All across the Mideast Iran is ascendant.
It's coffers filled with cash acquired under the terms of the disastrous Iran nuclear deal and emboldened by the retreat of American power engineered by the Obama administration, the Persians are on the march.
Lebanon is owned by Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy force. Yemen has been set ablaze by Houthi rebels, armed, trained, and directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Missiles supplied by Iran are fired deep into Saudi territory by those rebels, and U.S. warships are targeted at sea.
Bahrain has been declared to be a legitimate province of Iran and is marked for "liberation,"
Syria has become an Iranian client state. Iraq is teetering on the edge, and when Mosul falls and the need for American air power recedes, Baghdad will ultimately fall to Iranian agents and puppets.
The scope of the disaster is unprecedented, and yet the media touches on it almost not at all. Distracted by the fantasy of a Trump-Putin secret cabal and lead around by the nose by apologists for Tehran, journalists find nothing of interest in the collapse of forty years of American policy in the Mideast.
Reality has a way of intruding however. The Iranians are just getting started, and next in their sights are the Israelis.
Iran’s position on the existence of Israel is crystal clear. Israel must cease to exist. The Israelis must be exterminated. Iranian leaders repeat the threat to wipe Israel from the face of the earth at every opportunity. Iranian military personnel write that threat on the nosecones of their missiles before every test launch.
We have for many years ignored those threats as the ranting of religious fanatics. We have assumed as a matter of course that the Israelis are so militarily superior as to be immune from any danger. We should not.
Lebanon, bordering Israel on the north, is now under the control of Hezbollah, a terrorist group whose army is superior to the Lebanese national army in every respect. Hezbollah has some 50,000 fighters under arms. It has anti-tank missiles, drones and sophisticated air defense systems.
Hezbollah also has, courtesy of its Iranian masters, 150,000 rockets and missiles. Some of these are simple tactical weapons. Some of these have the range to strike any target anywhere in Israel.
In Iraq, Iran has built a multitude of Hezbollah clones, Shia militia armed, trained and lead by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Together these various groups have 100,000 men under arms. Their leaders have already given notice.
After Iraq is "liberated" they vow to move on to Syria and continue the struggle to ensure the ultimate victory of Shia Islam.
After Syria, Israel can only be next. A senior IRGC general posted to Syria to work with Shia troops there admitted last year that the Shia militias Iran is creating across the Mideast are being built explicitly for the purpose of destroying Israel.
The same general also stated that Iranian-led fighters have already been deployed to the Israeli border.
The threat is keenly appreciated by Israel. In a very real sense Iran is now sitting on Israel’s northern border and is poised to attack. An ammonia plant in the city of Haifa was recently permanently closed because the threat of a Hezbollah rocket attack is so great.
Ammonia escaping from that facility would potentially kill 600,000 Israelis.
Earlier this year Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah made a specific threat to use his missiles to target the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona.
Such an attack, if successful, could cause massive casualties and render large portions of Israel uninhabitable. Given the long-range weapons Hezbollah already has.
Nasrallah could make good on his threat at any time.
Catastrophic mistakes of the Obama administration, aided and abetted by those who peddle the fantasy that Iran can be a force for good on the world stage, are now having their full impact. The Mideast balance of power has been fundamentally altered.
Sunni Arab states, like Saudi Arabia, are already face to face with the Iranian threat and are scrambling to compensate for our mistakes. As a consequence, Saudi defense spending is expected to rise sharply this year.
The Israelis have a bit more time to prepare, but the impact of our Mideast failures on their security are no less dire. What is massing on their borders will, if we do not change course and restore the balance of power in the Mideast, become an international army of Shia fanatics, armed to the teeth with the most lethal weapons on earth, seeking just one goal: The complete and utter destruction of the state of Israel.
Washington, D.C., Cairo, Riyadh, Amman and Abu Dhabi are discussing a pan-Arab coalition, aided by the U.S. and Israel, designed to confront the brewing Iranian menace.
They must hurry.
Charles S. Faddis, retired CIA operations officer, led the first CIA team into Iraq (in 2002) and retired as head of CIA’s Counterterrorism WMD unit. He is a senior counterterrorism editor for Homeland Security Today and a contributor to EpicTimes.com, Andmagazine.com, Fox News, and OANN.com. He also is a former congressional candidate and consultant to the U.S. government on military/intel issues. He is the author of “Beyond Repair” (on the need for intel reform). Faddis is a U.S. Army veteran and former assistant attorney general. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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