Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the 86-year-old cleric who turned Iran into a corpse and Islam into a coffin — is no more. Yet Khamenei’s assassination on Feb. 28, 2026, following an Israeli strike on his compound in Tehran, a joint operation with the CIA, did nothing to dismantle a deeper lie: the fiction that clerics have the exclusive right to rule Iran in the name of the Mahdi, the Shi’a messiah.
Instead, Khamenei’s assassination has opened a nuclear Pandora’s box — a clash of civilizations that can draw the United States, Israel and Iran into the vortex of an apocalypse.
A war with a civilization that has a messianic tradition as rich and ancient as Iran’s has to be won on a spiritual and cosmic plane in terms of the stories and myths that bind Iranian civilization to the highest ideals of justice and truth. Only then can the United States or any other power win a military, economic or political campaign waged in the material, terrestrial and temporal realm.
Trump could have won this Iran war without resorting to violence and lies.
After the ayatollah massacred thousands of Iranian protesters on Jan. 8 and 9, the Islamic Republic had lost all claims to representing the Iranian people, let alone the Mahdi. Iranians were calling for humanitarian intervention — and there was a legal basis for collective action.
On Jan. 13, less than a week after the massacre, Trump entered the fray. In a post on Truth Social, he said: “Iranian patriots, KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTONS!!!!...HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” (His caps and bolds.)
The Iranian people’s reaction was electrifying. They trusted America. From the heir to the Peacock Throne to peddlers on the streets of Tehran, from Iranian Americans at the pinnacle of Silicon Valley to political prisoners in the pits of Evin Prison, many welcomed Trump’s intervention. Young and old placed their faith in the price of an American president’s words. Iran would finally be free again.
And then, Trump flipped the script. He resumed the nuclear negotiations with the ayatollah — asking for a better nuclear deal.
The children of Iran, the “patriots” massacred and piled in body bags, were mere casino chips for him to trade — or burn — as he pleased.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president’s partner in the Iran job, would prove himself to be even more shifty and treacherous. As the pied piper of an Iran war, Netanyahu would not only cast his Iran spell on Trump but would also play on the despair of the Iranian people to sell them on the fantasy of liberation. In his many addresses to the Iranian people, he waxed and waned about Iranians as the heirs to Cyrus the Great and promised that Israel would free Iran just as Cyrus had liberated the Jews from under the yoke of Babylonian captivity. Yet, in practice, Netanyahu’s idea of honoring the Persian empire was to use his partners and proxies to inflame and incite the January massacres, not as a prelude to Iran’s liberation but as a pretext for its partition.
Our Iran war’s goal is not to secure Israel’s right to exist. It is to boost Netanyahu’s reelection campaign.
Former CIA director Mike Pompeo blurred the boundaries between Iranian protesters and Israeli spies. Here is his malignant Jan. 3 Twitter post: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.” A few days later, Iranian protesters, by the thousands, were mowed down as Mossad agents.
And now, in the first week of the Iran war, the cat is out of the bag.
Netanyahu, the would-be savior of Iranian civilization, is paying Israel’s debt back to Cyrus the Great by arming Iran’s ethnic and religious groups in a bid to pit Iran’s children against each other. It’s déjà vu — the Iraq playbook reenacted, with Netanyahu treating Iraqi and Iranian Kurds as Operation Roaring Lion’s “teeth on the ground.” Such manipulation of populations and inflammation of identities are worthy of Stalin, not an heir to King David’s throne.
Netanyahu had repeatedly offered to turn Iran into a paradise fueled by Israeli talent, capital and technology. Yet instead of linking Iran’s liberation to the lifting of sanctions, he bombs Tehran’s oil depot, burning the heavens to deliver hell. As for prosperity, he offers the the Gulf petrostates a shot at the ultimate heist — a chance to boost their sovereign wealth funds by claiming a decapitated and partitioned Iran’s oil and gas reserves as their own. This casts Trump as Big Oil’s Arabian strongman — the new Saddam.
Herein lies the greater tragedy. Netanyahu and his Arab partners will sink Trump’s presidency to drive a permanent wedge between the United States and the Iranian people. And sadly, Trump is complicit — selling himself, the American people and Iranian patriots short.
We must stop this war so the Iranian people, military and clergy can resurrect Iran out of the ruins of the Islamic Republic — without the curse of the hatred and enmity the ayatollah propagated in the Mahdi’s name.
