Facing the Tyrant, the "New Hitler" of the Middle East
In a recent interview given to an English-language television channel, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did not mince his words in describing the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — and, by extension, the mullah regime in general — as the “new Hitler of the Middle East”…
Offering a particularly lucid reading of the geopolitical context of the current conflict, the Crown Prince noted without circumlocution that the Iranian regime clearly adopts an expansionist posture and seeks to extend “its own project in the Middle East, in the same way that Hitler had done” in Europe. “Several countries had not realized how dangerous Hitler was until it was too late,” MBS emphasized, adding — touching the nerve: “I would not want that to happen here.”
To strip the parallel to its barest outlines, the comparison with Hitler does present some similarities, but only at the level of form, of behavior, perceptible on more than one plane: a regional expansionist strategy aimed at imposing on other populations a hegemony based on a fascistic ideology — theocratic in the Iranian case, moreover —; the extension of “occupation,” indirect, of territories across several countries by controlling local powers subservient to the colonizing power; the establishment in each country of vassal militia organizations (similar to the Gestapo) tasked with suppressing any contestation and relentlessly maintaining a climate of terror and oppression.
But far beyond these manifestations of sectarian imperialism and the fascist militia practices in which those conventionally called Iranian proxies engage, the Khomeinist project afflicting the Middle East carries a danger of an entirely different dimension. It constitutes a threat of a fundamentally existential nature, one that bears not only on Lebanon but on all the countries of the region, Gulf states included. This political project, transnational by essence, advocates the construction of a warrior society — permanently “warrior” — whose foundations are values, a culture, a structure of thought, social customs, a way of life, entirely alien to the populations of the region. Worse still: brainwashing is practiced within this obtuse ideological framework from earliest childhood, as illustrated by the school curriculum applied in Hezbollah’s partisan schools, beginning at the primary cycle.
The curriculum imposed on pupils in these establishments mirrors the Khomeinist ideology, which “teaches” young children the cult of martyrdom. It comes as no surprise, then — to cite only this example — that the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran fixed, just a few days ago, the age of recruitment into their ranks at… 12 years old!
In this type of situation, however, the autocratic ideology underpinning an expansionist policy goes hand in hand with the construction of a military apparatus that barely conceals a belligerent posture toward countries or populations classified in the category of “enemies,” because they do not share the same values and civilizational foundations as the “mother” power.
As an illustration of this point, the military operations that have been unfolding since February 28 have laid bare the full extent of the nuclear and ballistic arsenal that the mullah regime has developed with diligence over entire decades. The morbid obstinacy to enrich uranium beyond 60 percent, to construct ballistic missiles with a range of 4,000 kilometers — capable of reaching European capitals —, to pour monumental investments into destabilizing the countries of the region through para-state militias subservient to the Pasdaran, can only be explained by the will to apply a strategy of conquest, not only at the geopolitical level, but above all in the socio-cultural sphere and in the imposition of “divine” values that are, in every respect, reductive, obscurantist, and retrograde.
President Donald Trump characterized the mullah regime on Friday evening as the “tyrant of the Middle East.” A “new Hitler,” a bloodthirsty tyrant sowing terror across the region, should under no circumstances benefit from any complacent or conciliatory attitude. He must imperatively be eliminated from the scene. Any half-measure in this context would be a grave strategic error. To refrain from carrying to its conclusion, all the way through, an operation of radical and total eradication of the regional tyrant would only sow the seeds of a new armed conflict in the near term.
At the end of the Second World War, had the Hitlerite regime not been totally and definitively erased from the map, the specter of Nazism would have resurfaced without delay. In such circumstances, any elementary angelism displayed by the “right-thinking” or the pseudo-left-leaning wokists would amount to a vast and unspeakable crime against peoples in danger.