Category Archives: Iran

Iran Admits Responsibility for the 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing in Beirut

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 October 2023

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What To Make of China “Brokering” the Saudi-Iran Deal

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 14 March 2023

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Islamic State Attacks Iran and Many Iranians Ask: Did it Really?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 December 2022

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Western Self-Hatred and the Iranian Revolution

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 1 November 2022

The late Bernard Lewis recorded in his memoir, Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian (2012), meeting the Shah of Iran “a year before” the Islamic Revolution that felled him, thus, some time in early 1978:

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The Shah’s Perspective on the Islamic Revolution That Toppled Him

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 30 October 2022

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Hysteria and the Iranian Revolution

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 October 2021

Iranian protesters burn an effigy of the Shah outside the American Embassy, 1979 [source]

There were immense political forces at work in the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79, and they have been covered in some depth on this blog before. In this brief piece, I want to look at the social aspect, specifically the social contagion aspect. People who were in Iran during the Islamic Revolution or who have studied it deeply in retrospect describe the country going “temporarily insane”,[1] and tend to use terms like “febrile” and “hysterical” when describing the atmosphere, especially by the summer of 1978, since, as everyone seems to acknowledge, the revolutionary fervour fed on itself the longer it was allowed to continue. Continue reading →

Spywar and Strategy: The Israel-Iran Contest in the Middle East

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 June 2021

Members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, at a memorial in Gaza, 31 January 2017. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib, Flash90.

The May 2021 round of fighting in Gaza brought with it the upending of the unspoken understanding between Israel and Hamas and a level of intercommunal violence within Israel that has not been seen in quite some time. The scale of the rocket attacks on the Jewish state must also be counted among the unusual elements of this latest flare-up, with Iran clearly identifiable as the enabling state behind Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the two primary factions behind these attacks. Continue reading →

Just What Is Iran Capable Of?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 June 2021

Massive explosion at Khojir in eastern Tehran lights up the night sky, 25 June 2021 [image source]

The clerical regime in Iran, born in terrorism and dedicated to its export, has carried out atrocities across the world since 1979. The Islamic Republic has made Israel and Jews a special target of its murderous Revolution, and this has naturally incurred what one might call “resistance” from the Israeli government. What is notable in recent times is how the global ledger is shaping up, albeit while the strategic regional situation is quite different. The Israelis have delivered blow after blow to Iran, many of them within Iran, including removing senior officials, and the Iranian theocracy has proven unable to reply because its terrorist infrastructure is so badly infiltrated and just sheerly incompetent. Continue reading →

Gaza is Just One Front in Iran’s Regional War

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 May 2021

Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system [left] activates over southern Israel against incoming HAMAS rockets [right], 14 May 2021

Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary-general of Hizballah, the Lebanese division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), gave an interesting interview to Hizballah’s Al-Nour radio station on 22 May, explaining IRGC/Hizballah’s vision for what it had achieved with the recent war in Gaza. Qassem added to a large body of evidence about Iran’s extensive role in the war, a lot of it supplied directly by the combatant parties themselves. Not only did the clerical regime in Iran supply the material basis for the Islamists’ war against Israel this month; they provided much of the ideological framework, too. Continue reading →

What Can We Learn From Iran’s Foreign Minister?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 3 May 2021

Iranian Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif, December 2020, during an interview with Lotfullah Najafizada of TOLO News

Iran’s Foreign Minister, Muhammad Javad Zarif, took part in an oral history project intended for internal use by the clerical dictatorship in February and on 25 April the audio was leaked—so goes the story. There is every reason to think this is a controlled leak, which is to say an information operation or a piece of strategic messaging—more pejoratively, propaganda or disinformation: choose the terminology as you will—intended to assist the Iranian theocracy as it works through its negotiations on the nuclear file with the new American administration of President Joe Biden. Still, there are some insights from this episode, as with an interview Zarif gave—focused on Afghanistan—in December. Continue reading →