Reading Into Trump, Bibi and Assassination of the Supreme Leader
The C.I.A. had been tracking Ayatollah Khamenei for months, gaining more confidence about his locations and his patterns…
Dr Can Erimtan via 21Wire
The Trump administration had been building up its military presence in the Persian Gulf over the past days and weeks. An attack seemed imminent, but while hope remained that cooler heads would prevail….alas, they did not: ‘Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was assassinated in the strikes along with several senior military and political officials. Many now fear that events have progressed passed far beyond the point of reaching any political settlement, and will inevitably shape itself into a war of attrition.
The Pentagon has named their war campaign ‘Operation Epic Fury.’ As an aside, it is interesting to note that on X (formerly Twitter), the hashtag #OperationEpicFury has also been accompanied by another one, namely #OperationEpsteinFury.
#OperationEpicFury
On Saturday, 28 February 2026, “Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the opening salvo of a war the US and Israel launched with the aim of regime change” . This has come a little more than six years after the equally unexpected assassination of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani (3 January 2020):
The C.I.A. had been tracking Ayatollah Khamenei for months, gaining more confidence about his locations and his patterns, according to people familiar with the operation. Then the agency learned that a meeting of top Iranian officials would take place on Saturday morning at a leadership compound in the heart of Tehran. Most critically, the C.I.A. learned that the supreme leader would be at the site.
The next day, the U.S. President proudly announced the death of the cleric Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1989, in a post on his very own personal social network Truth Social. The aftermath of the assassination was and is as brutal as to be expected. The Islamic Republic of Iran started hitting back and now, Iran has unleashed war of truly eschatological dimensions. An ‘anonymous foreign correspondent’ present on the ground in Tehran recorded the following immediate reaction on the ground in the Islamic Republic:
As news of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death broke on Saturday night, the streets of Tehran and cities across Iran rang with both screams and cheers. Some Iranians celebrated their long-time ruler’s demise at the hands of US and Israeli bombing. Others were overcome with sorrow at the loss of a spiritual leader and national figurehead who had been omnipresent in Iranian lives for 37 years. There were plenty of people, too, who fear for whatever comes next.
Trump the killer, for his part, more than somewhat disingenuously told the world that he “got him before he got me.” The U.S. President quite literally claimed that U.S. intelligence believed that Khamenei had been involved in possible plots to assassinate him—a tenuous, if not outlandish claim, which purports to include alleged attempts linked to somewhat improbably 2024 incidents, and even suggested the strike was a ‘pre-emptive’ move against a serious threat to the United States.
It seems that Trump is now reading the Bush playbook, a playbook that had effectively been written by none other than Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu. Trump did not shy away from employing the language of pre-emption that had been so effectively used by Dubya (aka George W. Bush, 2001-09) in the early years of this century. Back then, the gruesome twosome that was the Bush-Cheney team had spoken of the doctrine of pre-emption as the main building block of the War on Terror. At that time, Dubya’s administration had been under the influence of a Neo-Con think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and its prescriptions made in 2000 entitled, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century – a publication that attempted to describe how America could again become the primary power in the world, but deemed such a development unlikely “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor” . . . a phrase that has by now become emblematic of George Bush’s War on Terror and the doctrine of pre-emption in the minds of critics of the U.S. and its foreign policy under Bush and Obama.
There are those who say that it was no coincidence that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit September 11, 2001, suspecting that the PNAC and the Bush administration had previous knowledge of the plot, or were even involved in the planning and execution of the attacks. The U.S. authorities have since then employed the events of 9/11 to justify the imposition of the Patriot Act to curtail the American public’s freedom domestically and to wage a global war on terror internationally – personified in the figure of the now-defunct Osama bin Laden (1857-2011, variously spelled and abbreviated as OBL) and a shadowy terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda (translated ‘the base’ in Arabic). In the process, Presidents Bush and Obama enthusiastically pursued this war, spreading American soldiers throughout the Hindu Kush (aka Afghanistan) and Iraq in the process. Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, Trump re-deploys the Bush playbook in order to attack Iraq’s neighbour, using equally spurious arguments to justify his actions: namely, Iran’s nuclear gambit. The real irony of the matter is that the U.S. has historically been the main sponsor of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as elaborated by Umar Farooq, Muhammad Saqib and Dr. Ghulam Mustafa:
Iran started its nuclear program in the 1950s.[The] United States helped Iran to develop [its] nuclear reactor through his “Atoms for Peace Program”. President Eisenhower initiated this program to assist developing countries to use nuclear power for energy and for other peaceful purposes.
