By David R. Parsons, ICEJ Senior Vice President & Spokesman

As the high-stakes conflict between Israel and Iran unfolded over recent weeks, there were two competing narratives on how we got here. As the fallout continues from Israel’s emerging victory in this historic confrontation, it remains imperative that world leaders decide which narrative holds the truth, because entertaining folly on an issue as weighty as nuclear arms can be enormously perilous for everyone.

One narrative held that Iran is a peace-loving nation which has been developing a nuclear program solely for benign civilian purposes. Further, Iranian officials were negotiating in good faith with the United States concerning its rightful efforts to enrich uranium, until Israel maliciously blew up those talks by launching “Operation Rising Lion.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi claimed that “Iran did nothing wrong,” and US President Donald Trump – by launching his “Midnight Hammer” bunker-buster mission while deceptively calling for more talks – had “betrayed” the respectful path of diplomacy. Russian President Vladimir Putin concurred that the coordinated Israeli and American attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites were “groundless.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went even further, describing Israel’s military strikes against Iran’s nuclear program as “criminal,” “crazed,” and acts of “state terrorism,” while adding that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now surpassed Adolf Hitler in committing crimes of genocide.

The other narrative asks us to take a more measured, objective look back to the origins and declared aims of the clerical regime which has ruled Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This is when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept into power in Tehran on the crest of Islamic fundamentalism, which centred around his message that the Arab and Muslim world had suffered repeated defeats and humiliations against Israel on the battlefield because they had left the basic, core tenets of Islam. But if they returned to the pure Islamic faith taught by the prophet Muhammed in the seventh century, Khomeini preached, it would please Allah and he would grant them victory first over the Jewish state and then conquest of the world.

Once ensconced in Tehran, the Ayatollahs were determined to export their Revolution throughout the region. Thus, the mullahs quickly arranged the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the Arab leader who had just made an historic peace with Israel. The Ayatollahs also sired the rise of Hizbullah in Lebanon and instructed its ranks on the virtues of suicide missions, thereby inspiring the twin bombings of the US Embassy and the US Marine barracks in Beirut which claimed hundreds of American lives.

From the outset, the radical Sh’ite regime deliberately focused on confronting America as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan” due to their assessment that these were the only nations who took their dark global ambitions seriously and could stand in their way. The rest of the world were seen as simply too weak, gullible or asleep to stop them. Sadly, they were largely right for all these decades.

The Iranian plot against Israel was to encircle the “Zionist entity” with a “ring of fire” in the form of well-trained and armed proxy militias. Hizbullah grew into the “A-team” of global terror militias, carrying out lethal bombings against Jewish and Israeli targets as far away as Argentina. They eventually accumulated an enormous arsenal of over 150,000 rockets – surpassing the strength of most nations’ militaries. Hamas, though Sunni Muslims, accepted funding, training, armaments and backing from the Shi’ite clerics. Similar jihadist militias were enlisted among the Shi’a Arabs in war-torn Iraq and the Houthi separatists in Yemen, while Syria’s Alawite minority led by the Assad family dynasty in Damascus also became increasingly subservient to Tehran.

Meanwhile, Iran had learned a painful lesson during its eight-year war with Iraq from 1980-1988. As Saddam Hussein lobbed hundreds of Scud missiles at Iran’s largest cities far behind the front lines, the Ayatollahs realised this would be an attainable weapons system to terrorise Israel’s civilian heartland. Thus began its ambitious ballistic missile program, aided by a space satellite agency that chiefly served as a cover to test rocket engines for their long-range Shahab missiles.

Finally, Iran set out on a clandestine quest for atomic weapons under the guise of a peaceful nuclear program. Israeli leaders have known of the existence of Tehran’s program and its genocidal designs on the Jewish state since at least the Rabin government in the early 1990s, but the world has been much slower at putting these pieces together. Iran, again, learned another key lesson from watching Israel take out the Iraqi nuclear plant at Osirak in 1981 and the secret Syrian nuclear reactor at Khyber in 2009. In response, Iranian leaders decided to spread out their nuclear facilities among numerous sites, to duplicate many key functions such as multiple centrifuge cascades for enriching uranium, and to encase vital components of their nuclear program in fortified structures deep underground.

As the world began to slowly wise up to Iran’s duplicity, the International Atomic Energy Agency started to monitor and inspect the Isfahan conversion facility and other nuclear sites, which was required of Iran as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Thus, the cat-and-mouse games began, with the Iranian opposition soon outing Tehran in 2002 over its hidden enrichment activities deep underground at the secret Natanz site. The so-called EU-3 of Germany, France and the United Kingdom then opened direct talks with Iranian officials to try to contain the burgeoning network of nuclear sites. But amid those talks, the Europeans were greatly miffed to learn in 2009 that there was an even larger secret, fortified uranium enrichment plant buried deep inside a mountain at Fordo. Yet they seemed to quickly recover from the shock as they teamed up with the Obama administration to continue the talks with Iran until reaching the JCPOA deal in 2015.

From there, Iran used US President Barack Obama’s cash deliveries and eased sanctions to expand its reach, using the windfall of billions of dollars to further bolster its vast regional network of proxy armies. But when Trump entered the White House, he withdrew the US from the JCPOA agreement due to its flawed sunset clauses, lack of any requirement to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, and its failure to deal with Tehran’s support for terror groups, stockpiling of ballistic missiles, and other bad behaviours.

While President Joe Biden brought back Obama’s appeasement policies towards Iran, the Hamas mass terror attacks of October 7 finally forced Israel to go on the offensive against the Iranian-led “ring of fire” surrounding it. With its battering of Hamas and Hizbullah and then Trump’s return to office, Jerusalem finally regained the confidence to confront directly the source of the existential threat against it – the radical regime in Iran.

Under this narrative, Israel actually has been very patient and cautious in dealing with Iran, choosing to engage rather in a long shadow war of covert operations that inflicted temporary setbacks on Tehran’s nuclear program but no real death blows. Israel also has always been very open and transparent about this growing threat to its existence, with Netanyahu in particular warning the world at every opportunity not to trust Iran’s lies about its peaceful nuclear intentions.

Indeed, it would be pure folly for anyone to accept Tehran’s assurances when it has been aggressively enriching uranium to 60% purity, which has no peaceful civilian use and is dangerously close to weapons-grade uranium. Iran was hiding its nuclear facilities, reinforcing them underground, closing them off to inspection, duplicating the stages of weapons development, and has even been caught designing nuclear detonators and forging converted metal into the tell-tale shape of an atomic warhead. Even the IAEA recently concluded that Iran has enough highly-enriched uranium to build in a short time at least nine atom bombs.

Finally, Iran was using the recent negotiations with Trump’s envoys as cover to make a mad dash for the Bomb! So, who has been deceiving whom? To the extent President Trump tricked the Iranians into thinking there would be a sixth round of talks in Oman, or he would not bomb Fordo for another two weeks, the evil, duplicitous regime in Tehran got what they have long deserved.

Main photo: An Israeli plane takes off to strike Iran. (Credit: IDF)