The Iranian strategists' failure lies in the Ayatollah's historic blindness - opinion

As all now understand, Washington’s scheduling of a sixth round of nuclear talks with Tehran on Sunday, June 15, was part of a ruse that helped put the Iranians to sleep as the June 13 attack approached.

However, these deceptions’ role in the stunning of Iran is marginal compared with the self-deceit of the ayatollahs, whose historic, strategic, and moral blindness led their country to military collapse.

The Mullahs lied to themselves on three major matters. The first was America.

Iran’s leaders misunderstood America both technically and substantively. Technically, they didn’t get what the American president meant when he gave them 60 days to conclude a deal. Having adopted an axiom that Donald Trump will never want war and will also prevent anyone else’s war, they thought he didn’t really mean what he said.

In fact, he meant what most Americans mean when they negotiate: 60 meant 2 times 30, and days meant multiples of 24 hours.

Yet the misunderstanding of America ran much deeper. Having claimed for decades that America is satanic, the ayatollahs thought they faced a civilization whose people are the fountainhead of human sin and whose leaders are gullible, impressionable, and stupid.

The mullahs, who over the years have killed thousands of innocent Iranians, will never understand that compared to them, America is not only not sinful, but righteous. However, the mullahs surely do understand now that Americans, the people who feed much of mankind and manufactured much of the firepower that now befell Iran, are not stupid.

Still, the ayatollahs’ misreading of America dwarfed compared with their woeful misunderstanding of war.

THE BIG Iranian misconception about war was the delusion that fighting could be outsourced.

Having spent billions weaving a network of political satellites and subservient militias, Iran steadily cast its shadow over the Middle East without exposing Iranian troops to its Arab and Jewish enemies.

In their military ignorance, the mullahs actually thought such a structure could serve as a substitute for a real army, with fighter jets, battle tanks, and artillery batteries manned by homegrown troops.

For a long time, it looked like a stroke of genius, but then came the Arab assault on the regime of Bashar Assad, Iran’s Syrian proxy. Faced with a call to battle, the Afghan, Pakistani, and Iraqi mercenaries the mullahs had collected fled the scene. The lynchpin of Iran’s imperial dream thus collapsed overnight. That was besides what had happened earlier with Hezbollah, which did fight, but was nonetheless decimated by the IDF.

The mullahs could thus be expected to conclude that the empire of which they dreamt could not be built with foreign blood. But they learned nothing. Failing to realize they had never built the kind of army their ambitions demanded, they failed to prepare even the antiquated army they did have for the Armageddon they had brewed.

This is, of course, besides the ayatollahs’ manifest failure to shield their country from the violence that their rhetoric provoked, most notably by neglecting to build bomb shelters, or even a siren system that would warn the public of an impending attack.

Harsh as these failures have been, and much as they explain the Iranian military’s underperformance, they are all secondary to the ayatollahs’ deepest and most fateful failure: The failure to understand the Jews.

LIKE NAZI Germany in its time, Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran made the Jewish cause a central part of its rhetoric, agenda, and deeds.

What began with the establishment of Hezbollah in the early 1980s, and the cultivation of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, was joined by a titanic effort to aim a nuclear bomb at the Jewish state. Hatred of Israel was fanned daily through an elaborate propaganda system.

So fierce was this hatred that it spawned the massacre in 1994 of 85 people and the injuring of 300 in a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, bombed by Iran’s operatives two years after Tehran sent bombers to the local Israeli embassy, killing 29 and injuring 242.

The ayatollahs’ anti-Jewish obsession was so fierce that in 2006, their government sponsored a Holocaust denial conference. This urge to provoke and mock the entire Jewish people reflected a psychopathic inability to feel someone else’s pain. And as had happened to other sadists, the ayatollahs didn’t understand they were tinkering with an emotional bomb that in due course would blow in their faces.

No wonder, then, that when the October 7 massacre’s blood came in their nostrils, the mullahs had nothing but praise for its perpetrators’ cold-blooded butchery of elders, women, children, and babies.

Just what this attitude was doing to millions of Jews worldwide apparently never crossed the mullahs’ minds. Well, now they should know. They convinced a nation as proud and as ancient as theirs, that they are out to destroy it.

Having never objectively studied the Jews, the ayatollahs thought the Jews would sit on their knuckles while the mullahs arranged their firing squads and fastened their gallows’ ropes.

Whether any ayatollah can ever admit the absurdity and futility, let alone the immorality, of the Khomeinist march of folly will only be known in the future. The Iranian people, however, need not wait for that future. They now know that what began with the fanatic, brainwashing, and unwarranted chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” ended with death to Iran.