This is really a case of the U.S. reaping what is has sown: ‘Announced by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, the “Atoms for Peace” program sought to reorient nuclear technology from solely military applications toward peaceful, civilian uses, such as energy generation, medicine, and agriculture. It encouraged international cooperation, facilitated the sharing of nuclear materials, and led to the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency.’ At the time, Pahlavi-led Iran was all but an American puppet, but following 1979’s Islamic Revolution which subsists on enmity and hatred of the U.S. as the Great Satan, the envisioned peaceful nuclear programme could but be perceived as a precursor to the construction of an atomic bomb, which had been the bane of the Cold War (1947-91). And clearly continues to frighten people to this very day. Meanwhile, ‘America’s greatest ally’, Israel is widely known to possess an undeclared nuclear arsenal, estimated to be between 90 and 300 warheads, while maintaining an aloof public policy of “nuclear opacity” (neither confirming nor denying their arsenal). Nor are they a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This contradiction sits at the heart of today’s geopolitical chessboard in West Asia.
Bibi’s Obsession: Attack Iran!
As long ago as November 1997, the BBC reported that the “Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, has said that Iran could pose a bigger danger than Iraq. He said the situation could develop where Iran had nuclear weapons aimed at Britain and the United States.” Bibi, has been at it for nearly 30 years now. In the late 20th century Bibi’s ridiculous claims were unable to move the world into action At the time, Bill Clinton was in the White House, and the U.S. was then somewhat averse to oversea adventures. In order to appreciate fully the extent to which Bibi is nothing but a fear-monger advocating military aggression, here are some of the choice things he said at the close of the previous century:
“Iran, unseen, unperturbed and undisturbed is building a formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles, actually ICBM’s (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles). Stage One would reach our area, Stage Two it would reach Britain and Stage Three, believe it or not, they actually plan to reach the eastern seaboard of the United States, Manhattan. This sounds fantastic but Iran wants to be a world power with a world ideology of fundamentalist domination, seeing the West as its great enemy. It seeks to have weapons to back up that ideology and that is even more dangerous than Saddam because there is a fanaticism, an ideological fanaticism attached to the acquisition of these weapons.”
At the time, U.S. President Bill Clinton steered clear of any Middle-Eastern adventures and continued his predecessor’s African forays: in Somalia, President George H.W. Bush initiated the U.S. military intervention (Operation Restore Hope) in December 1992 to secure famine relief, deploying 28,000 troops. The mission shifted under President Bill Clinton from humanitarian aid to nation-building, culminating in the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident, which ultimately led to a complete U.S. withdrawal – after U.S. troops faced fire from armed clans and 19 soldiers were killed in 1993 in the Battle of Mogadishu, the mission was abandoned: Clinton ordered troops out of the country in March 1994. Clinton’s successor George W. Bush (popularly known as Dubya) equally avoided Iran, sufficing to destroy Iraq next door. And as a result of Dubya’s Desert Storm, the Iraqi Shi’ites, unburdened by Saddam’s Sunni shackles, proceeded to align themselves with the Islamic Republic of Iran next door – the single power-base of Shi’a Islam in the world. And in all fairness, the Islamic Republic of Iran has always openly propagated its hatred of Israel.
As such, I would argue that the Iranian leadership leveraged a revulsion of Israel as a way of cultivating political capital, increasing its legitimacy in the eyes of their own population. The Islamic Republic of Iran had been established in opposition to the autocracy of the Pahlavi monarchy and eveything it represented. The Israeli historian Dr Doron Itzchakov, an eminent specialist of he history and politics of modern Iran at the Tel Aviv University, declares that “Khomeini’s anti-Israel policies had both anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist components that contributed to mustering different segments of Iran’s opposition to the Shah and Israel.” Khomeini effectively transformed opposition to Israel into one of the main pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s existence, as explained by Dr Doron Itzhakov:
In his Ashura Day’s speech in June 1963, Khomeini depicted three circles whose common denominator was their curtailment of Iran’s development. He placed the 7th century massacre of Hussein bin Ali and his supporters by Yazid ibn Mu’awiya (and his army) during the Battle of Karbala (680 CE), which led to a fracture in the community of believers, in the outermost circle. The Shah’s efforts to further separate religion and state as concretized in his ‘White Revolution’ proclamation was placed in the middle circle. The innermost circle was reserved for the relations between Iran, the US and Israel, which in his opinion symbolized the disconnection of the ruler from the will of the people. In the next instance, Itzhakov spells out the issue in great detail: The introduction to Khomeini’s book Velayat-e Faqih Hokumat-e Eslami identifies the enemies of Islam. This work, which over time became the scaffolding for the constitution and the revolutionary political system, presented the Jews as the enemies of Islam.
