ISRAEL says Iran wants to destroy it and uses the charge to justify the war on its reviled foe. Too many American politicians believe also that Iran seeks to destroy their country.
American neo-cons from both sides of the fence supporting the war are being increasingly challenged from within their ranks, however. Hillary Clinton-Joe Biden Democrats are opposed from within the group by Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders et al, and the Donald Trump-Pete Hegseth lot are increasingly doubted by the followers of the late Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson from the MAGA Republican cluster.
Like Israel, Americans have pointed to Iranian slogans since the 1979 Revolution that painted the US as ‘shaitan-i-buzurg’, the ‘great Satan’. Israel is considered the ‘small Satan’. Both countries see it as adequate evidence for them to conclude that “Muslim terrorists” of Iran posed an existential threat to them. They hide the truer reason for the cultivated mistrust.
The fact is that since the days of the Shah, Iranians in their material culture have been closer to America than to Europe. The Islamic Revolution did away with Kentucky Fried Chicken but retained the iconic image of Col Sanders peering through his glasses to vend ‘juje kebab’, skewered chicken.
Not growing bananas, Iranians still love the fruit as ‘mauz’. It’s also the word India’s Hyderabadis use for banana. The duty-free shop at Dubai airport was a rare such facility selling bananas, targeting Iranian women shoppers mainly who could smuggle the heavily taxed fruit to Tehran under their chadors.
The acquired taste for bananas goes back to the days of bonhomie with America who introduced Iran’s elite and later the hoi polloi to the joys of the banana split dessert. A cousin from India taught English in Tehran for a short stint. He left as the students found his accent jarringly British, and not adequately American. Under the chador, many women wear jeans and the two countries cooperated closely against the Taliban hosting Al Qaeda.
Iran has followed the Chinese model as one can see from its defiance of sanctions to build excellent healthcare, education and nuclear-free defence.
What Israel and the US hide in their war-mongering citations, presumably deliberately, is that Iranians in their Friday congregations would equally vehemently chant loudly for the demise of the USSR and Saddam Hussein who Ayatollah Khomeini had a personal hatred for after his years in exile in Iraq. In calling for the deaths to the four — the US, Israel, Saddam and the USSR (‘Shauravi’) — Iran successfully scored a 50 per cent victory in its foundational quest without lifting a finger. The fall of Saddam would become an American project, also at the behest of Israel. The implosion of the Soviet Union was similarly a cause célèbre for the duo.
By chanting curses against its opponents, Iran has obviously not plotted a massacre in Tel Aviv or Washington, D.C. or Moscow, or encouraged the terror campaigns being continuously alleged. Its chants in fact played to domestic audiences to rally support for rival systems of hostile governments to change and align with the Iranian Revolution’s political pursuits, chiefly the liberation of Palestine, à la Cuba, Vietnam or Venezuela.
The pursuit stands nicely if so far only partially fulfilled as Iran enjoys excellent relations with Iraq and Russia. Both were once in its crosshairs. It continues to wield a massive moral clout in its ideological pursuits that disrupts Western rivals in their planning rooms. Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, ensured Jimmy Carter’s defeat to Ronald Reagan after Zbigniew Brzezinski advised his one-term president to launch a botched commando mission to rescue American hostages. Khomeini waited for Reagan to win before releasing the hostages.
Today, Donald Trump is facing similar music as his ratings plummet before make-or-break mid-term elections in November. Benjamin Netanyahu’s political fate is already under a cloud and the war is unlikely to reverse that. Which gives cause to feel frightened, however, that he might take recourse to nuclear weapons with or without US approval.
The dream of defeating Iran and its destruction, which the Trump-Netanyahu duo is seeking, doesn’t stem from any publicly touted explanations on captive TV. The Obama-led nuclear deal was torn up to conform to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the neoconservative hallucination conjured by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz after the Soviet Union committed suicide. The Chinese advised Mikhail Gorbachev not to enact perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) together. China dodged his fate by pursuing rapid restructuring while leaving glasnost for a more opportune time.
Iran has followed the Chinese model as one can see from its defiance of crippling sanctions to build excellent healthcare, education and nuclear-free defence that has shocked the world. At home, it has taken the foot off the accelerator with regard to the hijab issue for women so as not to allow it to become a Western catspaw to exploit domestic fissures.
The PNAC is linked to a 1996 policy paper called A Clean Break by a group of advisers to Netanyahu but MAGA is proving to be not entirely in sync with Trump’s foreign adventures. The PNAC project took its toll on Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan, but Iran is proving to be a different kettle of fish.
By most accounts, it is not doing anything different from the Vietcong of yore. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a vast, heavily camouflaged network of jungle paths, roads and waterways to transport Vietcong soldiers, weapons and supplies to their forces in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The trail was critical to Vietnam’s ultimate victory in 1975.
Given its varied topography Iran opted for a different camouflage for the unequal war, burying its arsenal in a nationwide labyrinth of tunnels and underground cities, the kind that inspires Hamas, Houthis and Hezbollah to challenge the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Iran believes the asymmetrical war offers it a good chance to improve its success rate for a peaceful world, in which a liberated Palestine is the cornerstone.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, March 31st, 2026
