With the announcement of the creation of a new National Defense Council tasked with centrally reviewing defense strategies and enhancing the country’s military capabilities, Iran’s mullahs have begun ‘moving the deckchairs on the Titanic’. The futility of their efforts to make trivial and ineffective changes, as the theocratic regime faces its final countdown to collapse, will have impressed few international observers. The fall of the Iranian regime’s key ally, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the decapitation of their ‘axis of resistance’, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the surgical Israeli and American airstrikes that pummelled their nuclear compounds and destroyed their air defense systems, has left the regime facing impending disaster.
The grandiose declaration that the new National Defense Council would be chaired by the regime’s weakling president Masoud Pezeshkian and would be comprised of top military commanders from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – the regime’s Gestapo, together with senior government ministers and the speaker of the Iranian parliament, will have raised a few sardonic smiles in Tel Aviv and Washington DC. The Israelis forensically eliminated dozens of key IRGC commanders and nuclear scientists during targeted missile strikes in June this year, in what was dubbed the ’12-day war’. They know that Iran’s new National Defense Council is an empty vessel and that empty vessels always make the most sound. Unwittingly validating the point, the Secretariat of the mullahs’ Supreme National Security Council claimed that the new body will “review defense plans and enhance the capabilities of the armed forces in a centralized manner”.
The regime’s army chief, Amir Hatami, said that ongoing threats from Israel remained “serious”. “We should not underestimate the enemy and consider its threats as over,” he stated. Hatami told the state-controlled IRNA news agency that the regime’s missile and drone power “remains standing and ready for operations.” The elderly and increasingly irrational Supreme Leader – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed that Western mentions of the regime’s “Nuclear program, enrichment, human rights, are all excuses ... What they are after is your religion and knowledge.” He said that Western demands over Tehran's nuclear program are simply an excuse to confront the Islamic Republic.
The spokesman for the regime’s Foreign Ministry, Esmaeil Baqaei, pointed to what he described as recent US and Israeli “military aggression” against Iranian territory, saying it was part of a broader campaign to destabilize the country and obstruct its development. He described tough new sanctions imposed by the Trump administration as “a malicious act aimed at undermining the economic development and welfare of the Iranian people.” He was referring to fresh US sanctions targeting a shipping fleet operated by the son of one of Ayatollah Khamenei’s senior political advisors. On 30 July, the US Treasury Department imposed restrictions on more than 115 individuals, companies, and ships accused of facilitating the sale of Iranian and Russian oil. These include a fleet of more than 50 tankers operated by Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani, son of Ali Shamkhani, a top political counsellor to Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
The Shamkhani fleet generates billions of dollars in profit from transporting Iranian and Russian oil and petroleum products. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “The Shamkhani family’s shipping empire highlights how the Iranian regime elites leverage their positions to accrue massive wealth and fund the regime’s dangerous behavior.”Esmaeil Baqaei described the sanctions as “clear evidence of the enmity of American decision-makers toward Iranians,” describing them as a “crime against humanity.”
Meanwhile, the Iranian regime’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed there was still a “narrow” chance for diplomacy with the US over Tehran’s nuclear program. Araghchi’s bid to resurrect nuclear negotiations with Western appeasers like Germany, France, and the UK is clearly aimed at buying time once again to kick-start the regime’s clandestine uranium enrichment program. In June this year, Rafael Grossi, the UN nuclear watchdog chief, informed the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that the Iranians had developed a stockpile of around 900 lbs of uranium enriched to near weapons-grade’ grade - 60% purity. He pointed out that the mullahs’ insistence that they were enriching uranium for civilian energy purposes was clearly nonsense, as uranium enriched for civilian purposes requires only 4% purity. Grossi said Iran now had enough enriched uranium to make up to 9 nuclear bombs in a rapid time, evidence which clearly triggered the Israeli and American air strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Nevertheless, Rafael Grossi has confirmed that the IAEA is ready to resume technical discussions with Tehran and that inspectors could once more visit Iran within the next two weeks, to assess the state of the regime’s nuclear facilities in the wake of Israeli and American air strikes. Ever keen to maintain dialogue and diplomacy with the criminal mullahs’ regime, the EU and UK will no doubt readily endorse renewed talks on the defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, from which President Trump unilaterally withdrew during his first presidency, describing it as “The worst deal in American history”. The arch appeasers have refused repeated international pleas to blacklist the IRGC as a terrorist organization. They have repeatedly failed to confront Tehran over human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, hostage-taking, warmongering, and acts of terrorism on European soil. And now, with the mullahs accelerating the torture and execution of political prisoners, there is a sickening silence from the EU and UK.
Courageous Resistance Units of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran/Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) are mushrooming across the nation, fire-bombing IRGC and Basij militia compounds, plastering walls and bridges with dissident graffiti, banners, and placards, and disrupting state-run media broadcasts. Iran is teetering on the brink as the world watches in anticipation of a mass insurrection that will end the mullahs’ tyrannical rule and restore peace to the Middle East.
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