Almost eight years ago, on June 26, 2017, a huge digital clock was placed prominently in Tehran’s central Palestine Square. Beneath digital numerals, shown consecutively in Farsi, Arabic, and English, it began the countdown, day by day, to Israel’s extinction as forecast by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In a speech in Tehran on September 9, 2015, he had predicted that Israel would cease to exist within the next quarter century.
“God willing, there will be no such thing as a Zionist regime in 25 years,” he said.
In finalizing the original nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the permanent members of the UN Security Council, joined by Germany, allowed hope to outweigh common sense.
Signing it on July 14, 2015, they removed a tranche of sanctions laid on the Iranian regime and handed it a huge cash bonus. Meanwhile, Iran, hand on heart, undertook to limit its nuclear program in the future to exclusively peaceful purposes.
Of course, the Iranian regime had no intention of curtailing its efforts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, an essential step toward achieving its fundamental purpose – to destroy Western democracy, starting with Israel, and to substitute a Shi’ite theocracy across the whole world.
The founder of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and those who followed him into positions of power in Iran, never made any secret of this ultimate objective. Khomeini identified Israel and the United States as his prime targets, but included what was then the USSR.
“We wish to cause the corrupt roots of Zionism, capitalism, and communism to wither throughout the world,” said Khomeini on February 1, 1979. “We wish, as does God almighty, to destroy the systems that are based on these three foundations, and to promote the Islamic order of the Prophet.”
By this, he meant his strict Shi’ite interpretation of Islam, for elsewhere he had declared that the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, in the heart of Sunni Saudi Arabia, were in the hands of “a band of heretics.”
It is no surprise, therefore, to learn that even before the JCPOA came into effect, Khamenei was prophesying the elimination of Israel. But since Israel was widely assumed to have its own nuclear capability, a nuclear arsenal was clearly a prerequisite.
Khamenei obviously reckoned that Iran would have acquired its nuclear stockpile well before 2040, by which time Iran would have achieved its objective.
The day may arrive – perhaps it already has – when leadership figures, including the supreme leader himself, may regret the hubris that induced them to erect the clock in Tehran in the first place. It is doubtful if either of Iran’s supreme leaders envisaged fighting both the Little and the Great Satan, as they dubbed Israel and the US, at the same time.
The US strikes Iran's nuclear sites
Yet, this past Saturday night, June 21, US President Donald Trump sent B-2 stealth bombers with their 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs to obliterate what was left of Iran’s nuclear program, using the deep-penetrating weapon that Israel lacks.
Insiders said this military action was not a departure from Trump’s campaign pledge to steer clear of foreign entanglements, but a reminder that American power is based on the idea of “peace through strength.” He still puts deals ahead of military action, said one former official, but he recognizes that the best deals come when adversaries are negotiating from a weakened position.
“We have completed our very successful attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan,” the president posted on social media. “All planes are now outside of Iran air space.”
Nearly 10 years have passed since Khamenei, then riding high in the geopolitics of the Middle East, uttered his prediction about the limited time left for Israel as an independent sovereign state. At the time, Iran exerted control or influence over a “Shi’ite crescent” – or “Ring of Fire” as Iran began calling it – stretching from Lebanon to Yemen.
Hamas, Hezbollah, militias in Iraq, Bashar Assad in Syria, and the Houthis all created a noose around Israel’s neck that could be tightened at a given moment. The Iranian leadership must have persuaded themselves that it would not be long before a joint onslaught against Israel would sweep it from the map of the Middle East.
Today, Iran itself is close to collapse. Its proxies have been largely degraded and their leaders killed. In Syria, Iran’s puppet Assad has been swept from power and the country can no longer be used as an overland transit route to Lebanon.
Only the Houthis in Yemen continue to follow Iran’s agenda by disrupting shipping in the Red Sea. But they have their own priorities – gaining power across Yemen – and may soon begin to put self-interest first.
Trump still envisages a negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. If the Iranian leadership believes they cannot prevail against Israel and the US combined, they will probably decide to sit down at the negotiating table.
They will do so knowing that the terms demanded of them will be so stringent, and the subsequent inspection regime so intrusive, that they will be admitting they have lost their current bid to acquire a nuclear arsenal. But the regime will still be in power, and perhaps that consideration will outweigh all others.
Weakened across the board, and with their nuclear facilities under constant attack, Iran’s supreme leader and his acolytes may be viewing the huge countdown clock in the center of Tehran as a huge embarrassment. The longer it continues to mark down the days until Israel’s putative disappearance, the more of a humiliation it becomes.
Yet to remove it would be mortifying, an acknowledgment that far from Israel disappearing from the scene by 2040, the more likely candidate for oblivion is the Iranian revolutionary regime itself.
The writer is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. His latest book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at: www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com.