial capitals its many executive decisions on trade, agriculture, and management of economic and social services from Tehran to provincial capitals. (Remember: last autumn, the water crisis had sparked the idea already to relocate the entire capital to the underdeveloped Makran region on the southern coast along the Gulf of Oman.)

While official statements and intelligence briefings indicate that approximately 40 senior Iranian leaders and security officials were killed in the strikes including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.  Iran managed to keep its governing institutions more or less intact. Together with nominating the surviving son of the Ayatollah, Mojtaba, his successor, a new generation took charge, all having been fighting in the war with Iraq in the 1980. The new leadership now is comprised of current or former members of the Revolutionary Guards.

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Panem et Circenses

People like to compare the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, with historical emperors. Not of the more thoughtful and just sort, but tyrants.

The decline of the Roman Empire took actually hundreds of years. But in particular Roman Emperors of the first and second century CE may actually remind us of quite similar traits of the current Conqueror or Emperor of the World.

Panem et Circensis. The exchange of freedom and, well, sort of democracy with entertainment of the most perverse kind. The phrase describing a political strategy of the rulers was probably coined by a Roman poet, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, or Juvenal, around 100 CE.

Trump’s posts on his own platform, Truth Social, are not always entertaining, in particular when he announces the obliteration of an entire civilization, the “blowing up” of an ally in the Middle East, if it “won’t behave”. The annexation of a peaceful island in the Arctic which happens (at least seems) to be an easy catch in order to enlarge Trump’s homeland by more than 100% (at least when looking at the Mercator projection).

Last night, Donald Trump announced,

I’ll be going to the G7, in France, immediately following what will be one of the Most Entertaining Nights in American History, the UFC World Championship Fights on the South Lawn of the White House. Records indicate that whilst fights of a much lower level took place at the White House throughout its long and storied History, nothing even close to this, the Greatest Fighters in the World, CHAMPIONS ALL, was even thought of for the People’s House! President DONALD J. TRUMP

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Dragged Into the War

When Iran yesterday hit Kuwait International Airport with drones and ballistic missiles, an Indian national was killed. Dozens of people were injured and two Iranian diplomats declared personae non grata in Kuwait and must leave the country within 24 hours. Iran had also struck the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and an airbase in the region.

These were retaliatory attacks as U.S. military forces had conducted so-called self-defense strikes on an Iranian military ground control station on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Shortly before the escalation, the U.S. Navy disabled a Botswana-flagged oil tanker bound for Iran by firing a missile into its engine room, enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports.

The Kuwaitis will always be grateful to the Americans for the fact that G.H.W. Bush drove the Iraqis out of the country in 1991 (Congress was consulted).

On the other hand, Kuwait is a direct neighbor of Iran and maintains reasonably functional diplomatic relations—a fact due in part to the presence of a Shi’ite minority comprising approximately 30–35% of the Kuwaiti population. In Bahrain, even the majority of Bahraini nationals are Shi’ites. These individuals travel to Iran regularly—for instance, on business or on pilgrimages to Qom and, above all, Mashhad.

Consequently, it is not in Kuwait’s or Bahrain’s interest to be dragged into the war.

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Lustful Sighing

Musicians and activists Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno, on their latest album, Liminal, have expressed hope for a tortured and exhausted world in their piece Ringing Ocean.

Whenever I listened to the piece (regardless of the unrelated visualizer) I had to think of joyful and delightful life in the ocean, with sprawling whales and little noises of myriads of smaller animals. 

Liminal, a state of transition between two phases of life, worlds, or states, in which the old has passed, but the new has not yet begun. Can lustful sighing of oceanic creatures be preserved for future generations of humans?

No doubt, their entire environment is being destroyed. What are humans doing when preventing the loss of their basis of life?

Recently, attempts were made to rescue a confused young humpback, stranded on several sandbanks in German waters of the Baltic Sea. This attracted the monthlong, disproportionate attention of a public generally more or less ignorant of the destruction of their natural resources.

When the animal finally died, and was washed up at Danish shores, authorities promised to examine the cadaver which was grotesquely bloated due to putrefaction gases and about to even explode. They are certainly looking for large amounts of digested plastic and fishing nets.

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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Funeral

In a ” decapitation strike” in the early hours of the unprovoked war on Iran, U.S. and Israeli bombs killed the Iranian Supreme Leader, 86-yr-old Ali Khamenei. In addition, probably forty of senior Iranian leaders and officials. Moreover, many family members were either killed or seriously injured. So, Khamenei’s wife, Mansoureh Kojasteh Bagherzadeh, was killed and an unnamed daughter and a grandchild as well.

Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, who was seriously injured but appointed shortly afterwards by Iran’s Assembly of Experts new Supreme Leader, lost, besides his mother, his wife Zahra Haddad-Adel, his son Bagher, an unnamed daughter and a grandchild; as well as his brother-in-law Misbah al-Huda Bagheri Kani.

Traditional Islamic law dictates that a deceased person should be buried as soon as possible, ideally within 24 hours.

It is certainly remarkable that Khamenei’s remains lay unburied for months, probably due to security concerns and, likely, internal power struggles. Now, Iranian media have announced that a special coordinating body is organizing a final, “grand” public ceremony.

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