The Peacemongers Who Gave Us War

Obama, Kerry and the rest gifted the world more than a decade of war, and the "rules-based international order" is being enforced, at last, by Israel. With a guest post by M. Mehdi Moradi.

In the National Post this past week I set out the case that the G7 beclowned itself in Kananaskis, not least by its determined irrelevance in the matter of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. I also pointed out that there was no reason that the G7 leaders’ anodyne closing utterances about Iran should have been considered “controversial” in any way.

The catastrophic legacy of Barack Obama and John Kerry is finally unraveling.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is indeed the principal source of instability and terror in the Greater Middle East, and of course the Khomeinists must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. Doing so would be a flagrant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, perhaps the key pillar of the “rules based international order” we’re all supposed to be fervent about upholding.

Immediately after the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on June 12 that Iran appeared to be running a clandestine project going back at least as far as 2019 that gave every appearance of its intention to develop a nuclear bomb, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government acted.

It turns out the Israelis have had their own top-secret project, also going back several years. Its aim was to cripple the Khomeinists’ nuclear capability. In a series of audacious precision strikes, apart from disabling several nuclear sites and severely reducing Iran’s missile-launching capabilities, Israel’s Operation Rising Lion has also liquidated several of the Khomeinist regime’s principal gargoyles, one of whom is the subject of my friend Mehdi Moradi’s guest post below.

Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, one of the few grownups among the heads of the European Union’s member states and one of the only serious people attending the G7 at Kananaskis, put it best: Operation Rising Lion is a necessary effort in the work of drecksarbeit. “This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us,” Merz said. The Iranian regime has brought death and destruction to the world, Merz said, by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, and by supplying Russia with drones to attack Ukrainian civilians.

It’s about damn time

“I can only say, [I have] the greatest respect for the fact that the Israeli army had the courage to do this,” Merz said, “that the Israeli state leadership had the courage to do this.” It is all to the good that U.S. president Donald Trump eventually got around to helping the Israelis finish the job this weekend.

This is a developing story and there’s a great deal of disinformation and the spinning of talking points getting in the way, but the basic facts about the most recent developments as of this afternoon present the following picture.

Last night, the Trump administration’s Operation Midnight Hammer mobilized at least 125 U.S. military aircraft, including the largest operational strikes from B2 bombers since the missions following 9/11. Trump’s White House is claiming that the key nuclear facilities at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan have been “obliterated.”

Seven B-2 bombers dropped 14 GBU-57 “bunker buster” Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) in the operation and more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles, fired from submarines, targeted the Isfahan site.

As one might expect, threats of retaliation are emanating from Tehran, and Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are all the dregs of the UN’s police-state bloc are expressing their dismay.

In Americaland, there’s the usual frothing about “forever wars” that unites imbeciles of the right and the left, from MAGA windbags Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene to the cool-kids Democrats Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

There’s a NATO meeting coming up in Brussels this week. One hopes that the 32-member alliance might rise to do more than gurgle the usual Pavlovian appeals for “de-escalation” that are making the rounds. I haven’t found cause to shift my view from where it was in last week’s Real Story: The end of the world as we know it; And I feel fine, mostly.

How and Why It Came To This

We’re just now coming up to the 10th anniversary of Barack Obama’s crowning foreign-policy achievement: the disastrous nuclear-deal rapprochement with Iran laid out in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in Vienna on July 14, 2015. That’s when the China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and Germany were enlisted in Obama’s effort to rehabilitate Khomeinist Iran in exchange for nuclear-bomb commitments that the ayatollahs never intended to keep.

That would have been bad enough, but the worst thing about the JCPOA was the way Obama became a hostage of his own hubris, and Iran was allowed to get away with mass murder, and so was the Syrian monster Bashar Al-Assad. Revived by Joe Biden after Trump walked away from the arrangement in his first term, the deal was the culmination of Obama’s determination to keep the Khomeinists onside with his vision of re-ordering the Greater Middle East. Tehran and Moscow played Obama like a fiddle, and the U.S. Democrats still pretend that never happened.

The objective of the Washington-Tehran talks was ostensibly to convince the Khomeinists to give up or at least postpone their nuclear program for ten years. By the time it was signed in 2015, the deal anticipated that by this year, 2025, Iran would be permitted to build a full-scale nuclear program. The United Nations’ ban on missile development was reduced to an eight-year hiatus, and the arms embargo on Iran was to expire in five years.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was effectively given a green light to cause misery and mayhem from Yemen to Lebanon to Gaza and Iraq. Tehran’s use of blackmail was most effective in Syria, where Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, was told explicitly: If you mess with our man in Damascus, we’ll walk away from the table for good.

With his precious foreign-policy legacy at stake, Obama allowed Bashar Assad to cross his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons. Even worse, Kerry took up Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s offer to allow Obama to wash his hands of the Syrian file - establishing Russian as a major force for evil in the Middle East for the first time since the Soviet era. The result was hundreds of thousands of dead Syrians, killed mostly by Assad’s barrel bombers and by Vladimir Putin’s fighter bombers, and hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees.

In Yemen, the Houthis’ Ansarullah movement emerged as Iran’s military proxy in that broken country and went on to terrorize global shipping in the Red Sea. In Iraq, a network of Khomeinist militias led by Kata'ib Hezbollah, otherwise known as the Hezbollah Brigades, was integrated into the 45th, 46th, and 47th brigades of Baghdad’s Popular Mobilization Forces.