In many ways, Khomeini’s 1970 text stands at the intellectual root of the Islamic Republic’s official and state-sponsored enmity to the State of Israel – established in 1948 and defined by law and its ‘Declaration of Independence’ as the national home and nation-state of the Jewish people. And in this way, Israel is a nation-state with a population that is not bound together by means of a common ethnic and/or linguistic allegiance. Instead, as a type of European colonial settler state project, Israel’s population can be characterised as an ‘Imagined Community’ (using Benedict Anderson now-famous 1983 phrase) that does not base its existence on a shared ethnic and/or linguistic identity, but rather on a common religious affiliation. As such, the Israeli nation-state seems to all but exemplify Ernest Renan (1823-1892)’s famous definition:
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things which, properly speaking, are really one and the same constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is the past, the other is the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received.
The delegitimisation of the state of Israel has since accelerated, and has even taken on a global scope, following its brutal genocide of the native Palestinian population in Gaza following October 7, 2023.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, in turn, is also home to an ethnically “heterogeneous population speaking a variety of Indo-Iranian, Semitic and Turkic languages,” united under the umbrella of the Ithnā ʿAsharī (Twelver) branch of Shia Islam (tolerating and protecting Sunni, Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian minority communities living within the state’s borders) and an uncompromising enmity to the State of Israel. The real irony of the matter is that the U.S. has historically been the main sponsor of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, as elaborated by Umar Farooq, Muhammad Saqib and Dr. Ghulam Mustafa:
Iran started its nuclear program in the 1950s.[The] United States helped Iran to develop [its] nuclear reactor through his “Atoms for Peace Program”. President Eisenhower initiated this program to assist developing countries to use nuclear power for energy and for other peaceful purposes.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been established as a state uniting Shia Muslims, belonging to the Ithnā ʿAsharī (Twelver) branch. Like Israel, Iran does not base its legitimacy on either ethnic or linguistic ties, but purely on religious affiliation. The Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-89) himself explained:
The Ahl-e sunnet and the whole Muslim community believe a prophet or messenger is not appointed or elected by the Ummat or community, but ordained by God. The Shi’as believe that after the Prophet [Muhammed] died, his successor [known as Caliph (in the Sunni tradition) or Imam (in the Shia tradition)] was also appointed by God. Like the Prophet, the Imams are considered innocent and must be obeyed. This obedience is unquestionable and obligatory for all Muslims. They are equal to the last of prophets, prophet Muhammed, in rank position, but superior to all other prophets and messengers. They are the religious and lawful heads of the Muslims in all affairs and they, alone, are entitled to rule not only over the entire Muslim community, but the whole world. Only innocent Imams nominated by God can rule, and no one else has this authority. The ultimate proof of God over his creatures cannot be established without an Imam. It is through the Imam that men may obtain knowledge and awareness of Islam.
In Khomeini’s view, Iran’s precarious situation in 1979 was the fault of the Shah who had moved away from Islam to embrace a secular way of life and displaying open admiration for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the quasi-secular Turkish Republic. In fact, Ezgi Yavuz and Baharak Tabibi posit that “[t]hroughout the early 1920s, Iran and Turkey underwent a rapid and ‘forced’ modernization process under Reza Shah and Atatürk.” At the time, the Turkish statesman influence was even felt in the mountains of the Hindu Kush – Amanullah Khan tried to modernize Afghanistan along Turkish lines.