Emboldened in Gaza, Iran’s friends in Hamas launched their attacks of October 7, 2023, and tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed in the brutal war that followed. Emboldened in Moscow - and encouraged by Trump, this time around - Putin has relied heavily on Iran’s Shahed drones to slaughter tens of thousands of Ukrainians.

The good news is that even though Putin has been allowed to continue his terror in Ukraine and his threats to European security, the disgusting “world stage” pattern of impunity in the Greater Middle East has been mostly broken. Hezbollah has been decapitated. Hamas has been cut to shreds. Assad has fled to Moscow, and the interim Syrian government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa is giving every appearance of a sincere desire for peace with Israel and a transition to at least a form of genuine democracy.

More good news has lately come in the list of senior Khomeinist officials liquidated by Israel in Operation Rising Lion. They include the following:

Major General Hossein Salami, commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the central military and intelligence institution that controls perhaps a third of the Iranian economy; Saeed Izadi, head of the Palestine Corps of the Quds Force, the IRGC’s overseas arm; Behnam Shahriyari, commander of the Quds Force’s Weapons Transfer Unit; General Gholam Ali Rashid, deputy commander in chief of the Iranian Armed Forces; Rashid’s successor Major General Ali Shadmani, head of Iran’s Khatam-al Anbiya Central Headquarters; Mohammad Bagheri, Chief of Staff of Iran’s armed forces; General Gholamreza Mehrabi, the Iranian Armed Forces’ deputy intelligence chief; and General Mehdi Rabbani, deputy commander of operations for the Iranian Armed Forces.

Last but not least, a senior IRGC commander by the name of Ali Hajizadeh. He is the subject of the guest post that follows.

Amir Ali Hajizadeh, whose death is a welcome event

by M. Mehdi Moradi

So much has happened since Israel began striking Iran that the killing of IRGC aerospace chief Amir Ali Hajizadeh already feels half-buried, but not to those who lost loved ones on Flight PS752, shot down by the IRGC under his command.

Hajizadeh was the face of Iran’s missile and drone program. He wasn’t its architect, but its courier. His image, projected through ceremony and spectacle, became central to the Islamic Republic’s projection of power.

That changed five years ago.

On January 8, 2020, two missiles, fired seconds apart, tore through a Ukrainian passenger jet departing Tehran. One hundred seventy-six lives were lost. They were students, children, newlyweds - entire families. Most of the passengers were Canadians, or Canadian visa holders.

The next day, Hajizadeh appeared on television, standing before the flags of Iran’s regional allies and praising a missile strike on a US base in Iraq—launched in response to the killing of Qasem Soleimani days earlier.

He spoke with pride, smirking as if a massacre had not just unfolded under his command.The IRGC admitted to downing the plane three days later.

Hajizadeh resurfaced, blaming a lone operator. No resignation. No remorse. The gap between his initial celebration and later deflection said more than either moment alone.

In the years that followed, truth remained elusive. Families were silenced. One father recalled being told by a senior commander that if the plane had not crashed, Iran and the US might have gone to war, and “ten million could have died.”

Few admissions made the intent more legible: the passengers may have been a human shield against retaliation.

A reckoning by other means

For families of PS752, Hajizadeh’s killing brought a wave of raw emotion—grief laced with a private sense of justice. Their motto had always been: Never Forget, Never Forgive.

They had waited not for revenge, but for truth. For the day a free court would summon him by name. That day never came. The reckoning arrived by other means.

Hamed Esmaeilion, the Iranian-Canadian cofounder of The Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, lost his wife and nine-year-old daughter, Reera. Esmaeilion responded to the news with words shaped by fury and mourning. He recalled Hajizadeh’s defense: “The operator had ten seconds to decide.”

That moment, Esmaeilion said, sealed Hajizadeh not as a soldier, but as a custodian of a lie. “You are dead,” Esmaeilion wrote, “but our hatred of you, dead and alive, will live on in history.”

For Esmaeilion and others, Hajizadeh’s death may have closed a chapter, but not the book—not before the eyes of his daughter Reera, now etched in the national memory as a symbol of innocence lost.

Javad Soleimani, who lost his wife that same morning, wrote that while there was relief, there was also regret: “Standing eye to eye with Hajizadeh was a wish that never came true.”

The feeling is echoed in the words of Meghdad Jebelli, whose nephew was killed aboard PS752.

“Regret was added to all the regrets of my life,” he said — the regret of not seeing Hajizadeh “in a prison uniform and handcuffs, standing in a righteous court.” Still, he admitted, the feeling was “sweeter” than any regret before it.

As news of Hajizadeh’s killing spread, many families posted joyful clips of their loved ones—glimpses of life reclaimed against the void left by the IRGC’s system of violence.

A legacy built on bluster

Hajizadeh had projected strength, but his record told a different story.

He postured as a man firm against enemies, but often struck the powerless. He winced when under pressure, as when he downplayed the US base strike, insisting it was symbolic and not meant to kill.

The man who smirked as families wept, who lied as bodies burned, is no more.

The house of cards he built — missiles, drones, staged power — is collapsing with him. He never stood before Esmaeilion, Soleimani, Jebelli, or the nation’s eyes to face the public humiliation that real justice brings.

Still, the justice dealt in the rubble, though imperfect, carries its own humiliation. One journalist wrote she hoped Hajizadeh lived for “three minutes and forty-two seconds.” That’s how long it took PS752 to fall from the sky.

For the families, it may have offered a moment of healing. But the wound will not close until the truth behind the tragedies under his command is brought to light—and the system that created him is confronted in full.