Trump’s Project for a New Century Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats
In the spring of 2011, Donald Trump showed up to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. furiously pushing the so-called ‘Birther Movement’ – the conspiracy that Obama was born outside the United States. Subsequently, Trump reportedly left humiliated after a string of stinging jokes mocking his hair, his taste, his reality television show, and his fixation on the ‘Birther Movement.’ As such, ‘President Barack Obama and comedian Seth Meyers made Donald Trump a laughingstock’ of the night. NBC’s Andrew Rafferty matter-of-factly notes that ‘Trump reportedly left humiliated.’ And I (and many others) would argue that this bout of public humiliation led Trump to eventually run for president and move into the White House. In April 2016, Rafferty remarks that subsequently, ‘Trump announced he would not run in 2012. But that night may have more strongly ignited his desire to be taken seriously as a politician — and hatched his 2016 run.’ A run that would eventually lead to the 2023 Heritage Foundation release of the treatise Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project. Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, the 21st-century Fascist blueprint now religiously adhered to by the Trump administration – a 900-page conservative policy agenda that covers almost every aspect of American life and US foreign policy. As of November 2025, nearly half of all Project 2025 policies have been enacted or are in progress:
Restore the family as the centrepiece of American life and protect our children. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls the ‘Blessings of Liberty’.
President Trump seems to have employed one of Project 2025‘s precepts to further his own agenda of demonizing the Islamic Republic of Iran in order bolster his domestic position as a veritable strongman in the making. The 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani was this year followed by the annihilation of Khamenei and his retinue, which all but dovetails with the precept “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” Though the Islamic Republic has been employing a virulent anti-Israeli rhetoric, the likelihood that the Supreme Leader and his retinue were planning to have the current POTUS assassinated seems all but far -fetched. Instead, I would like to suggest that President Trump has taken Dubya’s example to heart. Whereas George W. Bush focused on Saddam Hussein as his chosen bogeyman, Trump has decided to focus on the Islamic Republic and its leadership. And it seems rather obvious to me that the U.S. President’s really rather cordial ties to Bibi lie at the root of his fixation on Tehran and its theocratic system. Dubya, for his part, cited Saddam’s plan to have his father (George H. W. Bush) killed as his main reason to focus on Iraq and it dictator. Netanyahu visited the White House on 11 February 2026, having a behind closed doors’ meeting with the POTUS . . . and about two-and-a-half weeks later, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei was obliterated. Though officially, reports said that the leaders ‘agreed to continue negotiations with Iran but no concrete decision was reached.’
And now, the people and the states in the region will have to deal with the aftermath. Whereas, in 2020 I had envisioned the Iranian authorities capable of exacting punishment that might even conjure up truly eschatological dimensions involving war and violence on a truly epic scale. Alas, at the time. the Islamic Republic remained relatively quiet and the end of the world proved elusive. The question emerging now is whether the Supreme Leader’s violent death could function as the catalyst that portends the end of the world and the return of the ‘Hidden Iman.’
The ‘Hidden Iman’ (Muhammad Ibn al-Hasan) as the ‘Mahdi,’ which means ‘The Guided One,’ the guide who ushers in the union of all Muslim that precedes the veritable end of the world – an expectation that has a “major ecclesiastical importance in Shia Islam.” Did Trump’s now literally play with the end of the world or will the vagaries of Realpolitik prevail . . . that seems to be the question. And as the hasgtags #OperationEpicFury and #OperationEpsteinFury indicate, the real reason underlying Trump’s sudden decision to decapitate the Islamic Republic at this point in time do appear rather dubious. Was it all down to Bibi pushing Trump into having Iran’s Supreme Leader executed or were the so-called #EpsteinFiles really behind Trump’s sudden decision?!?!? The mere fact that Trump’s one-time best buddy who is now defunct but all over the news has now been revealed as a veritable monster of epic proportions surely gives the POTUS cause to worry.
And thus, the question that now emerges: was the brutal assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nothing but a ploy to distract attention?!?!? Given the fact that Donald Trump’s name appears throughout the Epstein files, thinking that Khamenei’s execution was nothing but a ploy to distract particularly the American public would stand to reason . . . Would the POTUS really risk unleashing a brutal conflict in the Middle East to distract attention?!!??
Particularly, a conflict that has the potential to spin inexorably out of proportion given the various New Cold War reconfigurations that I have spoken about on previous occasions . . . Alas, now the war drums are calling.
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Header featured image (edited) credit: YouTube open public article tease. Emphis added by (TLB) editors
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